Eva’s has a new baby: “BESO”

Eva’s has a new baby: “BESO”
Chef Todd English knows a lot about Mediterranean cooking. But he’s going to have to learn pick his words carefully as he opens Hollywood’s Beso restaurant with celebrity friend and partner, Eva Longoria Parker.

“It’s been a long pregnancy,” says English, explaining the process of setting up a fine-dining restaurant. But when it’s pointed out that he has to watch statements like that dealing with Parker, he answers, “You’re right, I have to be careful about things like that. Sorry.” But standing behind the bar at Beso as he prepared for Thursday’s grand opening, he can’t help but go back to the baby place again. “It’s happening,” he says. “We are birthing the baby.”

“I’m a little nervous too,” she says. “But at least I don’t have to cook.” She could if she had to: Unlike spoiled Gabby on on Desperate Housewives, Longoria knows how to work a frying pan: “You get pigeonholed into your character,” says English. “She’s a great cook, it comes from her soul.” Concurs Parker: “I’ll go to a restaurant and if I have an amazing dish I’ll go to the kitchen and ask the chef how he made it. And then I’ll make him teach me. You can ask [my husband] Tony [Parker], I do it all the time. I’ll leave him at the table for like 30 minutes.”

English says the actress has been very involved in the restaurant’s creation – from the etched Spanish poetry at the restaurant’s entrance (including one poem from Eva’s sister Emily), to picking out the three chandeliers which decorate the ceilings, to adding two specialties of the house – the guacamole and the tortilla soup. “I make the best guacamole in the world,” says Parker. “And my tortilla soup for which I am renowned for.” (Can’t make it to Beso? Try out Parker’s recipes below!)