Asylum Restaurant Loses Its Chef

After a brief stay, chef Guy LeRoy has checked himself out of Asylum, L.A.’s hottest restaurant. “They always promise you things, but the promises don’t come true,” says LeRoy. “We were serving 350 to 400 per night and I was working 12-15 hours a day but after a few months when I wanted more money, they wouldn’t come through. Now I just want to go back home.”

The home LeRoy’s referring to is Santa Barbara, where he has a condo and where he’s planning to open his own restaurant. “It’s something that Wolf (Wolfgang Puck) is helping me put together. I’ll know in a couple of weeks whether it’s going to go ahead for sure. I want to open a little restaurant and serve simple, fresh and exciting food. It’s happening up there.”

Rumors that he owned a piece of Asylum, he says were absolutely not true. “I wish . . . I don’t know where people got that idea.”

Meanwhile, back at Asylum, owner John Thomas says emphatically that money never came into the conversation. “We wanted to improve the quality of the food and the efficiency in the kitchen. Guy is a talented chef who would function much better in a smaller kitchen. We wish him the best.”

Asylum general manager Greg Grafft says that Michel Wahaltere, who’s worked at Remi, Chapeau, Champagne and Colette and who has been sous chef since Asylum opened, has taken over LeRoy’s duties. “Michel created the lunch menu, and in about a week and a half he will introduce his own dinner menu, using seasonal ingredients.”

Celestino Drago has put his money where his mouth is. He expects his 80-seat Santa Monica restaurant, Drago, on the site of the former Le Cellier on Wilshire Boulevard, to open by July 15. “It will be like my old Celestino, only more exciting and with a bigger kitchen,” he says. “We are planning on eventually baking all our own breads, but right now I just want to get the restaurant open. Everything was going fine and then they had to take the pizza oven out, and now we are waiting around for another one.” Drago adds that he has no investors, put all his own money into the restaurant, and is “broke.”

One thing this will not be is a noisy new restaurant. Drago says he has designed the restaurant to keep the noise level down. “We’ve put in a special French ceiling, carpeting and Japanese aluminum panels that are designed to absorb sound,” he says.