L’Ermitage Owner Closes Posh Eatery; Site Up for Sale

L’Ermitage, for 16 years a favorite restaurant of Los Angeles’ well-heeled, movie industry crowd, is up for sale--shut down in the face of management fatigue.

Dora Fourcade, who with her brother, Jean-Pierre, has owned the posh West Hollywood eatery since 1986, said Monday that the restaurant had been doing steady business. But the siblings decided to sell because she was becoming overwhelmed dividing her time between the restaurant and her young children.

“I find it impossible to be a mom with two kids and be manager of the restaurant and owner. It’s just too much for a woman alone,” she said.

Fourcade and her broker, Irv Siegel, declined to name potential buyers. However, Siegel said that the site at 730 N. La Cienega Blvd. will remain a restaurant and that he expects to have narrowed the field of buyers to one within two weeks.

Siegel said his firm, Siegel Co. of Santa Monica, is appraising the closed restaurant. Siegel said the property has drawn a lot of interest among a number of prospective buyers interested in operating a restaurant at that location.

Although neither Fourcade nor Siegel said they knew what type of restaurant would replace L’Ermitage at the location, restaurant consultants said it would probably be one that offered food at similar prices.

“For the cost of the real estate alone, it has to be relatively pricey,” said consultant Saul Leonard, president of Saul F. Leonard Co., a Los Angeles firm that specializes in hotels, casinos and restaurants.

Since the sale is not finalized, no one involved could say what the name of the new eatery would be. Leonard said that often a new restaurant owner will change the name to “make their own statement” regarding food and ambience.

A new owner may have have to make some difficult choices, given the changed environment for Los Angeles restaurants. L’Ermitage was never believed to have been more than moderately profitable--if at all, according to industry sources, but the independently wealthy Fourcade never depended on its income.

A new owner, who may have more of a bottom-line outlook, will enter a market where expensive restaurants have not fared well during the recession. Some restaurants have lowered prices and revamped their menus in response.

“People are going out as frequently, but they spend less when they do,” said Dick Carter, who specializes in restaurant real estate for Beitler Commercial Reality Services in Sherman Oaks. In an industry where more than half the restaurants do not survive their first year, it is particularly hard for high-priced restaurants to survive now, he said. Carter said many people do not have as much discretionary income as they might have in the past, because “we have seen salaries that lie as flat as the day is long.”

Some consultants said that in addition to economic issues, people’s tastes in food have changed as well. “People go to restaurants with less-structured menus or what I call nosh menus,” said Jennie Smith, a vice president at Celebrity Properties in Beverly Hills who helps coordinate the buying and selling of restaurants.