Noa Noa Goes Bye-Bye While Champagne Fizzes Anew

After the sudden departure of Kenji Seki from Noa Noa six months ago, the nouvelle Polynesian restaurant changed its format. It became Cafe Noa Noa, a brasserie with a more casual, less expensive menu. Now it too has closed.

“It’s a situation where we decided the time has come to end the old and go forward with the new,” says Lessing Gold, an attorney who represents the Japanese investors in the Beverly Hills restaurant. Gold declined to say what the new was that the investors have in mind. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people,” he says. “We are looking for something that is going to be good and unique.”

One of the people Gold has spoken with is Bruce Cost, the former chef/owner of San Francisco’s Monsoon, who left his 2-year-old Chinese restaurant last month.

“I thought if I ever went into the right space in Los Angeles,” says Cost, “I’d have a reasonably priced lunch and do an herbal bar.” Cost has developed a line of drinks using herbal extracts made by a Chinese chemist in the Bay area. At Monsoon, one of the most popular was made with fresh ginger syrup, ginseng, a little lime and an extract of five herbs. “If you drink a couple of them,” says Cost, “you can actually feel the ginseng.”

“They want a proposal from me real quick,” says Cost. Although he says that “over $3 million was dumped into it,” Noa Noa’s custom-made furniture would have to go.

Another person Gold has contacted is Seventh Street Bistro’s Laurent Quenioux. His plans are different. “I would do really good California-American cuisine in that space,” says Quenioux, who closed his downtown restaurant Friday. “That’s what people would go for. They will be at your front door as long as you give them the real stuff and good service.”

Spago alumnus Takasha Iwasaki, who now owns Carrots restaurant in Santa Monica, says that he too has been talking to Gold. He represents a third option. “I would do California-French cuisine,” says the Westside chef, “because that’s what I do.”

SEEING STARS: Last month Patrick and Sophie Healy closed Champagne, their upscale California-French restaurant on Little Santa Monica Boulevard. This month, Sophie Healy will reopen it.

“Patrick gave up the lease because he didn’t want me in the restaurant anymore,” says Sophie, “but we still have 10 years to run on the lease.” So she has renamed the restaurant Champagne Bis ( bis means again in French) and will open the doors on Tuesday for lunch and dinner. Most of the original staff has returned, and the menu will remain unchanged. She says Vaughn York, who was chef at Champagne, will be in charge of the kitchen. “Patrick didn’t cook for the last two years,” says Sophie. “Most of the time he wasn’t even in the kitchen.”

“That’s an outright lie,” says Patrick. “The success of Champagne has always depended on the consistency of the cooking, and that was because I oversaw every element in the kitchen. It’s not chopping the onions.”

Meanwhile, Patrick has made an offer on a place of his own in Beverly Hills. “It is going to be something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” he says, “. . . real country cuisine. Something like the rustic stuff I did at Champagne, but exclusively that type of cooking--no foie gras or caviar. That way I can keep the ticket price pretty low.”

And yes, after 10 years, they are getting a divorce.

CLOSING: Michael McCarty will close Adirondacks, his Washington restaurant, on June 30. “We were paying three times the fair price for rent,” says Adirondacks general manager Ricardo Solares, “and we were hoping the landlord would renegotiate for the sake of good business.” McCarty, who also owns Michael’s in Santa Monica and another in New York, had signed a 25-year lease on the restaurant. “Instead of paying $360,000 a year, we tried to renegotiate to $120,000,” says Solares. “I don’t know why anybody signs a 25-year lease, it’s insane.” McCarty’s other two restaurants will remain open but Solares says, “Santa Monica has been struggling.”

Solares says none of the staff, including himself, will receive severance pay. “Michael has never given severance pay, ever,” Solares says. “That’s his policy , so I wasn’t even hopeful.”

In March, McCarty filed for protection from all three restaurants’ creditors under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. He is vacationing in the Hamptons, and could not be reached for comment.