Border Grill Finds It’s Cheaper to Close

Border Grill, the 35-seat Melrose Avenue nouvelle Mexican restaurant, has closed its doors. Co-owner Barbara McReynolds cites the economy and exorbitant workers’ compensation insurance costs as reasons for the closing. “We seat 35 people in the restaurant,” McReynolds says. “Now our insurance company wants us to pay $40,000-a-year for worker’s comp. And that was before (State Insurance Commissioner John) Garamendi approved that rate hike last week.”

Last year chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken split with their longtime la Eyeworks partners McReynolds, Gai Gherardi and Margo Willits. Feniger and Milliken kept their two largest restaurants, City Restaurant on La Brea Avenue and Border Grill 2 in Santa Monica, which remain open. The Melrose Border Grill, the partners’ original restaurant located next to la Eyeworks, went to McReynolds, Gherardi and Willits.

“The night we closed,” says McReynolds, “we brought everybody up front and talked about the economy and how every month we’ve been holding on and on, how we’d received this outrageous workers’ comp bill. We told them that we just couldn’t do it anymore.” Twenty jobs were lost.

Meanwhile, McReynolds says she and her partners will open another restaurant at the same location in the near future.

“Once you have claims filed, the insurance carrier gives you exposure rates--three claims or eight claims or whatever,” says McReynolds. “That’s how your rates are based. But you can go back to 100% or 0 claims if you do two of three things: change 100% of your employees; change 50% of the partnership; and/or start a new business, like a hardware store.”

McReynolds says she and Gherardi and Willits will hire all new employees and take on a new partner.

“But it won’t be another Mexican restaurant,” she says. “Before we sold some of our restaurants to Susan and Mary Sue, all of us had talked about this one idea and we are actually going to pursue it. I just can’t say what it is yet.”

SERIAL FOOD: Vaughn Allen, who has been cooking temporarily at L.A. Farm and Cicada since walk ing out of Asylum in April, has now found a permanent gig. He will be opening chef at Melrose Place, a restaurant (not to be confused with the much-hyped new television series of that name) opening next month on, ah, La Cienega .

Melrose Place (it’s where the ultra-modern Metropolis used to be) will be turned into a reasonably priced, California/French/Asian restaurant with a large, open exhibition kitchen. Allen will also offer a separate, “more conscious” menu where you can order, say, a vegetable plate or a piece of broiled fish and some steamed baby carrots.

Allen says the restaurant required major renovation. “When they started construction,” he says, “they started tearing down wall after wall after wall. It was really very funny.”

STOCKPOT: The big question this week is whether or not University Restaurant Group (it owns the downtown Water Grill, Santa Monica’s Ocean Avenue Seafood and I Cugini, and Long Beach’s 555 East and Pine Avenue Fish House) is about to open another downtown fish restaurant--this one on the site of the former 7th Street Bistro, which closed its doors three weeks ago. “I can’t comment on that at all,” says Angela Gabel, executive secretary for the University Restaurant Group. . . .

More downtown news: Casey’s Bar & Grill, the yuppie Irish bar on Grand Avenue, closed its doors, as did Vie de France, a French-style cafe in the California Plaza. . . . Arunee, the Los Angeles Thai restaurant that was torched during the Los Angeles riots, has reopened in a larger location on 4th Street and Vermont Avenue.

MUSICAL MENUS: Restaurant Antoine in Le Meridien Newport Beach offers its all-bean prix-fixe ($48) menu during the month of July: cassoulet of escargots, sweetbread salad with French beans, roasted monkfish in black bean sauce, grilled squab with fava beans, and white bean jam with fresh fruit fritter for dessert.