Chef’s Mission Is to Put Saddle Peak Back on Track

“The owner brought me in because the place has gone way downhill,” chef Josie Le Balch says. “The first thing I did was ban broccoli. It was like carrots and broccoli on everything.”

Le Balch is talking about Saddle Peak Lodge, the fantasy hunting lodge replete with animal heads and horns located in the mountains in Calabasas. After leaving Remi in Santa Monica last year, Le Balch took an extended ski vacation in Utah. Now she’s back at Saddle Peak, where she worked six years ago.

“I feel like the kid that went to the big city and has come home,” she says. “This used to be a real fun, cool place but now it’s kind of like a steakhouse.”

Le Balch plans to turn that around. She’s already contacted many of the distributors who once sold her fresh caribou, elk, boar and other wild game. “When I was up here before, purveyors used to tell each other, ‘Hey, call this chick up in Saddle Peak--she likes the weirder the better.’ Now all I’ve got are all these ostrich farmers calling me up.”

Game is great, but Le Balch also wants to take advantage of the restaurant’s large mesquite grill and lighten things up a bit. She plans to add lots of salads, vegetables and fresh fish.

“The place has become a special-event kind of place,” Le Balch says. “I want to get some of the locals back.”

Before she would consider coming back, however, Le Balch had a serious talk with Saddle Peak owner Ann Ehringer, who bought the place from her husband. “I asked her if she was serious about the restaurant or if it was just a hobby,” Le Balch says. “And she told me, ‘I’m very serious about this restaurant.’ And I said, ‘Whoa. . . .’ ”

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Dishing and Hissing: The dishiest news of the summer (which goes to show how slow things really are) is Patrick Gruest’s sudden and mysterious departure from Les Arts, the serious French restaurant he opened in Pasadena last year. Paris-born Gruest, who previously owned and ran Fleur de Vin in the same city, could not be reached for comment. And partner Ron Eisler, who also owns the building, wouldn’t elaborate. “Patrick is gone and nothing here is going to change,” Eisler says.

Ring-a-Ding-Ding: The owners of Cobalt Cantina, the popular 3-year-old Cal-Mex restaurant in Silver Lake, are opening another branch next month in the space once occupied by the Moroccan-themed Babylon on Robertson in West Hollywood. Cobalt co-owner Kirk Psenner says Babylon regulars won’t recognize the place once remodeling is complete. The partners plan to flip the bar around, enlarge the kitchen and redecorate. Eventually, they plan to take over the upstairs, too, and turn it into private dining rooms.

One other change: Unlike Babylon, Cobalt’s telephone number will be listed. “Babylon was one of those exclusive, trendy spaces like Asylum where they have their run and then they’re gone,” Psenner says. “We welcome everybody and we plan to be around for a long time.”

Future Cobalts are scheduled for Long Beach, San Francisco and Houston. Says Psenner: “We are going to take our funky, liberal, eclectic no-attitude restaurant and put it all over the place.”

For more restaurant coverage, please see Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Magazine and Thursday’s Food Section.