Her Last Resort

For 40 years, Ben Brown’s Restaurant and Aliso Creek Resort, tucked into an impossibly quiet canyon just off Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, has been knocked around and flooded out by storms, wind and mud.

Each time, owner Violet Brown cleaned up, rebuilt and came back. And each time, Ben Brown’s was born again in its old image: a 1950s-style meat-and-potatoes restaurant with formally dressed waiters and white tablecloths.

The winds of weather struck over and over, but the winds of trendiness, of California cuisine and low-cholesterol dining by shorts-clad customers, never blew through the sheltered canyon.

But this year, when El Nino smacked the resort with more damage than Brown ever dreamed possible, the widow was left wondering for the first time whether she should finally abandon her husband’s dream.

Instead, not only is she rebuilding at the age of 78, but she will change Ben Brown’s 40-year tradition, reshaping the local landmark into a rustic lodge in the woods, complete with two fireplaces and a menu that offers wild boar.

On top of that, it will no longer be named after her late husband, who bought the 84-acre resort and nine-hole golf course in 1957. The new name will be Canyon Lodge.

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The change, Brown admits, will likely startle many of the restaurant’s longtime patrons when it reopens this summer. Both she and general manager Ed Slymen predict their most loyal customers will complain loudly about the family’s decision to rename the restaurant, which was little more than a trailer-sized snack bar when Ben Brown, a developer from Beverly Hills, took over.

“To some, this place will always be Ben Brown’s,” Slymen said. “The history, the way we’ve stayed the same for so long, the way we’ve mourned loss after loss and never walked away. . . . It makes for a pretty strong attachment.”

But Brown said she hopes Canyon Lodge will draw a new generation of visitors to the secluded resort.

“It’s a very special place,” she said. “Nothing we do on the outside could ever change its heart.”

The resort has been closed since February, when the same storm that caused the Laguna Canyon landslide that killed two men also hit the canyon several miles south, pushing bridges down Aliso Creek into the ocean and packing nearly all of the hotel’s 62 rooms with 3 feet of slushy mud.

“Mother Nature gave us a goose, if you will,” said Slymen, who is also Brown’s nephew.

That night, about 50 guests were herded into the restaurant’s bar, where they sprawled on the floor and waited to be rescued by firefighters. Brown, helpless as the storm churned on, said she stood in the dark restaurant and felt an unusual twinge of panic.

“I looked at all of those people lying around in here and started wondering how we would ever come back from this,” she said. “At that point, I was really thinking to myself, ‘This is it. I can’t do this again. I can’t do this anymore.’ ”

But of course she is.

Crews hauled out hundreds of tons of debris and silt from the resort and began refurbishing the popular 2,223-yard golf course, which winds around Aliso Creek and through a steep, chaparral-covered canyon. Brown and Slymen canceled all of their hotel bookings for four months--effectively wiping out what could have been one of their best seasons ever--to remodel and re-carpet the condo-style units.

“It was sort of a sign for us,” Slymen, 55, said of this year’s damage. “It was time to start over.”