i’d like to take these home, please

The facade of the late, great Chasen’s restaurant will soon be serving as a triumphal entry for a Bristol Farms market. We can take small comfort, however, that some of its innards will enjoy a more fitting existence. (Upscale market or not, would it seem right if the leaded glass wall that once separated Chasen’s dining room from the patio kept frozen free-range chicken a safe distance from gourmet dog food?)

A couple of months back, restaurateur Rick Clemente heard that the Chasen’s furnishings were going up for auction. He headed over on a quiet Sunday morning to buy some stemware, but ended up making several trips in a 24-foot U-Haul instead. He bought the leaded glass wall, a matching window and six original booths named for Chasen’s regulars Fred Astaire, Spencer Tracy, Bob Hope, Edward G. Robinson, Alice Faye and Pat O’Brien. He purchased the booths in a lot (for a sum he won’t disclose) after watching the Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart booths go for $3,000 apiece and the Groucho Marx for only $400. “We’re not trying to re-create Chasen’s,” says Clemente, “we’re borrowing from the past. We’re respecting and giving homage to elegance.”

He’s talking about his high-end restaurant, Los Feliz, which he recently opened with a companion jazz club on the northern tip of Hillhurst Avenue. To retrofit the booths, which he reupholstered, the former TV/commercial production company owner with a big basso voice diverted the construction crew renovating his Paul Williams house up the block. The glass wall now functions as a dividing line between the bar and the Jazz Spot club. The result, Clemente says over the foam of a tall glass of Spaten beer, is “an architectural richness you couldn’t reproduce.”

The Chasen’s loot joins a veritable museum of adaptive reuse in the restaurant, including comfy dining and lounge chairs and a dozen bar stools picked up during an auction of furnishings from the Dodger Stadium VIP lounge, and wine glasses, a deep-fryer and an ice-cream machine Clemente scored when another swank Beverly Hills hangout, Jimmy’s, closed earlier this year.

Though resurrecting Chasen’s is not his goal, Clemente does hope his restaurant will evoke an era when “going out to dinner was a grand occasion.” He says Chasen’s was one of the hallmarks of that era, along with the Mocambo, Ciro’s and Romanoff’s before it. “I don’t know if it existed in reality,” he wonders, “or my mind.”