Suspicious Fire Guts Restaurant

An arson fire early Wednesday destroyed the popular Issay Restaurant in Newport Beach, taking half an hour to rip through the small Cape Cod cottage-style building on Old Newport Boulevard.

Firefighters who were summoned shortly after 5 a.m. found the building filled with flames, said Donna Boston, emergency services coordinator for the Newport Beach Fire Department.

Intense flames kept firefighters from initially entering the building, she said, forcing them to blast streams of water through the restaurant’s windows.

“It was a pretty hot fire and it blew out the windows,” Boston said.

She said the fire appeared to have started inside the rear of the building and spread quickly. No one was working in the restaurant at the time, she said.

Investigators also found unspecified valuable items that had been taken from the building and left outside, where they were unharmed by the flames.

“It’s really strange,” Boston said, adding that investigators were not considering burglary as a factor.

Issay is owned by Michiko Soffer, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday. She is the estranged wife of local restaurateur Sid Soffer, whose own self-named restaurant a few doors to the south closed this summer after what he described as problems with staffing. The restaurant at the time had been cited with 27 health code violations.

Issay was noted among restaurant patrons for its wine list and Italian-based menu. The building itself is a former Newport Beach cottage that was disassembled and rebuilt on the present site, perched on a bluff overlooking Newport Boulevard near Industrial Way in 1935.