Hollywood to get some Citrus zest

Angelenos who fondly remember the days when Michel Richard was in the kitchen at Citrus restaurant on Melrose Avenue probably felt their hearts beat a little faster when they read in the blogs that the big man was returning to the area to be chef at a restaurant at Social Hollywood.

Well, they can calm down a little. Richard will design the menu and train the chefs for Citrus at Social, which will be part of Jeffrey Chodorow’s entertainment complex in the old Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset Boulevard near Cahuenga Boulevard. And Richard says that after the restaurant opens in January, either he or one of his chefs will stop in once a month to make sure everything is running up to speed.

But he is definitely not leaving Washington, D.C., where his Citronelle restaurant is a cornerstone of the fine dining scene and where his new, casual Central is packing in crowds.

The position at Social Hollywood is similar to the one Richard will have at Citronelle at Carmel Valley Ranch in the Monterey area, also to open in January, and to the one at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas that he is negotiating for 2009.

“My title? Chef. Well, consulting chef,” he says. “The food will be 100% mine, even though I won’t be there all the time.”

In other words, it’s another of those modern chef gigs, not that different from those enjoyed by Tom Colicchio, Laurent Tourondel, Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud, among many others, at their outposts away from their home cities.

Ironically, Richard was in the forefront of that movement more than 15 years ago when he opened satellite restaurants of Citrus in Santa Barbara, Baltimore, San Francisco and Philadelphia as well as the one in Washington, D.C., which eventually became his home base when he left Los Angeles in 1998. The others have closed.

The details of the menu at Social Hollywood are yet to be worked out, but he says the food will be “casual postmodern,” which he translates as a restaurant “where the food is fun, somewhere between Citronelle and Central, and where 25-year-olds can come for dinner and not have to have a second mortgage on the house.”

One possible dish he mentioned as an example is the lobster burger so popular at the Citronelle bar in D.C. -- chopped, cooked tail and knuckle meat bound with lobster mousse and served on a brioche bun.

Asked why he’s taking on so many outside projects when Citronelle and Central are going so well, Richard laughed. “I need the money. I’ve got six kids and college costs $60,000 a year before taxes.”

Besides, he said, he’s always loved California and someday he and his wife, Laurence, who was raised here, might like to come back to live here. Just not right now.