Daily Grill seeks to go private

The owner of the Daily Grill and other upscale casual restaurants said Tuesday that remaining a public company had become too costly and it would ask shareholders to approve a plan to cease registration of its stock and pull its shares off the public market.

Directors of Grill Concepts Inc. in Woodland Hills approved a recommendation by a special committee of independent directors to halt stock registrations and withdraw the company’s shares from the Nasdaq stock market.

The company said it wanted to “avoid the substantial and increasing cost and expense” of complying with reporting requirements as a public company under the regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Grill Concepts figures it will save more than $750,000 a year by getting out from under the SEC rules.

To halt registration of its shares, Grill Concepts must reduce the number of stockholders of record to less than 300. To accomplish that, it will ask stockholders to approve a buyback program under which it would buy the stock of investors who hold fewer than 35 shares at $1.50 a share.

Grill Concepts, which operates 32 restaurants across the nation including the Grill on the Alley franchise, said it would schedule a shareholder vote in the first quarter of 2009.