RESTAURANTS : La Serre in the Shop for an Overhaul

“Thank you for calling La Serre. We’ll be closed until further notice. Thank you for your patronage in the past and we look forward to serving you again soon. Please call us back within the next two weeks for an update on our reopening featuring a reasonably priced California menu.” --The answering machine at La Serre La Serre as a reasonably priced California restaurant?

“It’s time for a change,” says Jerry Bakalyan, the restaurant’s co-owner. “La Serre was the Valley’s best restaurant for a number of years, but French food is not the thing for the Valley anymore. The only way to change completely is to shut off the engine and then turn it back on.”

Actually, the restaurant’s engine is about to undergo a major overhaul. The lattice work is slated for demolition, the gazebos will go, part of the roof may even come off. The restaurant will get a new look, lower prices, a new menu. And, of course, a new name.

Bakalyan says he has been busy eating at local restaurants. One of the dishes he most admired during his tasting tour is the duck breast quesadilla at Pasadena’s Crocodile Cafe. “It’s interesting to find that when you go to all the great restaurants, go in the kitchen and see who’s doing the cooking . . . Mexicans,” says the restaurateur. Dishes that he mentions include the quesadilla, enchiladas with sirloin, grilled fish, chops, “even duck sausage pizza.” Although the plans aren’t final, the Studio City restaurant owner says he definitely intends to have a grill menu.

And the new name? La Serre Grill. What else?

“We will have an interesting menu and lower prices to see if we can get our volume back,” says Bakalyan, who concedes that his customers have dropped to about 80 a day, down from 250 a day several years ago. But the recession is only partly to blame for La Serre’s problems. In 1988 Roger Sembiazza, then La Serre’s managing partner opened a bistro called Mistral down the street. “We lost a lot of business there,” says Bakalyan. “Then in 1989 Bistro Garden announced it was moving in across the street, then Val’s opened for lunch, and then we had a war and then we had a recession.”

Business at Bistro Garden at Coldwater is also down, about 20 to 25 percent says owner Christopher Niklas, who adds that the restaurant has made cutbacks to “weather the storm.” “La Serre had a 10 year run as a superb restaurant,” says Niklas, “but they didn’t adjust their prices to the current economic conditions . . .. We have adjusted our prices for the second time at Coldwater and we have a large range of prices. That’s what La Serre didn’t have, it was all high, high, high. We start at $12.50 and then get them on the wine and liquor. Our food is more casual, less French saucy and pretentious.”

Any new business during the last several days? “It’s too early to tell,” says Niklas, “but we already took enough as it is.”

SAME TIME, SAME PLACE: “We opened the same weekend, eight years ago, and almost the same thing was going on in the economy,” says Paul Fleming, who is about to reopen Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Beverly Hills. When the building burned down nearly six months ago, Fleming rebuilt on the same site. “The month we burned was the best month we ever had.” Fleming says that he gutted the restaurant, took out some walls, added cherry wood and made it look like a New York steakhouse. But while the look is different, the menu is not. “We added a bone-in strip, and we added a dish called ‘Voodoo Tuna’ (blackened ahi tuna on a soy mustard sauce). The rest is the same: steak, chops, fish and chicken,” says Fleming. Another thing that won’t be changing is the staff. “It’s amazing,” he says. “The whole kitchen staff, literally everyone, will be back . . . even after six months.”

OPENINGS: Bamboo, a casual French-Latin restaurant with American accents (meat loaf and mashed potatoes) at 10835 Venice Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Chef/owner is Jose Mendoza, who has worked at the Ivy and Morton’s. . . . Star Shake Cafe on the second floor of the Plaza Del Oro Shopping Center in Encino. An Israeli version of a “nightclub, restaurant and Hollywood show place,” says a restaurant spokesman. The walls are covered with movie posters and autographed pictures of famous stars; there’s a 50-foot aquarium, a patio and the food is basically pizzas, pastas, seafood and kebabs. As for the name? Says the spokesman, “Star, because there are a lot of pictures of stars on the walls, and Shake, because they sell milkshakes.”