An early-morning fire Monday caused an estimated $400,000 in damage and snarled traffic on PCH. The cause is still unknown.
By Knowles Adkisson / Associate Editor
County fire officials on Tuesday were still investigating the cause of an early-morning fire Monday at BeauRivage restaurant. The fire caused significant damage to the restaurant’s interior and backed up traffic on Pacific Coast Highway in both directions for several hours.
The Los Angeles County Fire Department received a call at 6:10 a.m. from someone who saw white smoke about a half-mile away, fire officials said. The first of more than 30 firefighters arrived on scene at 6:18, and fought the blaze for more than an hour before extinguishing it at 7:48 a.m.
Fire department officials said the fire began in the restaurant’s attic and pegged the cost of the damage at $400,000.
Previous owner Daniel Forge had closed the doors to his 33-year-old establishment the previous Thursday and went with his wife Luciana to Ojai for the weekend. He said the new owners, Morris Gerson Family, Inc., were only open one day and now they are shut down.
“The [new owners] served the two meals on Sunday, the brunch and the dinner, and then it burned in the night,” Forge said.
Investigators have not said what caused the fire, although Forge told the media he believed it was an electrical fire.
“It was a product of a lifetime of work, my wife and I built it from the ground up,” said Forge, 86. “It’s sad but life is sometimes crazy like that. Thirty-three years and I never had a fire, 72 years of working in the restaurant business and I never had a fire.”
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Arson/Explosive Details Unit investigated the scene for the cause of the fire, but the cause of the fire is still under review. One source familiar with the restaurant said it had been undergoing extensive renovations in the week leading up to the fire.
The BeauRivage has been a fixture of the Malibu landscape since 1982, serving as a voting center, meeting place for city functions and a frequent location for weddings.
The sale of the restaurant cleared escrow Friday last week, several years after the Forges first began trying to sell the property after a string of misfortune and battles with the California Coastal Commission, the National Parks Service and the California Sierra Club over plans to build a bed and breakfast on the property, which abuts nearby Solstice Creek.
Under the deal, the Forges transferred title of the property to Pepperdine University, which sold the property to Morris Gerson Family Co., Inc. on Friday.
Lou Drobnick, executive vice chancellor of Pepperdine, said such transactions are common practice by universities across the country. A donor gives property to the institution as a donation, and receives a charitable deduction on taxes. The donor also receives monthly payments on a tax annuity for several years. When the annuity concludes, the university receives the remainderment, or what is left over from the sale of the property.
“Half of the remainder will go to name our fall musical the Luciana and Daniel Forge Fall Musical at Pepperdine, and the other half will go to scholarships toward theater students,” Drobnick said.
The principal owners are Glen Gerson, owner of Calamigos Ranch, and Bob Morris, owner of the Paradise Cove Caf/.
It is believed the sons of Gerson and Morris plan to jointly operate the restaurant after renovations are complete, but that could not be confirmed as of press time. It is unknown how long the restaurant will be closed. Attempts to reach Gerson and Morris for comment Tuesday were unsuccessful.
Realtor Chris Lashelle, who has been assisting the Forges in getting the property sold for years, said the sale came just in time.
“We got very, very lucky,” Lashelle said. “I closed on Friday, went off to Hawaii, then I get the call [about the fire]. We’re all just really lucky and I’m really glad everyone’s okay.”
Lashelle said Glen Gerson was particularly helpful in facilitating the sale.
“Glen Gerson is a total class act,” Lashelle said.
Both Drobnick and Lashelle said they believed the restaurant had fire insurance.
The long road finally ends
An analysis by Arnold York
After a multiyear battle with the State of California, Caltrans, the California Coastal Commission, the Sierra Club, the steelhead trout lobby and an alphabet soup of environmental organizations, both governmental and private, Luciana and Daniel Forge last week were finally laid low by age and the enormous cost of fighting the environmental establishment.
Their dream of a 27-unit bed-and-breakfast adjacent to the BeauRivage Restaurant, which had been years in the making, was finally crushed in 2005 when the California Coastal Commission, dominated by local Malibu member Sara Wan and the late Executive Director Peter Douglas, unanimously rejected the Forges’ proposal. The rejection came after a group of local environmentalists all testified against the project, and the irreparable harm they claimed it would cause, even though the Coastal staff, typically not particularly project friendly, had recommended that the project be approved.
The Forges bought the property in 1982 and built the BeauRivage Restaurant, originally a small Mexican eatery. Later they sought permits and fought lawsuits, initially to construct a small shopping mall and later a bed and breakfast. The City of Malibu granted a permit for the bed-and-breakfast in 2003. But the Sierra Club sued, claiming among many other things that the steelhead trout were not sufficiently protected. The Sierra Club lost in the trial court and in the Court of Appeal; nevertheless, the project ultimately failed unanimously at the California Coastal Commission in 2005.
In 2010, the State again went after the Forges to take part of the property by eminent domain so they could build a trout ladder along Solstice Creek, for what was estimated to be 500 steelhead trout. It was ultimately completed. The Forges, ever feisty, fought back. The fight involved easements. The state representatives said it really was no big deal because “the entire property remains in the hands of the property owner.” Daniel Forge, who had already had some significant experience with the State environmental bureaucracy, didn’t quite see it that way. He was quoted as saying to The Malibu Times, “In simple terms, they are stealing my property.”