There was still stunned shock last night (SUN) over the sudden and unexpected temporary closing of Nick Lachey, Wilmer Valderrama and Nicky Hilton’s new Company American Bistro at the Luxor.

It had been open just four months—and will undergo a complete food-menu makeover for its planned seven-day-a-week reopening on Thursday. Click here for our breaking-news report that we posted on Saturday when executive chef Adam Sobel quit on the heels of five major staff resignations.

“There was no choice—the owners were just losing too much money.” I was told. “It was serious financial hemorrhaging. The chefs were fantastic but the food costs and menu pricing were outrageously high. They changed the original menu to introduce better-priced comfort foods but even that didn’t work. It wound-up that the chefs just didn’t want to have their names attached to a cheaper franchise-type steak-house menu more in keeping to appeal to Luxor’s room-guests rather than the young crowd going next door to the LAX nightclub.”

Apparently the “unique fine dining” concept failed to draw the needed 300 covers a night and today (MON) new chefs are being trained there and a new “ friendly more approachable bar-type menu” is being readied. I’m told that when Company opened in December it was an investment of somewhere between $14 and $20 million—and although Pure Management Group carefully points out that the Company restaurant is not being re-branded they do say that the new menu will be completely different from when the restaurant first opened. PMG continues to run its other restaurants—Social House at TI and Dick’s Last resort at Excalibur—although it is also battling the fall-out from an IRS raid of its offices and the Pure and LAX nightclubs in connection with a probe into alleged cash-skimming and unreported cash tips by “line-fishing” doormen and managers.

Two weeks ago, although totally unrelated, it was widely reported that Pure Management Group “lost” its Lucky Strike bowling lanes at the Rio and now rumors are running rampant that the Café Martorano operation there will also be “taken back” as a hotel food operation.

Tattooed chef Steve Martorano, however, will continue to be the featured celebrity chef there.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.