LOS ANGELES BUSINESS JOURNAL
"Perino’s Site Will Be Redeveloped Into Apartments"
By Danny King, Staff Reporter / August 18, 2003

A local developer has purchased the old Perino’s restaurant site in the Mid-Wilshire area and will be redevelop the property into a 48-unit apartment complex.

Carey & Kutay Development paid $4 million for the 1.5-acre location at the northwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Norton Avenue. The site includes a single-family home as well as the 12,000-square-foot building that once housed the legendary eatery, and will spend an additional $10 million to $15 million building out the 60,000-square-foot project.

“We’re residential builders and we were looking for something in that area,” said Tom Carey, a principal at Carey & Kutay.

Along with Chasen’s and Scandia, Perino’s, which opened in 1932 on Wilshire near Gramercy Place and moved two blocks west in 1949, was among the elite mid-century Los Angeles restaurants, counting composer Cole Porter and gangster Bugsy Siegel among its regular guests. The restaurant fell out of favor as the area changed and was shut down in 1983. Two more attempts to revive it later that decade failed.

Still, the developer, which has hired Santa Monica-based Killefer Flammang Architects plans to pay homage to the storied eatery, whose interior was designed by noted architect Paul R. Williams. Among the elements considered for the new project are the restaurant’s canopy along Wilshire and the dining room’s leaded glass doors and booths, according to Wade Killefer, a Killefer Flammang partner.

Coldwell Banker Commercial WESTMAC’s Alexander Sachs and Jim Bailey represented the buyer while the seller, Harold Frank, who had owned the property for the last decade, represented himself.

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