Michel Richard returns

Sort of. The celebrated chef who helped jumpstart L.A. cuisine into the big leagues with Citrus restaurant on Melrose will be opening a new place at Social Hollywood, an entertainment complex on the site of the old Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset near Cahuenga. The restaurant, which he describes as "casual postmodern" (oh brother), will open in January and Richard says he'll drop in once a month - much as he'll do at several other locations he's opening around the country. From the LAT:

It's another of those modern chef gigs, not that different from those enjoyed by Tom Colicchio, Laurent Tourondel, Thomas Keller or Daniel Boulud, among many others, at their outposts away from their home cities. Ironically, Richard was in the forefront of that movement more than 15 years ago when he opened satellite restaurants of Citrus in Santa Barbara, Baltimore, San Francisco and Philadelphia as well as the one in Washington, D.C., which eventually became his home base when he left Los Angeles in 1998. The others have closed.