Restaurant

Napa is all about good wine and good food -- and a summer package from the River Terrace Inn on the Napa River makes it easy to take it all in. Free tastings at more than a dozen wineries and bars, as well as a restaurant credit good for $75 to $200, make August a good time to visit and explore. The deal: Some nice freebies come with the Summer Sip Away package: free bike rentals, a Downtown Wine Tasting Card with access to 12 winery tasting rooms and wine bars ($25 each)

Raymond Taix, who owned one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles, the French establishment Taix that his family has run since 1927, has died. He was 85. Taix died Oct. 10 of leukemia at his Pasadena home, said his son, Michael. The restaurant owes its beginnings to an act of capriciousness at the height of Prohibition when Raymond was 2 years old. After his French-immigrant grandfather built a hotel in 1912 in a French enclave downtown, he leased space to a restaurant.

Nudist foodies in San Francisco may soon find themselves forced to cover up. Public nudity is legal in the Bay Area city, and no one is suggesting that residents will be barred from taking a stroll down the street or a picnic at the park in the buff. But restaurants may soon be off limits to the unattired, and San Francisco supervisors are also considering codifying a practice that nudists call "normal etiquette," by requiring those who bare it all in public to lay down a cover on public seating before they sit down.

Cardiff Giant, the hospitality group behind The Hudson and The Churchill, has been very busy of late. The Daily Dish just got word that the group is set to take over the former Voyeur Nightclub  space at 7969 Santa Monica Ave. and will renovate and re-open it as a new nightclub concept in January of 2013. This comes after rumors circulated on the web that NYC's The Box was going to take the space. In addition Cardiff Giant has announced plans to open an as-of-yet un-named restaurant in downtown L.A. in the old Heinz loading dock at 712 S. Santa Fe after the New Year.

The last surviving Brown Derby restaurant building, which dodged the wrecking ball in the mid-2000s, has been sold for $9.25 million to local investors. The domed structure at Los Feliz Boulevard and Hillhurst Avenue in Los Angeles was the fourth Brown Derby, a small restaurant chain popular with the entertainment industry in Hollywood's Golden Age. The sellers, a group led by Adler Realty Investments Inc. of Woodland Hills, had let go of their plans to raze the building and build a five-story condominium and retail complex.

Anyone who knows Hollywood knows Musso & Frank, where the stars of the motion picture industry's Golden Age often dined. Everyone came to Musso's: Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. Even as the world outside its doors changed with the times, Musso's, which opened in 1919, embraced its old charms: steaks, chops and martinis served by waiters in red jackets to patrons in red leather booths. No one messed with the Musso mystique, because in a town where it's sometimes hard to tell the difference, this was the real deal.

Restaurants typically do their best to keep their establishments clean. And in Los Angeles, we even grade our restaurants based on cleanliness. So it came as a surprise to see a restaurant in Japan serving actual dirt on the menu. And we're not talking about the small remnants that can cling to a piece of produce after it's been washed. Nor the trendy "dirt" -- made with ground  nuts and malt flour -- popularized by the Copenhagen restaurant Noma. It's real dirt. Ne Quittez Pas , a restaurant in Tokyo, is serving an entire menu devoted to dirt, reported Asian news site RocketNews24.com . The first course consists of a potato starch and dirt soup; the second, salad with dirt dressing, then an aspic with oriental clams and a top layer of sediment; and the fourth course, a dirt risotto with sea bass and burdock root.

Sunday is a slow night for the Beijing Hooters girls. Jiang Xin -- or Summer, as her name tag reads -- takes the opportunity to teach the new hires one of their dance routines. With smoky dark eyes and her all-black trainer uniform, 24-year-old Jiang is sexy, smoldering and standoffish until she smiles. This she does when she gently admonishes the girls to loosen up, laugh, and stop tugging at the bottoms of their shorts. Hooters in Beijing is much like its American counterpart.

The city of Vernon is under pressure to change, but a push is on to keep at least one thing in this 5-square-mile industrial city the same. That's La Villa Basque, a 1960s-era landmark used as a location to film the television show "Mad Men. " Even as state lawmakers seek to dissolve the city around it, Los Angeles-area preservationists are campaigning to convince the restaurant's new operators not to remodel and modernize it. The operators are...

When asked why he was sneaking out of a Pico Rivera restaurant with a computer, Fernando Castillo offered a simple answer: I'm the manager. Only problem? The person asking was the actual manager. “It was an 'I'm the manager, no I'm the manager' type of thing,” Sgt. Ernest Bille of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said of the back-and-forth exchange at Clearman's Steak 'n Stein on Tuesday night. As employees prepped to close for the night, Castillo sneaked in, unplugged a computer monitor and tried to leave the restaurant with it, authorities said.