Flames consume Newport Beach restaurant

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- A fire suspected to be the work of an arsonist gutted

Issay Restaurant early Wednesday, only days before the 10th anniversary of its opening.

Business owner Michiko Soffer had planned to celebrate Monday a decade

in business.

Instead of looking forward to the milestone, she sat dazed in a chair

Wednesday morning outside the restaurant at 485 Old Newport Boulevard.

She watched as investigators shoveled through blackened bits of what used

to be walls, windows and furniture.

“Ten years for nothing,” Soffer said. “We started from scratch.”

Soffer is the wife of Sid Soffer, who owns the property Issay sits on

and runs Sid’s Steakhouse, also on Old Newport Boulevard.

The cause of the fire at Issay has not yet been determined, said Donna

Boston, a spokeswoman for the Newport Beach Fire Department, adding that

the circumstances of the blaze are considered suspicious.

No one was injured in the fire.

But the damage from the flames was so extensive that, though the

building was still standing, Boston said the restaurant would probably be

a total loss. Issay did not have an automatic sprinkler system.

Firefighters received reports that the building was burning at a few

minutes past 5 a.m. and had contained the conflagration within half an

hour, Boston said.

“When they arrived, they saw huge columns of smoke,” she said. “They

thought they saw flames shooting through the roof.”

It turned out, however, that the fire was burning with such heat that

it had blown out the windows and skylights of the restaurant, and was

roaring through the empty frames. It appeared to have originated from a

spot near the rear of the interior.

When firefighters tried to enter the building, they found the floor

was collapsing beneath them, Boston said. They were forced to fight the

blaze from outdoors through the windows.

“It was a very intense heat,” Boston noted.

Andy Crean, who owns Villa Nova, a restaurant that was nearly

destroyed by a 1995 fire, said the process of recovering from such a

calamity can be long and arduous.

“To come in all of a sudden and have nowhere to go, it was

devastating,” Crean said.

Reconstructing the restaurant took 10 months, he noted.

Wednesday’s blaze is the fourth serious fire that has swept through

properties owned or maintained by Sid Soffer, who is living in Las Vegas

to avoid being arrested on city code violations at one of his Costa Mesa

properties.

The most recent blaze, in 1986, scorched The Blue Beet Cafe on 21st

Street.

Other fires charred his properties in the 1960s, when a 31st Street

triplex burned to the ground, and in the ‘70s, when a smaller flare-up

damaged a restaurant.

“I thought the city would not allow me to have another fire,” Sid

Soffer said jokingly Wednesday.