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# Restaurant owners chomping at the bit
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/restaurant-owners-chomping-at-the-bit/
- Published: 2004-02-12T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T03:46:30.000Z
- Author: John Wood
- Tags: Business, Promenade, #archive-import

*Barney’s Beanery was a Janis Joplin hangout*

PROMENADE — After more than a year and a half of dealing with City Hall bureaucracy, construction on the second outlet of a famed Los Angeles bar and restaurant will start here today.

Plans for Barney’s Beanery were approved by City Hall this week. Barricades will go up in front of the building today, and construction is expected to take three months at a cost of $1 million, co-owner Dan Houston said.

Officials said getting to this point was anything but easy. Barney’s sued City Hall in 2002 over what could be built in the new restaurant. That lawsuit eventually settled, but Houston then hit another snag — plans for the project were stuck in the “plan check” department of City Hall for well over a year, he said.

The situation got so difficult that the City Council, fearing Barney’s would levy a second lawsuit against the city, on Tuesday voted unanimously to extend by four months Barney’s window for developing the Promenade property.

Difficulties in getting through the plan-ning department in City Hall are all too common in Santa Monica, merchants have long complained. They say the process is overly bureaucratic and marked by poor customer service and other inefficiencies. That claim was backed by a recent study conducted by graduate business students, as well as the admission of the department’s top bureaucrats.

The case of Barney’s was even more confusing, because — like the Midnight Special Bookstore, which also hit snags when it moved to Second Street last year — Barney’s was a project local officials were eager to pursue. What’s more, Barney’s is moving into a space that used to be occupied by a restaurant, meaning it didn’t need to apply for a time-consuming change-of-use permit, officials said.

But Suzanne Frick, planning director, said the owners of Barney’s are largely to blame for the lag in getting the new restaurant approved.

“This one is certainly an exceptional case, because when they first applied, they were asking to go well beyond what the original... permit would have allowed,” she said. “The city and Barney’s got into a dispute about that determination and it ended up a settlement agreement... so you really can’t use this as an example, because this really was an anomaly and the subject of a potential lawsuit.”

City Councilman Herb Katz said both sides contributed to the delay.

“They’ve gone through quite a bit of a struggle — quite a bit of it was city, part of it was theirs,” he said. “They just went through all kinds of gymnastics.”

> “They just went through all kinds of gymnastics.” — — HERB KATZ City Councilman

No matter who is to blame for the delay in opening Barney’s, Kathleen Rawson, executive director of the Bayside District Corp., the nonprofit that runs downtown with funding from City Hall, said something needs to be done differently.

“The process has to be much more efficient,” said Rawson, whose office is above the site of the new Barney’s, just north of Santa Monica Boulevard on the Promenade.

Houston, who also owns Q’s Billiard Club & Restaurants in West LA, Santa Barbara and Pasadena, declined to discuss the delays at City Hall.

“That’s far from our goal — our goal is not to get into litigation with anybody, particularly not the city of Santa Monica,” he said, later adding, “It’s been longer than we would have liked it to be, because we’re anxious to open up in Santa Monica.”

Barney’s Beanery moved from Berkeley to LA in the 1920s. Over the years it’s been frequented by all types of movie and rock and roll stars, including regulars like Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, Houston said.

“We’re excited,” he added. “The style of Barney’s is very loose. I call it a hyper-casual, almost, dining experience... and I thought that would work very well in Santa Monica and particularly on the Promenade because it’s a very relaxing place.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 12, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/021204.pdf?ref=smdp.com)