The Buzz at Spago
Talk about uninvited guests.
A swarm of bees unexpectedly showed up last week in the atrium at Spago in Beverly Hills, creating a flurry of departures from the outside area into the posh restaurant.
Owner Wolfgang Puck, nonplussed by his bumbling guests, called for a bee specialist who arrived in full fighting regalia overalls, gloves and netted head gear.
With guests looking on from the safety of glassed doors, the bee wrangler gathered and shooed away the insects, without disturbing diners like Jason Robards Jr. and Valerie Harper.
“Even bees have to eat well,” quipped Puck’s wife and partner Barbara Lazaroff.
Taste at Your Own Risk
The owner of the Light My Fire store at Farmers Market isn’t taking any chances when it comes to customers who taste-test the four hottest sauces in the shop.
Those who want to sample “Da Bomb,” “Ground Zero,” “Pure Cap” and “Smack My Ass & Call Me Sally” must first sign a waiver absolving proprietor Byoung Min of all responsibility should health problems occur.
Each sauce has its own disclaimer form, which among other things states that the signer is not inebriated.
The store sells more than 900 different types of sauces, but those four have the biggest kick because of their generous amounts of habanero peppers, the juice of which has been known to cause injuries to skin and eyes.
“You just never know,” said Min. “It’s a half-joke, half-serious thing. Nobody has said no to signing it.”
Naked Truth
The owners of a Hawthorne strip club are staging a golf tournament to raise money for some decidedly non-adult-oriented charities.
Coming up on July 21 at the Knollwood Country Club is the First Annual Bare Elegance Charity Golf Classic, which is expected to raise between $5,000 and $10,000 for a local little league, a parks and recreation foundation and a sheriff’s youth program.
Bare Elegance will supply 30 dancers to entertain the 36 foursomes expected to sign up. Some of the dancers will serve as caddies, said Chuck Bowles, whose Corporate Event Planners is organizing the event.
“Our girls will be fully clothed will have a skirt on, and a fitted top,” Bowles said. “We’re doing it a little differently” than other strip clubs.
Tea Cake Time
Normally when the name of a real estate broker appears on a sign outside a piece of property, they get calls about price and square footage.
But when CB Richard Ellis broker Barbara Emmons was handling the former site of Martinos Bakery in Burbank, she got lots of calls about tea cakes.
Seems the callers wanted to know where they could find the goodies that had been made and distributed at the landmark building until it was shut down and liquidated last year.
Martinos sold the property to Hackman Equities, which fixed it up and sold off the equipment before re-selling it to Captions Inc., a company that makes captions for movies.
“I’ve never gotten calls on things like that,” said Emmons. “The new owners have joked about whether they should get into the tea cake business.”
