The highly regarded Bay Area restaurant Manresa will reopen for business on Sept. 19, two months after a fire started outside the building and blazed through the kitchen.
No one was injured in the July 16 fire; the restaurant, in Los Gatos, Calif., was closed and unoccupied. But the facade was damaged and the kitchen lost some of its roof, leaving a hole over the pastry department, said the executive chef, David Kinch.
Some of the fermented products that Manresa’s cooks prepare for as long as two months were lost. And most of Mr. Kinch’s antique Japanese glassware, used for service at the restaurant, was destroyed.
“If I’m going to lament and moan about anything,” Mr. Kinch said, “it’s that.”
Manresa, a fine-dining restaurant with a modern American menu and three Michelin stars, had already been damaged in an earlier fire in 2014, and shut down for about six months. That fire started in the same place, behind the building, and spread quickly along the eaves.
An investigation of this summer’s fire by the Santa Clara County Fire Department has concluded that it was accidental. A spokeswoman for the department said Thursday that the fire began when some dish towels, soaked with sunflower seed oil, were left outside the building. In the heat, the temperature inside the pile of towels rose and ignited spontaneously.
After the fire, Mr. Kinch said, even parts of the restaurant that appeared unaffected had to be replaced to get rid of the stubborn smell of smoke.
He noted that the restaurant’s insurer has compensated management and salaried employees for the duration of the closing, but did not cover what workers might have made in tips. (Manresa charges $275 a person for its tasting menu.) Over the summer, many on the staff worked in other fine-dining restaurants in the Bay Area, and almost all will return to their jobs in September, Mr. Kinch said.
“Everyone is on call after Labor Day weekend for touching up, painting, dusting, cleaning chairs, that kind of thing,” he added. A new carpet will be rolled in, along with new lights and sconces, though maybe not until a few weeks after the opening.
Mr. Kinch spent August developing new dishes at his home kitchen in Santa Cruz. What he considers the restaurant’s signature dish — an extravagant miscellany of fruits, vegetables and flowers that changes with the seasons — will turn to various late-blooming tomato varieties and late-summer fruits such as plums and melon.
He described another new dish as a corn custard, made without dairy and thickened with cornstarch, with a wobbly texture close to that of panna cotta. He plans to serve it with caviar and a roasted chicken jelly, made by steeping chicken with porcini mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and kombu, among other ingredients.
“It’s a crystal-clear umami bomb,” said Mr. Kinch, who estimated that when the restaurant reopens, at least half the menu will be new.
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An earlier version of this article incorrectly described a new dish of tomatoes, plums and melons. It will not include pesto.
