Ragin Cajun has to move

Mary Domingue, her son and the restaurant’s owner Stephen Domingue, and kid sister Jeannine cook in the kitchen of Ragin’ Cajun Café. Photo by Patrick Fallon

The popular Ragin Cajun Café must find a new location, and that makes owner Stephen Domingue one Cajun who is ragin’.

Domingue has guided the restaurant through two expansions during its 18 years on upper Pier Avenue, all the while priding himself on critically acclaimed food, an informal atmosphere and family-friendly tradition. But at the end of the summer he will be pulling up stakes. Building owner Chris Bredesen Sr. plans to turn the space over to his son to launch a new eatery, Town Hall Gastropub.

Bredesen said he regrets the ill feeling and understands Domingue’s anger, but he decided to end Ragin Cajun’s run at the location at a time when the lease was ending and Bredesen’s son wanted to launch a restaurant.

Domingue’s four-year lease expired in May. The Bredesens described the summer extension as a courtesy to Domingue, who said, in essence, thanks a lot for very little.

“I came here from Louisiana with nothing. Nothing. I built me an empire, and now this guy is taking it away from me,” Domingue said of his landlord.

Domingue said he made improvements, including paving a parking lot and adding handicap-accessible elements, and said he was led to believe he would not be asked to go until he was ready.

He said the elder Bredesen “sat me down November of last year and told me ‘the place is yours, just tell me when you’re ready [to leave].’” Domingue said he told Bredesen he wanted to stay another three or four years.

“We don’t do anything like that,” Bredesen said of the November conversation.

He declined to get into the details of the conversation, but he said, “The bottom line is that Steve has done a great job, his lease was up May 31, he knew it was up, and we had other plans for the real estate.

“It’s a very difficult situation because he’s a very nice man, and he runs a nice business…I’ve owned the real estate for long time – it’s family first, right?”

Domingue said he got word of his looming departure in a February phone call from the younger Bredesen, who left a voice mail that was heard by many of Domingue’s 12 employees.

Domingue said he called his landlord.

“I told him I’m going to deal with you, not your son,” Domingue said. “You’re on my lease, not your son.”

The younger Bredesen said he left the voice mail to make the offer for Domingue to stay put through the summer, three months after the lease’s expiration, to make some more money and “end on a high note.”

“Look at all this construction,” said Domingue, referring to the ongoing makeover of upper Pier Avenue outside his front door. “You think I’m going to make any money? That’s crazy.”

The younger Bredesen said Domingue waited more than a month past a renewal deadline without asking to renew his lease, and then Bredesen approached his father for a lease of his own.

“He’s mad, and I understand that, but if you miss the date, you miss the date,” the younger Bredesen said.

Domingue said his lease had no renewal clause, so he did not miss a date to renew without a full renegotiation. His attorney, Matt Fragner, said a lease provided to him by Bredesen did not contain a renewal clause.

The younger Bredesen will be partners in the new restaurant with the owners of Union Cattle Company restaurant and Saint Rocke in Hermosa. Partner Alan Sanford, who will handle some marketing duties, declined to describe the new restaurant concept, saying he did not want to roll it out as a secondary piece of a contentious story about the future of Ragin Cajun.

Domingue came to California from Lafayette, Louisiana, where he worked at Don’s Seafood and Steakhouse and at La Fonda, a locally well-known Mexican food restaurant.

“I took all that I had learned and brought it out here,” he said.

Domingue started up Ragin Cajun with four tables in a much smaller space, and then expanded once in 1992 and again in 1997, taking over the leases of a nail salon and a clothing cleaner. He secured a beer and wine license in conjunction with the second expansion. ER

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