Bill Lee out at newest restaurant, Lucky's Roadside, after less than 7 months open.

Restaurant insiders like to say Bill Lee has nine lives.

They just didn't think it would get so literal, so soon.

He has launched eight local, often landmark restaurants—including Billy Quon's, Bahama Billy's and Kula Island Steakhouse.

But now, suddenly, it's time for his ninth.

Sunday he worked his last official day at Lucky's Roadside, which he co-owned until recently, on Fremont Boulevard and La Salle in Seaside.

This comes after Lucky's just opened in February.

Here's some of the info from my story that appears in this week's print edition, up on The Food Blog by Thursday, Aug. 14:

Largely-silent-until-now money partner Erasmo Aiello, who owns area institution Palermo Bakery (394-8212)—and happens to be a former boxer and gifted tenor—is not only taking complete ownership, but stepping into the void, baking pizzas five or six nights a week in the wood-fired oven, with other members of his family like his wife Maria helping too. (She’ll be at the front of the house.)

Lee’s dramatic makeover of the former City Diner was expensive, and so was Lee, Aiello explains. 

“We didn’t get the crowds he expected,” Aiello says. “They did a good job designing the place and we got a good business at the beginning, but the place wasn’t able to take care of him. We couldn’t afford him.” 

Aiello may not enjoy Lee’s fame, but neither does he bear his infamy. 

“I know the whole town through the bakery,” Aiello says. “I’m a well-known figure in the Italian community.”

To that end he wants to tilt Chef Herman Hernandez’s menu toward Italy, bake more calzones and stromboli like he did in a Wall Street pizzeria, and add things like Italian nights dripping with the Old World’s best food and music.

Seaside-based restaurant-fixer-of-sorts Dana Lewis, after turns helping with launches and transitions from the Shake family’s Fish Hopper in Hawaii to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, goes from part-time assistant manager to manager. 

Her aims sound deceivingly simple—“trying to streamline the operation so it’s running more efficiently, with quality customer service and food”—but it’s not quite Restaurant Impossible either.

“The kind of things on those shows are extreme, but there are times when you look around and think, ‘Where is the camera?’” she says. “But my whole career in restaurants has been like that. It’s the nature of the business.”

For his part, Lee is typically upbeat, but also contrite. 

“Aiello said, ‘We’re going to scale back on the whole operation—make it a leaner, more family-style operation.’ I said, ‘I think that’s a great idea.’”

He will be there to help consult through complications, partly because they’re longtime friends and partly because he wanted to do better by a partner who put up all the funds and owns the building. (Aiello has put the restaurant up for sale at various times through the separation proceedings.) 

“We spent hundreds of thousands more on initial build-out than we thought,” Lee says. “The handwriting was kinda on the wall that it would be hard to make ends meet.”

Some more background from other stories, complete with history and plot twists, follow. From "Bill Lee to Open Latest Restaurant, Lucky's Roadside, in former City Diner," Aug. 27, 2013:

It can be hard to put perspective on a career like Bill Lee's, which has covered 44 years in the restaurant industry, seemingly dozens of new (and often landmark) eateries launched, three separate stints at the Sardine Factory (373-3775)—covering 17 years across 40 overall—and what seems like a billion employees hired. 

"Every gray is a tribute to an employee," he says. "And I have a full head of gray hair."

He was 16 when he got his start, wearing jeans and a t-shirt into Lovers Point Inn in Pacific Grove on a busy Friday night to ask the owner at the front if he needed a dishwasher. 

An eight-hour shift later, the hulking chef demanded he come back the next day and, as Lee says, "That started my restaurant clock."

In 1973 he waited tables at Ted Balestreri and Bert Cutino's Willie Lum’s China Row (now the Chart House), advanced to GM, then transferred to Sardine Factory to run the show just as the iconic Conservatory Room and wine cellar were taking shape. 

When he started his first restaurant in 1982, Billy Quon’s—where the Rio Grill (625-5436) now sits—the first CD player was recently released and Time named The Computer as its person of the year.

A half dozen different restaurants—Bahama Billy's, The Point at Heritage Harbor,Billy Quon’s at Ryan Ranch and Volcano Grill (now Plaza Linda) among them—have followed. Cash registers and checks written for meals have gone from omnipresent to archaic. Scheduling, food and credit card systems have evolved wildly. A region and a country have gone foodie.

From "A chef and a city get the restaurant they want in Lucky’s Roadside," Feb. 20, 2014: