Maurice Beaudet, a vegetarian restaurateur, musician, activist and onetime needle in the side of Redondo police, died peacefully at home on May 24 after battling a mysterious wasting illness. He was 61.

Beaudet rose to prominence after he and his wife Tonya Beaudet opened The Spot Restaurant, a cozy and well-received vegetarian eatery just off Hermosa Avenue, on July 10, 1981. The restaurant hewed to a vegetarian and vegan menu, and in 1989 was selected to cater for Paul and Linda McCartney and about 300 others, when McCartney’s world tour stopped at the Great Western Forum.

In 1995 the Beaudets divorced, and a year later Maurice launched Greens at the Beach, a similar restaurant in the Riviera Village section of Redondo Beach. After the divorce the couple reestablished a close and enduring friendship.

It was in Redondo that Beaudet ran afoul of a city police officer in a high-profile dustup that ended in court. The officer gave Beaudet a ticket for crossing a street illegally, a charge Beaudet denied. He decided the officer’s account of the incident was less than honest, and he took his case to the public. He altered a photo of the officer to give him a Pinocchio nose, and circulated it for public consumption.

The officer took Beaudet to court for defamation and won what Beaudet characterized as a small settlement.

“I was sued for a million dollars, and I want to be clear, I never paid a cent to the cop. In fact the settlement was $20,000, paid by Farmers [insurance company]. The lawyers got half. He ruined his life for 10 grand,” Beaudet said in an interview weeks before he died. “The cops in Redondo Beach had to be honest for five years,” Beaudet said.

“He was the king of protesting,” said Tonya Beaudet. “The first car he bought, he protested because it was a lemon and they wouldn’t live up to the lemon law.”

But it was a Hermosa protest that earned Beaudet his “claim to fame,” Tonya said.

In 1989 the couple bought their first house, paying $400,000 for a slice of paradise in the area of 11th Street and Prospect Avenue. No sooner had they settled in than they noticed a noxious smell in the air. Beaudet found that it came from nearby auto body shops and began a protracted battle over air quality controls that stretched into the next decade.

“We were at that City Council every single week,” Tonya recalled. “We circulated petitions.”

Beaudet marched into the auto shops to take photos of their venting. He invoked the standards of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, using photos and diagrams that reminded Tonya of a small-town courtroom scene immortalized in song by Arlo Guthrie.

“It was like ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ with the ‘27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one,’” Tonya marveled.

Beaudet prevailed, and the shops had to step up their air quality control measures, Tonya said.

“At that time we had 28 auto body shops in Hermosa Beach,” she said.

The same year that protest began, the McCartney catering gig spread the fame of the Beaudets’ restaurant, which became referred to often after as “the world famous Spot.”

The McCartneys, notable vegetarians, were on the lookout for just that type of restaurant, and when his first world tour in 10 years landed in L.A., their chef came to check out The Spot.

“She sampled everything on the menu,” then gave the restaurant her nod of approval, Tonya said.

The Beaudets were booked to cook for three days, serving about 100 band members, roadies and staff, plus about 200 VIPs and others filling a hospitality suite.

“We couldn’t cook on the premises because of a union rule, so we cooked at the restaurant – while we kept it open – and we cooked at our house and two neighbors’ houses,” Tonya recalled.

She thought they would swoop in, serve food and get shown the exit, but they were allowed to mill around and sit in the darkened Forum to watch McCartney’s sound check.

“He sang Cole Porter tunes, he goofed around and danced. It was great,” Tonya said. “We met Paul and Linda and they were lovely.”

She recalled meeting zillions of celebrities, and listening to McCartney’s son complain that then-pop sensation Michael Jackson had gotten hold of the Nintendo “and was not giving it up.”

A reporter with a Los Angeles TV station picked up on the Spot-McCartney connection and broadcast it on the air. For the next few years someone from McCartney’s crew would stop at The Spot to pick up food whenever the ex-Beatle was in the megalopolis.

Beaudet also had a life as a musician, playing the saxophone and conducting a big band called The Peninsulans, who played on stages from the Queen Mary to the ballroom on Catalina Island.

“I was Lucy and he was Ricky,” Tonya said.
Beaudet also pursued photography, placing first in Easy Reader’s annual writing and photography contest in 2007 with a picture of the Manhattan Beach Pier taken from the Goodyear blimp.

He also excelled as a painter.

Beaudet was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and came to California at age 5. He grew up in Redondo, attended Redondo Union High School and, in Tonya’s words, “was an El Camino [College] student for maybe 40 years or so.”

Over the last couple years of his life, he was struck by an illness that physicians could not diagnose. He called it a weird wasting disease, and said it left him bloated with water, his liver unable to work properly and his body unable to absorb proteins. He went in and out of hospitals more than 20 times.

“They say it’s cirrhosis but I was never a drinker. I was a pot smoker daily for 40 years,” he said. “Some say it was because of a vegetarian diet. I might try chicken soup.”

He spoke matter-of-factly about his coming death.

“I had a good life,” he said. “I still have vitality and a big agenda, but my body isn’t going to make it.”

He spoke of his youth in the beach cities, riding his bicycle all around from his home near Redondo Union, eight blocks from the beach.

“No one was going to jump out of a bush to hurt you. You could do what you wanted to, go to the beach and body surf by yourself.”

Tonya said Beaudet was painting until three days before his death, mixing colors, planning his approach to the canvass, enjoying life.

She described Beaudet as a man who sometimes had a hot head, but always kept a warm heart. The Spot has served thousands of meals to the homeless and has for years collected clothing for them as well. It began, Tonya said, when the couple passed a homeless man who was cold, and Beaudet gave him his coat.

“That’s the man he was.”

Beaudet is survived by children Nikki Reese and Jason Beaudet, his mother Noella Beaudet, siblings Susan and Jim Beaudet, grandchildren Tesla, Haley, Roxy and Ethan, ex-wife Tonya Beaudet, and “friends to the end” Tobin Grey and Judy Smith.

A celebration of Maurice Beaudet’s life will be noon Friday, June 12 in the band shell at Veterans Park at the Esplanade and Torrance Boulevard in Redondo Beach. Burial at sea will follow at 1 p.m. “In lieu of flowers bring your funny stories and a blanket,” the family suggests. ER