Let It Rain : Citrus closes this week to prepare for El Nino. No rain buckets will sit among the soup tureens.

El Nin~o Is to Blame. Just when you thought we news-types couldn’t blame another thing on El Nin~o, along comes this tidbit: Michel Richard’s Citrus on Melrose Avenue is closed this week for repairs. “We’re preparing for El Nin~o,” says manager Julio Iturbe. Along with a repaired roof, Citrus will get some new paint and upholstery.

The restaurant will reopen Friday for dinner, with Daniel Rossi continuing to run the kitchen as executive chef. Since summer, chef and owner Richard has been cooking three weeks out of every month at Citronelle in Washington, D.C. That is one of the three restaurants--Citrus and Citronelle in Santa Barbara are the others--he is involved in as a partner with Capstar Hotel Co. He had opened and helped run those restaurants as a consultant before becoming a partner recently.

King Me: Checkers Restaurant in the posh Wyndham Checkers Hotel in downtown L.A. has a new chef. You may remember that former chef Andreas Kissler migrated to Chasen’s awhile back. The new man at the stove is Tony Hodges, formerly the executive sous chef at Diaghilev Restaurant in the Wyndham Bel Age on Sunset.

Although Diaghilev was a Franco-Russian place, don’t expect to see chicken Kiev on Checkers’ new menu. Hodges plans to lighten it up with more fish and seafood. One of his signature dishes is a tower of mahi-mahi and New Zealand scampi atop Oriental stir-fried vegetables in a honey pink peppercorn sauce. New dinner and banquet menus are already out; lunch menus will be revised after the holidays.

A Hot, Smoky Marriage: Recently Mary Atkinson of Orleans restaurant moved in with Rick Royce Premier BBQ on Pico Boulevard in West L.A. to form Royce’s Cafe Orleans. The new place is a joint venture for the two chef-owners, who have know each other for years. Atkinson’s lease on her space at National and Barrington in West L.A. became too prohibitive, so she closed her restaurant in January. (Jamba Juice, Starbucks and Noah’s Bagels will be inhabiting her former space.)

Royce’s Cafe Orleans will fuse the two great Southern traditions of barbecue and Cajun Creole cooking. You’ll find ribs, meatloaf and steak sandwiches next to seafood etoufe, jambalaya and gumbo on the menu.

For the week before Christmas (the place will be closed Christmas Day), Atkinson will cook Paul Prudhomme’s classic turducken--a duck stuffed into a chicken stuffed into a turkey. To make turducken, you have to debone all three birds, leaving only the turkey with leg bones and wing bones. You then layer the birds with stuffing and roll them all up together with the duck on the inside and the turkey on the outside.

This creation takes between 10 and 18 hours just to roast. Atkinson, who’s been making this recipe for the last 10 years, pairs the duck with an oyster dressing, the chicken with a corn bread dressing and the turkey with an andouille dressing. It’ll be on the menu from Dec. 19 through Christmas Eve.

* Royce’s Cafe Orleans, 10916 Pico Blvd., West L.A.; (310) 441-7427.

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Openings: Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza is home to the newly opened Maggiano’s Little Italy and the Corner Bakery. This is a small chain of restaurants and bakeries run by Chicago restaurant mogul Richard Melman, president of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises. Maggiano’s was created in Chicago in 1991 and now has sites in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. This will be the first West Coast location.

The Corner Bakery is a restaurant in its own right featuring fast foods like sandwiches, salads and (naturally) freshly baked breads. Patrons walk through the bakery to get to Maggiano’s restaurant, which serves a variety of pastas, some seafood, chicken and veal, all in the southern Italian style.

The restaurants are in free-standing building near the mall’s Sears.

* Maggiano’s Little Italy and the Corner Bakery, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa; (714) 546-9550.

Bistrot Provencal, the new restaurant from La Cachette chef-owner Jean Francois Meteigner and his partner Allie Ko, will open Dec. 1. The chef is Patrick Ponsaty, who was most recently the executive sous chef at Park Bistro in New York. He has also cooked in France and Spain. Bistrot Provencal will be open late every night until 11:30 p.m. Prices are moderate ($12 to $18 for entrees, $9 to $11 for wood-fired pizzas) and the menu reflects the Provence region of the south of France. Bistrot Provencal occupies the former Fatty’s Arbuckle’s space just down the street from L’Orangerie, where Meteigner was chef for nine years.

* Bistrot Provencal, 829 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 360-9064.

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A Little Holiday Magic: At the Tam O’Shanter Inn, you can experience a Dickensian dinner complete with actors and carolers from Sunday through Dec. 5. For $49 per person, you get a salad, main course, dessert and “merriment.” The fun begins at 6:30 each night. Call for reservations.

* Tam O’Shanter Inn, 2980 Los Feliz Blvd., L.A.; (213) 664-0228.

At Lola’s, you can down three new martinis with Mrs. Claus on Monday. She’ll be present at the bar and in the dining rooms from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. If you bring an unwrapped toy (worth more than $10) to Lola’s any time in December, including the night of Mrs. Claus’ visit, you can have one of the three new martinis (the Poinsettia, the Menorah or the Snoball) free. Toys will go to the West Hollywood fire and sheriff departments for disbursement.

* Lola’s, 945 N. Fairfax, West Hollywood; (213) 736-5652.

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For the Procrastinators: If you still haven’t made reservations for Thanksgiving dinner and really don’t feel like cooking, you have one shot left: the Shark Bar on La Cienega. A three-course prix-fixe dinner will be served today from 2 to 9 p.m. for $36.95. Southern hospitality even overlooks those without reservations.

* The Shark Bar Restaurant, 826 N. La Cienega Blvd., L.A.; (310) 652-1520.