Alia? We Hardly Knew Ye...

From the Department of Doomed Restaurants: Alia, the fabled Mediterranean restaurant at 95 North 6th, whose main claim to fame was her nearly three-year interior build-out, was shuttered Monday night, after just six weeks in business.

The enigmatic new bearer of baba ghanouj - whose menu teased us with talk of belly dancers - has been shuttered at least since Saturday, when we called to reprise an earlier brick-oven pizza order. The "Locale" pizza was memorably good - though curiously, it arrived in a Fornino box the first time around.

This time we were greeted with a rambling, nearly-unintelligible voicemail message explaining that the restaurant is closed while they're "dealing with a medical condition", and that they "should be open real soon". We're certainly sympathetic to someone's (the owner? the chef? couldn't make it out) medical condition, but it strikes us as odd that the brand-new eatery would simply close rather than find a temporary replacement.

There's no signs on the storefront explaining the sudden closure.

Recall that Alia lives just across the street from the doomed space that once housed government-seized Bull's Eye steakhouse, and more recently the twice-failed Sense sushi club. Maybe there's something in the water down there.

Update 12/13: Great news concerning whomever may have had a 'medical condition': Alia appears to have reopened today.