I bet irony is good for red blood cells. It seems the biggest seller at Jeffrey Chodorow’s cruelly maligned Kobe Club is wild salmon. I worried the feeding mogul might be ailing or retired because he hadn’t been heard from lately.  Seems he was playing with the idea of a joint venture with the team from Tao in the sprawling space where Wild Salmon faded after three other Chodorow concepts fizzled too. Instead, he decided to hand the lease back to the owner and take the tax loss.  He’s still smarting from the critics’ failure to take the place seriously.  “No one even talked about wild salmon flown in daily from Oregon. Bruni only wanted to complain because the little penguin was missing from his dessert,” Chodorow rants, stopping only to note that he’ll open the Roof Top Bar at the Empire Hotel across from Lincoln Center at the end of May or early June.  His steak house on the second floor arrives in September. And it’s not that he’s been relaxing, though he admits, “Good ideas sometimes come to me in dreams.” He counted off six places he’s opened since we last spoke: Citrus in L.A. for Michel Richard, Kobe Club in Miami, Maxim Prime in Atlanta, China Grill in Ft. Lauderdale, Social in the Dominican Republic, and Di Bono’s, “a simple old-fashioned Italian place in North Miami Beach with my brother-in-law. Great meatballs.”

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