Boozefish closes after this weekend’s two-day party

Looking for a bag of wine corks? (Great for some future craft project.) Framed artwork? Snazzy votive candleholders? Maija Diethelm-Floyd, owner of Boozefish Wine Bar in Westport, is selling all kinds of things — except the kitchen equipment — in an estate sale that she kicked off yesterday at her 13-year-old restaurant at 1511 Westport Road. The sale continues today and tomorrow from 1:30 to 9 p.m.

The sale represents another closing chapter in Diethelm-Floyd’s life. She’s in, she says, “intense negotiations” to sell her popular Westport bistro ahead of, as she told The Pitch in April, a permanent move to France before the end of the year with her husband, Steve Floyd. Diethelm-Floyd, the daughter of a French citizen, visits France later this month to see her stepmother and, she says, “and take care of some family business.”

It’s an eclectic mix of decorative items, tableware, Boozefish T-shirts, record albums, mirrors and paintings at the Boozefish sale. Whatever doesn’t sell will be packed up to ready the dining room for an event that Diethelm-Floyd is calling “Le Grand Finale” on Friday, September 19, and Saturday, September 20. From 6 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. on both nights, Diethelm plans to serve light hors d’oeuvres and offer a cash bar as her official going-away party. The restaurant will be closed for regular service after that, but Diethelm-Floyd is booking the space for holiday parties.

“It’s a time for new beginnings,” says Diethelm-Floyd, who was a freshly minted Kansas State University graduate when she opened the midtown wine boite in 2002. Diethelm-Floyd plans to settle in Aix-en-Provence to be closer to her stepmother (her father died earlier this year) and to reinvent herself as, she says, a teacher, an event planner or some other new career.

“I’m ready to start another adventure,” she says.