Shangri-La, a shuttered Chinese restaurant at 138 Cambridge St. at the foot of Beacon Hill, will be replaced by the Tip Tap Room, under plans presented to the Boston Licensing Board.

Gordon Wilcox, who has been involved with several other Boston restaurants and bars, including the Rattlesnake on Boylston Street in the Back Bay, plans $800,000 and four to six months' worth of renovations to the restaurant - on top of the $275,000 he's paying for Shangri-La's liquor license - his lawyer, James Byrne, told the board. The board votes tomorrow on whether to approved the transfer of the liquor license.

The new restaurant will have room for 200 patrons, with a bar area that can seat 40, Byrne said.

Tom Clemmons, co-chairman of the Beacon Hill Community Association's Zoning and Licensing Committee, said the association "does not oppose" the re-use of the restaurant. He said Wilcox proved very amenable to neighborhood suggestions for ways to minimize noise and other impacts from the restaurant and bar, which would be open until 2 a.m. - with food served until 1:30 a.m.

Scott Dyer, who is buying Nico at 417 Hanover St., told the Boston Licensing Board today he plans to change the name to Mico.

Rehabbing the Knight Children's Center on South Huntington Avenue, opened in 1914, would just have cost too much, the Home announced yesterday.

The campus currently houses a year-round residential and day school treatment program for boys and girls aged 5 to 13 with a wide range of emotional, behavioral, educational and psychiatric needs. The Home will relocate the program to its 166-acre Longview Farm property in Walpole, Massachusetts where it has provided services to youth since 1940. The time to move the children to better conditioned settings has never been more urgent.

So if you need some space on South Huntington, now's the time to get a bid in.

File this under: Wheels of justice grinding slowly. A Roxbury man was arraigned on drunk-driving charges today following his arrest by a Metropolitan Police officer - more than 22 years ago.

Richard Matthews, now 67, didn't show up for his arraignment after his arrest in what was then the Dewey Square tunnel at the end of the Central Artery early in the morning of Jan. 12, 1989 for OUI, operating without a license, insurance or registration and attaching a 1975 Corolla's plates to his 1977 Buick station wagon, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

The DA's office says the Metro Police officer stopped him in the tunnel after noticing him slowly drifting across three lanes of the highway. Two years later, Metro Police disappeared, its officers merged into the State Police.

Matthews got tripped up not by modern forensic techniques but by a document in a folder that had been gathering dust for all these years, coupled with a more recent arrest, the DA's office reports.

The case and his default status went unnoticed until Friday, when he appeared in Roxbury District Court in connection with a pending case charging him with trespassing and soliciting sex for a fee. Upon learning of the open OUI case, the judge there ordered him to appear in Charlestown to answer on the 1989 matter.

Innocent, etc.