Category: Home Kitchen

Fans of rocky road ice cream can rejoice because the flavor — chocolate ice cream swirled with nuts and marshmallows — will be available in Girl Scout cookie form next year.

Girl Scouts of the USA announced Tuesday that “Exploremores,” a sandwich cookie inspired by the popular ice cream variety, will join the organization’s cookie lineup for the 2026 selling season, which typically runs from January to April.

The cookie will be filled with “delicious flavors of chocolate, marshmallow and toasted almond–flavored crème,” the organization said in a news release.

But the upcoming cookie season overall will have fewer offerings than were available this year, with that Girl Scouts having previously announced that two flavors — S’mores and Toast-Yay! cookies — would be retired.

The S’mores cookies, graham cracker sandwich cookies with chocolate and marshmallow filling, were introduced during the 2017 Girl Scout cookie season. The Toast-Yay! cookies, French toast flavor and dipped in icing, debuted in 2021.

The youth organization has its members sell the cookies to learn people skills and how to manage money. Proceeds help to fund philanthropic causes and programs such as field trips and camp visits. Initially, the cookies sold were homemade, but the Girl Scouts turned to commercial bakers by the 1930s.

Two commercial bakers supply the millions of boxes sold every Girl Scout cookie season: ABC Bakers, headquartered in Richmond, Va., and Little Brownie Bakers, owned by Ferrero U.S.A. and headquartered in Louisville, Ky.

Did you see the purple loaves of sourdough that were all over social media a few years ago? I missed them. In fact, I’m five years late to trying Karlo Evaristo’s heirloom blue corn masa sourdough bread, and I only discovered it by accident. Now, I can think of little else.

During a recent dinner at Le Hut Dinette, a new restaurant located in a Quonset hut in Santa Ana, my dinner companions ordered the sourdough bread. We wanted something to help sop up the peach vinegar and jalapeño oil in executive chef Ryan Garlitos’ excellent tomato salad.

What arrived at the table were slices of bread in a deep shade of violet. It was toasted on both sides, with umber splotches interrupting the purple, the entire surface shiny and shellacked with clarified butter.

I sniffed the bread in amazement, getting butter on my nose. It had the distinct aroma of blue corn tortillas cooking on a comal.

The crust cracked at the slightest provocation, and the middle was as fluffy and tender as a milk bread bun.

It was unlike any bread I’d tried, with the deep earthy flavor of blue corn balanced with a wonderfully sour tang.

Garlitos serves the bread with a side of compound butter made with beef tallow from sister restaurant Heritage Barbecue’s briskets, confit garlic and lemon. It’s the sort of thing that could hold its own on a cheese board. It’s stellar on the bread, but we found ourselves eating it plain, marveling at the blue corn flavor.

“I knew that after tasting it, we had to use it in some way,” says Garlitos.

When researching breads for the restaurant’s sandwiches, he wanted to source from a local baker. He was familiar with Evaristo’s breads, having tried them shortly after the baker started making breads out of a cottage bakery in his home in 2020. And when Le Hut Dinette opened earlier this year in Diesel Commons, the Quonset next door was already occupied by Evaristo’s bakery, 61 Hundred Bread.

“It’s become a staple, and I don’t think it’s something that will ever leave the menu unless Karl stops selling it to me,” says Garlitos. “Our guests love it. Every table gets an order.”

It’s the same bread three-Michelin star restaurant Somni uses in West Hollywood. It’s been featured in dozens of videos on TikTok and Instagram.

“I never expected it to be like this,” says Evaristo of his bakery’s success. 61 Hundred Bread, named for the ZIP Code of Bacolod, his hometown in the Philippines, draws daily lines and often sells out of his breads, croissants and cruffins by midday.

The former fine dining chef only started baking bread during the pandemic. He grew up in his parents’ restaurants on Negros Island in the Philippines, but never wanted to cook himself. After a nudge from his father, he attended culinary school in both the Philippines and Napa, Calif. He eventually landed in Orange County, cooking at the Montage hotel.

A couple of years before the pandemic, he quit his restaurant job and started hosting elaborate, 20-course pop-up dinners. It was during his time hosting dinners at Melody in Virgil Village that he was introduced to both the sourdough bread from Bub and Grandma’s Bakery, and the blue corn tortillas from Metztli Taqueria.

“It was the first time I’d ever tried really good sourdough bread before,” he says. “I was like, ‘I need to make this.’”

It was October 2019, months before the sourdough craze that accompanied the start of the pandemic. Evaristo taught himself how to make sourdough and started baking loaves out of his home. In March 2020, when everything shutdown, he already had a baking operation set up in his kitchen.

“I had no job, no source of income and bread was automatically what I was going to do,” he says. “I’ll make sourdough and see if anyone wants to buy it.”

He started with one to two loaves a day, posting on Craigslist, the Neighborhood app and Instagram. Restaurant critic Brad Johnson featured the bread in the OC Register, and soon, there was a two-week wait list for the sourdough boules.

Evaristo moved all of his dining room furniture into his living room, and replaced it with a prep table and a 50-quart mixer. He scaled up to 120 loaves per day. But with
everyone making sourdough, he needed a way to set himself apart.

“The first thing I thought of was how good those blue corn tortillas were and I wondered how it would be in a sourdough,” he says.

It took Evaristo two years to develop the corn masa loaves, first experimenting with dried blue corn. He milled the corn and created a porridge, introducing butterfly pea flower tea to achieve a deeper blue color. But it wasn’t quite right. He thought about the nixtamalized corn in those blue corn tortillas and started incorporating blue corn masa into the dough.

“It was mind-blowing,” he says. “The corn flavor is so much more and it smells like a tortilla.”

I was equally floored when I tried it, and made a plan to visit the bakery to buy a boule of my own to take home.

There was a line when I arrived early on a Sunday morning, but it moved quickly. The loaves of bread are the first thing you notice when you open the door, the numbers 6100 written in flour on the surface. You can just see the violet peeking through the top of the loaf, where the bread is scored before baking.

The aroma of blue corn tortillas filled the car during the 51-minute trip back home.

I suggest you have a meal at Le Hut Dinette, and order the bread and butter. And visit the bakery to buy a loaf to take home. If you want that same crispy crust and super fluffy middle, both Garlitos and Evaristo suggest slathering a slice with butter and toasting it in a pan. However many slices you end up eating in one sitting, is up to you.

Cook, stirring often, until the farro has absorbed the liquid. Continue cooking the farro, adding the stock a ladle- or cupful at a time and allowing the grains to absorb the stock each time before adding more, until the farrotto is creamy and the grains are tender and have burst open, 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Add ½ ladleful of stock and cook for a few minutes, until the farrotto is a loose and spoonable consistency, like porridge, not so runny that you couldn’t eat it with a fork. If the farrotto gets too dry, add more stock or water.

Sushi Zanmai

Japan’s prolific sushi restaurateur known as the “Tuna King” has debuted his first restaurant in the United States, bringing his signature focus on tuna to the heart of L.A.’s Koreatown.

Kiyoshi Kimura is a legendary and record-breaking figure at Tsukiji Fish Market — he paid 333.6 million yen, or roughly $3.1 million at point of sale, for a 612-pound tuna in 2019. The former pilot launched his restaurant empire in 2001 with Sushizanmai Honten at the Tsukiji Outer Market, where he still offers affordable sushi and prepared small plates 24 hours a day. He now has some 50 restaurants in Tokyo and throughout the world.

The new Koreatown outpost of his Japanese chain Sushi Zanmai, which opened last month along an edge of Chapman Plaza, serves lunch and late-night hand rolls, nigiri, donburi, tempura and beyond.

Much like his restaurants in Japan, Kimura’s Los Angeles sushi bar specializes in tuna, or maguro, sourced via his “Sustainable and Reserve” system: capturing grown tuna from around the world when and where they are not in danger of decline, then transporting them to his quasi-natural preserve where they swim until they are ready for harvest.

At L.A.’s Sushi Zanmai, guests are greeted by a plastic statue of Kimura, arms outstretched, then order via tablets at each table and the sushi bar. Diners quickly receive dedicated tuna sushi sets, plus six tuna varieties available via a la carte nigiri and sashimi, a range of tuna donburi, tuna hand rolls and crispy rice, and cooked tuna toban, as well as non-tuna sushi, tempura, bento, karaage, chawanmushi, mochi and more.

Sushi Zanmai is open daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and 5 p.m. to midnight. 3465 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, (213) 529-4008, sushizanmai-usa.com

El Muelle 8

One of L.A.’s best new mariscos restaurants closed abruptly last year. Now it’s back in a new neighborhood and with a new format.

Sinaloan seafood specialist El Muelle 8 opened in a Downey strip mall in 2023, but the first U.S. branch of the Culiacán restaurant of the same name closed quietly the following year. During its initial run, the mariscos destination garnered praise from L.A. Times Food columnist Jenn Harris as well as taco authority Bill Esparza. Chef-partner Abel Martínez served a vibrant array of classic ceviches and cooked seafood dishes alongside his own creative spins, such as his piquant, signature take on tuna sashimi and his version of camarones roca, with breaded and fried shrimp tossed in a sweet-spicy sauce and served over lettuce and a fried wonton wrapper.

Unrelated to the restaurant’s closure, Martínez died in 2024, but his business partner and cousin, Jay Orozco, sought to revive the restaurant — this time as a more pared-down operation with an abbreviated menu.

Now El Muelle 8 can be found operating as a food truck in East L.A. with its own tent and tables, and Martínez immortalized on the truck. The team serves the former chef’s signature recipes, including shrimp zarandeados, tostadas, tacos and ceviches.

El Muelle 8 is open Thursday to Tuesday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 5221 E. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 797- 0423, instagram.com/muelle8ela

Little Tokyo Farmers’ Market

A new weekly farmers market is bringing dozens of vendors to the heart of Little Tokyo, with a focus on Japanese purveyors and artists. Each Saturday find produce vendors such as Tamai Farms, Osorio Farms, Yamabushi Farms and G Farms with fresh fruits and vegetables, and many goods available via food-assistance programs such as SNAP, EBT and SUN Bucks.

The Little Tokyo Farmers’ Market, which launched Aug. 30, also features prepared-foods stalls such as Kenchan Ramen, Pupusas Delmy’s, Mister Riceball and Antipasti LA, plus a rotation of botanical skincare products, ceramics and other artisanal goods.

The new farmers market is located in Isamu Noguchi Plaza, at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, and is a collaboration between nonprofit Food Access LA and the JACCC.

Open Saturdays from 9 a.m to 2 p.m. 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles, foodaccessla.org/littletokyo

Men and Beasts

With seasonal L.A. produce and an entirely plant-based menu, Echo Park’s Men & Beasts is reimagining dim sum. Husband-and-wife team Alex Falco and Minty Zhu honed a number of their vegan recipes at their previous restaurant, the pan-Asian Minty Z in Miami, but at their first L.A. restaurant, which opened this summer, they’re keeping the focus centered on flavors reminiscent of Zhu’s upbringing in China.

Handmade dumplings get stuffed with pork alternative, steamed monkey buns feature a molten center of “char siu” seitan and whole vegetables take center stage in larger plates such as cauliflower curry and sweet-and-sour mushrooms. Other prominent L.A. flavors weave in, such as in taro puffs inspired by elote. At brunch, try vegan dishes like bao beignets with black-sesame caramel, soufflé pancakes and breakfast sandwiches, with the option to add real egg.

Falco, who serves as executive chef, makes the restaurant’s proteins, dim sum, doughs and ice creams — in flavors such as miso corn and carrot calamansi — all onsite, while Zhu heads up the tea program and leads weekly Gongfu-style tea ceremonies.

Men & Beasts is open Wednesday to Friday from 5 to 10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. 2100 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 262-1781, menandbeasts.com

Seogwan by Yellowcow Kbbq

A popular Korean barbecue restaurant in Gardena recently teamed up with a naengmyeon specialist in Korea for a new best-of-both-worlds restaurant in L.A.’s Koreatown.

Yellowcow owner Monica Kim partnered with Pyeongyang’s long-running Seogwanmyeonok to create Seogwan by Yellowcow, where the signature items include Kim’s tabletop-grilled meats and Seogwanmyeonok’s signature chilled buckwheat noodles in a cool, refreshing broth.

The sturdy, springy noodles are made onsite daily with 100% buckwheat, and can be enjoyed in a classic secret-recipe, long-simmered cold meat broth, or augmented with perilla oil, spice or extra meat, and splashed with house-made vinegar. Also on offer are Yellowcow’s grilled meats such as galbi, beef tongue, spicy pork bulgogi and brisket, plus specialty items like sausage stew, crispy mung bean pancakes, soft tofu and bulgogi ramen.

Seogwan by Yellowcow Kbbq is open Wednesday to Monday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. 3460 W. 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 277-1281, instagram.com/seogwan_by_yellowcow

Joshua Gil wants to return to Los Angeles

Amid his debilitating fight against cancer, numerous restaurateurs, food photographers and other members of the industry are rallying around Joshua Gil: a pioneering Alta California chef whose projects have included Three Flames in Westchester, Mírame in Beverly Hills and underground dining club the Supper Liberation Front. Gil has been battling cancer since 2022; in August, Gil and his family learned the cancer has spread to his brain, and are seeking help in funding his travel from Florida to California in order to resume treatment in Los Angeles.

Put the corn cobs in a soup pot and any of the optional additions in a stockpot and add 3 quarts water. Bring the water to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook the cobs for about 1 hour, until the liquid has reduced by half and the stock is golden and flavorful. Turn off the heat. Remove the corn cobs from the stock. For a clearer stock, strain it through a fine mesh strainer.

Use immediately or, when cooled, keep covered in the refrigerator for up to 1 week or in the freezer for up to several months.

It’s Week 1 of the NFL season — meaning many of us have already started grazing for the winter.

Fans of losing football teams have been found to devour 16% more saturated fat the day after a big game than their normal daily amount. Fans of winning teams consume 9% less than usual … as if the victory were not enough.

Dig a little further into the data behind our football eating habits, and you’ll find that as a nation, we consume more calories on Super Bowl Sunday than we do on Christmas Day or Easter. Food and football are so synonymous in America that we consume more calories on Thanksgiving than on any other national holiday — not just because it’s a harvest feast, but also because there are three NFL games that day.

Face it, Week 1 tailgating may look innocuous, my friends, but usually it is our first step toward Gluttonyville.

I say usually because the rising use of GLP-1 drugs is leading some of us in a new direction.

Cornell University and the market research firm Numerator recently found that within six months of usage, new GLP-1 users reduce their overall grocery spending by 6%. They’re also exchanging ultra-processed snacks and sugary beverages for healthier options. We’re talking hamburgers, hot dogs, chips … you know, some of ultra-processed foods’ biggest hits.

The decline in interest in traditional tailgating favorites is so measurable that “retailers are adapting their strategies accordingly to be more forward-thinking,” according to Amanda Mosseri Oren, vice president of Industry Strategy for Relex Solutions. Her 20-year-old firm specializes in supply chain logistics for retailers around the globe. She said grocers are “reformulating ready-meal offerings to include higher protein content and more vegetables, recognizing that traditional convenience foods no longer match consumer needs.”

It’s still football season in a country with a 40% obesity rate, so end caps at grocery stores are still going to be dominated by salty snacks promotions and cases of soda. However, celery sticks and hummus are likely to become easier to find as the habits of the expanding community of GLP-1 users continue to reshape industry purchase orders.

For the retailers that already specialize in healthy foods, this trend potentially widens a customer base that has more disposable income. There is a quirk though: While changing eating and spending habits may be a triumph for science — and ideally wallets and waistlines — Oren noted the research “also revealed that higher-income households cut shopping by nearly 9% and that “trend has been consistent since 2024 and continues strengthening.”

So, the top 10% are getting thinner and saving money. Great news for the rich — except those wealthy folks who make their money selling junk foods. This trend is a conundrum for them.

As for the rest of us, the monthly cost for drugs such as Wegovy or Ozempic prevents a large-scale shift in consumer behavior without subsidies, greater insurance coverage or a more competitive free market to drive prices down significantly.

And then there’s this wrinkle: GLP-1 users still crave ultra-processed snacks.

Brandon McFadden, a professor at the University of Arkansas (and Tyson endowed chair in food policy economics), told me that GLP-1 users still want junk food, they just don’t want to pig out anymore.

“It’s all still fairly new,” he said. “For sure, there seems to be research evidence showing … stomach size is decreasing.” McFadden said “number of calories overall is obviously decreasing,” but not “uniformly across categories.”

Even as we’re getting a handle on the effects of the drugs being adopted widely now, new ones are in development. He pointed to clinical trial data on a new drug that reduced weight as much as 24% in 36 weeks — “really wow stuff,” as he put it.

Speaking of “wow stuff,” I was stunned when Sally Lyons Wyatt, global executive vice president and chief advisor for consumer goods and food service insights at Circana, told me 60% of U.S. consumers now report reading the labels on food.

“I can guarantee you that was not the case five years ago, not even close,” she jokingly said. “How did we get here? It’s a culmination of things. Obviously it started during COVID, where people started to learn what they needed to do to stay well. … More people are looking at what they’re putting into their body.”

With all that said, Wyatt was also clear on this: Indulgence is human nature. It won’t go away, but we might see more moderation.

So even if your team finishes 0-17, and all of that losing has you eating more chips and salsa than usual, as long as you’re monitoring what you eat the other days of the week, there’s a slim chance you may be able to watch the playoffs still able to fit in your favorite jersey.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

There are countless reasons to dine and drink in the Valley. After canvassing the region for months, the Food team released guides with 65 of our favorite places to eat and 24 of the best bars and coffee shops, plus a spotlight on a neighborhood deli that’s fed generations of Italian residents and a sushi chef turned social media star who’s drawing fans from all over the world. We even asked some local celebrities and chefs to weigh in with their favorites.

But there’s still so much more to discover.

To dig even deeper into the Valley, we asked Times subscribers to share their stalwarts. Some of their choices overlap with ours — long-running Casa Vega, cozy Augustine Wine Bar, Sri Lankan specialist Apey Kade — but they also named more than a few standouts that we can’t wait to try. Here are their picks:

“It is about time you cover food in the Valley,” writes Joe Hassan, whose favorite places include Cavaretta’s Deli in Woodland Hills, Barone’s in Sherman Oaks and Carnival in Sherman Oaks. “I have memories of Cavaretta’s subs and Barone’s pizza since I was a little kid in the ‘60s,” Hassan says, adding that, “Carnival’s hummus is the best.”

Times subscriber Danielle L.‘s favorite bakeries are in the San Fernando Valley, including House Roots Bakery in Chatsworth, Lodge Bread in Woodland Hills and La Princière in Westlake Village.

“Casa Vega is for the entertainment industry, La Fogata is for the people,” writes Alex Mokover. He calls it “An institution for half a century of families going to [Van Nuys Sherman Oaks Recreation Center].”

Mokover says that “some of the best birria in the city” can be found at Birrieria San Marcos and that Mercado Buenos Aires is “the center of the Argentine community.” He recommends Aroma Cafe as “the perfect first-date spot.”

As far as regional hidden gems, Mokover says he’s “been going to Pa Kua on Laurel Canyon for like 15 years now for martial arts and Chinese archery, and the competing central Asian food trucks at the Jon’s on Laurel Canyon and Magnolia are the perfect place to refuel.”

Matt Larsen lists, “The Snug, OG Smash Burger, Ozzy’s Apizza and Residuals,” as his favorite places to eat and drink in the Valley.

Jeremy Ziskind‘s favorite Valley spots overlap with the Food team’s list, including Salsa & Beer #1 in Lake Balboa, Lum Ka Naad in Encino, Apey Kade Restaurant in Tarzana and Borekas Sephardic Pastries in Woodland Hills.

Ziskind also lists Hummus Bar and Grill in Tarzana, Black Heart Coffee Company in Lake Balboa and Baja Subs Market and Deli in Northridge, as well as Tarzana Armenian Deli and Baklava Factory as his go-to hidden gem.

Larry Cohen recommends Arias Machane Yehuda for “unique Middle Eastern food in Tarzana” and names Casa De Papi Mexican Grill in Canoga Park as his favorite low-key spot.

“Papa’s Meat & Seafood [has] pastrami to rival Brent’s,” writes Elliott Weber, who also recommends Humble Bird, Black Market Liquor, L.A. Ramadita for a “killer torta ahogada,” Laotian restaurant Kop Jai Lai, and 786 Degrees, which he calls “criminally overlooked.”

Weber names Horseless Carriage as his favorite little-known spot in the Valley, describing it as a “great greasy spoon hidden in a car dealership.”

“Shik Do Rak in Northridge; Daglas Drive-In in Winnetka; Yunomi Handroll in Toluca Lake; El Rey del Mar amd Mis Raices in Reseda; and San Carlos Deli in Chatsworth,” are some of Julio Avila‘s favorites.

If you’re looking for a place to drink in the Valley, subscriber Maria Sklar recommends the happy hour at Odyssey, which she says has a “great view,” as well as Norwood Bar and Lounge, which she describes as “old school” and says the “back room is very cool.” Sklar’s favorite hidden gem is the Green Cottage in Encino.

“Baja Subs Market & Deli [is the] best meal I’ve had in Los Angeles in years [and the] best Sri Lankan food I’ve had … ever. With its warm and friendly staff, I cannot wait to go back!” – Bradley Novicoff

Subscriber Courteney Stallings’ favorite Valley hangs overlap with the Food team’s guide, including the Smokehouse in Burbank and Idle Hour and Hy Mart Sandwiches in North Hollywood, plus Don Cuco’s in Burbank, the Front Yard in Studio City and Le French Rooster in Burbank.

“I love old school places, like the Smokehouse,” writes Debra Blanchard Knight. “Their happy hour is bomb, and we love the bartenders. Poquito Mas is our favorite fast food-style Mexican place — we like the one in Burbank best. We like Augustine Wine Bar and Mirabelle Wine Bar for a nice evening drink. For a quick and delicious Vietnamese lunch, we head to Few, which is a tiny place in a strip mall on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. They have really great small bites, pho and sandwiches [and] never disappoint.

“Laurel Tavern, also on Ventura in Studio City, has a great happy hour and a fun patio to hang with friends. We often see celebs there, and it’s such a casual environment that we all just chat and cheers each other without drama or selfies! For brunch we like Vivian’s, also on Ventura in Studio City. They have amazing breakfast options, and good coffee. Parking can be tough, but worth the effort for sure.”

As far as hidden gems, Knight writes that, “Hands down I love, love, love the New Deal in Burbank. The food is amazing, and the owner and staff are so warm and welcoming. It’s a cozy little place that serves an interesting menu, including some nice vegetarian options, and has a good wine list. We sit at the small bar to eat, drink wine, chat with the staff and watch TCM movies on the TV. Fabulous for a date night, too! The owner of this restaurant also owns my favorite coffee shop, which is a few doors down, Romancing the Bean. It has a very Parisian environment, and is a nice place to land when you’re on Magnolia Boulevard doing some vintage shopping. Both spots have a great vibe with good food and drinks, and [are] often overlooked.”

“Joselito’s original location in Sunland-Tujunga is the very best OG Mexican food in L.A.,” claims JC Wendel. He also recommends family-owned ToriYen Sushi, with what he says is the “best and freshest tuna in L.A.”

Subscriber Bettie Blumer has a long list of Valley favorites including Country Deli in Chatsworth; Casa de Tacos with “late hours” and “always good, fresh food” in Canoga Park; Daglas in Winnetka for its burgers and fries; Johnny Pacific in Winnetka for what she calls the “best empanadas”; and Follow Your Heart Market & Cafe for great vegetarian food in Canoga Park.

Matthew McLean writes that El Big Burrito in Canoga Park serves “the best al pastor burrito I’ve ever had.”

Cheryl Leff recommends, “MacLeod Brewery for casual evening where we can bring in our own meal. We often bring delicious tortas sandwiches from Cemitas Don Adrian just around the corner.”

Leff’s favorite hidden gem is “Didar Kitchen, a new addition to the many excellent Middle Eastern restaurants along Ventura Boulevard [with] large portions of Persian food [and] friendly service. There is seating for maybe 10 or 12 inside, but they do a huge takeout business. On our first visit, I ran into a Persian friend I hadn’t seen in years. She told me they order Didar takeout at least weekly, and described it as the best Persian food in the Valley.”

Cook the black-eyed peas: Strain the beans, discarding the soaking water, and put them in a large pot. Add enough water so that it covers the beans; the water should be 2 inches above the bean line.

Bring the beans to a boil. Cook them at a hard boil for 15 minutes.

Reduce the heat to medium-low and bring to a simmer. Add the bouquet garni, black lime, onion, turmeric, pepper and fenugreek. Continue to cook at a simmer until the beans are tender, about 1 to 2 hours, depending on the age of your beans.

Shira Yevin was on her way to grab lunch from the Studio City Trader Joe’s, when she caught sight of a new restaurant on the block called Local Kitchens.

“I was like, ‘That sounds good, sounds healthy,’” she said. “‘Let me see what it is.’”

Excited at the prospect of not eating preprepared grocery store food, she was initially deflated when she saw that the restaurant served Vietnamese food, a cuisine she doesn’t normally eat. Then she noticed that the restaurant also served some of her favorite Mediterranean dishes.

After she placed her order, she started reading the colorful signs on the walls, one of which mentioned an Oklahoma onion burger.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, a burger? What is this place?’” Yevin wondered.

Local Kitchens is a fast-casual restaurant with five distinct menus from five different chefs. The catch is that there aren’t five kitchens operating separately. Rather, the five partnering chefs — a mix of restaurateurs, cookbook authors and chef-influencers — worked with Local Kitchens’ in-house culinary team to design the menus. The food is prepared from scratch by a single team of on-site cooks, ghost-kitchen-style.

But unlike many ghost kitchens, customers can eat on site. Diners are greeted by screens where they can scroll the five menus, then mix and match items as they build their order. When ready, servers deliver the food to the table all at once — not in disposable containers but on white ceramic plates. It’s a touch of restaurant-style service combined with the choice of a food hall and fast-casual convenience.

“It’s a valuable proposition,” said cookbook author and content creator Rick Martínez, who for his first restaurant venture has partnered with Local Kitchens to offer a Sonoran-style Mexican menu. “A lot of my friends are either vegan or pescatarian, or have some kind of allergy. It’s like no one can agree on any one place, right?”

Local Kitchens and similar ventures, such as Neighborly at the Promenade at Westlake in Thousand Oaks, are part of a new field of fast-casual dining descended from the online ordering boom of the pandemic when convenience and choice became paramount for diners and ghost kitchens, such as takeout titan Wonder on the East Coast, proliferated.

While still rooted in the ease of screen technology, Local Kitchens and Neighborly are betting on customers’ renewed desire for social connection, while also recognizing their demand for high-quality food. Diners get convenience and variety; chefs get the financial backing to scale with minimal risk.

From ghost kitchen to social gathering space

Local Kitchens, launched in 2020 by former DoorDash co-founders Jon Goldsmith and Andrew Munday, along with Jordan Bramble, began as a ghost kitchen servicing Bay Area favorites such as Boba Guys and Humphry Slocombe. By 2021, Local Kitchens had begun offering diners the chance to eat on site.

With time, however, there was a growing awareness, said Chief Executive Jay Gentile, that Local Kitchens was expanding other companies’ brands without cementing its own. Some locations, including the company’s first Southern California outpost in Huntington Beach, have shuttered.

“How do we move away from being this tech platform that does food, and become a restaurant brand that partners with great chefs, that creates menus, that scratch-cooks in our own kitchen, and delivers at a really high level at a fast-casual pace, at a price point that makes sense for people?” posed Gentile, who stepped into the CEO position in March as the company approached its five-year anniversary.

For Gentile, a large part of the answer is teaming up with individual chefs instead of established restaurant brands. On Local Kitchens’ initial chef-partner lineup are Eggslut and Amboy founder Alvin Cailan, who devised the aforementioned Oklahoma onion burger; Einat Admony, the chef-owner of New York’s Israeli restaurant Balaboosta; Ari Feingold, chef and co-founder of San Francisco’s Proposition Chicken; Tuệ Nguyễn, better known among Gen Z audiences as @twaydabae on social media and partner in the currently closed Vietnamese restaurant DiDi in West Hollywood, and Martínez, who took some of the company’s employees to Sonora, Mexico, to help them nail his menu.

While delivery and takeout still comprise a healthy amount of the company’s revenue, the restaurant is dedicated more than ever to a dine-in experience, with front-of-house staff available to guide customers through the touch screen menu or to take their order directly and the addition of ceramic dishware in Studio City and soon in other locations. Think Tender Greens but with a variety of cuisines.

Getting Neighborly

Over at Neighborly, the latest project from DOM Food Group, which previously worked with Gwyneth Paltrow to scale Goop Kitchen, customers at the Promenade at Westlake also order from a screen or they can speak to a front-of-house staff member to build a meal across six menus. As at Local Kitchens, one kitchen prepares the food, which is delivered as a single meal.

But Neighborly largely works with established restaurants and personality-driven businesses. Customers can choose Armenian cooking from Glendale’s Mini Kabob; chicken sandwiches and no-beef burgers from Questlove’s Mixtape; pizza and pasta from the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills; California-inspired salads, bowls and sandwiches from chef-influencer Gaby Dalkin; cookies from Amirah Kassem‘s Flour Shop and the pan-Asian-focused Social Monk, started in 2019 by the Cheesecake Factory in the same Westlake space that now houses Neighborly.

Going a step further, Neighborly’s physical space doubles as a superette, where customers can pick up spreads from Jessica Koslow’s Sqirl, frozen meals from Burritos La Palma and Katie’s Pizza, or any number of clean pantry essentials labeled “woman-owned,” “kid-friendly,” “better for you snacks” or “bespoke local merch.”

Taking its inspiration from Erewhon, founding partner Mario del Pero, known for co-founding Mendocino Farms with his wife, Ellen Chen, said Neighborly’s core customer is the “time poor” suburban mom, who wants to have a nice meal with friends and also grab prepared meals to take home.

“If we’re best in class in every genre then we’re gonna win the pizza person, we’re gonna win the bowl person, we’re gonna win the Mediterranean person,” said Del Pero, from Neighborly’s ocean-blue patio, bustling with customers.

A lifeline for chefs

For chefs, Local Kitchens and Neighborly offer a place to incubate menus and spread their brands without the risks associated with scaling a small business on their own.

This opportunity is particularly exciting for those who have never dabbled in the restaurant space, yet have sizable online presences, such as Dalkin and Martínez.

But the same can be said for established restaurateurs.

Take Cailan for example, who is largely uninvolved in the international expansion of Eggslut but still personally operates Amboy and says that facing rent in Studio City would have been “100%” impossible.

“Having the yin and yang of having a business like Amboy and being a part of a business like Local Kitchens makes everything work,” said Cailan. “I could still be chef Alvin Cailan smiling and shaking hands with my customers every single day, and also really trying to be a business-forward innovator in the restaurant world with Local Kitchens.”

Similarly, Mini Kabob’s Armen Martirosyan had long been interested in scaling the family business. But facing $20,000 to $30,000 a month in rent for a new location, he said, was “almost a dream.”

That’s when the Neighborly team reached out.

“I explained to my parents, like, ‘Look, we can cook but we’ve never scaled a business,’” he said. “‘You’re tired. I’m tired. Let’s put that creativity back into Neighborly’s hands, and let’s grow with them.’”

Mini Kabob’s has tried expanding before — at the Westfield Topanga shopping center’s Topanga Social food hall. Martirosyan calls the still-operating venture “the bane of my existence.”

“There was no chef coming in and training with us. We literally had to go to Topanga and train 18-year-old kids to make our proprietary recipes,” he said. “Immediately we knew this was bad, and it was either A, we would go everyday to try to save the face of our company and make sure that the quality doesn’t get killed, or B, we just take a step back.”

Local Kitchens and Neighborly, however, are explicitly pitching a higher level of fast-casual food and work with the chefs to ensure quality.

Local Kitchens, for instance, has implemented safeguards such as requiring each store to submit a picture of a specific recipe each day, said culinary head Ashley Torrijos, who got her start in Michelin-starred kitchens Melisse and Providence before working in research and development at the Cheesecake Factory.

And unlike a traditional food hall where small businesses pay rent to the operator, the partnering businesses at Local Kitchens and Neighborly receive a share of revenue. This will continue as both companies look to expand — in West L.A. and beyond.

“We’re getting our brand marketed, and we’re actually getting paid back by tasting all these different products and trying all these new things and having access to a research and development team at zero cost to us,” said Dominick DiBartolomeo, owner of the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills and Domenico’s Foods.

“If I would have tried to come up with this plan on my own, of course we would have done it. But you know how much time and money that would have taken? It’s exactly what you call a win-win.”

The Southern California grocery brand that has become synonymous with luxury and wellness is taking its first steps into New York City.

Erewhon said it plans to open a tonic bar within an exclusive West Village members’ club later this fall.

The tonic bar will serve members at Kith Ivy, a lifestyle and fitness club from Ronnie Fieg, chief executive of the popular streetwear brand Kith.

Kith Ivy will open to an “extremely limited” number of members this fall, the Kith website said.

The miniature Erewhon will be tucked away near cold plunge pools and a sauna at 120 Leroy Street in New York City, according to blue prints Fieg posted on Instagram.

The members’ club, which will also feature rooftop padel courts and dining from Cafe Mogador, reportedly comes with a hefty initiation fee of $36,000 and an annual fee of $7,000.

The price and exclusivity of Kith Ivy aligns with Erewhon’s own high-end reputation. In Los Angeles, the grocer is known for expensive specialty goods and celebrity-inspired drinks, like the $20 Hailey Bieber strawberry smoothie.

“Erewhon is going after those really premium customers,” said Jeff Wells, lead editor of the trade publication Grocery Dive. “If you’re succeeding in Southern California, New York would be the next logical place to go.”

Erewhon’s new tonic bar will offer a limited selection of drinks and smoothies, a company spokesperson said Wednesday. Only Kith Ivy members will be able to order in-person, but other New Yorkers within a select radius of the club can order drinks for delivery through Postmates and Uber Eats.

Erewhon has a loyal following in the Los Angeles area, where the company operates 11 locations and plans to open three more in West Hollywood, Glendale and Thousand Oaks. The company got its start in the 1960s as a health foods store in Boston before relocating to the West Coast.

The grocer’s foray into New York comes as other supermarket chains have cut back on costs. Kroger, the parent company of Ralph’s and Food 4 Less, is in the midst of closing locations and recently laid off nearly 1,000 corporate employees.

Unlike Ralphs, Erewhon has established itself as a luxury destination that caters largely to wealthy customers.

“Erewhon is all about being at the cutting edge of food and beverage, for a premium price,” Wells said. “Your average middle-class shopper can’t afford to shop there.”

Guinness bread was the beginning of Café Cecilia. In a strange way, without it there wouldn’t be a café and I would have never learned how to cook. At a time when I was desperate to recover from depression, I decided I needed some time out from the music management company where I was working. My mother Odette showed me her recipe for Guinness bread, and I found that the meditation of mixing the bread really helped with the pressure and intensity of what I was going through.

My mum is from Ireland and the bread recipe is very traditionally Irish. Every meal at Café Cecilia begins and ends with a nod to this bread. From the bread plate when you first sit down to the Guinness bread ice cream for dessert, it always features. It’s slightly sweet, with notes of treacle along with the buttermilk, and I find it brings something unique to the café’s menu, as it’s hard to find good freshly baked Irish soda bread in London. Our menu changes daily, but the soda bread is always here.

In Max Rocha’s London restaurant, Café Cecilia, he blends the concept of fish stew with the ubiquity of smothered toast, resulting in one of his most popular dishes: crusty sourdough that’s slicked with garlicky aioli, cider-braised mussels and sweet roasted tomatoes. In his debut cookbook, “Café Cecilia,” Rocha shares his recipe for mussels and datterini tomatoes on toast, which can be found on most tables at the restaurant. It serves two, but Rocha also recommends making larger batches to serve at parties or for groups of friends, as the preparation of making aioli, roasting tomatoes and braising the mussels can come together in preparation before everyone arrives, then assembled just before serving.

Against all odds, Tyler Wells’ Altadena restaurant remains standing. Like roughly 10,000 homes and structures in the area, many of the surrounding businesses burned in January’s Eaton fire, changing the mountain town’s community and landscape forever.

After the neighborhood’s destruction Wells thought his restaurant would never reopen, but on Saturday, Betsy — formerly called Bernee — will serve its rustic, seasonal cuisine once again. It will usher in customers for the return of its hearth-fired menu in what Wells hopes will be a beacon of light and a gathering place for Altadena after so much pain.

Betsy — near the corner of Lake Avenue and Mariposa Street — is flanked by remnants of the fire’s destruction: to the west, a hollowed-out brick structure that once held the local hardware store, its metal light fixtures still wilted from the heat; to the south, a leveled lot that was once a Spanish-language school; and north, there’s what’s left of a pottery studio and neighborhood stalwarts Café de Leche and Rancho Bar.

“Fire’s an incredible thing, and also will decimate an entire city and ruin people’s lives,” Wells said. “The allure of it for me is to not control it — and this is getting spiritual — but to find that harmony. Maybe we can do our tiniest little part to restore some of that balance.”

Bernee debuted Dec. 7, 2024. In its one month of service before the fire, guests dined on steaks, cast-iron potatoes and rich, fluffy burnt cheesecakes in the glow of its wood-fired hearth. The oven, overseen by lead chef Paul Downer, burned through almond wood and red oak, required near-’round-the-clock staff, and functioned as a baking oven by day and a blazing grill and roasting oven for meat, fish, beans and charred vegetables by night.

Wells had poured himself into the space, building his own tables, shelves and sleek wooden walls. Through personal duress, including the dissolution of his marriage and of his partnership in popular Los Feliz restaurant All Time, he found hope and focus in his new Altadena restaurant.

On Jan. 2 he moved to a new home, nearer to what is now Betsy, which is named for his late mother. On the day of the Eaton fire he told his therapist, “I don’t know, man, I could see myself being happy here. There’s a little crack with light being shown in.” He had a morning of revelation and optimism. That night, located practically along the Eaton Canyon trail, his new house was directly in the fire’s path.

Wells never imagined the fire would reach the city. On Jan. 7 he worked the restaurant til close, and helped his staff leave early and chart safer routes back to their homes.

“I was like, ‘The restaurant’s fine, you guys get home safe,’” he said. “Like, this restaurant is so far from the mountain, a fire can’t burn through all of this. Little did I know about these grapefruit-sized embers getting blasted down the mountain.”

That night he evacuated a few of his own belongings. Then he woke up to roughly 150 text messages, many simply sharing statements like, “It’s all gone.”

“I was just like, ‘OK, the restaurant’s gone. My house is gone. I’m separated. I just had this moment: ‘I’m out. I’m leaving now,’” he said. “I was just like, ‘I’m not coming back to L.A. This is it.’”

He began to envision starting over anew, maybe in another state, maybe in Mexico. Not two hours later, Paola Guasp — owner of Amara Kitchen, which also burned — reached out: Wells’ restaurant was, somehow, still standing.

He drove to Mariposa Street to check on Bernee and happened to meet one of his staff, who’d also decided to visit the restaurant at that moment. They embraced, then Wells grabbed two cases of the most expensive wine in the building and drove north without a destination.

Wells had befriended potter Victoria Morris and her husband, Morgan Bateman, occasionally dropping by the ceramics studio housed in the building behind Bernee. It burned in January. So did their home.

As Wells drove north he called an Ojai hotel and booked a few nights there, then called Morris and Bateman, who have a home in Ojai. Morris told him to cancel his hotel. “I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?’” he asked. “And there was a long pause, and she’s like, ‘Tyler, f— you. You live with us now.’”

For eight weeks they processed the fire and their losses and grief. Those meals and months with them, he said, are moments he’ll cherish for the rest of his life.

He then traveled to Mexico City to visit friends, and his return to California, he vowed, would only be a temporary one.

A call from the Ecology Center, a sprawling farm and market stand in San Juan Capistrano, changed his course. Could he help reshape the onsite cafe, molding its menus and programming closer to the farm’s bounty? No, he thought, he wasn’t ready. Wells traveled to Colorado, but he couldn’t get the Ecology Center out of his mind; he cut his trip short and headed back, throwing himself into work on the farm, its cafe and ticketed dinners and events. Then he called in Bernee reinforcements.

Joey Messina, a cook at Betsy, agreed to temporarily relocate to the farm. Wells vacated the Airstream trailer on the property for him, and took up new residency on the property’s yurt. When they needed waitstaff help they called Tom Oakes, also currently at Betsy; he trekked down to join them and Wells relocated again, this time pitching a tent between two orange trees. He remained there for eight weeks. More staff followed.

They called it “dirtbag summer camp,” working 18 hours a day, then cooking luxurious meals with produce pulled right from the ground. These dinners convinced him to stay.

“L.A.’s got some challenges that are really hard for me as a business owner, but these are my people,” he said. “These are the greatest friends I’ve ever known in my life. … It’s hot and it’s expensive and it’s a pain in the ass to do business here, but the greatest people in the world are here.”

After its closure, most of Bernee’s staff found work in other restaurants. Some, like server Courtney Johnson — the new curator of Betsy’s wine list — told The Times that they were ready to leave the industry entirely, unless Wells reopened his restaurant.

“They made the decision that the restaurant’s reopening,” Wells said. “I had to just pull a few levers here and there, like, ‘Here’s your restaurant back.’ I can’t believe it.”

The timing, he said, also began to feel right. The first months were horrifying, filled with trauma and smoke. In spring when construction crews began clearing the lots, he felt slightly optimistic. Through the summer, grass began to grow. The air felt cleaner. He saw signs of life returning to the community.

“I just realized: We’re right at the bottom of this climb, and it’s a hell of a climb, and I want to be a part of it,” he said. “This is where I fit in.”

What kind of a member of this community would he be, he thought, if he only returned once all the damage had cleared?

He renamed the restaurant and tweaked the menu for seasonality, but nearly everything remains as it did during Bernee’s single month of service. He’s gotten that wood-fired hearth back up and running. He deep-cleaned the air ducts and filters and restocked its kitchen.

On Aug. 3 he threw his first dinner at Betsy, cooking for friends, family, neighbors, and guests who’d cut their dinner short on the night the fire began in January. Wells gave the staff a pre-opening speech that was so unexpectedly emotional it brought him to tears in front of them all.

“I was just like, ‘This restaurant is not a restaurant,’” he said. “That’s a silly thing, but what it represents is something so much bigger and deeper, and what it means for people in the community.”

On Aug. 24, during another practice run of dinner service, a customer approached Wells in the dining room and tapped him gently on the shoulder from behind.

He didn’t know her, she said softly over the din of the guests, but she lives in the neighborhood. She said she needed to tell him that the return of the restaurant felt like the start of something new for Altadena, and she was so glad it came back.

“I think people do see it as a beacon, just to let a little bit of light in,” Wells said later. “It’s not going to be just us, obviously — I think we need another 1,000 examples of that — but it’s so meaningful to me. That’s what restaurants have always been for me, but to be able to do it in this kind of time and place is really powerful. It feels like a calling for all of us.”

Betsy is at 875 E. Mariposa St. in Altadena, open daily from 5 p.m. until close.

SEOUL  — In many parts of the world, convenience stores are the shops of last resort: cigarettes, sodas and laundry detergent. But in South Korea, you might find single malt whiskies, $800 French wines, 24K gold bars, shampoo and conditioner refill stations, televisions or a dine-in instant noodle bar with more than 200 varieties of ramyon.

A customer might be able to pick up a package, wash and dry their clothes, or sign up for a new debit card.

The stores are best known for their numerous feats of “instant-izing” food, a process in which nearly every conceivable dish is turned into a packaged meal: spaghetti, Japanese udon, fried rice that you squeeze out of a tube. These have turned convenience stores into a $25-billion industry in South Korea and those food products are churned out at a staggering pace: up to 70 new food items hit the shelves each week, effectively offering a live feed of South Korean tastes.

“In South Korea’s food retail market, you go extinct if you’re not quick to change,” says Chae Da-in, who says her obsession with convenience stores is decades old. “It’s all about being diverse and fast.”

Known in the national media and on social media as a “convenience store critic,” Chae is the author of three books on the world of convenience store foods, which has led to TV appearances and newspaper interviews.

Every Friday, she tours a handful of convenience stores near her home to keep up with what’s new. Over the last two decades, she estimates she has consumed at least 800 varieties of convenience store samgak gimbap — rice wrapped in dried seaweed and a grab-and-go staple.

In recent years, Chae has watched her obsession go global. Much like South Korean movies, TV shows and music, South Korean convenience stores have become a cultural sensation.

Specific locations, such as the store that appeared in Netflix’s hit series “Squid Game,” have made the news. On TikTok and YouTube, mukbang — videos of people eating — of South Korean convenience store foods have gathered millions of views.

“Giant cheese sausage,” announces one reviewer in a TikTok video series titled “ONLY Eating Food from a Korean Convenience Store.” The meal also includes blue lemonade that comes in a plastic pouch, a “3XL” spicy tuna mayo samgak gimbap and a carbonara-flavored Buldak (“fire chicken”) noodle cup.

South Korean convenience stores are now expanding into nearby countries such as Mongolia or Malaysia. CU, one of the country’s leading operators with more than 600 stores in Asia, is set to open its first U.S. location in Hawaii later this year.

“The percentage of the Asian population in Hawaii is six times that of the mainland U.S., making it a place where there is a high level of familiarity and positive attitudes toward Korean culture,” said Lim Hyung-geun, the head of overseas operations at BGF Retail, CU’s parent company.

“On top of that, we’re seeing the sustained popularity of Korean culture, such as a Korean food boom among American teenagers and young people in their 20s and 30s, which we believe will be a big boost for CU’s future expansion.”

Lim calls CU’s overseas locations “‘miniature South Koreas’ where people can experience the products that have become popular with the K-wave.

“But as is the case here, K-convenience stores aren’t just a place to experience South Korean culture,” he said. “They are also restaurants, cafes and a general amenity.”

In other words, everything stores that are everywhere and open all the time.

***

Like many things South Korea has embraced and spun off into something novel, convenience stores are an import to the country. The first such store was American — the Southland Ice Co., which was founded in Texas in 1927 and changed its name to 7-Eleven in 1946. The first of the 7-Elevens opened for business in Seoul in the 1980s.

Today, South Korea is the convenience store capital of the world. Like the bodegas of New York, they have become part of the fabric of contemporary urban life, multifunctional spaces that can be restaurants or coffee shops or bars with microwaves and outdoor seating. Chae calls them the “oasis of the streets.”

“People hang out in convenience stores,” she said. “They’ve become a social place.”

Part of what makes them such a force in the country is their sheer numbers.

There are around 55,000 convenience stores in South Korea — a country the size of Indiana — amounting to one convenience store for every 940 people. In Seoul, where their numbers have quadrupled in the last 15 years, it sometimes feels like there’s one on every corner.

Much of this has to do with the fact that roughly one in every four workers in South Korea is self-employed, a high number relative to other developed countries. For those in this mom-and-pop economy, which includes older workers pushed into early retirement or others who have been boxed out of the traditional labor market, convenience stores offer the most accessible form of entrepreneurship.

“Compared to the hundreds of thousands it would cost to open another business, the main draw of convenience stores is that you can open one with starting capital as little as 20 million won [$14,000],” said Oh Sang-bong, the head of social policy research at the Korean Labor Institute. “Of course it’s not easy. There are a lot of cautionary tales. But there are success stories, too.”

***

This profusion has made the convenience store business one of the most fast-paced and competitive in the country — one that moves in lockstep with boom-and-bust social media attention spans.

Hit products generate the kind of buzz you might see only for a limited-edition sneaker or the latest iPhone, necessitating preorders or, when inventories inevitably dry up, leading to scalping.

But the lows are abrupt. When it was first released last year, CU’s “Dubai-style chocolate” — an in-house take on the global TikTok food trend — commanded lines outside of stores and sold out in a day. Four months later, sales had dropped to a sixth of what they were.

“The lifespan of products is now incredibly short because social media fads come and go so quickly,” said Kim, a merchandiser for a leading convenience store franchise who asked to be identified only by his surname because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

“In the past when the market wasn’t so saturated, revenue would naturally rise as everyone opened more stores. But now there are so many stores, and then you’re competing not just with other convenience stores but with e-commerce platforms, coffee shops, restaurants — everybody who’s following the same trend.”

Most of Kim’s job involves scrolling through social media platforms such as TikTok, looking for the next hot-ticket item, such as a distant food trend that shows signs of making landfall.

“It’s brutal. It’s like trying to find the eye of a needle over and over again,“ he said. “If you miss something big and a competitor releases it first? Then you’re getting chewed out by your boss.”

Kwon Sung-jun is a chef who specializes in Italian cuisine and the winner of “Culinary Class Wars,” a hit reality cooking competition released by Netflix last year. He has a ritual of stopping by a convenience store every night after work — even if he doesn’t have anything to buy.

“It’s very useful for staying abreast of any trends in the culinary world,” he said, and his routine proved to be pivotal in winning the $223,000 prize for “Culinary Class Wars.”

In one stage of the competition, contestants were tasked with cooking a dish using ingredients sourced from a true-to-life replica of a convenience store on set. Kwon, 30, handily won with a chestnut tiramisu whipped together from chestnuts, milk, coffee and a package of biscuits.

“I came up with the idea in 30 seconds,” he said. “Because I had a mental list of what convenience stores have, I also planned substitute options for each of the key ingredients like chestnut, cream and so on.”

Since winning the competition, he has avoided convenience stores; just two weeks after that episode aired, CU released a mass-produced version of his tiramisu, with Kwon’s face on the packaging.

“It’s a little embarrassing to see those photos of myself,” he said.

***

All of this makes running a convenience store no easy feat, says Kim Hye-ryeon, the 52-year-old owner of a GS25 in Seoul’s Hongdae district.

Because franchisees are responsible for picking out their own inventory from the company catalog, which is updated three times a week, running a successful convenience store is less about the labor of stocking shelves and cashing out customers than keeping up with the frenetic cycle of food trends.

“Whenever there’s a popular item, the owners who are a step ahead buy up all the stock so sometimes I can’t get any for my store,” she said. “You have to know what’s popular with young people at all times.”

In recent years, as South Korea’s cultural footprint has expanded, the assignment has gotten even more complicated. Streets that were once quiet are now popular thoroughfares for tourists staying in the guesthouses and Airbnbs that have opened in the area. Global tastes must be accounted for, too.

“There’s been a noticeable increase since the pandemic,” she said. “Before, it was mostly Chinese or Japanese tourists, but now it’s from all over, especially Americans and Europeans.”

From behind the counter, she has been keeping mental notes of what this international consumer base is buying, noting, for example, how her Muslim customers carefully study the labels to check whether the item is halal.

“Most of the tourists come looking for products related to Korean movies or TV shows like dalgona [a traditional Korean candy] because they saw it on ‘Squid Game,’” she said. “They also really like ice creams, especially bingsu [Korean shaved ice].”

A young man wearing a bucket hat and a denim tuxedo monogrammed with the letters LV across every inch of fabric leans in to talk to his dinner date. Another couple takes selfies between bites of a California roll, both using forks to stab at the maki. Four women, their faces buoyant with Botox, clink glasses of elderflower and lychee martinis. It’s just another Friday night at Nobu on La Cienega Boulevard.

The Los Angeles Nobu is not as flashy as the one in Malibu, where the waves of the Pacific Ocean create a backdrop for the restaurant and Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox were just spotted on a double date. This Nobu, which opened in 2008, several years after its more famous Malibu cousin, is somewhat of a hidden gem on a stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, where black cars once swarmed its valet stand and reservations were elusive. Now, it’s more of a hotbed of furniture and home decor stores. And weeknight dinner reservations are procured with ease.

The main dining room that houses the sushi bar still vibrates with a current of money, celebrity and those who seek it. But, once revered as one of the most stylish rooms in Los Angeles, it now suffers from the aesthetic malaise of an “Asian-themed” chain restaurant in the mid-2000s, its patterned fabric banquettes feeling more dated than retro. The menu, for the most part, is similarly past its prime even if everyone (this writer included) still loves the black cod with miso.

When I learned that this specific location of Nobu was getting a new executive chef, I was intrigued. Sean Tan, originally from Malaysia, has cooked at Nobu Melbourne, Nobu Chicago and overseen Nobu experiences at events like the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. Would he be introducing new dishes that are only available in Los Angeles? Updating old favorites?

There was nothing noticeably different about the menu during a recent visit, but my server said that the chef had tweaked the Chilean sea bass with jalapeño, a dish that’s been exclusive to the Los Angeles location for about a decade.

The broiled sea bass was topped with a small heap of micro cilantro and a salsa of chopped red and green jalapeño, onion, lemon and olive oil that resembled pico de gallo. Marinated in “jalapeño miso,” it was nearly indistinguishable from the restaurant’s black cod miso, one of the signature dishes that helped catapult founder Nobuyuki Matsuhisa‘s career as the most recognizable sushi chef on the planet. But the sea bass was cooked far past firm, and the marinade, despite the salsa garnish, far too sweet.

While Tan may be running the day-to-day operations, it is only ever Matsuhisa’s name associated with any of the dozens of Nobu restaurants around the world.

The Nobu phenomenon can be traced to the opening of Matsuhisa restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1987. In 1994, actor Robert De Niro famously partnered with the chef to open the first Nobu in New York, and a restaurant empire and hotel brand — with more than 50 locations from Dallas to Dubai — was born.

Matsuhisa’s influence reverberates through every strip mall sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. He is the reason 99.2% of the sushi restaurants across the country have versions of tiradito and all variety of broiled white fish marinated in sweet miso on the menu. With sprigs of cilantro, dots of chile paste and lines of miso powder, the chef recalibrated the way people think about sushi.

“He made sushi chic and he made it the thing everybody wanted to eat,” says Ruth Reichl in the new documentary “Nobu.” Director Matt Tyrnauer’s film is a comprehensive look at Matsuhisa’s humble beginnings and his journey to becoming the face of sushi in America.

It was Matsuhisa who merged Peruvian flavors with classic Japanese technique, and introduced a new style of sushi to the masses.

His black cod with miso and pinwheels of chile-decorated yellowtail continue to be staples at every Nobu. Only now, you might find the versions across the street, down the street and all over town, better.

At Nobu Los Angeles, tiles of saba, hotate and toro all have a uniform flabby texture and a distinct, heady aroma of disinfectant and raw fish. The shari underneath is cold and soft enough to mash with a chopstick.

The tiny fried wonton taco shells are bubbly and crisp but overshadow the diced lobster and Wagyu cradled in the middle.

Umami chicken is bloated with salt, like something you might find in an airline lounge, sliced and splayed over a handful of mushy green beans.

The seaweed hugging my handroll is so tough and chewy, the spicy scallops and rice in the center shoot out the back with every bite. There’s a single piece of baran draped over the top of the handrolls, the same faux clump of grass you might find separating your plastic-clad sushi at a grocery store.

My mind flashes to a scene in the “Nobu” documentary where Matsuhisa is addressing the staff at the Nobu Los Cabos. He repeatedly sends back a dish, unhappy with the inconsistency of the plating. The garnish needs to be uniform. It’s too fine and clumped together. Make it more separate. Overlap the fish.

It is difficult to reconcile the precision demanded by the Matsuhisa on the screen and the plates before me. Maybe the film should be required viewing for anyone contemplating a first-time meal at Nobu. I found myself frustrated on his behalf, the blow of spending an exorbitant amount of money on a less-than-stellar dinner a little less severe. Is it fair to expect a certain level of consistency from a restaurant group that has a presence on five continents in more than two dozen countries?

During meals at Nobu Malibu, Matsuhisa’s famed miso cod has been more supple, evenly cooked and the marinade less cloying. The service more attentive and sharp, and the shari properly seasoned. If you inform your server of a penchant for silver-skinned fish, he might recommend the off-menu kohada.

And at the original Matsuhisa, now nearly 40 years old, I’ve always found the nigiri to be an exemplary version of the genre. And here, the miso cod is nonnegotiable.

Perhaps Tan needs more time to establish himself in the Nobu Los Angeles kitchen, though there are still glimpses of the brilliance Matsuhisa inspired decades ago. The hearts of palm salad with jalapeño dressing is exhilarating the first time you try it, revolutionary in its simplicity and clarity of flavors. The vegetable is shaved into a mountain of tender ribbons over a pale green vinaigrette that hums with chile and citrus.

The restaurant’s interpretation of spicy tuna with crispy rice is a playful, interactive dish that requires diners to dunk squares of crispy rice into a ramekin of spicy tuna. Though the amount of fish is hardly sufficient, the nuggets of rice are at once crunchy and chewy, the perfect vessel for the cool, smooth tuna.

Halved okra are lightly dredged and fried until crisp as potato chips. Los Angeles could be a brighter, better place if there were more plates of fried okra and a little less Brussels sprouts.

While Matsuhisa is widely credited as the progenitor of yellowtail sashimi with ponzu and chile, the tai with shiso and fried shiitake mushrooms is the sashimi plate that should grace every table. The slices of tai are fanned out, surrounded by a sharp citrus sauce that gently tightens the flesh. It’s crowded with chopped shiso, like a sweet, minty chimichurri you’ll want to spoon over anything else on the table. And the curls of fried mushrooms over the top have the same smoky, meaty complexity as a pile of bacon.

During my third dinner, I looked around the room to see a family fresh from a graduation wearing orchid leis around their necks, their heads on swivels, scanning the dining room for celebrities. I was reminded that Nobu isn’t just a sushi restaurant. It’s a brand like Louis Vuitton or Mercedes, with the sort of name recognition any company would spend endless amounts of money and maybe commit corporate espionage to achieve. If you stay at a Nobu hotel or dine at Nobu on a cruise ship, it can also be a lifestyle for those who hover comfortably in a certain wealth bracket.

There is no doubt in my mind that Nobu will continue to thrive on vibes, the allure of the name and a handful of dishes Matsuhisa is most known for. Like the Birkin bag and the Chanel 2.55, the Nobu in Los Angeles, Malibu, or wherever else you happen to be in the world, will never go out of style. It also won’t be, and probably shouldn’t be, your favorite sushi restaurant.

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, diced

4 garlic cloves, minced

2 ½ tablespoons chili powder

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 teaspoons smoked paprika

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon tomato paste

2 tablespoons white wine

1 tablespoon fresh thyme

2 ½ teaspoons kosher salt, to taste

½ teaspoon black pepper

2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced (and 3.5 to 4 cups)

1 can (15-ounce) fire-roasted tomatoes

1 can (15-ounce) black beans, rinsed and drained

1 can (15-ounce) kidney beans, rinsed and drained

2 ½ cups chicken stock

1 tablet Abuelita chocolate

A new coffee giant could be brewing.

The American beverage firm Keurig Dr. Pepper plans to buy JDE Peet’s, the European parent company of California’s gourmet coffee trailblazer, Peet’s Coffee, in an all-cash transaction worth about $18 billion.

Keurig Dr. Pepper will be split into two independent companies, one of which will focus on coffee, according to a Monday release.

The new coffee company will be called Global Coffee Co. and will be publicly traded in the U.S., as will the beverage company, which will be called Beverage Co. Global Coffee Co. will have approximately $16 billion in combined annual sales and Beverage Co. will have more than $11 billion in annual net sales, the release said.

“Today’s announcement marks a transformational moment in the beverage industry,” said Keurig Dr. Pepper Chief Executive Tim Cofer in a statement. “Through the complementary combination of Keurig and JDE Peet’s, we are seizing an exceptional opportunity to create a global coffee giant.”

Under the terms of the deal, Keurig Dr. Pepper will pay JDE Peet’s shareholders 31.85 euros per share in cash, equivalent to about $37 per share. The value is a 33% premium to JDE Peet’s 90-day volume-weighted average stock price.

After the deal was announced, JDE Peet’s shares climbed more than 15%. Keurig Dr. Pepper shares fell more than 10%.

According to JDE Peet’s half-year report released in July, sales for the company grew more than 19% over the past year.

Along with Peet’s Coffee, JDE Peet’s owns popular brands including Stumptown Coffee Roasters and German coffee name Jacobs. Peet’s Coffee has made a name for itself as a San Francisco-based destination that helped bring dark, gourmet coffee to American consumers.

After working at his father’s small coffee company in the Netherlands, Alfred Peet moved to the U.S. and in 1966 opened the first Peet’s Coffee shop in the Bay Area, near UC Berkeley.

“I came to the richest country in the world, so why are they drinking the lousiest coffee?” Peet used to say, according to the Peet’s Coffee website.

By 1971, Peet was training three young entrepreneurs and provided them with the roasted beans to open their new venture, Starbucks. There are now more than 220 Peet’s Coffee shops in California and more than 40 in other states.

After the acquisition closes, Global Coffee Co. will have the world’s most expansive coffee portfolio, the release said, including $1-billion-plus revenue brands Keurig, Jacobs, L’OR and Peet’s. The acquisition and split into two companies will unwind the merger between Keurig and Dr. Pepper that closed in 2018.

“We are excited to join forces with Keurig to chart the future of global coffee by leveraging our combined portfolio of the world’s most beloved coffee brands,” said JDE Peet’s Chief Executive Rafa Oliveira in a statement.

A suero is a “water cocktail,” consisting of lime juice, ice and sparkling mineral water, all served in a tall glass with a salted rim. The same word is used for an IV of fluids in Mexico, and the two serve the same purpose: to keep you healthy and hydrated. Use whatever mineral water you like. Agua de Piedra is my favorite.

Casey Elsass shares a recipe from his cookbook “What Can I Bring?” It’s bright, tangy and the perfect addition to any spread of starters. Here’s Elsass on his salt and vinegar salsa verde:

Let me just get out in front of this before it becomes a scandal: This is not a salt-and-vinegar-flavored salsa, although that sounds incredible. This is a very easy and classic blend of the usual suspects — tomatillo, lime, onion and cilantro, plus one special ingredient to make sure the salsa is as verde as possible. But back to the recipe title: It’s because I refuse to eat it with anything other than salt-and-vinegar chips. I know, tortilla chips are already perfect with salsa, and you’re right to say that. Just trust me — a salt-and-vin chip is an even more perfect partner for the natural acidity of the tomatillos. They really make this salsa sparkle with a huge pop of flavor!

Note: Whenever you need a blended sauce to stay vibrant, drop in an ice cube! The ice crystals shock the cilantro and keep this salsa looking bright and fresh.

The food scene in the Valley is massive — spread out across 260 square miles and sustaining roughly half the population of the city of Los Angeles. Eight Times Food writers spent weeks traversing its trafficked highways, long boulevards and hidden side streets in search of greatness.

Our search yielded 65 dining destinations and 24 drinking establishments — barely scratching the surface of all the culinary abundance the region is home to.

Now we want to hear from you: Where are your favorite places to eat and drink in the San Fernando Valley? What’s a hidden gem that you wish more people knew about?

“I’ll have what she’s having.” A memorable punch line, but not much of a menu strategy — unless you believe that best-selling qualifies as a cuisine.

And yet I keep seeing the same dishes over and over, often on menus whose identities are defined mostly by popularity: goat cheese salad, a riff on Buffalo chicken wings, Caesar salad, avocado toast, mac and cheese reboots and their upscale cousin, cacio e pepe. Chili crisp on top of everything but dessert.

Chef David Chang single-handedly transformed Brussels sprouts from a sad fall-season also-ran to a year-round star when he opened Momufuku in 2004 in New York City — the addition of bacon and kimchee will do that — and to this day variations on that amped up little cabbage are a menu staple far beyond Chang’s empire. We’ve graduated from a quest for the unique to menus crowded with versions of familiar favorites, as more and more of us seem content with less and less, choice-wise.

I will not call out a single restaurant by name because they’re in enough trouble as it is, between an uptick in operating costs and a downturn in the number of diners who’ll get off the couch at mealtime. Tariffs could knock avocado toast off the popularity list unless Mexico gets an unlikely exemption, and profitable wine lists will shrink. Restaurants are understandably more risk averse than ever, so I wish them profits and survival even as I turn away from the ones that ride the culinary slipstream.

Homogeneity is an awfully polite euphemism for the national agenda right now, as the federal government ushers people of color out of the U.S. and encourages people whose color is white to come on in. Nothing is immune to the exclusionary mindset, not the arts, sports, medical research and healthcare; not even daily life, where sameness takes hold in more subtle ways.

The mash-up hit parade menu is a pendulum swing away from where we were just a few years ago, when a hard-core definition of authenticity ruled, and a clear link between a chef’s background and the menu was as essential as knife skills. No more. Anyone cooks anything, as long as it has a proven track record: In a single night a chef might be a pizzaiolo, a New England lobsterman, a wings- or guac-master.

I’m not recommending cultural food purity — it would limit me pretty much to my grandmother’s brisket and kugel, if I were a chef — but there has to be a sweet spot between that attitude and lowest common denominator food. A dish’s origin story should involve something more interesting than the number of units sold.

I often turn for refuge to ethnic spots, long a traditional portal for immigrants who build their families’ future on dishes they grew up with, places where I’m unlikely to encounter generic options. And yes, I am aware of the sad irony: Authenticity, in this case, only adds to these restaurants’ precarious state because owners, workers and diners who weren’t born here are vulnerable to ICE showing up without a reservation.

The threat is everywhere, but announcing one’s roots on a menu, right now, feels riskier still.

There’s an ever-expanding row of food stalls on a busy street near where I live, and at first I saw them as incubators for ambitious cooks serving an array of international dishes. The food truck Evil Cooks is now a brick-and-mortar operation whose owners were 2025 James Beard semifinalists for best chef, California region, their second time on the list. It’s a nice dream; it could happen again.

But lately I walk by even if I have other dinner plans, just to see that everyone is still there — the taco operation, the shawarma guys, the Korean stand, the new Peruvian stall. The visibility that was these eateries’ best asset now seems like their biggest drawback.

I rely on old standbys, too, places that figured out who they were years ago and have stuck with it. There’s a nice logic when they introduce dishes; the new stuff plays well with others rather than making me scratch my head at the disconnect.

I imagine that a proponent of the greatest-hits menu will say it’s diversity on a plate, but I don’t buy it. To me, it’s constraint masquerading as diversity. We pull back and pretend otherwise, and the narrower our field of vision becomes, the larger the terrain we define as not us, not ours.

I appreciate that sometimes we’re after comfort food when we go out to eat, that what we crave is an experience that dredges up happy memories of the same dish we’re staring it, which is one reason classics keep selling.

I’m as happy as anyone to stand in line for a bagel sandwich here, there or everywhere, if I so choose. Or to take my pick of any of the four blister-crust pizzas within five minutes of my front door. I just don’t want a Top 10 mentality to be the default. I don’t always want to have what she’s having.

Karen Stabiner’s most recent book is “Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream.”

When I want to feel closer to my late grandmother — and to my great-aunt, aunts and cousins — I drive to Burbank. I head directly to the cookie case at Monte Carlo Italian Deli, passing beneath the wooden puppets that line the walls, and scan the rows of sweets for pignoli. I wander the aisles, still dumbstruck after all these decades: the countless jars of giardiniera, every twist and shape of dried pasta on offer, the familiar buzz of customers around the deli case all waiting for their number to be called.

By my count at least four generations of the Petrucelli line, by blood or by marriage, have loved shopping here, where retro neon signage welcomes you to a cornucopia of Italian excellence. On one side of the building is Monte Carlo, a well-stocked market and importer, and on the other, Pinocchio’s: what feels like the last vestige of 1960s red-sauce, cafeteria-style dining.

It’s a relic and a palace, built of sausage links, frozen manicotti, gasoline-like canisters of olive oil and a confounding Pinocchio theme. It should be made a local landmark and protected for as long as Los Angeles remains standing.

Informed by her New Jersey-born mother-in-law, in the ’90s my own mother would cart me along to the deli, where the staff would gift me and every child a long, spindly breadstick, as is still their tradition. In adolescence I would line up at Pinocchio’s and pick out affordably priced wedges of lasagna and eggplant parmesan or the house-made Italian sausages with wilted green peppers over pasta, always served on muted pink cafeteria trays, and always with my favorite side dish: the tart marinated mushrooms, boiled in vinegar then coated in oil and flecked with spices.

Now in adulthood, it’s where I find solace and connection to my family. Sometimes I’ll meet my cousin Victoria, sipping sub-$5 glasses of wine and sliding into well-worn leather booths in one of the brick- or wood-accented dining rooms. Now expecting her own child — who’ll undoubtedly become the fifth generation of our family to fall in love with this magical market — she asks me to send photos of the heaps of garlic bread when unable to muster the strength for her own visit. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’ll be stopping by for that garlic bread on the way to her baby shower in a few weeks.

The legacy of shopping at Monte Carlo isn’t limited to the Petrucellis. According to co-owner Tony Scuticchio, many of the customers here are multigenerational; he’s seen children grow up and begin their own lineage.

He estimates 80% of his patrons live in the San Fernando Valley, but some make the pilgrimage from Las Vegas to shop four or five times a year, while others come from Palm Springs whenever they’re in town.

“The customers make it so pleasant,” he says. “They’re so appreciative and they love it. We have a lot of Italians that come in here, old-school Italians, and they even go back to, ‘When I was in Italy, we did this,’ ‘When I was in Italy, I did that.’”

It’s been a family affair since 1969, when Croatia-born Mark Brankovich Sr. purchased the 1950s-founded Monte Carlo deli. Though not himself Italian, “He always felt that he was more Italian than the Italians were,” Scuticchio says with a laugh. Brankovich spoke Italian, and lived in Italy during World War II; at one point, the family lore goes, he was arrested by Mussolini’s troops, then released after his uncle called in a favor. After moving to the U.S., he never returned. But he did buy an Italian deli along Magnolia Boulevard.

In 1971 he also purchased the adjacent liquor store, flipping that into Pinocchio’s, and eventually bought the next-door bar to expand his dining room. When he died in 2001, his daughter, Laura, took the reins, and not long after that, she fell in love with Scuticchio, who operates the business.

Scuticchio had owned his own grocery stores in Los Angeles and his own father — born in Italy — operated restaurants at the Santa Monica Pier in the 1960s. Sliding in to take over the deli was, he felt, right in line with his own work experience and heritage. Now he and Laura have a 19-year-old daughter who has helped scoop the gelato through the years.

Their kitchen whips up 2,500 meatballs and between 3,000 and 4,000 sausages every week, plus 80 gallons of meat sauce and 30 gallons of the marinara each day. Preparation begins at 7 a.m. daily. The bread is made freshly for the deli around the corner, by a bakery that the deli used to also own.

But no time is as busy as the holidays, when the deli hums from morning to night.

“Christmastime is so busy because everybody gets back to their roots,” Scuticchio says. “You have people that say, ‘My grandmother used to make lasagna,’ or ‘My grandmother used to make these raviolis,’ ‘My grandmother used to make manicotti.’ Everybody just gets back to what their family has done. So I think that’s really unique.”

Some form of stuffed pasta in red sauce can be found on my own family’s table, be it Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter. A few years ago I placed a call to my Aunt Carol, who was organizing the holiday feast; I was heading to Burbank anyway, and would she like me to pick up anything from Monte Carlo for the dinner?

No need, she told me. She’d already made the trip for frozen ravioli the day before.

Monte Carlo Italian Deli and Pinocchio’s are at 3103 W. Magnolia Blvd. in Burbank.

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It hits me like a wall as the glass doors slide open: an unidentifiable scent — toasted, warm and slightly sweet. At international markets, smell, inextricably linked to our memories and emotions, is often a one-way plane ticket home. Imported laundry detergent, tightly sealed jars of hard-to-find spices, fragrant incense and loose teas are all olfactory postcards.

At Q Market & Produce in Lake Balboa, this is no different. Its scent, while unrecognizable to me, is a reminder to others of life in Iran. And for some, one of the only tangible links for the Iranian community in the San Fernando Valley.

“I would love to go to Iran,” manager Bobby Nosrati tells me. “I want to go get that feeling of home. Obviously it feels like home here, but I want to go feel it. I want to smell it. I want to show my kids where I was born.”

Nosrati’s family moved from Tehran to the Valley in 1991 when he was just 5 years old. When asked what he remembers most from that time, he simply says, “I remember my parents’ red couch.”

Nosrati’s father, Farzin, worked long hours on a farm in Camarillo before making the decision to become a retailer; he wanted to build something for fellow Persian immigrants. Q Market opened in 1993 and has remained at the original Vanowen Street location ever since. While Nosrati has made adjustments here and there to keep up with customer requests (most recently appeasing the throngs of teenage Dubai chocolate fanatics by stocking pistachio cream), the market has, for the most part, stayed the same.

Strings of plump, young dates sit tangled together near the cash register, their wrinkled elders side-eyeing them from across the aisle “back in my day”-style. Next to the dates, a library of lavashak, the puckery fruit leather, like ancient scrolls written in pomegranate and apricot, lay unfurled and stacked to the sky.

At the deli, massive hunks of feta soak in tubs against a backdrop of pale pink butcher paper. Tubes of mortadella overflow from the cold case, pressing into the glass as if they yearn to escape.

Two butchers sit on either side of the building, one halal, the other glatt kosher. At the end of the spice aisle, like a period at the end of a sentence, a 20-gallon black plastic bucket filled to the brim with dried lime.

Although Nosrati has few memories of Iran beyond the big red couch, he recognizes the importance of importing ingredients straight from the source. Easier said than done, given the contentious trade relationship between the U.S. and Iran. But by employing distributors in Canada and Turkey, Q Market, like Persian markets nationwide, has made do.

He walks me through the aisle of products from Iran, touching skinny bottles of sour cherry syrup best enjoyed in bubbly water or over ice cream, rows of Istak, a nonalcoholic malt beverage, and large sacks of Iranian rice.

“The smell is why a lot of people end up buying it. It fills up the room. You could probably smell it from here.” Nosrati says of the rice. “To me, it smells like heaven.”

The rice boasts a hefty price tag based on its weight, quality and scarcity (a 10-pound bag starts at $57.99), a price that has only risen given the recent tariffs, now at the highest rates since the Great Depression.

“The tariffs are affecting us and we’re trying our best not to pass that onto the consumer,” Nosrati says. “Obviously, I can’t sell things for less than we’re buying them, but we’re not keeping the same margins anymore; we’ll cut the margin in half to help the consumer with that tariff.”

When asked about the importance of keeping these ingredients stocked, he speaks of the gravity of consistency and tradition.

“Maybe you’re making that dish once a month or once a week for your family, but if you don’t have that one ingredient, you can’t make it. … We didn’t have [Iranian rice] for six months. A lot of containers just sat there in customs for months on end. Some of this stuff isn’t shelf stable and that time affects the integrity of the product; a lot of companies told me they had to throw their stuff away.”

I begin to inquire about the Iranian brand of Cheetos (called Chee.Toz) when Nosrati politely asks me to hold that thought, and pops over to the dairy aisle to ask about a customer’s recent doctor’s visit. There are plenty of moments like this during our chat, moments in which Nosrati reminds me of a grocery’s role as community center.

It can be seen in the aisle with crystal clear bottles of water of every flavor and function: rose, orange blossom, fenugreek, cinnamon, peppermint, anise. A sign hung at the endcap in English and Farsi explains which flavor one should drink for a stomachache, joint pain or kidney health. Near the front entrance, a CD shop sells albums with covers of women in blue eyeshadow next to a bead curtain, and concert tickets for old-school Iranian artists.

“When I first started working here about 12 years ago, people would call and say, ‘Hey, what will the weather be like tomorrow?’ or ‘When’s daylight savings time?’ I went to my dad and told him, ‘People are nuts! Why are they asking me these questions, this is a grocery store!’ He told me, ‘You need to understand, we’re their pillar for a lot of things. Some of these customers are older, so they don’t understand how to use technology.’”

Perhaps Q is more than a community center; perhaps it’s an embassy. And for second and third generations, an embassy to a place they’ve never visited, or hardly remember or hope to see soon, but can’t imagine when.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. struck three Iranian nuclear facilities, an attack ordered without congressional approval and against the recommendation of the administration’s intelligence. Shortly before, Israel, with the financial support of the U.S., bombed six Iranian airports, along with several residential and military areas of the city, prompting a 12-day conflict that displaced nearly 9 million from the country’s capital, and escalating a decades-long history of tension in the area. Based on this alone, one would assume, if one was Iranian, that the U.S. has no vested interest in the commemoration or understanding of Persian culture. One would assume that the fragrant smell of Persian rice, or the big red couch, relics of immense personal significance, are as expendable as a military dollar. Q Market, by way of existing, challenges this assumption, and Angelenos, by way of visiting, echo it loudly.

In the back office next to a large wooden abacus, a framed photo of Mt. Damavand, a volcanic mountain in the northern part of Iran, watches out over the Nosratis’ operation. We never get back around to discussing Iranian Cheetos; it feels somewhat trivial now. Instead I ask Bobby about extended family in Iran, most of whom have relocated overseas. His cousin, an actor, still lives in Tehran, and the two keep up on Instagram and WhatsApp. I ask if he’d ever want to come out and do some acting in L.A.

“Oh, he would love to! He would thrive. He’s really good too. Navid Nosrati, that’s his name.”

“Hey, 1.8 million people can’t be wrong, right?” This is how Evan Lovett, the social-media pop historian of all things L.A., said we should frame our thinking about the dining culture of the San Fernando Valley, where he lives.

And yep, he’s right. If half the population of Los Angeles is here, they must be eating well. Could it be that the other half of us in city limits south of the ridges just might be … missing out?

Take a look at the stories below and we all might end up agreeing. Use our guides and the map pins inside to eat and drink your way through a core engine of Southern California culture: the San Fernando Valley, proud, historic and ready for its culinary close-up. — Daniel Hernandez

This simple starter of fried plantains quickly became the star of the menu at Adrian Forte’s modern Caribbean restaurant Lucia, which opened on Fairfax Avenue in the spring. The caramelized, crispy plantains are heightened with a pickled Scotch bonnet aioli that’s based on a recipe from Forte’s “Yawd” cookbook and served on the side.

Forte calls the pickled Scotch bonnet aioli his “utility paste” and always has some on hand to add to chili, lasagna, rice, a marinade, dressing or any number of dishes. Think of it as a condiment like sambal oelek; you can use it everywhere.

Note that pickling Scotch bonnets reduces the heat. The longer they are pickled, the less heat they have, but watch out — the heat that leaves the peppers is absorbed by the vinegar so the longer they stay in there, the hotter the vinegar liquid gets.

On June 30 Justin Pichetrungsi posted news on his restaurant’s Instagram account that drew thousands of responses in shock, dismay and support: He would be closing his generational family business, Anajak Thai Cuisine, for nearly two months.

What followed was a complete renovation that uncovered family relics and reimagined the space that helped raise Pichetrungsi, and catapulted the chef and his Sherman Oaks restaurant to international fame.

“In order to preserve something,” he posted, “you have to change it.”

The neighborhood Thai restaurant, founded 44 years ago by husband-and-wife team Ricky and Rattikorn Pichetrungsi, served the Sherman Oaks community for decades. But when their son, Justin, took over the restaurant several years ago, his own vision began to take hold: new dishes, new formats for enjoying them, an expanded wine program and a new energy. Its generational blend of old and new helped it garner accolades including being named the L.A. Times Restaurant of the Year in 2022. That same year, Justin Pichetrungsi received the title of best chef in California from the James Beard Foundation.

If all goes as planned and Anajak reopens on Friday it will feature entirely new equipment — except, that is, for his father’s original three-hole wok station, which has been refurbished. His mother, still a fixture in the restaurant, will finally have her own workstation dedicated to her famous mango sticky rice. Guests will find an additional dining room, an entirely new and more open kitchen, an overhaul of the original dining space, his grandfather’s art, a repaving of the alfresco area (the venue for its popular Thai Taco Tuesdays) and more.

It all started with the dish pit. Anajak ran through a lot of plates, flatware and wine glasses by hosting 250 guests a night. Washing them all in one three-compartment sink located alongside the cook line, wok station and grill finally proved untenable.

Pichetrungsi first asked where he might be able to move the sink, and it all unraveled from there: He’d have to place it where the bathrooms were. To offer guests new bathrooms, he would have to renovate and open the adjacent wine storage room. And if a wall would have to come down in order to renovate, he might as well redo it all.

“The hardest part of the business is the organization part of it, not the innovation,” he told The Times. “Innovation is so fun: You dream of new dishes, new ways to talk to your customers and things like that. But with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, people never saw how broken it was in order to make the show go on.”

In January the staff began in small phases, such as moving the contents of the wine storage room to the office and storage space in the alley. Then on July 1, construction began in earnest.

On the first day, the staff passed a sledgehammer between themselves, each taking a swing at a wall, including Ricky Pichetrungsi, who attacked it from his wheelchair.

“Everyone on the team has a hand in breaking that wall down, which was a beautiful moment,” Justin Pichetrungsi said.

As they renovated, they uncovered Anajak relics: a box of old celebrity photos and headshots of those who’ve visited through the years, the original, grease-coated cash register, old menus, branded matchbooks and an entire mirror his father built walls around during his own renovations 30 years ago.

“I was hoping to find money, but unfortunately… ,” Pichetrungsi laughed.

Pichetrungsi, a trained artist who formerly worked at Disney Imagineering, wanted to make changes for a long time — longer than he’d known he wanted to become a chef or take over the family restaurant.

While revisiting his sketchbooks from years prior, Pichetrungsi found a list. He was flipping through a book he hadn’t used in a decade and saw various notes of changes he would make to Anajak.

“I realized that a lot of my decision making in the last couple of years has really been about how to get to this specific point,” he said. “A point where I can have a kitchen that I was happy to work in — not that I wasn’t happy to work in my father’s kitchen, but it was very uncomfortable — and it wasn’t about my uncomfortability. It is and it was about developing a space that would feel in line with who we wanted to be.”

Pichetrungsi was still drawing and teaching when he began helping his parents keep their restaurant afloat after the 2008 economic crisis. But in 2019, after his father suffered a stroke, he left Disney and took over Anajak full-time, working alongside his mother, his aunt and occasionally his father. In a bid to once again keep the family business alive, he pivoted during the pandemic, flipping the vacant alley space to host Thai Taco Tuesdays, a wildly popular weekly event with lines around the block. Then, he pushed its boundaries even further with a constantly evolving Thai tasting menu.

When Pichetrungsi began cooking at the restaurant there were eight staff members, including himself and his relatives. Now there are nearly 60.

Near the center of the restaurant, Ricky Pichetrungsi’s former office — which once served as a de facto daycare center but became storage for pots and pans — will be home to a new climate-controlled wine cellar overseen by wine director Ian Krupp.

The construction team works six days a week, beginning at 5 a.m., with multiple crews overlapping. They’ve installed a new oven hood, a floating kitchen pass, new plumbing, new electrical systems and new banquettes in the dining room.

The new dining room, which the staff calls the East Wing, will offer two dozen seats and a hallway to the new bathrooms. Oil paintings and watercolors by Pichetrungsi’s late grandfather were flown in from Thailand. The old, now-gone carpet, as well as a tarnished “butt print” section of the wall where for years guests and staff leaned while waiting for the restrooms, are also being framed.

“It’s gross, but it’s art made by millions of people,” Pichetrungsi said.

He alerted the restaurant’s staff throughout the last year, giving time to make plans or find temporary employment for the month and a half of closed business. Many took vacation. Some staged at other restaurants. Some are working through construction, writing the restaurant’s first official training manuals.

Pichetrungsi declined to share the cost of Anajak’s overhaul but said, “It’ll be a lot of pad Thais.”

Pichetrungsi’s parents raised concerns about the renovations: Think of the cost. Did it all really need to be done? But they’ve come to appreciate the changes.

“They’re not as nostalgic about it as I am,” Justin Pichetrungsi said. “They’ve seen it so much, they’re okay letting it go. But I wasn’t able to. I was here during the demo day, and it was a hard time for me.”

As different as the restaurant will look, much of it will remain the same. The Kobe basketball jersey will still be hanging over the dining room. Thai Taco Tuesday is set to resume immediately, and the restaurant’s omakase will return as well, albeit at a later date.

With so much more kitchen space, new dishes might crop up at Anajak, too.

Today, Pichetrungsi’s notebooks are filled with sketches of floor plans, the views from various tables, the new server station and dishes he might like to execute in the new kitchen: The addition of a second deep fryer could one day mean whole fried fish. There could be enough space at the pass to shuck oysters and build seafood towers. Or maybe, he joked, these are the changes guests will see in another decade, when he decides to shake things up all over again.

Everyone has a Valley standby, a place they go when they want to feel at home, with little fuss, a reliable menu and friendly faces. For me it’s Tiki No, a neon-lighted bar that serves up flaming Scorpion bowls in North Hollywood. We reached out to some of our favorite Valley residents, from local chefs and cookbook authors to actors, a senator, record shop owner and podcast host. Some were born and raised in the area, while others are newer residents.

Alex Padilla, California senator:
“The San Fernando Valley food scene includes quality, authentic cuisine from around the world, but my comfort food favorites are still Mexican restaurants in the northeast end of the Valley. The handmade tortillas at Lenchita’s in Pacoima that my dad introduced me to years ago are as good as ever. El Tarasco in Sylmar is under new ownership, but they’ve maintained the same high-quality ingredients — many regulars think that some of the dishes and salsas are even better than before. But what I’m most excited about right now is being able to order El Mero Mero (Pacoima) on DoorDash. You can’t go wrong with any of the tacos, burritos, sopes or specialty quesadillas. Just make sure to ask for extra salsa — both green and red — because your mind and your taste buds will be blown.”

Tiffani Thiessen, actor and cookbook author: “Bill’s Burgers [is] our [favorite] burger in the Valley. Super casual setting for a quick bite with the best legendary old school burger. Oy Bar [is] one of our favorite date night spots [and the] food is always on point. Casa Vega [is a] nostalgic Mexican joint that has been a staple in the Valley for many years and [I] hope it continues.”

Valerie Bertinelli, actor and host: “I love Mistral, I’ve been going there since the ‘80s, and of course, Casa Vega, we had [Wolfgang] and Andraia‘s rehearsal dinner there and there’s little plaques in the booths for me and [Wolfgang] and [Eddie Van Halen]. And of course I was so happy when Petit Trois came to the Valley, perfect little French bistro.”

Eric Warheim: comedian, winery owner and cookbook author: “A premium Valley experience is a margarita at Casa Vega then over to Bill’s Burgers: two of the realest, most L.A. spots you can find. Then Asanebo for some toro and then Anajak for some Emrich-Schönleber!”

Evan Lovett, “L.A. In a Minute” podcast host: ”I love Casa Vega because it’s an institution and for what it means to the Valley. When you go in there, it’s fun, it’s comfortable, they have good drinks. Christy Vega cares so deeply about the legacy of her dad and going back to her grandfather, who opened Cafe Caliente on Olvera Street. Listen, in the Valley, 70 years is forever. … When my wife and I go out to date night, we go to ‘Sushi Row’ on Ventura Boulevard. Our little place is Studio Sushi, right near Radford Studios. But we start at Oy Bar. It’s super dark, been around since the 1970s, when it was called Oyster House, and was updated. It’s kind of a Japanese-Jewish menu, but [Jeff Strauss] does a killer job.”

Jaime Ray Newman, actor and producer: “My husband and I can’t live without Red Window Coffee. It used to literally be a small coffee stand where you’d get your fix through a red window, but they got so popular over the years they opened their own storefront. Owned by Aussies, they make the best oat cortado in the Valley. And they have a DJ to set the mood. Lovely baristas, their vibe is very cool, laid-back, and their beans and presentation are excellent. Ticks all our coffee snob needs. Also a shout-out to Coffee Commissary in Burbank. Love their coffee too, but their vegan chocolate chip cookies are the best in L.A.!”

Justin Pichetrungsi, Anajak Thai Cuisine chef-owner: “Me and my folks love going to Brothers [Sushi, in Woodland Hills], but actually what we love more is to do the temaki takeout and bring it back home. It’s a little bit more economical, and it’s very generous and it’s lovely.”

Philip Frankland Lee and Margarita Kallas-Lee, co-owners of Sushi by Scratch and Pasta Bar: “[Machu Picchu in Van Nuys] is a hole-in-the-wall Peruvian spot. Peru is our favorite country to travel to and we’ve spent quite a bit of time in Lima, and it’s exactly like the stuff in Peru except with better product. The anticuchos are done really well. And their ceviche is the best we’ve had in Los Angeles. You’ll tend to see a grandma in the kitchen and her grandkids playing with coloring books.

Sergio Amalfitano, owner of the Midnight Hour Records: “I happen to be vegan. At Leonor’s Mexican Vegetarian in North Hollywood off Lankershim, I like the ‘chicken’ and cheese empanadas. Tender Grill Cafe for the falafel wrap, or the falafel plate dinner with hummus and fries. Good China in North Hollywood is a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese spot that has six or eight vegan options — honey walnut shrimp, Mongolian beef, chow mein. You would not assume it has vegan options, but it does. I just ordered Veggietize Me’s vegan Western burger. They have vegan Big Mac-style and Tommy’s-style burgers. Lotus Vegan, a Thai restaurant on Lankershim — awesome mom-and-pop shop. I don’t drink, but I like Tony’s Darts Away because they have trivia and half the menu is vegan.”

Allen Yelent, Goldburger owner: “The Valley is rich and dense and there’s lots of people here, and it is one of the most beautiful parts of L.A. if you actually love and care and think about L.A. The Valley has everything. I mean, sometimes you don’t even know the names of the places! There’s a regular kabob spot that my dad and I always get takeout from [Malek’s Grill & Kabob], on Winnetka and Vanowen. There’s so many great neighborhood mom-and-pop strip mall spots doing really, really amazing food.”

Danny Gordon, Heavy Handed co-owner: “I keep talking about these sushi joints down the stretch of Ventura Boulevard. I think they’re the best in L.A. and for me, as someone who’s been to Japan, these Valley dive sushi spots have this sort of no-frills casualness to them that felt like one of those joints in Japan where you walk in and the guy has five or six seats and he just serves you what he wants. There’s no gold leaf or caviar. It’s just really good, solid fish and a couple of cooked hot items. The list goes on: Sushi Spot [in Tarzana], Niko Sushi [in Tarzana], Restaurant Tatsuki Woodland Hills, Sushi Iki [in Tarzana], Chiba in North Hollywood. There’s just so many like that.”

Max Miller, Heavy Handed co-owner: “I know Danny [Gordon] and I both grew up on this, but Dan’s Super Subs. They just absolutely crank out sandwich after sandwich after sandwich. And that was a staple after games: Your parents would take you and a couple kids as well, and be able to get these huge sub sandwiches.”

HelloFresh agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle a consumer protection lawsuit brought by Santa Clara County.

The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, alleged the meal-kit company had misled customers and made it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions.

As part of the settlement, which was approved last week, HelloFresh will pay $6.38 million in civil penalties, $120,000 in investigative costs, and $1 million in restitution to California consumers.

“Misleading automatic renewal subscriptions and false advertising practices don’t sell products — they sell deception,” said Santa Clara County Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen in a Monday news release about the settlement. “Stop means stop.”

California consumers eligible for the pay out must have been enrolled in HelloFresh’s automatic renewal product subscription between Jan. 1, 2019, and Aug. 18, 2025, and charged for the first shipment without their knowledge. They also must have canceled their subscription after that shipment and failed to receive a refund from HelloFresh.

HelloFresh denied wrongdoing.

“We take our commitment to customer transparency very seriously, and our subscription model and cancellation policies have been consistently clear to customers throughout the whole customer journey,” said HelloFresh spokesperson Abby Dreher in an email. “While we deny any wrongdoing, we have cooperated fully with the coalition of California District Attorneys and have entered into a settlement agreement with them to resolve the matter amicably.”

The Santa Clara County district attorney’s office led the case alongside the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, as well as other members of the state’s “Automatic Renewal Task Force,” which also includes the district attorney’s offices of San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz counties, as well as Santa Monica’s city attorney.

The company enrolled customers in subscriptions with automatic renewal but did not clearly disclose those terms or offer a simple way to cancel the subscription, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office said.

The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office also said the company had failed to provide terms and conditions of free meal perks, bonus gifts and offers for free shipping — actions that are violations of the state laws governing automatic renewal and false advertising.

Millions of consumers pay for services or goods without their consent, and regulators at the federal level have sought to establish rules that prevent this practice — but with little success.

Although the Federal Trade Commission last year finalized a “click to cancel” rule requiring that it be as easy to cancel a recurrent subscription as to sign up for one, an appeals court of Republican-appointed judges threw out the rule last month after business groups brought a legal challenge. The failure in court came less than a week before the law was to take effect and after years of regulatory work to hash out the specifics.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Tetsuya Nakao — the affable, upbeat 62-year-old Asanebo sushi chef with slicked silver hair — is filming one of his soon-to-be viral videos. Cheeky, occasionally unhinged and released nearly every day, they’ve garnered the Studio City legend a new fandom that’s changed Nakao’s life and his business, possibly forever.

Nakao is flanked by cameras at a makeshift cooking station at the center of his restaurant. He seamlessly bounces between Japanese and English as he speaks to his staff while topping his crispy-rice “pizza” with Wagyu slices, caviar, uni and gold dust. The dish won’t be served at his restaurant, but it could be shared by millions of fans.

He dusts so much edible gold over the top it looks like the “pizza” passed through the glitter aisle at a craft store, a dish truly made for the eye of the algorithm. A cameraman readies the boom mic to catch the crunching sounds from his first bite.

They throw out line suggestions: “Better than Pizza Hut,” “Better than Domino’s,” “I’m the real Papa John.” (They settle on the last one, after deciding they probably won’t get sued.)

In one video he deep-fries a Labubu. In another, he plays Jenga with raw Wagyu. Playful and regularly ending with the signature phrase “Asanebo style,” Nakao’s videos have captured a social media audience that’s turned the stalwart sushi spot into an international destination.

“We’ve had customers flying from all over the world,” says general manager Kunio Kaji, an employee of roughly 16 years and a driving force behind Asanebo’s videos. “We have people who came on a private jet from Japan just to see him. … It’s to a point where he’s known. It’s not like back in the day, when he was just in the back peeling onions. He’s a star.”

They started the restaurant’s Instagram account with 4,000 followers. Now they’ve amassed more than 1.1 million fans on that platform, and more than 950,000 on TikTok.

Nakao reluctantly agreed to appear online. In the wake of a pandemic, entertainment industry strikes, rising operating costs and wildfires, they needed a new way to advertise the business. It also introduced him — a chef who preferred to work behind the scenes — to the world.

“The whole point was me trying to get him out of his shell that he was in,” says Kaji, who also appears in the videos. “I told him I had this vision, and if this really works, I think it not only will draw more people to come in, but everyone’s going to recognize him for who he is and what he has accomplished for 34 years.”

Nakao’s sons, 19 and 22, watch the videos religiously. His wife, he says, never mentions them.

The team films on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons before dinner service, anywhere from three to seven videos each day. Today they’re shooting a cooking ASMR — the most popular but also time consuming — as well as two “relatables”: silly, trend-inspired sketches that often involve Kaji and the chefs.

Between shoots it feels a little like a green room before a play. Staff change into costumes. One dons a long, blond wig. They quickly run through the sketches, the blocking and their lines.

Two members of Nakao’s team say that while there are many food videos vying for attention in the world, there is only one Nakao, and he’s the secret to their success.

Now he’s approached for photos at the grocery store or at dinner with his family. They ask, “Excuse me, are you Asanebo?”

“I never expected it,” Nakao says of his newfound stardom. “I started the Instagram at 61; I didn’t know what Instagram is! Like, you know, TikTok? ‘What is the TikTok?’”

“He thought it was a Tic Tac,” Kaji laughs. “I said, ‘It’s an app.’ He said, ‘App? What’s an app?’”

It’s a far cry from the pastoral cowboy life Nakao imagined he’d lead.

When the rugged appeal of the Marlboro Man caught his eye, Tokyo-born-and-raised Nakao flew to San Luis Obispo in 1982 to work on a family friend’s ranch. (“I thought, ‘Wow’ — that’s a man! I want to be like this.”) Unable to wake up early enough to work the land and tend the cattle, he was fired after only a month and a half. Nearly a decade later it would inspire the name of his own restaurant, “Asanebo,” which translates to “sleepyhead” or “late riser.”

He moved to Los Angeles to find a new career and, only able to say “yes,” “no” and “thank you” in English, trawled the local Japanese newspapers to find a job. He started as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Marina del Rey, and soon after was transferred to the sushi station. It was there, at O-Sho, that he met Nobu Matsuhisa.

Before he became one of the world’s most famous sushi masters and founded upscale chain Nobu, Matsuhisa took Nakao under his wing, as well as Nakao’s younger brother, Shunji Japanese Cuisine chef-owner Shunji Nakao. The three worked together at O-Sho, and then at Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, before the Nakao brothers left to begin Asanebo.

Shin departed in 2000, while Tetsuya remained. The popularity grew steadily over the decades, especially with locals and celebrities; today, Bruno Mars is waiting patiently outside for the doors to open.

But the largest jump in sales, Kaji says, came from Nakao’s new online stardom. They estimate business has increased 20% to 30%.

When the initiative began last April, Nakao never wanted to touch the ornate and outrageous dishes that garner the most views, likes and follows. For nearly all of his career the man wouldn’t offer rolls made with now-ubiquitous mayonnaise or sriracha. He never imagined he’d make sushi inspired by the video game “Minecraft.”

But after a few attempts, Nakao realized he could do both: serve the classics at the restaurant, and the over-the-top online. It’s helped him become more flexible as a chef: Now he does serve mayonnaise-laced hand rolls and spicy tuna, though he still refuses to make sushi rolls featuring rice on the exterior; it wouldn’t do his imported Japanese seaweed justice.

His exacting parameters haven’t stopped legions of fans from requesting his video items at Asanebo, which the team politely declines to make.

And Nakao’s popularity hasn’t stopped blowback from sushi purists.

“There were comments and direct messages saying, ‘What are you doing? You’re a sushi chef, you’re not supposed to be doing this,’” Kaji said. “People are commenting, ‘You’ve gone mad.’”

They hurt the chef’s feelings on a deeply personal level. He grew to understand that this is par for the course when existing on the internet. Now, Nakao says, he simply never reads the comments.

Back at the center of the intimate, wood-accented sushi bar, before Nakao takes a bite of his “pizza,” a camera operator reminds him to flash his signature thumbs-up and say the tagline heard ’round the world: “Asanebo style!” They breeze through two more videos before wrapping up the day’s social media shoots.

Maybe next time, they say, Nakao should riff on skincare, rubbing uni and other ingredients on his face as if part of a nighttime routine? Or maybe they should make another video with jumbo clams? They decide to table the decision for another day, turning their attention to dinner service. After all, they’re still running one of the city’s favorite sushi restaurants and Bruno Mars is waiting.

In his new cookbook “What Can I Bring?” Casey Elsass shares a recipe for fried halloumi caprese. Here’s Elsass on his salad: I’m going to ask, but not demand, that you wait for peak tomatoes. This salad is especially bare bones, so everything needs to be on point for it to sing. But when it’s right, it’s right. I love halloumi in a caprese because (and this is not mozzarella slander) it has a sharper, saltier, tangy flavor and fries up so nicely for a slightly crispy outside. Flash frying fresh oregano not only crisps up the leaves but also gives you a super fragrant oil to drizzle over the final salad.

Casey Elsass grew up in New England and frequented a farm in rural New Hampshire for hayrides and what he calls the best apple cake he’s ever had. He shares a recipe for his easy apple cake in his new cookbook, “What Can I Bring?”

“The batter is what you’d expect, with diced apples, sour cream and cinnamon, plus a crunchy topping of chopped walnuts and brown sugar,” writes Elsass. “But the curveball here is apple cider vinegar, which not only adds a ton of great apple flavor, but also gives the cake a lofty, fluffy lift.”

Note: Leftover cake can be covered and left at room temperature for up to 3 days or refrigerated for up to 5 days.

Dan Tana, the restaurateur whose eponymous Santa Monica Boulevard eatery has for decades been a Hollywood hotspot — one with dishes named for celebrities who are liable to be there on any given night — died in Belgrade, Serbia, on Saturday. He was 90.

Tana, born Dobrivoje Tanasijević, was a professional soccer player before opening the clubby red-sauce Italian restaurant in 1964, running it until he sold it in 2009. By then, its reputation as a favorite of A-listers had been cemented by the regular presence of devotees including Elizabeth Taylor and Kirk Douglas.

The details of Tana’s death were confirmed by L.A. historian Alison Martino, a friend of the restaurant’s current owner, Sonja Perencevic, who purchased it from its founder. Martino, who runs the eatery’s Facebook page — where a message posted Saturday announced Tana’s death — said that Perencevic was close with the former proprietor and had been with him in Belgrade on Friday. Martino said she did not know the cause of death.

“Dan lived a wonderful life, and we will keep Dan Tana’s in his memory forever,” Perencevic said in a statement relayed by Martino, who was at the restaurant on Saturday night.

Born near Belgrade, Tana played professional soccer in Canada before immigrating to the United States, where he studied acting. He debuted in the 1957 war film “The Enemy Below,” according to Variety. While seeking acting jobs, the trade publication reported, Tana started as a dishwasher at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood, before eventually becoming the maitre d’ at La Scala in Beverly Hills. That lined him up for a career in food.

Before long, he was opening Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood, near the eastern edge of Beverly Hills. He told the Hollywood Reporter in 2014 that he’d wanted to create an establishment where stars could dine late into the night.

“There was not a decent restaurant serving until 1 a.m. You had to go to a coffee shop,” he told the Reporter.

But Dan Tana’s was not an immediate hit.

It eventually gained a following after actor Richard Burton, a seven-time Academy Award nominee who married Taylor the year the restaurant opened, became a regular presence. It received a jolt in the 1970s, when the Troubadour, a neighboring music venue, began booking big acts such as Elton John, drawing large crowds to the area.

The restaurant, with its red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, and green neon sign, soon became a local institution. It has long been known for the discreet way it caters to the movie stars and moguls who slide across its channeled red booths. George Clooney, former Lakers owner Jerry Buss and heiress Nicky Hilton are among the eclectic bunch of notables with menu items named for them, and the routine presence of celebrities has only burnished the eatery’s aura — especially among tourists hoping for a table.

But guests aren’t necessarily coming for four-star food. The menu eschews the sort of regional Italian cooking that has for years been a staple of the Los Angeles dining scene. Instead, Dan Tana’s offers comfort-food fare such as fettuccine Alfredo and chicken Parmesan.

In 2016, Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold penned a memorable review of Dan Tana’s, relating the time he took a high school crush there on a date, only to embarrass himself: “The waiter laughed when I tried to order wine, and then served us Sprite in wine glasses. The bill came to $20 more than I had in my wallet. She groaned and pulled out the credit card her parents had given her for emergencies.”

As for the food, Gold called some of it “ordinary,” but noted, “Weirdly enough, I don’t care,” noting the restaurant’s place in L.A.’s culinary firmament. He went on to highlight dishes including the chicken parm, and instructed readers, “Dan Tana’s is not about denying yourself things.”

In the years since Tana sold his restaurant and retired to Belgrade, several landmark L.A. haunts have shuttered, Greenblatt’s Deli, the Original Pantry Cafe and Papa Cristo’s Greek Grill & Market among them. Dan Tana’s has endured, Martino said, in part because it can still deliver a charming, old-world experience.

“When … you walk in, the world stops,” she said. “That’s what I love about it — the history and the food. The staff has been the same: you could leave L.A., come back after five years and come in and they will remember your favorite drink.”

Martino sent The Times a video of an impromptu toast she made in Tana’s honor at the restaurant on Saturday night. Flanked by tuxedoed servers and the maître d’, she announced the founder’s death, mostly silencing the crowded dining room.

“We do not need to be sad,” Martino said. “Mr. Tana would want us to be happy.”

Guests raised their glasses. And the din of a busy restaurant soon returned.

If you can’t find Jeff Strauss in his Highland Park deli, Jeff’s Table, or inside his Studio City bar-restaurant, Oy Bar, you should probably check the parking lot of the latter.

The ex-television writer — now chef and restaurateur — is channeling more of his creative energy into a new, weekend-only bar and tasting menu called Vey, Oy Bar’s new alfresco space built in the back parking lot.

“I wanted to do something that had as much delight and surprise without being the same experience,” Strauss said. “We’re sitting in a parking lot in Studio City, in the Valley in the summer. It was 92 degrees back here today! So I said, ‘How do we celebrate that space, the night sky?’… The other idea, since we’re on effectively asphalt, we’re on the street, is to pay tribute to street food both here and all over the world.”

He fashioned new walls from his storage unit behind Oy Bar, while artist Nick “Sick” Fisher painted them as a kind of home interior in surreal, almost cartoon-like fashion.

At one corner, Strauss and sous chef Esteban Palacios grill crisp-edged onigiri, yakitori-style chicken liver with egg and hot honey, and scallops dripping with gochujang butter over binchotan charcoal, while a pizza oven warms whole heads of mushroom in soy and butter in cast-iron skillets. Sometimes they offer small plates, other times, like this weekend, a reservation-only, six-course tasting menu for what Strauss likens to “a casual, rolling omakase.”

On Friday and Saturday nights, guests fill the tandem concept while waiting for indoor tables, or use Vey as their meal and cocktail destination for the evening. The experience, like Vey’s culinary inspirations, is meant to be flexible and fluid.

“People have taken to that very nicely,” Strauss said. “It feels fun to me. I hope it feels fun to them.”

Vey is accessed through the back of Oy Bar, and is open Friday and Saturday beginning at 6:30 p.m., with variable hours. Strauss hopes to expand its days of operation in the future.

12446 Moorpark St., Studio City, oybarla.com

Baby Bistro

They call it a California bistro, but really, chef Miles Thompson said, it’s “an Angeleno bistro.” The new 36-seat restaurant from Thompson and his sommelier business partner, Andy Schwartz, debuted earlier this year in Victor Heights with hyper-local sourcing and a wide-ranging menu that draws on Japanese, Korean, Italian, Mexican, French and more flavors.

“I think the food is really defined by the cultures of Los Angeles,” Thompson said. “If you already eat at any of the regional or international restaurants in this city, you’ll find inspiring foods that go into this menu.”

It began as a pop-up, which debuted at the base of Koreatown’s Hotel Normandie in June 2023. Thompson, a former Michael’s and Konbi chef, teamed up with Schwartz, formerly of Lolo Wine Bar, to serve a tight menu of seasonal dishes by candlelight. Now in its permanent home, the duo are leaning into their creativity and finding their footing.

Thompson ages wild-caught squid for five days before slicing it and tossing it in a cucumber and yuzu kosho salad. His ginger-marinated prawns come plancha-seared and served over a puttanesca-leaning sauce, then garnished with Hot Cheetos-inspired fried enoki mushrooms. He drapes burnt eggplant over house-made chicken sausage with fish sauce, Hungarian wax peppers and chile de arbol. Even Thompson’s signature planks of lightly fermented, fluffy house bread update with local produce. The dough is packed with sweet caramelized onions; in one iteration it’s topped with Liptauer cheese and more marinated onions, and in another, it’s Franklin’s Teleme cheese and marinated squash.

The three compact rooms in a converted bungalow — part of the reimagined courtyard that also houses Perilla, Bakers Bench and Cassell’s — offer the soft glow of candlelight with a view of the open kitchen. On the patio, take in the small grove of century-old banana trees.

Baby Bistro’s à la carte menu is designed to share between two people, and many customers order it all.

“If you’re looking to really experience the beating heart of the restaurant,” Schwartz said, “it’s in the menu.”

Daily specials might involve items more flexible to the whims of the farmers market, either in small plates or a larger meat dish.

The intimate new setting also allows for Schwartz to rotate his wine offerings frequently.

His list spotlights natural wines, often small producers making esoteric flavors or blends. He’s enjoying creating pairings for Thompson’s cuisine, which he characterizes as “classically challenging to pair with”: unique concentrations of flavors, attention paid largely to acidity. The challenge is part of the fun.

“That speaks to the connection between the wines that I like, and the ones that we serve at the restaurant, which can taste different every day,” Schwartz said. “That’s sort of the nature of real cooking and real wine.”

Baby Bistro is open Tuesday to Saturday from 5:30 p.m., with its last seating at 9:30 p.m.

1027 Alpine St., Los Angeles, babybistrola.com

Hi Bake

With laminated egg tarts, whimsical pastries, lines out the door and plenty of cute puppies, a prolific China bakery chain has touched down in Beverly Hills. Hi Bake, founded in Hong Kong, has expanded to more than 60 shops in China over the last 12 years, and thanks to a new partnership with Chubby Group (Niku X, Chubby Cattle), it just landed in the U.S.

Its first American location takes over the former home of Sur Le Vert and Bouchon, and offers a number of the signature items found overseas: Tokyo banana rolls, thousand-layer cakes, meat floss rolls and egg tarts. Loaded toasts, flattened croissants, Dubai-chocolate tarts and fluffy matcha rolls all line the pastry case, while a separate pickup counter for cream-top matchas, pistachio lattes and other caffeinated beverages can be found next door. Hi Bake is extremely pet-friendly, hosting adoption events for cats and dogs around the world; the bakery’s own emblem is a drawing of Dà Mài, the founder’s own rescue dog. In Beverly Hills, expect house-made pet treats in the near future. Hi Bake is open Monday and Wednesday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

235 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, hibakebakery.com

Bar Avoja

It’s not every day that Evan Funke opens a new concept, let alone a dedicated cocktail bar, but the celebrated pasta-focused chef recently launched Bar Avoja, a new semi-hidden cocktail lounge inside his Hollywood restaurant, Mother Wolf. Much like the restaurant, Bar Avoja is a partnership with co-owner Giancarlo Pagani, and it’s accessed only by walking through the lounge area of Mother Wolf.

It fills the former Mars bar space (which was also owned by Pagani), and features separate food and cocktail menus in a setting inspired by a Roman villa: jewel-tone curtains and pillows meant for lounging, while a disco ball reflects off the walls and gold-gilded mirrors. On Thursdays, find vinyl DJ sets, but every night of service find spuntini informed by Roman street food, including an oxtail-meatball sandwich on pizza dough; fried carbonara bites; flatbreads piled with salad, salmon or sugo; and grilled octopus skewers. Bar Avoja — slang for “hell yeah” — is open Thursday to Saturday from 6 to 11 p.m.

1545 Wilcox Ave., Los Angeles, motherwolfla.com/bar-avoja

Boichik Bagels Bradbury Building

This popular Bay Area bagel outfit made its L.A. debut earlier this year, and it’s already expanding. Boichik Bagels, from former engineer Emily Winston, serves the New York-style bagels she enjoyed throughout her childhood in the Northeast. Now it serves them at the base of one of L.A.’s most iconic buildings, downtown’s Bradbury Building.

The new bagel shop offers the same range of bagels found in the Los Feliz location — including bagel sandwiches, more than a dozen bagel flavors, and schmear in options like hatch chile, chive or lox — with its own unique menu of daily specials. Look for whitefish-salad sandwiches, kippered salmon, frozen take-home bagels, coffee and more. Boichik Bagels is open downtown daily from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

304 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, boichikbagels.com

Tokyo Fried Chicken has closed its doors in downtown. And a buzzy Mexican rooftop lounge along with a legacy L.A. brewery in the area said they would do the same, the latest in a string of businesses abandoning the city’s core.

Founded in 2013 in a Monterey Park shopping center before moving to a location in downtown L.A. in 2023, Tokyo Fried Chicken is known for its fried chicken and sides that borrow inspiration from Southern and Japanese cuisines. The fast-casual diner, which marinates its chicken in soy sauce, ginger and garlic, has been ranked on The Times annual 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. guide two years running.

The company announced its last day of service, Aug. 10, in an Instagram post with less than a week’s notice. When the day came, an hours-long line wrapped outside the building, with another hour wait for the piping hot chicken to arrive to the table once seated.

“It was so amazing to see the turnout and all the love people have for the brand and for the food,” said Elaine Yamanashi, who co-owns the business with her husband and chef, Kouji Yamanashi. “That is what has kept us going every day.”

Elaine Yamanashi emphasized that the original plan was for the Olive Street location to be an expansion from the Monterey Park location, where she said many customers made the fried chicken joint part of their weekly routine.

Ultimately, with construction and permitting delays downtown — they signed a lease mere months before the pandemic started — coupled with staffing shortages in Monterey Park, the couple decided to go all in on launching the downtown location before resuming service in Monterey Park.

“Could we even run both at the same time? We didn’t think we could,” Yamanashi said.

The downtown location had its perks: the Yamanashis’ ultra-crispy chicken found a broader clientele, and a larger kitchen allowed for increased service hours. But the pandemic had also changed customer eating habits.

“We built our place for people to sit down and dine, but the majority of our food was being taken out,” said Yamanashi. A lack of parking and outdoor dining patio also led to decreased visibility in that location.

Tokyo Fried Chicken is also a victim of broader industry challenges, including a downturn in business following the writers’ and actors strikes, the Palisades and Eaton fires and most recently, immigration raids and protests that scared diners away from downtown.

“By last October, people were starting to come out again and it was better,” Yamanashi said. “Then most of this year has been filled with very challenging issues along with increased costs along with slim margins.”

“The things that were happening in the larger economy made us feel like, ‘Oh man, we should scale back so we don’t have to break ourselves to make it,’” she added.

Fans of the restaurant are in mourning, with many on Instagram saying they’ve followed the restaurant since its days in the San Gabriel Valley. But Yamanashi isn’t saying the concept is gone forever.

“We’re taking this time, not off, but to reflect,” she said. “If we come back, we intend to come back intentionally and strategically to be able to survive long term in whatever location we find.”

LA Cha Cha Chá

The sister restaurant to Mexico City-based Grupo Palmares’ open-air hit Terraza Cha Cha Chá, LA Cha Cha Chá is known for its tacos, strong margaritas and stylish rooftop in the Arts District designed by architect Lena Kohl. The lush two-story space weathered the pandemic, writers’ strike and January fires, but co-owner Alejandro Marín blames recent ICE raids and ensuing protests in downtown L.A. for a significant drop in customers.

“After June, it seemed like everyone was avoiding downtown, and we don’t see tourists anymore,” Marín told Eater LA, adding his team expected to remain open for “a couple of months, maybe three” before closing permanently.

The group is also behind L.A. restaurants Loreto and Za Za Zá in Frogtown and Santa Canela in Highland Park.

LA Cha Cha Chá, 812 E. Third St., Los Angeles, CA, 90013.

Angel City Brewery

Angel City Brewery recently announced it is slated to close at the termination of its lease in April 2026, according to a statement from its parent company Boston Beer Co., best known for its Samuel Adams brand. Its on-site sister taproom Truly LA, which serves the brand’s hard seltzer, will only provide Friday and Saturday service by the end of the year, with the area converting to overflow and rental space.

“Our coworkers are our top priority, and we’re making this move gradually to give our people the opportunity to do what’s best for them,” said the statement. “The goal is to absorb as many Truly LA coworkers as possible into our Angel City Brewery team for the duration of the lease and avoid a significant impact to coworker shifts.”

Angel City Brewery was founded in 1997 by Michael Bowe in Culver City before moving to its current location, a three-story 1913 John A. Roebling building on the corner of Alameda Street and Traction Avenue, in 2011. Boston Beer acquired the company in 2012 and completely overhauled the menu during a boom in L.A.’s craft beer industry.

Now, the company says, “the brand no longer lines up with our long-term growth strategy,” adding that its focus is “growing our core, national brands.” However, the company notes that the brewery has been “doing well” and is earnestly looking for a buyer.

“We believe there is potential for this brand to succeed outside of Boston Beer as a strong local offering, and we’ll be putting significant efforts behind selling Angel City so the brand can continue to live on,” said the statement.

The company confirmed it has no plans to close its other taprooms.

Angel City Brewery, 216 S. Alameda St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, (213) 622-1261

Yue Wa is one of the last remaining markets in Chinatown, a place where the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents could find affordable groceries. For the past 18 years, customers chatted while they hand-picked their produce in front of the store, the small market providing a dwindling sense of community.

By next month, Yue Wa will be gone, the business proving unsustainable in a fast-changing neighborhood that has historically been a crucial hub for Chinese and other Asian immigrants.

But after a slew of burglaries, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the recent ICE raids and the shifting demographics of the neighborhood, owner Amy Tran is making the difficult decision to close the store in September.

On Tuesday afternoon, Tran stood in the shade of the store’s entrance, helping a customer put some garlic bulbs in a plastic bag.

Every day at 1 p.m., Tran arrives at the narrow storefront near the corner of North Broadway and Ord Street. She spends her mornings scouring the produce warehouses in nearby downtown for the oranges, mangoes, mushrooms, yams, garlic and greens her customers rely on to meet their daily grocery needs.

“I don’t feel ready to let go of the store, but there’s not much I can do to bring more people in,” she said. “Business was booming and a lot of people used to come around, but now there is no foot traffic and a lot of people have moved away from Chinatown.”

Tran has watched the neighborhood change from a bustling historic enclave where many Asian immigrants live and work, to what is starting to feel like “a ghost town.” Chinatown is where she settled after immigrating from Vietnam in the ’90s. Her son was born at the pink hospital on Hill Street. With no formal education, she worked in restaurants in the area before taking over the an herbal supplement and tea shop in 2007.

“She noticed that a lot of locals were always asking her for ingredients like sweet potatoes and taro, so she started selling fruits and expanded to vegetables,” said Derek Luu, Tran’s son. Luu went to school in the area and spent many childhood afternoons in the back of the market. “She realized all of her customers were looking for fresh stuff, so she started going to the produce warehouse district to get produce for them.”

What started as a small row of groceries in front of the store quickly grew to include snacking fruits like apples, oranges and berries, and anything the primarily Asian clientele might need for cooking. There was always a steady supply of bitter melon, eggplant, gai lan and bok choy.

“Most of the old folks didn’t want to walk all the way into the store, so she found that most of her business was happening on the sidewalk,” Luu said. “She sort of started the trend in Chinatown of putting the produce out on the street.”

The need for fresh produce and other market goods grew over the years as the existing stores in the area started to close, and Chinatown was left without a real nexus for its Asian ethnic communities. Ai Hoa and G&G, two long-standing full-service grocery stores, closed in 2019. Other shops in the area attempted to fill the void, with the bookstore next to Yue Wa selling a selection of produce and Banh Mi My Dung, a sandwich shop around the corner, following suit.

When she’s not at the market, Luu said his mom spends the majority of her time hunting for deals for her customers at the produce warehouses in downtown Los Angeles.

“Because the population that I serve is mainly elderly and low-income, the pricing, if I ever raise, they won’t be able to afford it,” Tran said. “So I want to be one of the stores in Chinatown to be able to provide fresh fruit and produce for the elderly.”

With nearly 30% of Chinatown’s residents living below the poverty line, many without the means to travel outside the area to a grocery store, the need for fresh, affordable food is as dire as ever.

At Yue Wa, Tran displays her produce in the boxes they arrive in, with no prices listed for the various goods. She hands her customers, mostly the neighborhood’s elderly Asian and Latino residents, a plastic bag, then a discourse ensues regarding the prices.

“The grandmas and aunties ask how much,” Luu said. “Can I get a discount?”

It’s a way of doing business that’s quickly disappearing, with younger shoppers used to mainstream stores and clearly labeled prices.

“There is a culture of bargaining that’s baked into Chinatown, but the younger people don’t do it because it’s too awkward,” Luu said. “I recognize that my mom’s store is a bit old-school.”

The shop experienced a decade of sustainable profits before starting to feel the effects of the changing demographics of the neighborhood.

“Even with the low prices, business was good until around 2016, when I started seeing all the art galleries and trendier restaurants coming to the neighborhood,” Luu said. “We started noticing our community members leaving.”

Tran also contemplated leaving and setting up shop somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley, but the ties to her Chinatown community were too strong. And her decision to close the shop goes far beyond the gentrification of Chinatown and the surrounding areas.

“We’ve been getting hit from all sides,” Luu said.

Luu left UCLA during the pandemic in 2020 to help his mom at the store. He was worried about the rise in Asian hate he was seeing all over the country. His mom complained of the people who came by to repeatedly harass her at the market.

The family was struggling to break even and Tran’s husband, Hugh Luu, needed to look for work outside the store. He found a job at one of produce warehouses downtown, working shifts that started at 3 a.m.

“I didn’t want to hear a story of my mom getting punched,” Derek said. “But even when I was there, it didn’t stop people from taking our stuff and throwing it onto the street and calling out racial slurs.”

Most recently, the family credits the ICE raids with stoking fear into an already diminished immigrant community in Chinatown.

“When my mom goes to buy produce, she’s noticing half the workers are gone or the shops are closed,” Derek said. “These raids are kind of mysterious to the Chinatown community and people here don’t want to risk being arrested or abducted, so a lot of the foot traffic has died down.”

But it was a series of robberies at both the store and later at the family’s home in the San Gabriel Valley that prompted Tran to make the difficult decision to close.

Derek recently posted a video about the store’s impending closure on social media, including video footage of a robber assaulting his mother and stealing her purse from the back of the store.

He estimates that the family has lost more than $100,000 over the last decade or so, with people repeatedly stealing products and both small and large amounts of cash from the store. Derek and Tran have filed multiple police reports, but robberies continue.

“The burglaries happen throughout Chinatown all the time, but they are very underreported,” Derek said. “We are not the only business this is happening to. I don’t know if it’s a mistrust of the police or the Asian mentality of not wanting to be known as the person who gets robbed.”

“I also don’t know about making a police report when someone steals $5 or $10,” Tran said. “It just feels helpless.”

The family took increased safety measures at the store and installed window reinforcements and a new security system with cameras at home. There was a break-in at their home in September and another earlier this summer. On June 11, Derek’s sister Tiffany was assaulted during a robbery at the family’s home.

Tran’s medical bills from an ongoing battle with diabetes and cataracts and the costs of the increased security measures were the last straw for the family and the market. Derek set up a GoFundMe page to help cover some of the bills, but the shop is scheduled to close by the end of September.

“A lot of times when people see businesses go, it’s sort of seen as this thing is just gone,” Derek said. “The fact that this was here is a testament to something. My mom put in a really good 18 years keeping this community fed and in touch with their heritage. That’s something.”

Uncle Ollie’s Penthouse, the new maximalist downtown L.A. bar that opened in April between Little Tokyo and Skid Row (a region some have dubbed “Skid Rokyo”), captures the visceral, dopamine-driven alchemy of the best kind of house party every Wednesday to Sunday night. It has wild, color-saturated decor, potent cocktails served in red Solo cups and a killer soundtrack that inspires stomping the floor with pals or singing along with strangers.

But can this multisensory home away from home help revive L.A.’s fading nightlife landscape?

Beckoning from the second floor of owner Brian Traynam’s downstairs restaurant and club, the Escondite — known for its crispy wings, punk-rock bands and DJs — the immersive “penthouse” was a decade in the making.

“I have an uncle named Ollie and this is his penthouse,” says Traynam of the narrative he conceived for his eye-popping space. “He had to leave town so he gave me the keys and said three things: I know you’re going to have a party here so if anything gets stolen or broken, I break you; if you tell your mother about any of this, we’re both finished. Have a good time, kid!”

Traynam, whose first dive, Bar 107, closed in 2015, says he always wanted to open what he calls “Bar 107 2.0” in the vacant space above the Escondite. But nightlife has changed a lot since then and people don’t hang out in one downtown bar all night the way they used to.

The concept of a neighborhood dive, where the same people come in nightly, build a tab and stay for hours, is practically a pre-pandemic thing of the past. But Traynam hopes to change that and entice a new generation by filling a void with more experiential elements than any other bar in L.A.

“Customer acquisition is more challenging now because we used to get a lot of people walking to the Arts District from the Old Bank District or Little Tokyo,” notes the bar owner. “No one walks anymore. So we are now a destination.”

‘It’s a total vibe’

Walk up an austere flight of white stairs and a hostess greets you at the (keyhole-shaped) entry with party cups, nametag stickers and Sharpie pens to label them with, encouraging intros and interaction with others even before you enter. Once inside, there’s a dizzying array of amusements to absorb.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” says local musician Taleen Kali, who just celebrated her birthday at Uncle Ollie’s, as she had done at Bar 107 a decade earlier. “You can grab a bite and catch a DIY show at the Escondite downstairs and now, come up to the afterparty…. I’ve seen so many familiar faces and met cool new people here.”

At the crimson-hued, ’70s-living-room-style main bar surrounded by kitschy collectibles, vintage nude paintings and neon, Kali snaps photos with a giant lion sculpture before she and her friends take over the retro arcade full of rare ’70s and ’80s consoles, pinball machines and clown art. Later, she’ll dance in another room to DJs under a shimmering disco ball and freshen up in the cartoony Hello Kitty-themed bathroom.

”I can’t remember the last time I felt so connected to my hometown as an L.A. native,” Kali says. “I also love that you get to keep your own party cup all night — it’s a total vibe, plus it’s less wasteful and more sustainable.”

Traynam says that “every time I’ve had fun, I’ve had a red cup in my hand.” Here they’re filled with cheap and cheeky drinks like the Shaft (Gordon’s vodka, Bailey’s Irish Cream and cold brew, served on the rocks with a straw), Grandpa’s Ol’ Cough Medicine (Woodinville bourbon and root beer) and You’re My Boy Blue (Ketel One vodka, Sprite, blueberry syrup), all running $9 to $13.

An interactive shot called the Influencer offers a swig of Herradura tequila “and a selfie with the bartender,” but this funhouse full of knickknacks and playground-like structures begs for photos and videos, regardless. It’ll also feel familiar to Angelenos who frequented 107 in its heyday.

Known for its chaotic interior and wild energy, Bar 107 closed when Traynam and his former partner, Vee Delgadillo, failed to reach a lease agreement with the building’s landlord.

The Spirit of Bar 107

Traynam and Delgadillo made local news when they decided not to leave without a fight, promoting the hashtag #Occupy107 on social media and announcing plans to defy eviction. They protested against what they saw as a soulless “swankification” of the area at the time. Fancy hotspots also brought higher rents and bars like 107 couldn’t keep up, nor did they want to.

“I knew what downtown was going to become — super-expensive and not inclusive, just like Baltimore, New York and Chicago, where the rich displace the artists and the students,” Traynam says.

Though the “occupation” didn’t last long, it solidified the bar owner’s vision for unpretentious and budget-friendly hospitality. Before he was a businessman he was a hard-partying comedian who threw legendary DIY shindigs at his Hollywood apartment and, later, a house in Echo Park.

The full circle house-party vibes live on at Uncle Ollie’s via the oddball entertainment that became legendary at 107, including its popular “Gong Show Karaoke” on Wednesdays, which attracts a wacky group of singers and “D-list celebrities” to judge them. Other nights offer retro dancing and live bands.

Irreverent new burlesque nights feature renowned dancers from venues like Jumbo’s Clown Room and El Cid. Performer and promoter Vanessa Burgundy has been tasked with putting a new spin on the art of striptease here, and so far her monthly residency, called That Time of the Month, has more than delivered.

“Brian’s original idea for my night was kind of like a Beacher’s Madhouse style setup, you know, just kind of mayhem,” Burgundy recalls. “But ultimately his only guidance for me has been, ‘make it weird.’”

Burgundy’s unstructured gatherings, featuring original Bar 107 DJ Morgan Higby Knight, have boasted plenty of rock ‘n’ roll-fueled debauchery — from an eclectic Easter show featuring male and female dancers disrobing bunny suits and nun garb, respectively, to a spectacle dedicated to the music and mayhem of recently departed icon Ozzy Osbourne and his band Black Sabbath (the venue was dubbed “Uncle Ozzy’s Penthouse” for the night).

There’s no shortage of promoters who want the figurative “keys” to the penthouse, but getting patrons in has had some hurdles Traynam didn’t expect. The bar was open for just two months when Mayor Karen Bass implemented curfews downtown because of ICE raids and protests, which he says hurt its momentum. He also notes that businesses are still navigating nightlife shifts post-pandemic as well.

“Everyone has curtailed their spending habits after COVID,” he says. “Also FOMO [fear of missing out] no longer exists. Now people are used to being at home, watching Netflix, ordering GrubHub and just chilling out. They don’t care as much about going out.

“L.A. really needs to have fun again,” Traynam said. “So we’re banking on a reset. We’re banking that in these times, people need to get out of their own heads and get out of their apartments. That’s why we’re offering cheap drinks, a photo booth, dance floor and no cover most nights…. Uncle Ollie’s is a blast from the past, but it’s also about the future, where the party is about you and your friends, not the people behind the bar.”

Lina Lecaro is the author of “Los Angeles’ Best Dive Bars: Drinking & Diving in the City Of Angels.”

Evan Funke’s eponymous Beverly Hills restaurant, where delicate handmade pastas are rolled out and shaped in front of guests, is temporarily closed following a Tuesday evening fire.

According to a representative for the City of Beverly Hills, the small fire was contained primarily within the ventilation duct system, and the restaurant sustained minimal damage. In an email statement to The Times, Funke said that the cause of the fire is unknown. The Beverly Hills Fire Department confirmed that the source of the fire is under investigation.

Guests and staff evacuated the building, and no one was hurt.

Funke is currently ranked 25th on the L.A. Times 101 list of best restaruants. It opened in May 2023, the third project from the celebrity chef who also operates Mother Wolf in Hollywood and Felix Trattoria in Venice. The restaurant is a partnership with real estate investor Kurt Rappaport, and quickly garnered local and national praise for its hyper-regional focus. On its menu, each pasta dish details the region in Italy where Funke first tried it, and the name of the woman who taught him how to make it.

At the center of the restaurant, a glass room allows for guests to view fresh pastas being made by hand, while a semi-open kitchen provides a view into Funke’s pizzas, grilled meats, signature fried squash blossoms and beyond. Funke also turned heads with its pastry and bread program headed by Shannon Swindle.

“This sfincione, which means sponge, is the closest I’ve come to the best pizza I’ve ever tasted,” L.A. Times Food columnist Jenn Harris wrote of the tomato-topped focaccia.

According to Funke, guests with reservations already on the books for this week will be contacted by members of his team, who will offer alternative reservations at his other local restaurants.

“We’re relieved to share that all building safety systems functioned exactly as designed,” Funke wrote in his statement. “Thanks to the calm cooperation of everyone present, our staff and guests were evacuated swiftly and safely. Our deepest gratitude to the Beverly Hills Fire Department for their rapid response and expert handling of the situation. … We’re truly grateful for your patience and understanding as we work diligently to repair and restore the affected areas. We can’t wait to host you all very soon. All love and pasta.”

According to a representative for the Beverly Hills Fire Department, firefighters received the alarm at 6:31 p.m., arrived on the scene one minute later and remained until 10:30 p.m., ensuring the fire was thoroughly extinguished.

Funke could not be reached for further comment, and a representative for Funke declined to share a projected reopening date.

Funke is located at 9388 S. Santa Monica Blvd. in Beverly Hills.

A vibrant social scene has burgeoned on Saturday nights along Route 66 in Glendora — a sleepy suburb in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains — at Glendora Continental, a nostalgic time capsule of the local Basque community for nearly half a century.

But now the 45-year-old, family-run restaurant might be nearing its end.

Earlier this year, the second- and third-generation owners put it up for sale, and are now considering offers from potential operators and developers. A cornerstone of the community, it’s a reminder of fading connections to the Basque diaspora in California.

In the last decade several Basque restaurants — tied to a culture centered around sheepherding and preserving traditions through social clubs and festivals — have closed. Cafe Basque in downtown L.A., Santa Monica’s Bar Pinxtos and Pasadena’s Ración have all shuttered. In Bakersfield, where once the Basque community included many vibrant restaurants, just a handful are standing, like Wool Growers Restaurant and Pyrenees Cafe.

Now, the people who most love Glendora Continental — its owners, employees and regulars — are making lasting memories at the restaurant in its final days.

A lunch and dinner spot with early-bird specials, Glendora Continental offers a mix of Basque, French and American food. It stays open until 2 a.m. every day of the year except Christmas.

On a recent evening, every seat was filled. A five-piece cover band called the Subs performed hits from the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” to Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” on a small stage. Several birthday celebrations took place, and guests, donning cowboy hats and baseball caps, drank beer and feasted on lamb shank and prime rib.

“The restaurant is a place where everybody eventually gets to know each other,” said general manager and co-owner Bernadette Sabarots, 55. “Everybody looks out for everyone here.”

An immigrant story

The paraphernalia on the walls near the entrance of Glendora Continental paint a Basque immigrant story. Black-and-white photos include a 1966 wedding snapshot of the late owners, Elisabeth and Jean-Baptiste Sabarots. A painting of the Basque coat of arms, called Zazpiak Bat, symbolizes the seven provinces that make up one of Europe’s oldest ethnic groups, straddling France and Spain in the western Pyrenees Mountains. A decorated wood carving depicts a man playing jai alai, the Basque handball game using a curved basket.

“The whole style — including that old-school diner look — was really my parents,” said co-owner Antoinette Sabarots, 56, of the nearly 7,000-square-foot Glendora Continental.

Her father, Jean, who hailed from the French town of Osses, came to California in 1955 and worked as a sheepherder, like many other Basques who migrated to the United States. He eventually landed a bartending job at the now-closed Can Can Club in Covina in 1962. It seemed like a better fit for him. “We never liked to camp with him because he hated being outside,” said Antoinette. “I can only imagine he herded sheep as minimally as he could.”

On a trip back home in 1964, Jean met Elisabeth Larralde, who had worked at the Hotel Arcé in Saint-Étienne-de-Baïgorry for over a decade, starting at 12. “She cultivated and developed a sense of taste and grace and how to cook like a chef there,” said Antoinette.

In 1966, Jean and Elisabeth traveled to the U.S. and got married in Chino. Next door to the Can Can Club, they worked at the Little Inn Lounge and Smorgasbord in Covina before eventually owning it. When they saved enough money, they opened Glendora Continental in 1980 and simultaneously ran both restaurants, until Little Inn closed in 1989.

A family-run restaurant

At Glendora Continental, Jean was in charge of the bar and Elisabeth hosted and managed the kitchen. She crafted French Basque dishes like slow-braised lamb in a Burgundy demi-glace, bouchée à la reine, pickled tongue and escargots à la bourguignonne — items that remain on the menu as an homage to the family’s culture.

“These are dishes that are more popular with French Basque people, not so much the general public,” said Antoinette, who noted that over time her family incorporated more American dishes like crab cakes, grilled steaks and salads. “I would say it’s Basque with a sprinkle of American, or vice versa.”

The bar displays its Basque influences: French and Californian wines, apéritifs from Ricard to Dubonnet, and classic cocktails, including a traditional Basque drink called Picon Punch.

Elisabeth and Jean’s three daughters — Antoinette, Bernadette and Marguerite Sabarots (who died last November from brain cancer at 57) — grew up working at the restaurant, cleaning dishes, whipping up chocolate mousse and folding napkins. When they left for college, they would come back to help their parents cater events.

The sisters forged their own paths. But when Elisabeth died in 2005 from colon cancer, and Jean, who had his own health issues — he had become a double-amputee years earlier — was alone managing the restaurant, Bernadtte stepped in to help. She moved back to Glendora and worked alongside her father until he passed away in 2012.

“I wasn’t planning on working at the restaurant, but we didn’t realize my parents were going to pass away so early,” said Bernadette. “Obviously, things change as you get older.”

Bernadette has found family among her longstanding employees. Lunchtime chef Marcelino Espinoza, 63, trained under Elisabeth and has been at the restaurant since it first opened; Kathy Gutierrez, 64, has been a bartender for 15 years; and Victor Hernandez, 50, a dishwasher and busboy for 12 years. Marguerite Jaureguy, 78, was Jean’s girlfriend in the last years of his life and continues to come in once a week to do administrative and bookkeeping work.

“It’s our second home,” said Hernandez.

Customers have similar sentiments. For 25 years, Paul and Jan Collett, 81 and 77, have dined at Glendora Continental nearly every day. “It has really good food,” said Jan. “We’ve got several friends that we meet down there all the time, so it’s just like home.”

Kirk and Elloise Warner, 75 and 74, have been frequenting Glendora Continental since the 1990s. They have a tradition to stop by the bar for shots whenever UCLA wins a game. “We’re not Basque, but we’re kind of related,” said Kirk. “Both of our families raised sheep for years.”

Multigenerational families have been among the most loyal customers. Stella Arambel’s Basque parents were friends with Elisabeth and Jean, and Glendora Continental catered her family’s birthdays, anniversaries and most recently, her daughter’s bridal shower in June. “It has this vintage charm … and the food is great and it’s at an affordable price,” said Arambel, 56. “It holds a special place in my heart and I’ll be sad to see it go.”

An influx of Basque immigrants arrived in California around the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, when sheepherding became a growing industry as demand for its meat and wool rose.

Nancy Zubiri, author of the book “A Travel Guide to Basque America,” has long studied local Basque history and changing demographics. In the late 1800s, Basques populated downtown L.A. before moving east to Chino, where there were ranches and dairy farms.

“There were Basque hotels, but they were actually boarding houses where the men would have a room and the owners would cook meals for them,” said Zubiri. “They would all eat in the dining room together and that eventually developed into the Basque restaurant business.”

However, Basque immigration to the U.S. slowed in the 1960s as France’s and Spain’s economies improved, Zubiri said. Eventually, the Basque community in Chino also changed.

“A lot of Basques used to live in Chino until the land got bought up and people started building — and then a lot of the dairy farms moved to Bakersfield,” said Bernadette. “We don’t see as many Basques anymore … they’re just not around.”

Even the culture in Bakersfield, 150 miles north in the southern Central Valley, is shifting as many locals there are also descendants of an aging immigrant generation and fewer folks are emigrating from the Basque Country.

As for the dwindling number of Basque restaurants in Southern California, a lot of it has to do with a generational divide. “Most of the restaurants were started by the immigrant generation and they were so willing to work hard and spend all day in the restaurant and give up their life to that,” said Zubiri. “The younger generation are not as interested in it.”

Saying goodbye

“I think we all sort of knew it was a matter of time,” said Antoinette. “My family doesn’t live close by, and we never really imagined our kids would like to take it over.”

Decisions about the restaurant’s future are being made through its board, which includes Antoinette, Bernadette and Marguerite’s children.

Bernadette had originally wanted to keep the restaurant going, but has recently agreed with the board to put it on the market. “I’m not getting any younger,” said Bernadette. “I realized, ‘You know what? Life is too short. I’m not going to continue to fight the fight.’ ”

As for the remaining Basque restaurants in Southern California, diners can still visit Centro Basco in Chino, Costa Brava in San Diego and Top of the V in Anaheim. Others are Basque adjacent: While Xuntos in Santa Monica primarily focuses on Northern Spanish tapas, some of its dishes are influenced by the Basque Country, and Taylor’s Cafe in Chino offers Basque sausage on its Mexican and American breakfast menu.

While Glendora Continental is drawing to an end, Jaureguy is reminded of Jean in his influence on his children. “He used to say in Basque, ‘Goatzen aitzina,’ which means ‘Let’s move forward’ — and now Bernie says the same thing,” said Jaureguy. “She talks the same way as her dad.”

Figuring out what should go into your curbside waste bins is hardly straightforward.

Consider your single-use coffee cup — the one holding the latte you’re going to drink as you drive to work.

It’s paper, right? So it can be recycled?

Wrong. It has a plastic lining that paper recyclers won’t touch.

Or what about the compostable produce bag you used to hold the few broccoli heads you purchased from the bulk bin at your local grocery store?

Composters don’t want it. The plastic — even when made from non-fossil fuel sources such as kelp, corn or sugar cane — often contains additives that composters say can contaminate the soil. And they say it doesn’t decompose completely.

The waste landscape is a confusing nightmare that even folks well-versed in waste management struggle with — especially when you consider that each city, county and municipality in California has its own rules about what goes where.

It’s why many people are hoping the reuse movement will grow — a movement that asks people, restaurants and stores to create food-ware items that can be returned, washed and reused.

It’s estimated that 50 billion paper coffee cups are thrown away in the United States alone. And in California, only 9% of single-use plastics is recycled.

In small, geographically contained settings — such as stadiums, arenas and conference centers — re-usable food ware items have been used with success. In Los Angeles, Crypto.com arena and the Peacock Theater have participated in reusable food ware programs, with the company r.World, since 2024.

In an attempt to see if such programs could be implemented at a broader scale, a consortium promoted and financed by such unlikely sponsors as Starbucks, PepsiCo, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, launched a 12-week reuse pilot program in the Northern California city of Petaluma, last summer.

According to a report issued by the consortium, called Closed Loop Partners, the program got buy-in from 30 stores, including Dunkin, Habit Burger and Peets coffee. The food establishments offered consumers a reusable purple plastic beverage cup — with no deposit or added charge — that could be dropped off at purple collection bins around the city after the item was used. The cups were then washed, inspected and delivered back to participating stores.

The organizers claim the project was a success. More than 50% of the cups were returned, which organizers say surpasses the “environmental break-even point” — meaning they were better for the environment than single-use cups. That’s even when you include the water and energy costs required to transport the cups, clean them and transport them again.

And, they say, 24,000 cups that were not returned to the purple bins were recovered by the local recycling company.

“We learned that the biggest driver of returns was being part of a community-wide solution,” said Carolina Lobel, senior director at Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy. “Instead of working with the traditional monetary incentive, we focused on building up pride and empowering everyone to do the right thing. And they did because it’s what their neighbors and their entire community was doing.”

She also said the organizers were surprised at how quickly people embraced the new behavior, and saw return rates accelerate week to week.

The group will soon be launching another program in a larger California city — this time in Southern California.

Mid East Eats — a popular falafel pop-up turned private dinner service — is now open as a fast-casual destination for homestyle Palestinian cuisine with an L.A. edge. It’s also the first legally permitted home kitchen in Watts.

Sumer and Andrew Durkee’s nearly 700-square-foot home on Grape Street has a white banner stretched across the front gate, with blown-up photos of pita wraps, rice bowls, tacos and nachos topped with falafel. Enter the front yard, outfitted with a few tables, and maybe one of the home cooks will greet you, if they’re not busy wrapping burritos or throwing meat on a grill. Business has kicked up since the Durkees relaunched Mid East Eats three weeks ago.

The restaurant initially began as a private dinner service in February, when Sumer and Andrew offered Palestinian feasts in a decorated tent on their front lawn. For the July 12 opening, the pair added halal chicken and beef shawarma to their largely vegan menu — think fast-casual food like Shawacos (corn tortillas filled with shawarma, cilantro-lime hummus and feta) alongside dishes like the El Jifnawi falafel wrap, named after Sumer’s father’s Palestinian village, and the West Bank burrito, with fresh fries like the wraps served by street vendors in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

From the ages of 9 to 12, Sumer and her family lived in Jifna — a village outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, where she and her brother went to school. The Maryland native recalls living through the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli military occupation, which began in 2000.

“My brother and I saw a lot of terrible things just by crossing the checkpoint to get to school in the city,” Durkee said. “When they would close the checkpoints, we’d have to travel over the hills. … We’ve been shot at.”

For Durkee, being able to serve Palestinian food in L.A., sometimes to local Palestinians, is bittersweet. As an entire generation of Palestinian children suffer irreversible damage from starvation and malnutrition, Durkee grapples with her role and platform as an owner-operator of a Palestinian restaurant. A week after reopening Mid East Eats, she announced that she would stop posting pictures of her restaurant’s food on Instagram until Israel ended its blockade of food aid into Gaza.

“It feels insensitive to hold a grand opening during these times, but the time has come to open consistent business hours. Mid East Eats is our only source of income,” read an Instagram post from the restaurant. “Our grand opening is dedicated to all oppressed communities. We need each other more than ever now.”

Before it opened as a microenterpise home kitchen operation (MEHKO) in Feburary, Mid East Eats got its start as a pop-up last summer. The Durkees served dishes like falafel tacos at events across L.A., sometimes up to five per week. It’s the same food they now serve in Watts, where many residents live more than half a mile from the closest supermarket, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Access Research Atlas.

“I wanted to make food more accessible to our neighborhood — Watts is a bit of a food desert,” said Sumer, whose bubbly personality and warm hospitality has helped the restaurant maintain a flow of customers. “There’s a lot of fast food … there’s no Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Palestinian food.”

Mid East Eats is one of the greater L.A. area’s roughly 150 MEHKOs, thanks to a state program that was passed in 2018 and was implemented in L.A. County last November. It allows residents to cook and sell food out of their homes and plans to subsidize 1,000 home businesses through June 2026. MEHKOs are limited to serving up to 30 meals per day and 90 meals per week, with no more than $100,000 annual gross sales.

Since its pop-up days, a common thread throughout the Durkees’ business has been advocacy for Gaza. Many of the pop-ups Mid East Eats attended were fundraisers for families in Gaza, along with other causes such as local wildfire relief. The restaurant’s reopening, which featured a few local vendors, raised money for two local community organizations and $100 for a family in Gaza. On the last weekend of July, Mid East Eats fundraised with sales of its West Bank burrito, donating $400 to two other families in Gaza.

“We [donate] direct to families that are unable or too far away from aid distribution,” Sumer said. “Unfortunately, they have to buy food at inflated prices, so that’s why I try to focus on rotating families.”

Mid East Eats is best known for its herbaceous falafel, which Sumer stuffs with mint, cilantro and parsley. While she doesn’t use an exact family recipe, Sumer said that it “comes from my soul,” and tastes like the falafel her aunt would make. She and Andrew also take pride in cooking with olive oil made by a Palestinian family in Garden Grove.

Vanessa Guerra, a loyal customer who discovered Mid East Eats through a fundraising falafel-making class the Durkees held last year, has no problem driving from her home in Northridge to Watts for falafel.

“They’re amazing people — if someone needs help, they’re there to help you,” said Guerra, whose great-grandfather is Palestinian, of the Durkees. “I’m not just paying for the food. I’m paying for the service, everything. … It’s very home-like. It’s like going to your mom’s house.”

Open the Durkees’ front gate to find tomato plants growing along the fence. To the left is another table accompanied by fig and lime trees. Next to the house, a young watermelon plant, and in front of it, the colorful tent where the couple formerly held private dinners for $95 per person.

“I really wanted to do the Palestinian experience — I wanted people to come over, feel like they’re at home, come sit on the ground,” Sumer said. “Back in the village, we would sit on the floor and eat. Most modern-day Palestinians don’t do that anymore, but we did … I wanted to have that vibe, and I wanted to cook traditional food.”

Though the Durkees have paused the private dinners until mid-August to focus on their fast-casual service, it remains a core aspect of Mid East Eats, according to Sumer. Now, for $195 per person, diners will sit inside the tent on colorful cushions around a circular wooden table, feasting on a selection of mezze and mint lemonade followed by Sumer’s maqlubeh, or fragrant rice flipped upside down, revealing a layer of eggplant, cauliflower and tomatoes.

“When we do the private dinners, what I really focus on is the foods that we really eat back home — the stuffed grape leaves, stuffed cabbage, stuffed zucchini,” Sumer said. “It’s important to me to preserve my culture through food.”

The Durkees continue to support both families in Gaza and their Watts neighbors however they can — which, after the reopening, most often manifests as falafel wraps and forearm-length shawarma burritos bursting with garlic toum, tahini and Andrew’s homemade jalapeño sauce.

“Of course I’m gonna fight for Palestinian liberation. These are my people,” Sumer said. “I want to bring people here, and I want them to come and experience that Palestinian hospitality, and that is important to me — to show people that we are humans.”

Mid East Eats is open in Watts on Thursday through Sunday from noon to 9 p.m.

9613 Grape St., Los Angeles, mideasteats.com

If you were dining out in Venice late last decade, you knew this place — in the thick of Abbot Kinney Boulevard’s luxury-cool retail density. MTN (pronounced “Mountain”) closed five years ago and, with a few pivotal modifications, has now returned as RVR (yes, pronounced “River”). Being at RVR doesn’t feel like experiencing déjà vu so much as streaming the surprise new season of a show we all thought had been canceled forever.

Its second life turns out to be shockingly good, thanks especially to the kitchen’s brilliance with vegetables.

We knew MTN as an experimental izakaya that opened in 2017, dripping in hipness. It was the passion project of Travis Lett, the culinary architect behind Gjelina and hybrid food-hall Gjusta whose obsessions with relentless seasonality, global flavor combinations and a brand of casual, photogenic perfection gave Millennials an up-to-date definition of California cuisine.

MTN’s interpretation of Japanese cuisine closed a circle for Lett, a blond with surfer-model good looks who grew up in New Jersey. His father had spent time in Japan during his military career, and his parents had embraced the macrobiotic diet philosophy that surged through the United States in the 1970s. Scene-wise, MTN was apace with that top-of-the-world L.A. era: a magnet for the setters and chasers of trends, servers who threw attitude in the melee and could get away with it, the music from a turntable often inaudible in the deafening clamor.

The cooking could pierce the noise. I remember teetering on a window seat, absorbed in Japanese sweet potatoes glossed with miso butter and covered with snipped scallions and bonito flakes swaying in the heat. Clam broth for one ramen variation arrived so sea-sweet it could fool you into thinking ocean water was quaffable.

Two years into the restaurant’s run, Lett separated from his Gjelina Group business partners, and MTN closed early into the pandemic. Gjelina and Gjusta carry on of course, still beacons your friends just off a plane want to race first for their California vibe check.

But then last spring, the big announcement: Lett, with different investors, had reclaimed the MTN space for a second coming of his izakaya.

RVR opened in October, recalibrated for a new decade. From across the street the building looks the same: Asymmetric, modernist exterior walls with a finish that resembles grainy wood. In another incarnation it could house a niche textile museum.

Inside, the restaurant’s walls have been lightened. A retractable roof has been replaced with panels that let in soft, filtered sunshine; the dining room fades to candlelight-dim when night falls. The tone of the hospitality is notably warmer. Overall, the whole operation comes off as more grounded, and ultimately more appealing. MTN walked so RVR could run.

To eat in Los Angeles is to know the ways both classicists and individualists claim the word “izakaya.” Show up to RVR itching to parse the traditionalism of its dishes and you’re probably not going to have a great time. It’s Venice. It’s Lett. Small plates of chicken thigh karaage drizzled with chile honey, shrimp dumplings beautifully rounded in the gold-ingot wonton fold, roasted black cod and grilled kanpachi collar start at $15 to $20 and go from there. A meal adds up quickly.

The value is in how the ingredients sing. This is where centering the region’s finest produce comes into play.

Lett brought in Ian Robinson as RVR’s partner and executive chef. Robinson previously ran a Toronto restaurant called Skippa that specialized in regional dishes of Kyushu island in southern Japan. They’re joined by chefs who previously worked with Lett for years, including Cean Hayashi Geronimo and, as of June, chef de cuisine Pedro Aquino, who co-led the Gjelina Group’s short-lived Oaxacan restaurant Valle in the same space after MTN closed.

The team’s cohesion is important: There’s some ur-Gjelina alchemy at work here in the plant realms. Even early in RVR’s run the crew was teasing the Technicolor out of winter: They’d layer, for example, ripe, honeyed Fuyu persimmons in pinwheel patterns under rounds of lilac-purple daikon, their earthy-sweet differences further contrasted by crunchy furikake and torn shreds of dark-green shiso.

Now, in the holy season of summer? Floral apricots step in for the usual cucumber in a take on sunomono, stung with tosazu (vinegar-based dressing smoky with katsuobushi) and aromatic accents of pickled Fresno chiles, ginger and crushed Marcona almonds. Tiny tomatoes rupture on the tongue, sharpened with myoga and blood-red sweet potato vinegar from the Kyoto prefecture and needing nothing else than salt and peppery olive oil. Costata Romanesco zucchini lands on the grill, its signature ribbing still visible under char and hacked on the diagonal; rubbed with a blend of spices that nod to Japanese curry; smeared with playful, mysteriously citrusy curry leaf aioli; and covered in a punchy furikake made with of crushed pine nuts, shallots and nori.

For all the Southern California mythologizing around seasonality, few menus in Los Angeles cast produce in feature roles year-round. With technical command and on-their-feet imagination, the RVR chefs are pulling off the city’s most inspired plant-centered cooking.

Vegetables comprise the menu’s largest and most compelling section, but there’s plenty more that entices.

Hand rolls like kanpachi wrapped with avocado, slivered cucumber, spicy-green yuzu kosho and shiso, or rock cod in tempura slicked with tartar sauce and piqued with daikon radish sprouts, delight with their very Californian cleverness.

I keep coming back for duck meatball tsukune, at once fluffy and dense and served with head-clearing hot mustard; smoky-sweet Monterey bay squid, matched with a revolving mix of herbs and acidic punctuations that always coalesce; and pan-fried pork and cabbage gyoza crowned with a crackling, lacy dumpling “skirt.” Among several ramen options, right now I’m favoring the springy noodles with Dungeness crab and corn. The viscous broth gently builds flavors, prominently echoing the two lead elements.

However the idea of an izakaya may be translated, the drinking component is crucial. Among cocktails: fresh-fruit shochu highballs, plum-accented negronis and freezer martinis. Suntory premium malt runs on draught. Six styles of sake number among options by the glass, as do plenty of hot or iced Japanese teas and a fun, smooth cherry-vanilla soda made by the bar staff.

More than not, though, I’m drinking off-dry Rieslings or rich, slightly oxidized whites from more obscure corners of France because wine director Maggie Glasheen is in the house. She’s one of those enthusiasts who, if you show interest, gathers several bottles of wine in her arms and brings them tableside to discuss. Each sound like a mini-adventure, and Glasheen always swings back around to make sure you’re happy with the one you chose.

Nearly 10 months in for RVR, prime-time dinner reservations remain maddeningly competitive. A few months ago, the restaurant began serving weekend brunch as well. Before word spread, one could stroll in at 12:30 p.m. on a Sunday and savor a silky rolled omelet and one large, chewy-crisp black sesame pancake alongside the moment’s sugar snap peas glossed with sour-sweet ume.

Now brunch too is catching on, so it’s safer to book a week or so out, particularly if you want to request a place on the breezy rooftop patio that launched when the weather warmed.

It could — no, it should — be the new first-stop meal your vibe-seeking friends demand as soon as they’re out of LAX.

It has been a brutal stretch for L.A. restaurants. Since 2023, hundreds of notable spots have shuttered amid escalating costs for food and labor, and a weakening economy.

More recently, the local scene has also been roiled by the January wildfires, which torched several restaurants, caused some to temporarily close and displaced workers. Then, this summer, federal immigration enforcement raids led many undocumented workers to leave their posts over fear of detainment.

It’s a dicey environment in which to launch a restaurant industry career. But Los Angeles Trade-Technical College’s culinary program tells a different story — enrollment grew by 13% last academic year, and it is up nearly 30% since 2019.

The program’s growth comes as culinary schools have also been closing over the last decade: Le Cordon Bleu shut down its colleges across the country, including a Pasadena branch, in 2017; and a handful of other notable ones closed in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent Trade-Tech culinary graduates — and the instructors who taught them — said that they are not surprised by the school’s success, explaining that the program has appeal, in part, because it teaches useful, real-world skills in a new, modern building.

“Going to school is super important — I tell that to the young cooks we have,” said Trade-Tech culinary graduate Katya Shastova, the chef-partner of Vin Folk, a well-reviewed Hermosa Beach restaurant that opened last year. “Some people think you can learn in the kitchen. Yes, you can. But when you come into a kitchen with techniques that are already embedded in you … it puts you on a different level.”

Longtime instructor Robert Wemischner said the program emphasizes giving “students a real-life view of the work that they will be doing in the field.”

“Even at a point when the landscape is bleak, or rather uncertain … the students wish to find a career, pursue a passion,” he said. “And they find teachers who fuel that.”

There are other factors, too. Department Chair Jerry Vachon said the program may be benefiting from a post-COVID-19 bump, as people rethink their careers. The Los Angeles College Promise initiative, launched about a decade ago by the Los Angeles Unified School District and the L.A. Community College District, has also helped. It provides two years of tuition for select graduating high school students at the college district’s nine schools, Trade-Tech among them.

Vachon projects future growth for the culinary school, which offers certificates and associate’s degrees, through the creation of new topics of study. Trade-Tech will begin awarding a certificate in plant-based cuisine starting this fall. The program is also aiming to provide certificates in food trucks and mobile vending by 2026. Both increasingly popular areas have lower barriers of entry than restaurants.

Why students enroll

The roughly $50-million Culinary Arts Building, which opened in summer 2021, is a showcase facility that transformed the program, Vachon said. On a recent tour, he showed off a garden used by a new class in green technology, and a cavernous room that included 12 mini-kitchens and was stocked with gleaming stainless steel appliances.

Many students, he said, “really haven’t experienced” using the sort of high-end equipment that the school provides.

The building’s large main kitchen accommodates multiple classes, among them production baking and butchery. Vachon, who long taught a class on charcuterie — “we do pâtés, terrines,” he said — was particularly proud of the dry-aging refrigerators, where salami hung. It is near the campus coffee bar, whose offerings are prepared and sold by students.

Students who recently completed the program said the facilities had wowed them. Raul Gonzalez, 26, said he was studying mathematics at Trade-Tech, but left after an epiphany during a calculus exam: “I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.” He pivoted to the culinary school three years ago, and received his associate’s degree in culinary arts this spring.

“I always had passion for cooking. It finally clicked for me,” said Gonzalez, who is now working toward his associate’s degrees in baking and restaurant management, and works at the school’s coffee shop during the summer. He hopes to open a restaurant in Guatemala, where his parents are from.

Sandy Hernandez, 19, said that baking had been a hobby in high school — but she wanted to develop her skills. She enrolled in the school’s baking program in 2023. Hernandez, who earned her certificate this spring, has already found a job preparing custards and other items for a cafe and caterer.

For many students, it’s helpful that the program is relatively affordable: Vachon said that students can get their certificate or degree for roughly $3,500 to $5,000, depending on the route they choose. By comparison, it costs $22,105 a semester to attend the Culinary Institute of America’s outpost in St. Helena, Calif.

What the graduates say

Graduates of Trade-Tech’s culinary program said it prepared them well for their careers.

Ricardo Mora, 34, left a job in sales about a decade ago and enrolled at Trade-Tech with the goal of becoming a pastry chef. He earned certificates from the baking and culinary programs in 2017 and 2018, and worked for about three years as a pastry cook, with a stint at SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Eventually, though, he tired of it, and pivoted to food photography in 2020. What he learned at Trade-Tech has helped him in this new venture.

“I spent years working hands-on with food, knowing how food should be presented to people,” said Mora, who is from South Gate. “I can help [clients] make sure the food looks perfect for a photo.”

Another graduate, Eric Warren, 72, also used his Trade-Tech experience to launch a culinary career in his late 50s. After graduating in 2011, he debuted the Ooo-We! sauce, a “sweet, spicy, saucy glaze” that he said pairs well with everything from eggs to pork tenderloin. His path has been unique, but he believes that the culinary program turns out versatile graduates.

“You may start flipping hamburgers, but you may end up being a specialist in caviar,” Warren said. “Everybody’s gotta eat.”

Shastova, 34, the chef at Vin Folk, which The Times said last month was “the most exciting restaurant to open in the South Bay in recent memory,” is among that program’s most visible recent graduates.

A Russian immigrant, Shastova came to the U.S. in 2011 and settled in New York before eventually relocating to Los Angeles. Pondering her next move, she thought about her mother’s bakery back home.

“I figured I already knew how to do that,” she said with a laugh. “Then I found Trade-Tech.”

She graduated with a certificate in culinary studies in 2017.

In a further testament to the value of a Trade-Tech culinary education, two other graduates with whom Shastova attended the school found jobs at a well-reputed L.A. area restaurant.

They’re line cooks at Vin Folk.

Not since Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis introduced Angelenos to the lamb neck shawarma at Bavel have I heard this much of a buzz around a single lamb dish. My Chinese grandma is curious. My Orange County friends want to know. Have you had the lamb at M Joy? Is it the lamb equivalent of Hainanese chicken rice?

There is a single protein on the menu at the new M Joy restaurant in San Gabriel. Unlike many of the restaurants operating under the umbrella of Chinese cuisine in the San Gabriel Valley, there are no variations on American suburban dishes. The opposite concept of say the Cheesecake Factory, where there is, in theory, something for everyone. At M Joy, there is lamb, more lamb, and only lamb.

It’s the second U.S. location of a chain from Hangzhou, China. Like the first in Anaheim, M Joy in San Gabriel is a petite operation with a handful of tables. There will likely be a small crowd hovering near the entrance, waiting for a table. Inside, the dining room may have the lowest decibel reading in the city. The quiet has nothing to do with its size and everything to do with the focus of its patrons. You’re there to eat lamb, and it’s an endeavor worthy of your full attention.

The restaurant specialty is Xinjiang-style lamb rice, a dish hailing from the northwestern Chinese province. The gargantuan area borders Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and was a main thoroughfare along the Silk Road, connecting the Middle East and China.

The lamb is served as a single lamb rib ($15.99), double lamb rib ($20.99), lamb shank ($20.99) or rib and shank ($24.99) over rice studded with bits of carrot. If you choose the shank, prepare for a hulking mass of gray meat that glistens in the harsh light of the dining room. It’s chopstick-tender and falls from the bone at the slightest provocation.

The rib is a flaccid, boneless slab in the same shade of gray, draped over the mound of rice. With both the shank and the rib, there are no prized caramelized edges or crispy bits. Instead, the meat is cooked until it almost melts, each morsel a rush of beef, fat and juice.

The slow braising and stewing of the lamb curbs any harsh gaminess or funk, leaving you with the milder tempered cousin of the churlish mutton you know but may not love.

The rice underneath is seductively simple, each grain slippery with lamb fat and crowded with sweet, buttery carrots. The overwhelming flavor is that of the lamb, mild but unctuous and unmistakable.

It’s a dish that might feel overwhelmingly heavy if it weren’t for the triptych of condiments. A ruddy chile oil offers a wallop of heat and toasted chile flavor. Raw carrot salad is cool and crunchy. Pickled red onions are sharp with vinegar. Then there’s the accompanying bowl of warm lamb broth, as clear and comforting as mom’s chicken soup.

M Joy is more of a one-protein than a one-dish restaurant, with two other preparations of lamb. The grilled ribs ($12.99) are fatty, Flintstones-looking things with the prized crispy edges you might miss with the lamb rice. The spice blend rubbed across the surface is smoky, hot and sweet, with dried chiles, sesame and cumin seeds.

The lamb skewers ($12.99) feature the same spice blend but moistened into a gritty paste that gets painted over every inch of the meat. Both plates of skewers and ribs include small piles of the ground spices you can sprinkle over the top, dip or simply admire.

During a recent 38-minute lunch, the door swung open every few minutes with food delivery drivers collecting armfuls of orders. The thought of eating my lamb rice at home, free from the prying eyes of the people waiting for my table, was tempting. But if you brave the crowd and the harsh lighting, you’re rewarded with unlimited refills of chile sauce, carrot salad and pickled onions.

If we’re being technical, there are two things on the menu that aren’t lamb, if you count the bowl of coleslaw ($4.99) and homemade yogurt ($5.99). The latter is cool, tangy and, as the restaurant advertises, good for digestion. But make no mistake, M Joy is a place of joy for lamb lovers.

In the late 1990s, Paula Deen was an independent restaurateur whose family-operated restaurant had just received a glowing review from USA Today. Her life and career were permanently changed.

Now, over 25 years later, the Georgia native has announced the closing of the Lady and Sons — the iconic restaurant that made her a star of Southern cuisine and a household name in the cooking world.

Opened in downtown Savannah, Ga., in 1996, the Lady and Sons boasted a menu of local classics like fried green tomatoes, banana pudding and hoecakes. The signature dish, Southern fried chicken, was enough to draw lines wrapping around the block — and the restaurant came to be viewed as an embodiment of the indulgent and buttery flavors that characterize Southern cooking.

“There in Savannah, Paula Deen’s homestyle Southern menu at the Lady and Sons turned me into a ravenous beast, unmindful of manners, cholesterol, North-South diplomacy and the dropped jaws of my companions,” USA Today, then the nation’s most-read daily newspaper, wrote on Dec. 17, 1999.

Earlier that year, the popularity of the Lady and Sons caught the attention of Food Network journalist Gordon Elliott. Deen appeared on Elliott’s short-lived show “Door Knock Dinners” that led to her own Daytime Emmy-winning Food Network program, “Paula’s Home Cooking.”

On her website and social media accounts, Deen bid farewell to the Lady and Sons and its longtime fans. Also closing is her newer restaurant, the Chicken Box, which opened in 2023.

“Hey, y’all, my sons and I made the heartfelt decision that Thursday, July 31st, was the last day of service for The Lady & Sons and The Chicken Box,” Deen said in the statement. “We will now focus our attention on the four Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen locations across the country.”

The announcement came without warning, especially as the restaurant continued to draw tours and lines of customers. Three weeks prior to the announcement, the Lady and Sons posted on Instagram that it was hiring for all positions.

Over the years, some of Deen’s other restaurants have also closed suddenly. In 2014, employees at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House — a Savannah eatery she co-owned with her brother, Earl W. “Bubba” Hiers Jr. — reportedly arrived to work to find the doors locked and the appliances removed. A sign on the door said, “Thank you for 10 great years. Uncle Bubba’s is now closed.”

The Panama City, Fla., location of Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen also closed abruptly in 2019, laying off 30 employees without advance notice. Several former employees told local news channel WJHG that they were left without their main source of income following the closure.

Uncle Bubba’s closure came a year after controversy began to surround Deen after a former manager at the restaurant sued Hiers, alleging sexual and racial discrimination.

Food Network canceled “Paula’s Home Cooking” after Deen admitted to using a racial slur during a deposition for the 2013 lawsuit. Lawyers asked Deen if she had ever used the N-word, to which Deen replied, “Yes, of course,” later adding, “It’s been a very long time.”

Since then, the 78-year-old has focused on her restaurants.

The Lady and Sons, as her core establishment, was the result of a litany of personal struggles and ambition. Both of her parents passed away when she was in her early 20s and Deen, then a young mother, struggled with depression and agoraphobia, or fear of going outside.

With only $200 left, Deen founded a catering company out of her kitchen called the Bag Lady. Her handmade bag lunches were delivered by her sons Jamie and Bobby and earned Deen a local reputation for her homestyle cooking. After one attempt at a restaurant, the Lady in 1991, the follow-up, the Lady and Sons, co-owned with Jamie and Bobby, would be her success.

Turning the corner on 6th and Main Streets, an hours-long line of potential customers has been waiting to get a final dip and drink at Cole’s French Dip. It’s been this way since July 7, when owner Cedd Moses and his Pouring With Heart company announced the imminent closure of the historic restaurant and saloon.

“It’s back to the old days temporarily, when we were packed all the time before the pandemic,” Moses said Thursday.

The last day of service for the landmark restaurant, which claims to have invented the French dip, was meant to be Aug. 2. Now, due to the outpouring of support from the community as well as advocacy from local organizations including DTLA Residents Association, Independent Hospitality Coalition, Historic Core BID, Central City Association and the DTLA Alliance, Moses has struck a deal with the space’s landlord to extend service for 45 days.

“Diners and imbibers have been visiting from all across Southern California to say their goodbyes, for which we couldn’t be more grateful,” read a statement announcing the extension. “Though it’s likely not going to be forever, it is still a gift to keep the ovens on, the drinks flowing and our family of staff employed for a little bit longer.”

Moses declined to detail the terms with the landlord but said sales have jumped dramatically since the closure announcement. Notably, the restaurant, which in the recent past has sold more drinks than food, is now selling as many dips as drinks, he said. As of last weekend, the restaurant is opening at noon on Saturdays and Sundays to accommodate the crowds.

“When places are closing, it’s always such a celebration and a cast off,” said Eddie Navarrette, the executive director of the Independent Hospitality Coalition. “People want to get in there and get emotional and have some of that nostalgic memory with a cocktail.

“It’s the experience of being in the room one last time.”

Moses, who also sits on the board of the Independent Hospitality Coalition, said he is grateful for the surge in business. But he said it’s unlikely Cole’s will remain open indefinitely.

“We understand people are coming in now to say goodbye, and we can’t count on that business being sustainable,” he said, adding that the restaurant business in L.A. remains a “broken model.”

In addition to the lack of demand since the pandemic, Moses said increasing costs, particularly of labor, have been a major drag on the business.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we just assumed business would come roaring back,” he added. “But unfortunately we never saw that surge of business that we expected until just this couple of weeks, ironically after we announced our closing.”

In the interim, Moses is actively looking for a new buyer of the business — one that will respect the historic value of Cole’s, the oldest restaurant in the city.

“We have a lot of love for Cole’s, so we don’t want to sell it to just anybody,” he said. “We want someone that’s going to continue to take care of it in the future.”

William “Bill” Elwell, the humorous and occasionally ornery owner of a legendary burger shack in the San Fernando Valley, has died at 98, prompting an outpouring of admiration and memories from burger aficionados and restaurateurs who were inspired by him.

Elwell, who founded the Van Nuys burger stand Bill’s Burgers in 1965 and worked there continuously for 60 years, died on July 21. Over the course of decades he became as much of a draw as the burgers themselves.

Elwell seasoned and seared beef patties on his stand’s original griddle, which he believed dated back to the 1920s. Characterized as “gruff,” “cranky” and “grumpy,” he proudly ran the 10-by-20-foot stand with strict rules (cash only, no substitutions), and he could often be found ribbing his customers.

“Is McDonald’s closed today?” he’d regularly yell. “Why is everyone here? Go down the street!”

Another signature phrase sits at both the top and bottom of the menu: “You can’t have it your way, this is not Burger King.”

Allen Yelent, owner of local burger chain Goldburger and a Bill’s customer since childhood, said Elwell embodied the best entrepreneurial spirit of the Valley.

“Bill’s, for me, represents what I love about small business and what makes small business really beautiful in L.A.: the same person cooking the burgers literally every single day,” Yelent said. “Everyone can say they got a burger from Bill.”

Sandwiched among tire shops, lighting stores and factories, Elwell’s shack fed the Valley’s industrial workers just as readily as food lovers who’d make a visit to Bill’s a burger pilgrimage. Yelent, a San Fernando Valley native and resident, said Elwell epitomized the “absolute worker mentality, worker ethic of the Valley that I grew up in.”

William Clement Elwell was born in Ventura on Nov. 23, 1926. He served in World War II and worked in a variety of trades, including as a cab driver and at a linen company. He purchased the Van Nuys stand for $2,500 in 1965, before the block’s sidewalks were even paved and only a dirt path led to the building.

Elwell and Bill’s Burgers saw innumerable changes through the decades. At one point the stand was called Bill & Hiroko’s, named for Elwell and his then-partner, Hiroko Wilcox, whom he’d met while bowling. She worked the burger shack with him alongside one of his five ex-wives, Sharon Elwell. Bill Elwell told The Times in 2014 that one of his exes quipped: “We get along fine. It’s him we can’t stand.”

According to an obituary written by his family, which was published in the Ventura County Star, the burger icon is survived by his son, James Elwell, and his daughter, Charlene Morris, along with eight grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, three great-great grandchildren and multiple nieces and nephews.

On Tuesday morning, the first full day of business since the news of Elwell’s passing spread widely over social media, Henry McComas was the first customer in line. The filmmaker moved nearby six years ago and visits the restaurant at least once a week, he said, often on his walks through the neighborhood.

“The first time I met Bill, he was very busy over the grill, and such a professional and so focused that you didn’t know if you could talk to him,” McComas said. “He came up to me and started a conversation, telling me how great his burgers were, but he took a raw patty and some of the beef and ate it in front of me and said, ‘This is how good the meat is.’

“And I was hooked ever since.”

On Sunday, when McComas heard of Elwell’s death, he made a point of visiting Tuesday morning right as the restaurant opened, thanking the staff for their continuation of the business. He wants Bill’s Burgers to continue for years to come.

“Bill’s legacy means so much to the Valley,” McCormas said. “It really is a staple. My hope is if the family wants to continue the business that they do, because we’ll be here for their burgers.”

The legendary burger man occasionally threatened retirement or selling the business, as he told The Times he’d considered in 2020 during the pandemic. But Elwell said he hoped that even if he did, Bill’s Burgers would continue without him. One staff member told The Times that they would like to personally continue the restaurant in Elwell’s honor.

Yelent of Goldburger previously ran an Instagram account dedicated to posting burgers he’d enjoyed. The very first picture was of Bill’s. Dated Aug. 12, 2014, he captioned it, “Bill and Hiroko are inspirations.”

They remained an inspiration as Yelent grew his empire from a pop-up to multiple stands.

“They worked super hard,” he said of the duo. “They touched their product every single day. They were always completely and utterly devoted to what they were doing, and the city responded well. I want to have even a small fraction of the legacy that Bill’s created in L.A.”

Yelent, who grew up in Chatsworth, found himself at Bill’s Burgers multiple times during childhood, especially through the stretch of years his father operated a TV repair shop nearby. In adulthood, he rediscovered it and found Bill’s to be even more inspiring than his earliest memories of it.

More recently he’d found one of Elwell’s grandsons working at the burger stand, taking orders at the window while Elwell still manned the flat-top grill.

Heavy Handed owners Max Miller and Danny Gordon also grew up in the San Fernando Valley and frequented Bill’s Burgers. As they began their own burger business, they turned to some of the restaurants that shaped not only their own tastes but the region that raised them. Bill’s, they said, represented “frozen-in-time Valley spots” and “a taste of what the San Fernando Valley was” before they were born.

“He was really one of the last to do food in his own unapologetic way and stick to his guns when it comes to how he serves, how he runs his business and how he operates personally within the space,” said Miller.

Miller, who attended high school in Van Nuys, would often vie for one of the coveted counter seats overlooking the grill.

Both have tried to emulate Elwell’s “quiet showmanship,” most often seen through him slapping American cheese onto the patties, as if casually but accurately flinging a playing card from a deck of them.

“To me, it’s sort of the West Coast version of Di Fara Pizza in Brooklyn: the old man going at his own pace, not really giving you the time,” said Gordon. “He was just doing his thing, and you’re there for that experience. It’s a kind of restaurant that you don’t see many of anymore. It’s definitely a bummer to lose [Elwell]; he was a legend.”

Like Yelent, Colin Fahrner also ran a burger Instagram account before launching his own restaurant, but he never posted a photo of Bill’s — probably, he said, because his visit predated the social media account entirely.

It was, Fahrner said, the kind of old-school L.A. burger operation that inspired him to launch his restaurant, Yellow Paper Burger, though Bill’s perfectly griddled burgers come wrapped in white.

“There’s other places that do it, but I feel like he really stuck to it for the long haul,” he said of Elwell. “I think it’s also a reminder: All these legacy places are closing. Don’t wait to go to these spots, because they can close any day or the owner can pass away, or whatever might happen … Now is the time. These places are not going to be here forever.”

A local startup is using artificial intelligence and robotics in an unlikely way: making sashimi and other fish dishes taste better, last longer and more humane.

El Segundo-based Shinkei Systems wants to bring a traditional Japanese method of handling fish to fine dining in America, using technology to replace the labor-intensive process historically handled by practitioners on board ships. Investors have just bet millions that it will succeed.

The company’s AI-driven robot — called Poseidon — has been designed to do a traditional form of fish handling called ikejime in Japanese. It is a method of killing fish that enthusiasts say enhances flavor, texture and shelf life.

Although fish processed in this way is found in some of the best restaurants in Japan, it hasn’t been promoted in the U.S. because it is generally too expensive. Automating the process will make it more readily available to Americans, said Saif Khawaja, the company’s chief executive.

“My end goal is that you’re walking into your local grocery store and can buy fish that lasts three times as long, tastes better and is handled humanely,” he said.

The company raised $22 million in a funding round last month, co-led by Founders Fund and Interlagos, bringing total funding to $30 million since its inception. It has four Poseidons working on ships in the Pacific and Atlantic and hopes to have 10 more working in the coming year.

The ikejime process involves taking live fish that has just been caught and quickly putting them out of their misery by killing them with a spike through the brain and cutting their gills. This stops the stress hormone and lactic acid buildup that can hurt flavor and texture when fish are left to asphyxiate.

Although traditional practitioners sometimes add a step in which the spinal cord is destroyed, Poseidon just does the first steps of the ikejime technique.

The method has remained largely artisanal even in Japan, where only some fishermen will make the effort to process batches of fish in this way to sell to specific sushi chefs who are obsessed with having the highest-quality ingredients.

Even in Japan, the method, “is still too labor-intensive to replicate at a high speed without damaging the fish,” Khawaja said, adding that, “It’s impractical and unsustainable for fishermen to adopt methods that require significant hands-on work,” in the U.S.

Shinkei says it also has a higher calling than just better-tasting fish. Khawaja said one of the motivations for developing the technology was to try to find a kinder, gentler way to kill fish than letting them die gasping for air.

During childhood fishing trips with his father in the Red Sea, he remembers it being “very hard to watch” fish suffocating after they were caught.

While he was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, Khawaja was moved by an essay that argued that fish suffer inhumane deaths because they cannot vocalize pain. He even once considered developing sensors to make fish’s pain audible.

Shinkei provides Poseidon machines to fishermen, who then sell fish processed through the machines back to Shinkei at a premium. Shinkei in turn sells the fish to restaurants and other retailers underits fish company Seremoni.

Poseidon is roughly refrigerator-sized and sits on fishing boat decks. It processes fish within seconds of being caught. The fish is fed through an opening in the machine and into a small vinyl cavity. The machine then uses AI to identify what kind of fish it is and where exactly its brain and gills are.

Fish emerge with a hole in the head and incisions near the gills before being placed in an ice slurry for blood drainage.

Quickly killing the fish, bleeding it and chilling it without freezing leads to fish that is noticeably better, Khawaja said.

“There’s going to be a flavor profile difference and there’s going to be texture profile difference,” he said.

The company chose Los Angeles for its headquarters and production because it has the right mix of potential employees as well as customers. It has the mechanical engineering talent as well as a major fishing fleet and lots of high-end restaurants.

“The best mechanical engineering talent in the world, in my opinion, is in Southern California,” said Seremoni co-founder Reed Ginsberg.

The city is also a major health and consumer products hub as well as a trend setter for cutting-edge food fads.

Chef Michael Cimarusti, co-owner of the Michelin starred Providence restaurant in Los Angeles, says he tries to buy local ikejime fish when he can because it preserves the quality and color. The fish preserved using ikejime look as if they “were just pulled from the water minutes ago,” he said in an interview posted on YouTube by the American Fishing Tackle Co.

Shinkei currently processes thousands of pounds weekly across operations in Washington, Central California and Massachusetts, with expansion to Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico planned this year. After feedback from fishermen that the bots took up too much deck space, the company developed “Block 2” robots that have roughly half the footprint while processing fish twice as fast.

Currently, black cod and black sea bass processed through Poseidon are sold under Shinkei’s brand Seremoni at retailers such as Happier Grocery and served at upscale restaurants including Atomix and Sushi Zo. This summer, the company plans to add salmon and red snapper to its offerings.

Carlos Salgado wowed the world of Mexican food the moment he opened Taco María in 2013.

His marriage of high-end with homestyle — sturgeon tacos, Flamin’ Hot chicharrones, handmade blue corn tortillas from kernels he imported from Mexico and milled himself — seemed better suited to Los Angeles or Mexico City than a hipster food hall in Costa Mesa.

The accolades came quickly: L.A Times restaurant of the year in 2018. Four straight Michelin stars. One of Esquire’s most important U.S. restaurants of the 2010s. Salgado was a Best Chef in California finalist for the James Beard Awards — the Oscars of the restaurant industry — in June 2023.

A month later, Salgado shocked his fans by closing Taco María.

As his good friend, I have the exclusive on what’s next. It’s … Wisconsin?

A few months after the restaurant closed, Salgado relocated to Door County — the childhood home of his wife, Emilie Coulson Salgado — in a move that left Southern California’s food scene befuddled, if people knew at all.

If anyone deserved to go all “Walden,” it was the thoughtful Salgado. He had worked nonstop for a decade, weathering the pandemic and an Orange County audience that usually got mad when he explained why his space didn’t serve chips and salsa or had “Black Lives Matter” stenciled on the patio window. Taco María’s lease was up, the location was never the best fit and Carlos and Emilie wanted to spend more time with their two young children and her parents while they recharged and decided what was next.

Now, after some time off, they’re in the restaurant business again, opening La Sirena this month in Ephraim, population 345, about an hour and a half away from the nearest big city, Green Bay.

Expect everything that made Taco María so incredible — a prix fixe menu, a focus on local produce and meat, those fabulous blue corn tortillas that taste like a time portal to Tenochtitlan — except on the shores of Lake Michigan instead of off the 405 freeway.

Nothing against the Badger State, but the idea of a Mexican chef of Salgado’s caliber setting up on a peninsula jutting into a Great Lake is like Shohei Ohtani announcing he’s leaving the Dodgers to join a Sunday beer league. Gustavo Dudamel deciding his next gig isn’t the New York Philharmonic but the Whittier Regional Symphony. Gov. Gavin Newsom forsaking his office to run the Friends of the Sacramento Public Library.

About 8% of Wisconsin’s population is Latino, and Door County is 96% white. The Mexican food scene outside Milwaukee and maybe Racine is still mostly combo plates washed down with massive margaritas, or cartoonishly big burritos in the Chipotle model. Wisconsin is … Wisconsin, land of cheese curds and brats and brandy Old Fashioneds.

“I would push back that [Mexican food] is out of place anywhere in the United States,” Salgado told me by phone last week. “We are the foundation of the restaurant and hospitality industry, farming and construction — I don’t need to say all the ways we’re embedded.”

He sure shut me up there! Besides, I’m proud that his and Emilie’s next step is in an isolated spot in a state that went for Donald Trump in two of the past three elections. California needs all the ambassadors we can get, especially in places that don’t look like us — and we can’t get better ambassadors than them.

“In parts of the Midwest, you mention you’re from California, there’s inevitably haters who want to believe that we left California because it’s a failed state, and they try to commiserate with us about how California is uninhabitable,” the 45-year-old Salgado said. “Of course, I don’t believe that. I have pangs of longing for my home state every day, especially fruits!”

“I actually thought we’d live in California forever, and I still consider us California people,” Coulson Salgado, 41, said in a separate interview. “But this experiment to be here [Wisconsin] turned out to be really good for us and our children.”

The two met in San Francisco in 2008, when Coulson Salgado was working for a literacy nonprofit and Salgado was a pastry chef at a high-end restaurant. He moved back to his native Orange County in 2011 aiming to help with his immigrant family’s Cal-Mex restaurant in Orange.

Instead, he capitalized on the era’s food truck craze and opened Taco María. Coulson moved down in 2013 to help transition the luxe lonchera to a brick-and-mortar, eventually becoming the restaurant’s general manager and beverage director, roles she will also assume at La Sirena.

Taco María was a daily miracle, especially given its Orange County location. Salgado got nationwide media coverage and forced Angelenos to do the unimaginable: travel to O.C. for Mexican food. His exhortations for people to value Mexican cuisine and the people who make it was essential in an era where too many Americans love the former and loathe the latter.

But the grind of running a restaurant — which I know too well, through my wife — wore on the couple. They didn’t want to be rushed into opening a new Taco María, so they decided a sojourn to Door County would be fun and also right.

“Emilie put in 15 years with me in California,” Salgado said, and moving to Wisconsin “was something we felt we deserved as a family.”

He unwound from the restaurant rush by hiking through Door County’s forests and fishing in its waterways while continuing Taco María’s successful salsa macha mail-order business; Emilie moonlighted as a grant writer. The plan was to return to California sometime in 2024 and hop back on the restaurant hamster wheel.

But the more they experienced Door County’s slower pace of life, the more they realized it would be nearly impossible to replicate that in Southern California.

“We started Taco María without kids,” Salgado said. “This trial gave us the opportunity to imagine the kind of balance that we wanted, and we realized that we stood a very good chance of creating it here.”

I asked if he meant the cost of living or the sclerotic traffic or the lack of affordable housing or any of the other reasons California quitters give when they leave and whine about their move.

“We’re certainly not California quitters,” Salgado deadpanned. “People talk all the time about making career changes to spend more time with their families, and this is really it for now.”

Coulson Salgado said it’s been “wonderful” to return to where she grew up “with the eyes of an adult.” Door County has seen newcomers from California in recent years, mostly young families drawn by its immaculate landscapes. She does miss the multiculturalism of Southern California — “My son will say, ‘Let’s get pho!’ and I have to remind him we’re not in Orange County anymore,” she said with a laugh.

She doesn’t frame the opening of La Sirena in the rural Midwest in the age of Trump as a political act. But she brought up the “terrible” deportation deluge that has hit Southern California this summer (Wisconsin has so far been spared, “but we’re on high alert for it”) as a reason why their presence matters.

“It’s not like we’re in some alternate universe out here,” she said, “but you could be if you weren’t paying attention, and that’s what’s scary … But that’s why it’s more important than ever to create more pockets of joy.”

Her husband vowed that California “hasn’t seen the last of us yet,” while giving no timeline for a return.

In an ideal world, he and Emilie would run both La Sirena and a restaurant back in O.C.

“I’m proudly Mexican American,” Salgado said. “And I’m not going to shy away from taking up space and perform brown excellence in anywhere that I am.”

My dog Rufus’ wellness journey started with what I now consider an oxymoron: healthy kibble.

Just weeks after I adopted him, Rufus stayed the weekend with his first babysitters, my friend Jamie and her then-partner, a famous country singer. When I came to retrieve my handful-sized little guy, said singer informed me that the so-called healthy dog food I’d proudly left them with (the most expensive one I could find at a grocery store) listed corn and wheat as the first two ingredients. Both were potential allergens for dogs, she said. You have to read the label and make sure meat was the first (and second and third) ingredient on the list.

Or better yet, make his food, like they did.

I had once visited their house and was overwhelmed by the smell of meat — and they’re vegetarians! It turned out to be a boiling cauldron of lamb bones. “For the dogs,” they said.

This was 2008. And it was not uncommon for even the most loving, well-meaning pet owner to feed their dog inexpensive, store-bought dog food. Making your own food for your dog would have been considered exotic. Maybe even a little, errr … overboard, an undertaking reserved for people who said things like, “My dog is my child,” or, as my then-neighbor said before she gave birth to two humans, “I feel like I gave birth to Jackson.” Jackson was, of course, her dog.

Today, human-grade dog food (food that contains ingredients suitable for humans and is processed to the same standards as human food) makes up 30% of the $44-billion-a-year pet food market in the U.S. But back in the aughts, none of the big brands offering this quality of food — Ollie, JustFoodForDogs nor the Farmer’s Dog — even existed. By and large, dogs ate kibble. And by and large, that kibble was made of grains.

During the same couple of decades the wellness industry — as in human wellness — exploded, to almost $2 trillion nationally. A number too large to contemplate, but suffice to say that 82% of consumers consider wellness a top priority. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 97% of dog owners consider their dogs part of the family, and 57% of women (43% of men) say their dogs are just as much a member as the human members. That these same humans are projecting their wellness priorities onto their furry family should come as no surprise.

‘I’m gonna love you forever’

When I got Rufus, I was not really a Dog Person. (Which begs the question: Why did you get Rufus? Another story for another time!) But a few days in, I was madly in love with him. He was, as they say in Mexico, my perr-hijo, or “dogchild,” and in no time, the idea of Rufus’ inevitable death was the thing that terrified me most in life. Of course, there are humans whose deaths I can’t bear to imagine, but the difference between a human loved one’s impending demise and that of our canine companions is, in a word: denial.

Humans have long enough lifespans, coupled with anti-aging illusions (Botox and hair dye!) that allow us to put off thoughts of the inescapable — until we can’t. But with the average life of a dog between 10 and 13 years — a span that by the time you’ve reached middle age feels like a season — you could start worrying about the end as early as the beginning. I know I did.

Dog food companies play into that fear in their advertising. The Farmer’s Dog commercial titled “Forever,” which launched during the Super Bowl in 2023, chronicles the life of a chocolate Labrador puppy and a little girl that ends with the girl as a woman and a mother, staring into the soulful eyes of her now white-muzzled dog while the R&B song “Forever” (“I’m gonna looooove … youuuu … forever …”) plays and the words “Nothing matters more than more years together” flash on the screen. (If you don’t tear up watching that ad, I’m guessing you’ve never loved a dog.)

Another Farmer’s Dog ad features a voice-over that says: “The average dog only lives to be 10. At the Farmer’s Dog, we don’t think that’s long enough.” The ad goes on to say, in essence, feed your dog our healthy, pre-portioned food and he’ll live longer.

Rufus came into the world 15 years before this manipulative marketing campaign. And besides, I didn’t need an advertisement to remind me that my days with Rufus were numbered. Simple math told me that it was highly likely that one day, I would be alive in a world with no Rufus in it, and this thought struck me with a cold terror.

What Rufus ate

In the meantime, I felt it was my responsibility that Rufus lived as long as caninely possible, and to make sure that Rufus’ every day on Earth was as good as I could make it. ( I’m thankful he was the kind of kid who could entertain himself with an empty plastic water bottle.) I wanted Rufus to feel good, to have maximum energy, minimal brain fog (ha ha, I know), chase as many sticks and squeak as many toys as possible, feel as loved as a being could feel, and enjoy the yummiest, healthiest food a dog could eat.

After learning about the pitfalls of grains and the limitations of kibble, which is often cooked at such a high temperature as to be stripped of all nutrients, I started making Rufus’ food myself. I am a regular shopper at Huntington Meats, and one day when I was buying marrow bones for Rufus, Jim Cascone, the owner, told me about an off-menu item: pet food! (Today there is a banner promoting their pet food.) He brought a bag of Rubik’s cube-size blocks of frozen meat, a blend of liver, kidney, spleen and hearts. From then on, as long as we were in Los Angeles, that — along with some custom additions — is what Rufus ate.

At first, I mixed the meat with a freeze-dried vegetable mix for dogs. Like astronaut or camping food, it came in a pouch — and it didn’t smell or look like any vegetable I’d want to eat! So I looked at the ingredients, and since sweet potatoes were first, I added those, steamed or baked, to the meat. I also added fresh broccoli because it’s my favorite vegetable, and it so happened to be one of Rufus’ favorite foods too. And I added ground beef to the mix, because it seemed luxurious; and bone meal after a veterinarian told me, “Even though dogs have been domesticated, their G.I. tracts haven’t changed.” They need to eat bones.

I made a big batch of this mixture and froze it in pint-size containers labeled Rufus Hash. Rufus loved it, and perhaps just as important: Every time I fed him I felt like I was giving him the best shot at a great and long life.

Despite my best efforts, Rufus died. He left this world after 14 years and five months on a glorious March day during peak jacaranda season, in 2021 in Mexico City, where we were living and loving life at the time.

And that’s the thing. No matter what we do, regardless of what we feed them or the integrative medicine (including, in Rufus’ case, reiki, homeopathy, electromagnetic therapy and acupuncture), despite the walks and the talks and the love that we give, they leave us. But first, they love us. And they live with us happy and healthy, and along the way, we show them that they are as important to us, oftentimes more important, than any two-leggeds in our midst. We treat them like the precious beings and the members of the family that they are. And that, tragically, is the most we can do.

Adiós, my little Rufino. May there be pigs’ ears and calves’ liver wherever you are. And may Rufus Hash be your legacy.

Get the Recipe

My most vivid food memories involve overcooked spaghetti in a wooden bowl, and my grandmother Phyllis.

For decades, my grandmother’s wooden bowls sat stacked in the cabinet next to the refrigerator in her old, two-story home in Gardena. They followed her to her retirement home in Palm Desert, which she lovingly referred to as “toe-tag city.” She was part of the volunteer wellness-check committee that called other residents to make sure they were still breathing.

The bowls were lopsided and smooth, burnished and misshapen by countless years of scraping Lipton onion dip and spaghetti off the sides.

When she died on July 17 at the age of 91, the first memories that came to mind involved spaghetti in those wooden bowls, and all the meals and laughs we shared together.

They were not the expensive cherry wood, olive wood or acacia you might find at Crate & Barrel. The wood was thin, pressed and woven — the chicken nugget equivalent of a piece of dinnerware.

My grandmother bought them at a restaurant supply store in Los Angeles almost 40 years ago. An internet search for “cheap wooden bowls” produces images of something similar.

During my childhood summers, I spent most of my days lounging on a fraying towel on a patch of lumpy grass in my grandparents’ backyard, eating out of one of those wooden bowls.

My too-long hair was always damp from the aboveground pool where my late grandfather, Warner, taught me how to swim. “You’re my favorite,” he would say. He said that to all the grandkids.

Phyllis and Warner were Jewish but never kept kosher. She used to boast that her grandfather opened the first kosher butcher shop on Pico Boulevard, though she could never remember the name or the year.

There was always bacon in the house. She used a plastic tray to microwave the bacon until it was crisp and perfect. And her most famous dishes involved both meat and cheese in those wooden bowls.

The sound and sensation of my bent fork against the wood is palpable even now. My grandmother’s spaghetti was always cooked two minutes past al dente. I squeezed the noodles between my tongue and front teeth and counted how many I could eat without chewing. The sensation was simply exquisite.

The meat sauce, slightly salty and grainy, was always seasoned with Lawry’s spaghetti mix from a paper pouch. The ground beef was pulverized until it became one with the canned crushed tomatoes. My grandmother slid the emerald green cylinder of Parmesan across the table and never questioned the Everest-sized mountain I managed to shake into the bowl.

I used to study the grooves and nicks in the bowls and wondered what would happen if I accidentally ate wood. Is there a tiny tree growing in my stomach right now?

Armed with a head full of dreams, a slender grasp on reality and the high of a new Hello Kitty backpack for the fast-approaching fall, I happily slurped my noodles, unburdened by the anxiety of the 1/8th-life crisis that so often crept into my thoughts and threatened to ruin a good meal. But never this meal.

The bowls were a promise, that at least for the time it took to eat whatever filled them, things would be just fine. I have my grandmother to thank for this, and for so many of my fondest memories, food quirks and preferences.

It’s thanks to Phyllis Harris that I prefer the Lipton onion soup mix dip to anything whipped up in a restaurant kitchen. And that I know how to host everything from a small gathering to a proper rager. She’s the reason my friends ask me to make latkes for every Hanukkah party. Her holiday gatherings were legendary, with a full spread of golden latkes, brisket, bagels, lox and white fish. And there was always a bowl of pitted black olives. My cousins and I used to slide an olive onto each finger and pop them into our mouths while we ran around the house.

My grandmother was the master of something called the schmutz platter. I can’t recall which one of us came up with the name, but I suspect it was me. It was more of a table-wide spread than an actual platter, comprising various deli cold cuts, leaves of romaine lettuce, dill pickle chips, black olives, sliced cheese (always havarti and usually provolone), a wooden bowl of tuna salad, another of potato salad, sliced rye bread and challah, ramekins of mayonnaise and mustard. While grandma made her own tuna salad and potato salad, both studded with bits of hardboiled egg, the coleslaw was only ever from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“KFC or bust,” she would say. And she meant it.

I brought countless acquaintances out to the desert to visit, and each time, a schmutz platter would be waiting on the dining room table when we arrived. But even when it was just me, the platter was there.

After living in Los Angeles for most of her life, grandma was used to the depth and breadth of cuisines in the city. Her move to Palm Desert 20 years ago was accompanied by a bit of culinary shock, when she realized there were no Asian markets nearby and the local dim sum restaurant wasn’t exactly local or actual dim sum. Each trip to visit came with a request to bring her a loaf of double-baked rye bread from Langer’s Deli and an order or two of siu mai.

The desert being the desert, we used to brave the 30-second walk to her car in the 110-degree heat to drive to the Rite Aid down the street for ice cream. She used to call the pharmacy waiting area an “ice cream cafe,” and we sat in the blood pressure chairs while we licked our cones. I was only ever able to convince her to order the Chocolate Malted Krunch (the best flavor) once. Grandma only had eyes for rainbow sherbet.

While we sat in the ice cream cafe, she asked about work and my love life, but never in a prying way. She listened intently and never judged, though I gave her plenty to question. By the time I made it to the bottom of my cone, I felt like there was at least one person in the world who understood me.

As much as grandma loved to host company, with her weekly card games and mahjong, she lived for a night out. She had her hair done regularly into a golden coiffed pouf. Her nails were always painted. I don’t think I ever saw her leave the house, let alone her bedroom, without lipstick. There were dresses for the grocery store, dresses for the mall, lunch with the girls and dinner out. We often staged mini fashion shows to compare outfits.

Sullivan’s, a lively chain steakhouse on the second floor of the El Paseo shopping center in Palm Desert, was our favorite place. She went so often that she had a regular table. She always enjoyed a glass of red wine. I sipped a martini. And we both ordered the crispy Shanghai calamari. This was the height of luxury and culinary achievement for grandma. A plate of battered and fried squid from Point Judith, R.I., coated in a sweet chili glaze with cherry peppers, scallions and sesame seeds.

The rounds of squid were always tender, dredged in a light, crisp, shaggy coating. The orange, chile-flecked sauce was sticky and sweet, similar to the condiment typically served with Thai barbecue chicken. I can see her licking the sauce from her fingers as I type this.

One of the last great meals we shared was at Alice B., Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s restaurant at the Living Out LGBTQ+ community in Palm Springs. Feniger was there that evening and graciously took us on a small tour of the property before steering us toward an order of executive chef Lance Velasquez’s excellent biscuits. My grandmother, who was a fan of Feniger’s for years, was elated at meeting the chef. If the TV was on at grandma’s house, it was tuned to the Food Network.

We marveled at the texture of the biscuits, equal parts crunch and fluff. We finished every drop of the honey and butter. Grandma and I shared a love of fried chicken and discussed the restaurant’s chicken cutlet for much of the drive home.

She grew teary-eyed as we finished dinner. Grandma was someone who treated each meal, whether it was out or a schmutz platter at home, like it was something to be savored and appreciated, grateful for every moment we got to spend together.

I know that with time, this pang in my chest will dull, but I’m confident that these memories will stay vivid. I can summon the smell of her kitchen. The warmth of her embrace. The sound of her laughter and the way it filled a room. I can taste her spaghetti and feel the grooves of the wooden bowls. Thank you, Grandma, for showing me just how delicious this life can be.

Chef Sang Yoon opened an all-day bakery cafe in the historic Helms Bakery complex in Culver City. Yoon’s Helms Bakery is 14,000 square feet of baked goods (pies by the slice, cakes, cookies, sourdough loaves and more), snacks, coffee, soft drinks, packaged takeout items, a hot-dish lunch menu and sandwiches. This one — a recipe for his take on the egg salad sandwich — is inspired by the kind of sandos you find at convenience stores in Japan, as well as the Jewish deli version.

Get out two pots for boiling eggs. One pot is for 10-minute eggs, and the other is for 8-minute eggs. The softer-boiled eggs and their jammy yolks are featured split open in the middle of the sandwich, served on slices of fluffy milk bread with their crusts cut off.

Yoon has a couple of flavor-producing tricks, including onion powder, chicken bouillon powder and, yes, MSG, for extra tasty egg salad.

Beef ribs, says Andrew Muñoz, co-founder with wife Michelle Muñoz of Moo’s Craft Barbecue, are a Saturday special at their Lincoln Heights restaurant. “We can’t make enough of them,” he says. Those ribs are cooked in a smoker customized for the Moo’s team over California white oak. But the couple has developed this home-cook recipe that, as they demonstrated in the Times Test Kitchen, produces beautifully burnished ribs in an ordinary kitchen oven. “We realize not everyone has a smoker,” says Michelle Muñoz, “but everyone has an oven.” And, yes, Andrew Muñoz adds, you can get bark — that layer with earthy smoky notes — on these beef ribs in the oven.”

These ribs are terrific sliced (across the grain) right off the bone and served with traditional barbecue sides, but Michelle and Andrew Muñoz often like to let the ribs cook a little longer and then shred the meat for tacos. Michelle makes fire-roasted salsa with tomatillos, serranos and chile de árbol, but you can use any salsa you like.

Cut the noodles and assemble: When the mung bean jelly mixture is set, remove it from its container by placing a large plate or cutting board over the container and carefully flip. Grate noodles from the set jelly by using a noodle scraper or the largest holes of a box grater. Alternatively, you can cut thin strips with a knife.

Put a handful (about 1 cup) of noodles on each plate. For each serving, pour over a few tablespoons of the vinaigrette and garnish with cilantro leaves, blossoms (if using), peanuts, cucumbers, chile threads and scallions.

Here is the challenge we set out for the chefs of some of our favorite restaurants: Come up with a recipe that demonstrates chef skills and creativity but is still simple enough for an average home cook to make.

That’s not necessarily easy for chefs with regular access to specialty ingredients, a team of prep cooks and dishwashers to do the chopping and cleanup, plus years of training that enable them to handle complex kitchen tasks with ease. But with a little persistence we were able to get some of L.A.’s best chefs plus a few others to answer the call. You can watch the results in our ongoing “Chef That!” video series — as in chef that grilled cheese sandwich or date night pasta or ice cream sundae.

Collected here are some of the best summertime recipes from our “Chef That!” series along with tips we learned when the chefs cooked for us in The Times Test Kitchen. Sang Yoon of Helms Bakery and Father’s Office, for instance, shows us the best way to peel a jammy egg. Andrew and Michelle Muñoz of Moo’s Craft Barbecue show us how to make ribs with outdoor smoker flavor in a home oven. Vespertine and Meteora chef Jordan Kahn gives us advice on brining meat. Dave Beran, chef of Seline and Pasjoli, shows us the best way to caramelize onions. And Anajak Thai’s Justin Pichetrungsi shares the secret ingredient that makes his fried food so good.

We also gain insights into how chefs bring restaurant touches to classic recipes. Kismet chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson use pickles to add a pop of acidity to a cheesy dip. For macaroni and cheese pie, Bridgetown Roti’s Rashida Holmes changes up the noodles, cheeses and spices. 88 Club’s Mei Lin uses not only cilantro leaves but the blossoms and stems in her cold mung bean noodles. And chefs Brian Bornemann of Crudo e Nudo and Brian Dunsmoor make the case that shrimp stock should be a home cook staple.

These recipes — for ceviche, sandwiches, noodles, ribs and luscious desserts — will not only make your summer entertaining easier, they show off the best of restaurant and home cooking.

—Laurie Ochoa

Cook-along chef demos

Watch this space for more chef and cookbook author video demos this summer from Andrew and Michelle Muñoz of Moo’s Craft Barbecue, Sang Yoon from Father’s Office and Helm’s Bakery, 88 Club’s Mei Lin and more.

The recipes

A Silver Lake poke destination is back after five years away. Ohana Superette, the casual, daytime-only poke shop from husband-and-wife team Eric and Miriam Park, recently returned with its own space and thoughtful, traditional poke.

“I always try to do my version but not mess with it too much,” chef and co-owner Eric Park said, “and with the poke I just want to keep it super authentic.”

Scoops of ginger-and-soy-marinated tuna, garlicky poached shrimp, macaroni salad and ponzu glass noodles rest on short-grain Koshihikari rice or seaweed salad. The musubi features Spam that’s slow-cooked in brown sugar for an almost brûléed crust. Sides of kimchi are made fresh throughout the day to retain crunch. Each customizable bowl features a rainbow of texture and flavor.

Ohana Superette’s first iteration launched in 2015, inspired by the Parks’ frequent family visits to Hawaii, and the operation ran as half of a dual concept out of their former sandwich shop, Black Hogg. They closed both restaurants in 2020 when the pandemic began, and though they later opened popular cafe Bodega Park in the space, Eric Park said he always wanted to reprise Ohana Superette in its own form.

“Almost every week there were people like, ‘When’s Ohana coming back?’” he said. “And then one month Miriam’s like, ‘Let’s just open Ohana if a space opens up.’”

When the hair salon next door closed and its space became available, the couple jumped at the opportunity. It took two years to permit and flip the salon into a restaurant, even with a pared-down kitchen that doesn’t allow for much cooking. They added wood paneling and marble accents. This time around, Park said, he streamlined the menu with fewer add-ons and toppings in an attempt to keep things more traditional — though a few less-traditional specials might sneak in occasionally. Ohana Superette is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

2850 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, ohanasuperette.la

Lasita Kapé

Chinatown’s modern Filipino restaurant is drawing even more crowds to Far East Plaza and filling the courtyard with a new weekend series, Kapé. Lasita owners Nico de Leon and Chase and Steff Valencia recently launched a daytime-only Filipino cafe that riffs on meryenda culture, or as Chase Valencia says, “the art of taking a snack break, social pause, recharge and gossip.”

At Kapé, they’re serving fresh pastries such as pandan olive oil loaf iced with coconut, mango royal reimagined as rolled cake, Gouda-topped slices of ensaymadas combined with mamon, and the classic date-and-walnut “food for the gods” bars done instead as cookies.

Fluffy-egged breakfast sandwiches arrive with cheese and smoky eggplant, longanisa, tocino ham or corned beef on freshly baked pan de leche, while specialty coffee offerings include the likes of affogato with miso condensed-milk ice cream, cappuccino with jackfruit purée and espresso with ube milk. The Valencias and De Leon plan to run Kapé on weekends for the foreseeable future, though an expansion of operations is possible. Kapé is open Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

727 N. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 443-6163 , lasita-la.com

Sogo Roll Bar Highland Park

One of L.A.’s best hand-roll bars recently expanded with a second location.

Sogo Roll Bar debuted in 2020 at the edge of East Hollywood and Los Feliz with a 14-seat sushi bar almost solely dedicated to the art of temaki.

In the years since, the menu expanded with donburi and new appetizers. Now the collaborative venture between Sushi Note’s Kiminobu Saito and David Gibbs, and Bar Covell and L&E Oyster Bar’s Dustin Lancaster and Sarah Dietz, expanded with a second outpost, this time in Highland Park. Sogo Roll Bar’s newest outpost offers an identical food menu to the original, and also serves beer, wine and sake. It takes over the former home of Holcomb wine bar, also from Lancaster, and is open Sunday to Thursday from noon to 9 p.m., and Friday to Saturday from noon to 10 p.m.

5535 York Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 561-3100, sogorollbar.com

Bread Head Manhattan Beach

Last year, L.A. Times Food critic Bill Addison called Bread Head “L.A.’s next great sandwich shop.” This summer, it expanded with a location in Manhattan Beach, bringing those fresh focaccia sandwiches practically to the edge of the pier.

Founders and longtime friends Jordan Snyder and Alex Williams — both alums of Trois Mec — began popping up through Los Angeles with stacked sandwiches on crusty-edged bread, then partnered with Joolies founder Greg Willsey and Michael Pasternak (formerly of Night + Market) to launch their first restaurant, in Santa Monica.

Their new location in Manhattan Beach features indoor and outdoor seating, plus a seven-seat bar; that bar, ownership told The Times, will hopefully serve beer and wine eventually. Beachy art and pop culture — such as an autographed still from “Point Break” — line the walls in a nod to the new surroundings, while TVs mean a new place for the neighborhood to watch sports (a feature not found in the original Santa Monica restaurant). A larger kitchen also means a probable expanded hot-foods menu, which could include breakfast and a range of hot sandwiches. Bread Head is open in Manhattan Beach Wednesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

1129 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach, (310) 209-8071, breadheadla.com

DineL.A.

L.A. County’s sprawling two-week event dedicated to dining and special menus returns today, with nearly 450 restaurants participating. This summer‘s iteration of dineL.A. sees the largest number of restaurants offering special items and limited-run prix-fixe menus since the initiative launched in 2008, and 80 of them are entirely new to the program.

For the next 15 days find dineL.A.-exclusive meals at stalwarts such as Mélisse, Bar Amá and Wally’s, along with newer spots such as Marea, Soban, Luke’s Lobster and Saijo.

discoverlosangeles.com/dinela

When I rescued Tatty Jane from the Pasadena Humane Society, she was a super skinny, long-legged little thing with the black and gray coloring and sweetness of a poodle and the long, spindly legs and energy of an Italian greyhound.

At 16 pounds, she had sparse curly hair with a hilarious white tuft that hovered atop her head like a plume of smoke. She was soulful, elegant, loving and clearly puppyish, but her teeth were all brown — so discolored, in fact, that the staff technicians put her age at 4 years old. After examining her, my vet said she was probably only 1 year old — and her brown teeth were most likely the result of a bad diet.

So Tatty Jane had her teeth cleaned, and I determined that she would never again suffer from a bad diet. Of course, I wondered what she was fed to make her teeth so brown with plaque at such a tender age — after all, I have seen lean scavenger dogs in developing countries with beautiful white teeth. Starch and sugars, I learned, are the main causes of plaque, which could mean that little Tatty Jane was fed a steady diet of sugar-laden kibble — or doughnuts.

I did a deep dive into researching homemade dog foods. Who knew that cranberries, in small doses, are good for dogs? They’re full of fiber and antioxidants and help to keep a dog’s urinary tract healthy. I was also delighted to learn that I could bake and grind our chickens’ organic eggshells into calcium powder, needed for a dog’s bone health.

However, I soon concluded that, short of accumulating a whole pharmacy of supplements, I couldn’t guarantee that Tatty Jane could get all recommended trace vitamins and minerals. So I’ve compromised. I make her a well-balanced homemade dog food and serve it with a topping of vet-approved kibble.

So far, so good. Tatty Jane at 7 years old is frisky, at a perfect weight, with a bright white smile.

Michelle Huneven is a Los Angeles-based novelist and food writer.

Warning: Your dog will not live forever. To try to maximize their health and happiness while you are fortunate to have them prancing along by your side, I share with you one of Rufus’ favorite recipes as a jumping-off point. You’ll land on what your dog likes, and what works for you. I prepare — or used to prepare — this in a big batch (you can freeze some of it), then scoop out a cupful for each meal. Stir in some boiling bone broth or water, to take off the chill, because that’s what I would have wanted for myself.

Note: You can use 5 pounds of pet food grind with organ meats instead of 3 pounds of ground meat and 2 pounds of chopped organ meat.

Read: Can Rufus’ dog food make him live forever?

Beloved Food Network star Anne Burrell died by suicide, according to the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

On Thursday morning, the chief medical examiner listed the cause of death as “acute intoxication due to the combined effects of diphenhydramine, ethanol, cetirizine, and amphetamine.”

The celebrity chef and host of “Worst Cooks in America” died June 17 at her home in New York. She was 55.

The Food Network honored Burrell’s legacy with a night of curated episodes of “Worst Cooks” on June 25. Her final season on “Worst Cooks,” co-hosted with Gabe Bertaccini, is scheduled to premiere July 28.

Following the news of Burrell’s sudden death, her co-stars and colleagues paid tribute on social media.

“A very special person who shared her love of cooking with a generation,” Tyler Florence, Burrell’s longtime “Worst Cooks” co-host, wrote on Instagram following her death. “I was lucky to have a front row seat to watch her gift. She was an incredible Chef and I learned a lot from her, as we all do with one another.”

Burrell “owned New York City” and could often be found at Rangers games, Florence continued. While filming “Worst Cooks,” Burrell would join Florence’s family for dinner once a week and the two would stay out late drinking red wine if they didn’t have work the next day.

“Anne had a collage of star tattoos on her left arm. I asked her what they meant and she said she loved the night sky. And, how lucky she felt to be a star,” Florence wrote. “She was one of the brightest. There’s a new star in the sky tonight. I see you Anne. With all your sparkle, looking down.”

Fellow Food Network star Bobby Flay, who co-hosted “Worst Cooks” for four seasons, posted on his Instagram story a photo of Burrell holding two Maine Coon cats, noting that the chef was the one who introduced him to the breed. Flay’s late cat Nacho is a Maine Coon and the inspiration behind his cat food brand “Made by Nacho.”

“Worst Cooks in America was the funnest show on TV,” Flay wrote. “All of your co-hosts (me included) were just along for the Anne Burrell ride.”

Model Gigi Hadid, who appeared alongside Burrell on an episode of “Beat Bobby Flay” in 2020, also took to Instagram to express her grief.

“As a longtime fan, getting to share this day with her was a dream come true,” Hadid wrote in a story. “I wish we could have done it again. She was awesome. Rest in Peace Legend.”

Other Food Network regulars who honored Burrell include chefs Alex Guarnaschelli, Giada De Laurentiis and Maneet Chauhan; “Worst Cooks” co-hosts Beau MacMillan, Robert Irvine and Carla Hall; “The Next Food Network Star” winner Aarti Sequeira; and “Cake Boss” star Buddy Valastro.

“Anne, your passion, energy, and love for food lit up every kitchen,” Valastro wrote on Instagram. “You were a true force and a beautiful soul. Rest in peace, Chef.”

Add the toasted sesame seeds to a blender. Blend on high until blended into a powder, about 30 seconds, stopping and scraping down the sides and bottom corners to get any stuck seeds.

Add the soy sauce, orange juice, garlic, water, sesame oil, rice vinegar, orange zest and pickle juice to the blender with the sesame powder. Blend until incorporated, about 30 seconds.

Was it a restaurant opening or a car show?

On Monday, Cybertrucks and Teslas filed into the parking lot and lined around the block for the opening of the Tesla Diner: a two-story, retro-modern, steel-covered restaurant with two towering movie screens for customers to watch as they “supercharge” their cars.

It marks the popular but controversial car company’s first foray into the restaurant industry. Should it prove successful, owner Elon Musk posted to his social media platform X, the L.A. Tesla Diner will be the first of many.

The contentious new Hollywood diner will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The chef and co-operator Eric Greenspan posted a video of the diner set to Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” to his personal Instagram account with the caption, “Tesla Diner now open. 24/7 from now until forever.”

The roughly 9,300-square-foot Tesla Diner drew at least a thousand customers, according to co-operator Bill Chait, and at least one protester, on its first day. Some traveled for hours and arrived early in the morning to wait in line until the doors opened with little warning, and in memelord Musk fashion, at 4:20 p.m.

The opening day scene was a parade of Tesla owners, Musk fans and curious Angelenos who flocked to Santa Monica Boulevard to find parking lots outfitted with 80 superchargers compatible with any electric car, according to Chait.

Some of the vehicles outside were covered with custom decals, at least one done up in purple glitter, another with sparkly polka dots and one plastered with the face of the Musk-beloved crypto-meme dog, Doge.

Inside, the diner boasts the smell of an In-N-Out in a space that looks as if it were plucked from Disney’s Tomorrowland. From behind the pass in the kitchen, Greenspan shouted customer orders: “Epic Bacon,” tuna melt, grilled cheese, egg sandwich add avocado — most of which come served in paper boxes shaped like Tesla Cybertrucks. Some customers wore them as hats.

The diner is also fully electric, from the fryers to the griddles (no gas stoves).

“If our retro-futuristic diner turns out well, which I think it will, @Tesla will establish these in major cities around the world, as well as at Supercharger sites on long distance routes,” Musk, a former President Trump senior advisor, wrote on X. “An island of good food, good vibes & entertainment, all while Supercharging!”

At the center of the diner are two industry veterans: restaurateur Chait, whose credits include Tartine, Mian, Paloma and Firstborn, among others, and Greenspan, a former Foundry and Patina chef, the creator of New School American Cheese and the culinary lead on MrBeast Burger.

The company gave Chait and Greenspan “more or less carte blanche to operate the diner within the Tesla brand,” Chait said.

Tesla began planning the diner in 2018. Franz von Holzhausen, a lead automotive designer at Tesla, oversaw much of the restaurant’s design and consulted with Chait and Greenspan to bring Musk’s vision to life.

Chait characterizes Musk — who has been lambasted by critics for his work in the Trump administration as well as a recent alleged Nazi salute, which he denied — as “a big thinker.” Longtime Tesla fan, investor and cinematographer James Miller, who arrived at the diner at 6:30 a.m. Monday, likened him to Michelangelo or “Steve Jobs on steroids.”

As smooth as the diner’s opening has proved for the operating duo, sometimes the restaurateurs learn news of it just like the rest of the world: from social media outbursts by its polarizing tech billionaire.

“We hear it before he posts it, usually, but there is stuff that he posts, you know, in the middle of the night: out come proclamations,” Chait said.

Chait said he submitted a proposal for the diner years ago; Tesla chose another operating team, then parted ways, and Chait reentered the picture. When it came to tapping a chef, the restaurateur said he knew who to call. He and Greenspan were already in development of a modern Jewish deli, called Mish, which is planned to open Oct. 3 on La Brea.

“He’s an American chef, he knows this food really well, he understands the system,” Chait said.

Greenspan envisioned a pseudo-retro diner. “Charged sodas” on draft are meant to evoke phosphates, and breakfast is served all day long. There are hot dogs, club sandwiches, biscuits with gravy, tallow French fries, cinnamon buns and slices of apple pie served with vanilla ice cream.

Tesla’s branding — and occasionally Musk’s meme-leaning humor — seep into the food. Waffles come stamped with Tesla’s lightning bolt, while a white paper carton holds four maple-glazed strips of “Epic Bacon.” Tesla’s engineers devised their own smashburger press, which produces crispy edges and a juicy center for the burger topped with caramelized onions, shredded lettuce, pickles, a punchy “Electric Sauce” and Greenspan’s brand of American cheese.

Even the electric vehicles’ range influenced the restaurant: Greenspan and Chait wanted to build a menu using purveyors found within a Tesla’s mileage from a single charge. Burbank’s RC Provisions makes the diner’s wagyu chili. Colton’s Chino Valley Ranchers provides the eggs, while Buena Park’s Brandt Beef supplies the burger patties. Tartine, with a location two blocks away, delivers the bread.

The diner does not allow tipping the staff; instead, Chait said, Tesla covers a 20% tip pool, which is distributed to both front- and back-of-house employees.

“Being in food service myself, it’s always great to see innovation,” said Nathan Hoover, a Tesla owner who drove from San Diego at 4 a.m. that morning. “I was impressed. It was worth the wait.”

Chait said he finds the integration of food and technology “outrageous.” Orders can be placed up to 24 hours in advance, while a new “geofence” system tracks when a Tesla enters a set perimeter, alerting the kitchen to ready its order 15 to 20 minutes from arrival.

Guests can select their preference of dining in or utilizing carhop-inspired delivery. Movies projected onto two large screens in the parking lot can also be viewed within the vehicle. “Easter eggs” are hidden in the menu; Chait said some may or may not pertain to how long certain buttons are held while ordering.

On opening day, rumors ran rampant. Does the diner take crypto as a form of payment? No, Chait said, at least not currently. Will robots deliver the food? No, but one was serving popcorn.

The restaurant’s 360-degree rooftop — accessible by an all-white winding staircase with museum-like displays of Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robots in glass cases — offers ample seating and prime views of the movie screens. At the bar is the Diner Shop, where customers clamored for $40 Tesla Diner T-shirts and $175 levitating Cybertruck models. Adjacent sat a popcorn stand operated by none other than an Optimus itself. Fans giggled as the robot slowly filled paper boxes with popcorn, handed them to customers and gave a wave and peace sign.

Not everyone was there to plug in and dine.

Outside the entrance on Santa Monica Boulevard, a man strode the block carrying a sign that read “Workers should have power not the billionaires!”

It was, he promised, the first of many Tesla Diner protests to come.

“I’m putting word out to Action Network and a variety of other Tesla takedown organizations, so we will be here in vast numbers from now on,” said Charles Happold, who lives in the neighborhood. “We will do everything in our power to get him to sell this place and get out of here.”

The activist said he regularly protests Tesla dealerships on weekends, and considers Musk to be a threat to democracy alongside President Trump. Happold also pointed to Musk’s estrangement from his trans daughter as proof of poor character.

Happold paced the sidewalk, occasionally garnering honks of support from passing cars. As guests exited the restaurant, he stopped them to ask why they supported Musk; many responded that they were unaware of the billionaire’s involvement.

“They’re playing dumb,” he said.

Los Angeles, Happold said, is not a city receptive to Musk. But Teslas queued down the block to enter the diner’s parking lot.

“I wanted to make sure there was sound presence here today at this secret grand opening that will make people understand that this is not something we will tolerate in Los Angeles,” Happold said. “We do not want this restaurant here unless he sells it: It’s a unique place and that would be fine, but we don’t want Musk involved at all.”

For more than 75 years, In-N-Out Burger has been a pillar of California fast-food culture, its Double-Doubles and palm tree logos becoming fixtures of the West Coast landscape. But now, the family-owned chain is making a pivot eastward, with billionaire owner and Chief Executive Lynsi Snyder announcing her own departure from the Golden State.

“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here,” Snyder said during a recent appearance on the “Relatable” podcast, hosted by conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey.

The move to Tennessee represents a seismic shift for the leader of the brand. Currently operating more than 400 locations across eight states — California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, Texas and Idaho — In-N-Out has long thrived on being the burger chain you couldn’t find everywhere.

“I like that we’re sought after when someone’s coming into town. I like that we’re unique. that we’re not on every corner,” Snyder told Forbes in 2018. “You put us in every state, and it takes away some of its luster.”

But times, and Snyder’s position, have changed. The company announced plans in January 2023 to establish a corporate office in Franklin, Tenn., by 2026. In California, the company is consolidating its corporate operations to Baldwin Park, the chain’s birthplace.

The migration reflects a broader corporate exodus from California, with businesses and some billionaires leaving. Tesla, Charles Schwab and Chevron are among the companies that have moved, citing regulatory challenges, operational costs and policy disagreements.

During the podcast, Snyder discussed elements of California policy that make the state hard to operate in, specifically referencing pandemic-era restrictions as particularly challenging.

In-N-Out started in 1948 when Harry and Esther Snyder opened their first location on a small piece of land in Baldwin Park. With little money, they created what would become the first drive-through burger chain.

From those humble beginnings, the chain grew into a part of Southern California mythology, attracting devoted fans from Michelin-starred chefs to celebrities such as Julia Child, who kept a map of all In-N-Out locations in her purse.

Harry and Esther Snyder’s granddaughter Lynsi became president in 2010 at age 27, making her one of America’s youngest billionaires. Under her leadership, she has largely followed the path set down by her grandparents, maintaining the company’s founding principles and her grandfather’s own motto: “Keep it simple, do one thing and do it the best you can.”

Although at one point Snyder said the company wouldn’t expand further east than Texas, her views have changed. She told Stuckey that “the bulk of our stores are still going to be here in California.” The relocation of both corporate operations and the CEO signals a fundamental change in the company’s center of gravity.

“It will be wonderful having an office out there, growing out there, and being able to have the family and other people’s families out there,” Snyder said, though she maintains limits on expansion.

“Florida has begged us, and we’re still saying no,” she said on the podcast. “The East Coast states, we’re still saying no.”

In-N-Out did not respond to a request for comment.

The Cortez family piled out of their car and stretched their legs. Finally, after an hour and a half drive from their Long Beach home, they had made it to Little Tokyo — specifically, to One Piece Cafe.

“I was just sitting in the car like, ‘I’m going to be at the One Piece Cafe,’” said Cammy Cortez, who was introduced to the popular manga and anime franchise by her older brother and now runs a “One Piece” fan account on X. “It’s going to be a good day.”

Timed to the Los Angeles Anime Convention, the largest exposition dedicated to Japanese pop culture in North America, the new permanent restaurant is the second official location of One Piece Cafe, in collaboration with Toei Animation, from Andy Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur behind several themed restaurants. The first One Piece Cafe opened in Las Vegas in May 2024.

“One Piece” follows the adventures of protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, who dreams of becoming the Pirate King, and his band of Straw Hat Pirates as they seek the “One Piece” treasure. Fans of the anime have flocked to the Little Tokyo storefront, eager to try Japanese dishes inspired by “One Piece” characters like Sanji’s “Diable Jambe” Chicken Katsu Sando, with 24-hour brined chicken served on sweet honey milk bread, and Zoro’s Onigiri, in honor of the character’s love of rice and a nod to his precision as a swordsman.

The interior dons a nautical theme, with walls that mimic the wooden deck of a pirate ship and characters depicted inside portholes. Branded merchandise includes Luffy’s signature straw hat, themed key chains and even a “Wanted” license plate. Drinks, ranging from slushies to matcha horchata, come in collectible cups.

“It’s not [like] just they slapped the name ‘One Piece’ onto a random restaurant,” said customer Imelda Cardenas. “They really did it justice with the interior and the menu, and the merch they sell inside is really great too.”

Initially premiering in 1999, the “One Piece” anime has 1,136 episodes and counting, with ardent fans deeply immersed in the lore. The manga, by creator Eiichiro Oda, is the bestselling manga of all time. New audiences were also introduced to the franchise in 2023, when Netflix released a massively successful live-action rendition of the anime.

“If you’re a fan of ‘One Piece,’ then you think it’s the best anime of all time,” explained Karime Benmbarek, who came with his older brother Yassine from Northridge to experience the Little Tokyo restaurant. “Even if you’re just a chill fan, you still feel the love through the community.”

Restaurants themed around Japanese pop culture have recently gained footholds in L.A., with Gudetama Cafe and Hello Kitty and Friends Cafe — both within the Sanrio universe — opening in 2024. Local excitement for “One Piece,” however, seems to be approaching the mainstream. In June, the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted a One Piece Night, featuring a limited edition “One Piece” card drawn by Oda. The Los Angeles Lakers collaborated with “One Piece” for their February matchup against the Clippers; exclusive merch from the match now resells for up to $250.

“‘One Piece’ has a pretty big community, and especially with the Lakers and Dodgers collaborating with One Piece, L.A. is bringing anime into their culture as well,” said Yassine, who immediately alerted his younger brother after seeing a TikTok about the restaurant opening. The brothers bond over watching the show and, lured by the chicken katsu sandwich in particular, quickly made a plan to visit in person.

Karime, who tried the chicken katsu sandwich and curry, said, “I’d definitely come back — if my brother can take me.”

As anime, manga and other elements of Japanese pop culture have become mainstream, the understanding of Little Tokyo as a place where people can engage in those interests has also skyrocketed, said Kristin Fukushima, the executive director of Little Tokyo Community Council. This interest in Japanese subcultures — evidenced in the virality of One Piece Cafe — can have a positive impact on other small businesses in Little Tokyo.

After the Benmbarek brothers finished their meal, they planned to make a day of wandering through Little Tokyo. Another group of friends planned to hunt down a collectible in the nearby shops after visiting the restaurant.

“If you become more into anime and manga, that means you’re seeing depictions of not just culture, but also food,” Fukushima said. “So you have more people knowing what real ramen is versus the Maruchan instant ramen, or people who want real sushi and not just California rolls that they can buy in Ralphs.”

“I think it’s just a growing familiarity with what Little Tokyo has to offer,” she said. “Like, how do I further participate in this?”

The timing of One Piece Cafe’s opening comes as Little Tokyo is emerging from June’s ICE protests. Located minutes from City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center, Fukushima said many small business owners found themselves in a “lose-lose situation,” with images from the local news keeping people away from downtown out of fear.

Fans of “One Piece,” with its themes of friendship and freedom, are primed to be attuned to these tensions.

“I really like how ‘One Piece’ has a lot of nuanced messages about government powers and how oppressed people can come together,” said Daniel Orozco, who first learned about the restaurant at Anime Expo. “It’s really cool and especially relevant right now with everything going on politically.”

Cardenas started watching “One Piece” during the pandemic and quickly caught up by watching 12 episodes a day. Describing that time, she said, “Everything was really scary and uncertain, and people just wanted answers and a distraction.”

“There’s a message of hope in ‘One Piece’ because the protagonist Luffy wants to be the Pirate King, but underneath it all he’s just fighting for justice,” she said. “There’s a lot of symbolism that can be taken into the real world.”

One Piece Cafe is located at 241 S. San Pedro Street and open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.

This recipe is my version of a stew or caldo from my dad’s home state of Durango, Mexico. My dad would make a modified version of this at our house where he substituted chile pasado with roasted chile poblano. This was something he would cook up after work for us, at home after my mom passed away. Whenever I cook that or make that or eat that, it reminds me of that time so vividly.

Here I’ve kept it very simple. It’s excellent with flour tortillas and also makes killer burritos.

This is probably my mom’s favorite dish, and it was our favorite dish for her to make when my brother, my sister and I were kids. She passed away 30 years ago, in 1995, so it just just was calling to me. My mom was born in Lincoln Heights, but her dad is from Texas and my grandma was native, Concho Indian, so it’s very much not traditional, but kind of traditional in that 1960s kind of cooking.

And then that avocado sauce is so good. If you grew up here in the ’80s, in the ’90s, it’s like the avocado sauce that people would serve at Tex-Mex places. It kind of tastes like that, but better.

For the taquitos you can use beef stewing meat: shoulder clod, oxtail, beef plate, any braising meat. I use stewing meat that has nice marbling without a ton of cap fat to mimic the old-school canned meat my mom used to use, Hereford canned beef. It makes this recipe even easier if you can find it!

I serve this beef rolled in fresh, still-warm corn tortillas from La Princesita in East Los Angeles. If you don’t have a local Mexican market with daily warm fresh tortillas, don’t trip. You can use standard corn tortillas, which you can warm on a hot plate or comal; a quick hack is nuking them in a microwave in a damp towel for 30 to 45 seconds, about 10 at a time, so they are easily rollable before frying.

I use lard to sear and fry, but you could easily use rice bran oil or peanut oil. I used stewing meat lard in this version, because that’s how my mom would fry them. She would make a version of guacamole sauce both with and without jalapeño; in this version I use jalapeño. She would also serve them with Mexican rice. Here I serve them a la carte and topped with queso fresco, because why not?

The primary draw at Tun Lahmajo, a restaurant in Burbank lined with grainy woods to resemble a summer cabin, is right there in the name. A mottled, golden-edged lahmajo lands on nearly every table — or maybe three or four of them, for every person in a group.

In Levantine Arabic, the dish is known as lahm bi ajeen: literally, “meat with dough.” Armenians shortened the phrase and adapted the flatbread as their own. Cooks at Tun Lahmajo stretch their floury palette nearly as thin as a water cracker, though the flavor has far more char and tang. Cooks smear on a silky-rough mixture of seasoned beef and tomato paste right to the brim, which often handsomely buckles in the heat of baking.

They might arrive oval, or rounder, or somewhere oblong and in between. Their unpredictable beauty is a reminder that an actual human someone is in the kitchen shaping them. Always, a server rushes them straight from the oven, when they’re at once crisp and bendy, on plates where the crusty circumference hangs just over the rim. A squarish wedge of lemon has been dropped on the lahmajo’s center. Spritzing juice over the surface cuts the concentrated meatiness. Plenty of customers request extra citrus.

I could stop here, and it would suffice as a recommendation. The signature at Tun Lahmajo, consistent and excellent, has already been embraced by the Armenian community of Los Angeles, the largest diaspora population outside of Armenia. They’re keeping the place busy.

In the months since the restaurant opened last summer, though, the menu has kept expanding, to the point that it can be approached two ways: as a roster of comfort foods, and as a doorway into one cuisine’s long and intricate history.

To stick with the bready theme a little longer: A single variation of lahmajo is available, shellacked with cheese. But hedonistically cheesy khachapuris — specialties of the Republic of Georgia, bordering Armenia to the north — yank my attention away.

Adjarian khachapuri, the version tapered on the ends to resemble a canoe, will be remembered by food obsessives for its moment at the end of last decade. Cheese fills its hull; after baking, the cook cracks over an egg or two with pats of butter to exaggerate the richness. Combine it all with a spoon and voila: molten dip in a bread bowl.

To make the puffed Megrelakan (sometimes called Megrelian) khachapuri, eggs and butter are folded into stretchy, grated sulguni cheese before cooking. This one is the jewel. Servers carry it wobbling through the dining room, deflating like a souffle, and then they carve it into sixths at the table using a pizza wheel. Hot and irresistible, the texture is billowy, offset by the crisp, blistered fringes. As the speckled pie cools and its ingredients settle and condense, an appealing salty-sharpness becomes more overt.

Savory breads have been the focus from the beginning, when Eduard Janibekyan and his family opened the first Tun Lahmajo in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in 2008. (The restaurant space had originally been their ground-floor apartment. “Tun” is Armenian for “home.”) As the business found its rhythms, the Janibekyans had the bandwidth to add broader categories of homestyle dishes: cold salads, roasted meats, a range of soups and herbed stews. They mirrored the process, sped up, at their Burbank location.

L.A.’s best Armenian restaurants tend to excel at one forte: the exquisite marinated and charcoal-grilled meats at Mini Kabob; the mulchy pleasures of the greens-filled flatbread at namesake Zhengyalov Hatz; the cured beef, stingingly spiced, packed into sandwiches at Sahag’s Basturma. That, or they serve Lebanese-Armenian menus that trace back to the longstanding diaspora community in Beirut. Currently, the finest among our Lebanese-Armenian institutions is the Hollywood outpost of Carousel.

Very few local places delve into the regionally specific Armenian repertoire — what Janibekyan’s son Vladislav defined in an interview as “Caucasian cuisine,” referring to the geographic area located between the Black and Caspian seas broadly defined as the Caucasus.

Sorting the roots of Armenian food must take into account the aftermath of the genocidal killing of more than 1 million Armenians starting in 1915, and the nearly 70 years under the Soviet regime that closely followed and ended in 1991. The landlocked country, bordering Turkey and Iran to the west, has been a fought-over juncture for millenniums.

“Cultural and gastronomic exchange has been part and parcel of this region for ages … Armenians do not have a national cuisine in the same sense as nationalities that possessed a long history of statehood and well-defined frontiers,” wrote Irina Petrosian and David Underwood in their 2006 book, “Armenian Food: Fact, Fiction & Folklore.” For the example of lahmajo, the authors pointed to repatriated Armenians in the 1960s returning from the Syrian city of Aleppo as the ones who introduced the dish to Yerevan.

How does all this complex history inform a meal in Burbank?

Order a starter of strained yogurt, its density somewhere between mascarpone and cream cheese, to dollop over ripped hunks of lahmajo and bring silkiness to meats like lamb ribs roasted in the oven. I love the way qrchick, a ruddy soup jolted with pickled cabbage, slashes the richness of the khachapuris.

A dish of mildly spiced, sautéed beef and potatoes, both cut into strips, has been made by Armenian cooks for so long that no one can quite pinpoint the origin of its nickname. It’s called “ker u sus,” which colloquially translates as “shut up and eat.” If the combination doesn’t directly stoke your nostalgia, your inquisitive palate may be more stirred by ostri, garlicky spiced beef infused with dried red chiles and fenugreek. Avelouk, a tangle of wild sorrel served cool and garnished with crushed walnuts, brings a welcome infusion of green to the mix.

Khashlama is a category of brothy stews. An elemental variation made with lamb teeters on bland, but the generously sized fish khashlama is a summery joy, brought out in a pot with hunks of trout (watch for bones), peeled potatoes and whole peppers, and heaped with dill, parsley and other feathery herbs.

If you can pace your lunch or dinner with leisure, ask for the traditional and endearingly universal chmur: Russets roasted in the oven for 40 minutes and then smooshed tableside, along with plenty of butter, by a server wielding a wooden masher.

I could race you down other rabbit holes, including the Levantine shades of kebabs, shawarma, ishli (known elsewhere as kibbeh) and a bulghur-heavy riff on tabbouleh, or borscht and oil-glossed, Uzbekistani-style pilaf to swerve into Soviet-era holdovers. The menu is daunting, and against the many other highlights these choices each rate as fine enough.

Probably there will be little room for dessert, but I must point out the gata, a round pastry-cake hybrid served warm that hides an almost custardy layer just under the top crust. One could debate empires and authenticity over a spread at Tun Lahmajo, or take its soulful cooking at face value, but in the end a standout meal concludes as it should begin: with a bronzed thing of beauty pulled hot from the oven.

Slice the fish and assemble the crudo: Remove hamachi from refrigerator and rinse thoroughly under cold running water. Pat dry. Just before serving, cut the fish evenly into 1/4-inch slices.

Place each of the fish slices onto a work surface and zest a lime with a rasp grater over each slice of fish.

Spoon a shallow pool of chilled jalapeño broth onto (preferably chilled) plates or a rimmed platter. Arrange the hamachi slices attractively; fold once and stand the slices on their sides for height. Place the cherry halves, cut side up, around the fish slices. Drizzle lightly with extra-virgin olive oil and scatter torn Thai basil leaves on the plate. Finish with a pinch of Maldon sea salt for garnish if desired. Serve immediately.

Josh Kim and Sam Hong had successful careers in tech — but in 2022, they decided to start making burgers, bought a few portable griddles and did their first pop-up at Thank You Coffee in Chinatown. About a year and a half later, the pair earned a vendor spot at Smorgasburg, where they served 450 burgers on their first day of service inspired by their Korean American childhoods — think pork belly sandwiches with sesame mayo and kimchi jam, and a smashburger patty topped with a tempura-fried enoki mushroom, yuzu mayonnaise and pickled red onions.

Kim and Hong soft opened their bricks-and-mortar location of Softies Burger in the USC Village on July 6, where they formerly worked at Cafe Dulce. Owner James Choi put in a good word for them to the landlord who, after going to Smorgasburg to try their food, offered them a spot at the campus-adjacent shopping center.

“I say it’s like exploring cultural confusion,” Kim said of Softies’ menu. “Sam and I are both Korean American, so we grew up at home eating Korean dishes. But whenever we’re out, we wanted to eat burgers and pizza and whatnot. So it’s kind of trying to figure out what that looks like.”

The newly-opened burger joint has a few new items on the menu, including a classic New York-style chopped cheese sandwich, a chicken Caesar salad with spicy panko breadcrumbs and shrimp paste and a selection of sodas, along with drip coffee and cold brew. Desserts pull from childhood nostalgia, including a diner-inspired lime pie with yuzu and a miso-caramel banoffee pie.

Leading up to the opening, Kim and Hong started a GoFundMe that raised over $18,000 for restaurant equipment, furniture and other inventory. Neither of the pair are chefs, though Kim sees his time working in tech for OpenTable and DoorDash as “data gathering” for what he didn’t realize at the time would become his own restaurant.

The three burgers on the menu hail from Kim and Hong’s Smorgasburg days: the Cali, their take on a classic In-N-Out burger, doctored up with roasted garlic and caramelized onions (a nod to Korean barbecue toppings); the Japanese Peruvian-inspired Aji burger, a smashburger patty topped with pickled jalapenos and a cilantro, garlic and lime mayonnaise; and a rotating third option, which is currently the Crispy Shroom burger.

“We are very specific about the fact that we’re not chefs,” Kim said. “The kind of restaurant we want to build, it’s not too stuffy … We just want this space, especially for the USC students, to feel like their restaurant.”

Kim and Hong designed the 2,600-square-foot space to look like an old-school diner with modern Korean and Japanese influences, pairing retro barstools with spherical chandeliers, sleek white tables and wooden booths and chairs.

Softies Burger is currently open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

835 W. Jefferson Blvd. Unit 1710, Los Angeles, https://softiesburger.square.site

“The Bear” deli from Chicago at Uncle Paulie’s Deli

The hit FX series “The Bear” has given the iconic Chicago beef sandwich renewed time under the national spotlight. On the heels of the show’s fourth season, the dish, which features tender slices of roast beef dripping with au jus on a crusty roll, is back at the forefront of diners’ minds — and Angelenos are about to get a taste.

The Beverly Grove location of Uncle Paulie’s Deli will host Mr. Beef — the Chicago deli that inspired the Berzatto family’s restaurant on the award-winning drama-comedy — for a pop-up on July 19 and 20.

“Last year was such a success we had to run it back,” Uncle Paulie’s wrote in an Instagram post of its former collaboration with Mr. Beef.

Mr. Beef’s signature Italian beef sandwich, topped with giardiniera and dipped in au jus, will be offered at Uncle Paulie’s on Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Happies Hand Made

A new destination for fried chicken has arrived in the Arts District. Chef Joshua Skenes, who formerly led the two Michelin-starred Saison in San Francisco and now-closed, one Michelin-starred Angler in the Beverly Center, opened Happies Hand Made on June 6. Skenes throws his fried chicken on the grill before serving it a la carte, in sandwiches or on top of a crispy waffle alongside tallow fries.

The concept is centered around high-quality comfort food, with limited drops and an evolving menu. Happies Hand Made also offers soft serve, with flavors such as wild strawberry, passion fruit and butterscotch, alongside cold brew, tea drinks and house-made sodas, including the Yuzu-Up and Kumquat Cream Top.

Happies Hand Made is open on Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 8 p.m.

427 S. Hewitt St., Los Angeles, happieshandmade.com

Smokey Chance BBQ and Jikoni at Citizen Public Market

After wowing customers with its 14-hour-smoked brisket at Culver City’s Citizen Public Market for the last nine months, Smokey Chance BBQ will begin a permanent residence at the food hall beginning July 17.

“Before, we literally took over a corner, which was a seating area at the market,” said chef Derrell Smith. “Now we’ll have the opportunity to actually have a full, built-out kitchen [where] we can expand our menu and be able to experiment how we wanted to before.”

Smith, pitmaster Jeff Chen and Darren Wong, who Smith described as the “brain” of Smokey Chance, will serve sliders and other new dishes next week, alongside mainstays that include a brisket Cuban sandwich, brisket cheesesteak, and cornbread made with beef tallow and topped with Calabrian chile honey butter.

“Our barbecue sauce is made with gochujang and jerk — Jeff and Darren are both Taiwanese and Chinese, and my grandma taught me to cook, and she was from North Carolina,” Smith said. “[We’re] taking all of these regional ingredients and turning them into something that’s just fun and whimsical.”

Jikoni, a summer pop-up from “AfriCali” cookbook author Kiano Moju, has been extended at Citizen Public Market for the rest of the summer. Moju puts a California twist on the Kenyan and Nigerian food she grew up eating in Oakland, offering a rotating menu with dishes like Swahili biriyani and saucy coconut butter beans with chapati, along with mishkaki, skewers popular in Tanzania and Kenya.

“When I was on the book tour, people kept asking, ‘Where can I try food like this?’ … I thought it could be fun to do a pop-up where we bring the book to life with some of the recipes,” Moju said.

After a successful pop-up at Melody wine bar this spring, Moju said that Smith told her about a temporary spot opening up at Citizen Public. Her initial two-week residency was extended to a month and just last week, the food hall announced that the Jikoni pop-up would remain through August.

“It’s really fun, but it’s also still incredibly crazy because I thought I’d just be writing recipes and telling people how to cook, and here I am running a restaurant,” Moju said.

Smokey Chance BBQ is open Friday and Saturday from 12 to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 7 p.m, and will begin Thursday service on July 17. Jikoni is open on Wednesday through Saturday from 12 to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 8 p.m.

It started in an East Hollywood parking lot: one small fryer, no permits, a few heat lamps and a tent constantly battered by wind.

A trio of friends — all from L.A.’s Armenian community, and all high school dropouts — scraped together $900 in 2017 because they believed that their Nashville-style fried chicken stand was the future.

Now Dave’s Hot Chicken is worth $1 billion.

This year the modern specialist in the decades-old spicy fried chicken style that originated in Nashville became one of L.A.’s most astounding small-business success stories. The chain currently operates about 320 storefronts, with 800 more planned. Dave’s Hot Chicken has opened as many as five new locations in a day. (“Oh, we’ve done that multiple times,” co-founder Arman Oganesyan said casually.)

The spiced, craggly, neon-red chicken tenders and sandwiches can now be found in London and Dubai just as easily as in Hollywood and Ladera Heights.

And those are now valuable globetrotting chicken tenders. In June private-equity firm Roark Capital acquired the homespun chain, which began with a five-month renegade stint, valuing Dave’s at $1 billion.

“Ever since Dave’s started it changed my life, but this [deal] gives me a little bit of security,” Oganesyan said. According to Oganesyan, who declined to share the figure of his new net worth, the payout was “a lot.”

“Let’s just say it’s starting to look like a phone number,” he said of his bank account.

The 33-year-old entrepreneur, born in Armenia, moved to Los Angeles when he was 2 years old and met another Dave’s founder, Tommy Rubenyan, in kindergarten. In middle school Dave Kopushyan became another fast friend, and eventually the chef, co-founder and namesake of their company.

Until 2017 the thought of owning a restaurant empire — let alone a single restaurant — never crossed Oganesyan’s mind. But that year the aspiring actor and standup comedian noticed Nashville hot chicken starting to trend, primarily given the success of Chinatown’s Howlin’ Ray’s, a West Coast beacon of the dish.

The fried chicken is typically coated in a mixture of cayenne and paprika that singes the tongue. It was invented by Thornton Prince III, of Nashville’s Prince’s Hot Chicken. His descendant Kim Prince brought her family’s legacy to L.A. in 2017 with her Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw restaurant, Hotville Chicken, but closed it in 2022. She now serves her famous Hotville fried chicken via Dulanville Food Truck, which she runs in collaboration with restaurateur Gregory Dulan.

Prince’s sparked hot chicken restaurants throughout the country, but it reached a fever pitch in Los Angeles with Howlin’ Ray’s.

Oganesyan knew Kopushyan, a former Bouchon line cook, had the culinary skills to test the waters, but it took a little convincing to get him on board. But after a taste — and witnessing the popularity — Kopushyan had to try to create a recipe of his own.

“Arman brought me to Howlin’ Ray’s and it blew my mind,” Kopushyan previously told The Times. “We saw the lines at Howlin’ Ray’s and we knew it was going to be a good business.”

‘It’s not called Dave’s Mild Chicken’

When not working shifts at Echo Park vegetarian restaurant Elf Cafe, Kopushyan toiled in his home kitchen with spice blends for four and a half months, obsessively tinkering with breading, seasoning and frying.

The three friends ate it every day, tasting and discussing each batch in Kopushyan’s Hollywood apartment. He wanted to steer the pop-up in a cheffier direction, incorporating their own house-made bread and pickles, while Oganesyan wanted something more tailored to his own “simple palate.” Eventually they found compromise.

The recipes, however, remain secret.

They scraped together about $900: $315 Oganesyan had saved, $300 from Kopushyan’s most recent Elf Cafe paycheck, and another $300 from Rubenyan.

When the trio deemed their product ready, Rubenyan’s parents spotted an opportunity: Across the street from their East Hollywood flower shop sat a vacant lot. They knew the landlords, who gave the trio their blessing to use the space. The plan was simple: Pop up for roughly a year, then spring for a food truck and slowly grow the operation into a bricks-and-mortar.

Things moved at a much faster pace than any of them imagined.

Dave’s Hot Chicken debuted in May 2017 running Monday to Saturday, informally, in the parking lot.

“If we got shut down, we got shut down, back to square one,” Oganesyan said of the business plan. Fortunately for them, it never happened.

As word of mouth spread curious customers lined up for meals that included two tenders with fries, slaw and slices of white bread, nearly identical to what the chain offers today. A few weeks later the team added sandwiches.

Eventually they would expand the spice-level offerings from the simple choice of mild or hot to today’s seven options ranging from no spice to reaper. “We always tell people to get hot, because it’s not called Dave’s Mild Chicken,” Oganesyan said.

The chicken — sourced from Wayne Farms — has been halal from day one, not due to religious preferences but to quality, a choice that multiple members involved said contributed to the seamless expansion into the United Arab Emirates.

The early days were “hectic,” according to its owners, who said they were “working against the elements” with far too many customers than they were prepared for.

An early article from Eater LA multiplied the lines overnight, with 60 to 90 guests waiting for at least an hour. Instagram and TikTok fueled the demand, creating more buzz and a flurry of parking-lot imitators across the city. Within a few months, the trio realized they’d need to ride the hot-chicken wave and expand earlier than planned.

Rubenyan’s brother, Gary, became a partner, allowing them to launch their first restaurant, a corner space in a strip mall on Western Avenue. They invited their friends to scrawl spray-painted phrases and sketches across the walls, an aesthetic now seen in Dave’s locations around the world.

Flying the L.A. coop

Soon after launching their first storefront, investors John Davis and Bill Phelps entered the picture.

Davis, a prolific movie and TV producer, had his hand in a number of fast-casual restaurants. He’d helped incubate and grow businesses such as Blaze Pizza and Wetzel’s Pretzels with his business partner, Phelps.

In 2018 the Dave’s founders sold half of the company to Davis and Phelps, and tapped the latter as chief executive; the company launched the second Dave’s in 2019, quickly followed by a half-dozen more. Franchises spread into San Diego and Orange County, then Canada, across the U.S. and into the United Arab Emirates and London. Lines at openings still routinely wrap around the block, eight years into business.

“I’ve been doing the restaurant industry since I was 15 years old — I’m 51 years old now, and I’ve never seen anything like Dave’s or the fandom around it,” said Jim Bitticks, Dave’s president and chief operating officer.

Bitticks joined Dave’s after the company’s fourth restaurant, and had worked with Phelps and Davis at Blaze Pizza. The companies’ franchise and expansion plans, he said, are similar: Roughly 99% of the restaurants should be franchise-owned-and-operated, with a few company-helmed restaurants to staff training teams, which then help open franchise locations around the world.

The four founders still own and operate seven locations, including the first restaurant and three others in L.A., plus three in Las Vegas. They see themselves as a kind of In-N-Out for Nashville hot chicken — but with a globe-spanning reach.

Within two years of Dave’s partnership with Phelps and Davis numerous celebrities signed on as investors, including Drake, Samuel L. Jackson and Maria Shriver.

“It was great, but I emphasized to everybody that celebrities are not going to make or break your brand,” Oganesyan said. “If your food can’t stand on its own two feet, then it doesn’t matter if the pope endorses you, nobody’s gonna care.”

‘They’re going to sell out’

Then in 2025, a breaded-and-fried bombshell: Multi-billion-dollar private equity firm Roark Capital would acquire 70% of the chain’s business, a deal valued at $1 billion.

The behemoth, Atlanta-based firm currently owns five dozen companies, nearly half of them food-based, including Subway, Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Baskin Robbins, Dunkin’ Cinnabon and Jimmy John’s.

Its courtship with Dave’s was a long one. Representatives attended the opening of the chain’s 15th storefront in 2021, and ever since, they kept in touch. In late 2024 the Dave’s founders decided to expand into even more countries and “nontraditional” spaces such as airports and food courts.

After years of interest from Roark Capital they decided, in early 2025, to agree to a deal.

Bitticks said that a stipulation of the acquisition was that all executives keep 50% of their equity, keeping them engaged in the future of Dave’s Hot Chicken.

“None of us are leaving,” he said.

“We have gotten people saying, ‘Oh, they sold, they’re going to sell out,’” Bittick said. “We’re really focused on not allowing that to happen. Even though there was a sale and some of the equity changed hands, the whole point is that Roark Capital doesn’t want to screw it up, either.”

Eventually, Oganesyan said, he might like to start a new company. For now his focus is on Dave’s and how far they can build the brand.

“I feel like the sky’s the limit right now,” he said.

Nearly everything — at least so far — has remained the same at the company. The same management team remains in place. Oganesyan will remain the branding officer, and Kopushyan the chief culinary officer.

The founders’ hope is that Roark Capital allows for an international expansion with minimal intervention in the existing chain of command. There’s also the increase in access. With a network of global food suppliers, the Dave’s team aims to secure better vendor pricing and similar scaling perks under the Roark umbrella — though the chicken’s sourcing will remain the same.

According to Dave’s owners the food will not change, and if any new items are added to the menu, they will be closely related to the original dishes. Oganesyan said all employees will be retained.

“For the most part,” Oganesyan said, “I think we’ll continue to run the company the way it is.”

After the acquisition, shareholders contributed roughly $60 million of their own profits to start a bonus pool for Dave’s employees, including some store managers whom they felt had helped the business grow over the years.

The chicken road ahead

Before Dave’s, Olivia Mendoza had never tasted Nashville-style hot chicken. The closest she’d come, she said, was Popeye’s — not very close at all. But the spicy hot chicken would change her life, turning her into a first-time business owner in less than one year with the company.

Along with Bitticks and three others, Mendoza owns and operates Dave’s locations in Ontario, Fontana and Chino Hills, and a fourth is set to debut in Claremont this month, with more planned for next year.

Could the excitement over Nashville-style hot chicken eventually fizzle out?

“Obviously, there’s always things that come and go — a trend — and they die in a few years,” Mendoza said. “But I feel like this is something that’s going to stay because it’s not just another brand. I think because of all it has behind it, and all the support that is there, that it will keep us going and growing as well.”

The company hopes to bring its neon-red chicken strips farther into the UAE, U.K. and Europe. But to Oganesyan, no matter where Dave’s opens and how far his hot chicken empire spreads, Los Angeles will always be the chain’s home base.

“We’re just so known out here,” he said. “It’s our hometown. It’s like a home court advantage out here.”

Renowned for its elegant izakaya-style dishes and tasting menu served counterside, Shibumi earned its first Michelin star in 2019. Now, nine years since the restaurant’s opening, it will close on July 19, chef-owner David Schlosser wrote in an Instagram post last week.

“We embarked on a journey fueled by an outpouring of love, passion and curiosity from an extraordinary community,” Schlosser wrote. “We dared to be different, reviving ancient recipes and time-honored techniques that carried the weight of centuries.”

When Shibumi opened in 2015, Schlosser aimed to bring both Japanese classics and upscale tasting menus, sometimes with centuries-old recipes, to downtown L.A. Now, as business dwindles for many restaurants and other establishments and citywide crises such as homelessness pervade, even award-winning restaurants like Shibumi are struggling to keep doors open.

“In the end of 2023 to 2024, things really flattened out — the staff is the same, the recipes were the same. The only thing that wasn’t the same was people just weren’t coming in,” Schlosser said. “Any business owner invests in a community. And when you see that same destruction and graffiti 10 years later, it’s sad.”

Shibumi joins a growing crowd of recent restaurant closures in L.A., including the 117-year-old Cole’s French Dip downtown, soul food bistro My 2 Cents on West Pico Boulevard and natural wine bar Melody in Virgil Village.

“Shibumi, a modest, season-dependent izakaya on a lonely block downtown, feels like a Tokyo restaurant in important ways, which is probably kind of the point,” Jonathan Gold wrote in 2016. “Schlosser’s smack of pure obsession may be precisely what downtown needs.”

Shibumi is open Wednesday through Sunday from 6 to 9 p.m.

815 S. Hill St., Los Angeles, (323) 484-8915, shibumidtla.com

Cabra

Cabra, opened in 2022 by Girl & the Goat chef and “Top Chef” winner Stephanie Izard, will close on July 31. The Peruvian restaurant and bar is located on the rooftop of the Hoxton hotel in downtown L.A., which is finding new leadership for its two restaurants — Cabra and Moonlark’s Dinette, the latter of which will remain open during the transition.

“We’re incredibly proud of what we built together at the Hoxton, Downtown L.A.,” said Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, co-founders of Boka Restaurant Group, which operates Cabra, in a statement to The Times. “It’s been a privilege to be part of this community, and we’re excited to keep doing what we love at Girl & the Goat, just around the corner.”

The Peruvian-inspired restaurant, known for its array of ceviches, skewers and tropical cocktails, is open Sunday through Thursday from 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 5 to 11 p.m. and for Sunday brunch from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

1060 S Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 725-5858, cabralosangeles.com

Mother Tongue

Chef Michael Mina’s health-minded and globally-influenced Mother Tongue, located on the rooftop of a members-only fitness club in Hollywood, closed in late June. The rooftop restaurant opened in 2022 with the aim of highlighting non-processed, whole ingredients on its menu, which offered a variety of Mediterranean-inspired dips, appetizers and mains, along with veggie-forward pastas and sides.

“It’s really about how you take the best dishes and prioritize a health and wellness component from start to finish, from the products to the techniques,” Mina, chef and owner of Orla in Santa Monica and Bourbon Steak in Glendale, told The Times before Mother Tongue opened.

Verve Coffee (Spring Street)

When Verve Coffee Roasters first arrived in L.A. in 2015, the third-wave coffee shop became known for its roasted beans and a juice bar inside its modern industrial cafe on Spring Street. Over the next ten years — during which the Santa Cruz-based chain opened four more cafes in L.A., one of which contains a roastery, along with several shops in Japan, and more recently launched its own line of matcha — Verve earned a reputation as one of the city’s most reliable coffee spots, adapting to customers’ changing preferences with more unique teas and coffees on the menu.

On June 1, Verve closed its Spring Street coffee shop, its first in Southern California, citing downtown L.A.’s “evolving landscape” as the reason for closure in an Instagram post.

“Like many businesses in downtown L.A., we saw lasting changes in foot traffic patterns that deeply affected day-to-day operations,” a Verve spokesperson told The Times in an email. “While we worked hard to adapt — through programming and optimizing operations — the level of consistent foot traffic simply didn’t support what is needed to sustain the cafe in a high-overhead environment like downtown.”

Verve Coffee Roasters will continue to operate at its other L.A. locations in Manhattan Beach, West Hollywood and the Arts District.

The average wedding registry is filled with blenders, dishware and sets of fancy glasses and knives. Bride-to-be Liv Dansky didn’t need any more kitchen equipment.

As a seasoned recipe developer, food writer and kitchen gear reviewer, her collection of appliances rivaled the most well-stocked test kitchens in the country. When it came time to marry her longtime boyfriend, she knew they didn’t want, or need, a traditional wedding registry.

She and Jeffrey Rosenthal met at Washington University in St. Louis. He was from Manhattan Beach. She was from Denver. Their relationship blossomed as the two ate around their new city, trying as many restaurants as they could on a college kid’s budget.

“Exploring restaurants and food are my love language,” says Dansky. “I love trying new restaurants, and so does he.”

With her heart set on a career in food, Dansky spent a year abroad at Le Cordon Bleu in London. Rosenthal continued his medical studies, and Dansky eventually landed a job in the test kitchen of Food & Wine and Southern Living magazines in Birmingham, Ala. She spent her days shopping for groceries, assisting with food styling on shoots and testing and developing recipes.

When the two decided to marry and move to Los Angeles, they knew how they wanted to discover their new home together.

“Food has just been my entire life,” says Dansky. “I decided that it would be fun to get gift cards to restaurants in Los Angeles because it’s a really great way to get to know a city,” she says.

Her Los Angeles bridal shower took place in a back room at Mercado La Paloma with food from Gilberto Cetina’s Holbox on the tables. And the invitation included a special request for guests in the form of a poem:

As you may know, Liv and Jeff love to eat
Exploring food in L.A. will be such a treat
From Salt & Straw to Sugarfish
Even In-N-Out is so delish
So instead of gifting them a new Crock-Pot
Perhaps a gift card to a restaurant that’s hot!
Although a registry is the typical deal
I bet they would love to try your favorite meal.

The guests delivered. Dansky and Rosenthal received dozens of gift cards to restaurants all over the city. There were classics like Dan Tana’s and Musso & Frank, award-winning restaurants like République and Bavel. The selection ranged from Pink’s Hot Dogs to the crisp, white-tablecloth-covered tables at Nancy Silverton’s Osteria Mozza.

“It was so fun,” says Dansky. “Jeff’s aunt really took it to heart and she got us a ton of gift cards to places we probably would have never gone to like Dan Tana’s and Philippe’s.”

Rosenthal’s aunt arranged the gift cards in a binder with specific instructions for the newlyweds. They could use the the cards for a date night at least once a month. And for each meal, she included two blank note cards.

“How about writing about the food and your favorite dish,” she wrote. “Possibly write about another restaurant that you want to try that has the same chef.”

She told the couple to keep the note cards a secret and share the memories with each other the following year.

Dansky and Rosenthal found themselves all over Los Angeles. They obsessed over Margarita Manzke’s baguette at République, ordered with both butter and pan drippings. Though Rosenthal has spent a fair amount of time in the South, she couldn’t get enough of the shrimp and grits at Keith Corbin’s Alta Adams in West Adams and the cornbread at Hatchet Hall in Culver City. She’s still dreaming about an orange meringue dessert from Funke in Beverly Hills and a plate of crispy rice with squid ink she ordered as a special at Crudo e Nudo in Santa Monica. They spent the day in Pasadena after a meal at Union, an excellent Italian restaurant in Old Pasadena.

“I had never been to Pasadena, so it was fun to get to explore new parts of the city,” Dansky says. “I mostly just want to eat out, and we don’t really do a lot of other things. I would have spent all this money eating at these restaurants, so it saved us quite a bit.”

With restaurants and food vendors across the city still struggling to recover from the Hollywood strikes, January fires and the immigration raids and demonstrations, the gift cards were also a way to help Los Angeles restaurants. Gift certificates offer immediate revenue and often lead to repeat customers and diners spending more than the total value of the cards.

Dansky says she and Rosenthal have already returned to some of the restaurants they discovered through the certificates multiple times. They’re now budding regulars at Hatchet Hall.

After a year and a half of eating their way through the city, they still have a few gift cards left. Lobster rolls at Brooke Williamson’s Playa Provisions, French dips at Philippe the Original and sandwiches at Johnnie’s Pastrami in Culver City will all be future date nights.

“I lived in a lot of cool places, but in L.A., anything you want is accessible,” Dansky says. “On the weekends, we can spend the entire day running around, eating and exploring new neighborhoods. It’s the best way to get to know a city.”

Sun Nong Dan is a specialist in sullungtang, a gentle broth made by boiling beef bones for hours, even days, until the liquid turns a shimmering, pearlescent white that is pretty much the opposite of what French chefs are taught in cooking school. The soup is fatless and softly fragrant, not quite as rich as the soup at fellow specialist Han Bat, but with a sturdy mineral spine and a sensation that you are getting healthier with each sip.

When you first sip sullungtang, you may recoil at its blandness until somebody remembers to tell you that you are supposed to add sea salt and chopped scallions from canisters on the table. A sullungtang restaurant will always have vivid radish pickles on the table; I think it may be a law. If you are so inclined you can dribble some of the tart, spicy brining liquid into the broth, although I never quite think the lovely, beefy version at Sun Nong Dan quite needs it.

You can supplement the dish with sliced brisket, the chewy boiled cartilage from ox knees or soft chunks of beef-cheek meat. You can also get a clear, milder broth or order the meats on a separate, nicely arranged platter. Sullungtang has a reputation as a soothing morning-after restorative, perfect both after an evening of hard drinking and as an early-morning palliative. It is not an accident that the restaurant, whose name derives from a historic name for sullungtang, is open 24 hours each day.

But the throng in that Koreatown strip mall — it’s not there for the ox bone soup. Ox bone soup is not why you stand patiently outside while the excellent noodle shops, stew merchants and seafood parlors that surround it are half-empty. (The hosts seem to take special glee in crossing out the names of supplicants who are not present when their parties are called.) It is not ox-bone soup that New York chef David Chang posts to the zillion followers of his Instagram feed or has been known to eat twice a day when he’s in town.

When you finally straggle into the cramped dining room, possibly 90 minutes after you first scrawled your name on a clipboard, it is not ox bone soup that you see on every table, not ox bone soup at the center of awkward first dates and not ox bone soup that causes everyone to whip out their phones when the food comes.

The waiter will stand patiently at the table while you try to decipher the menu printed on your paper place mat, trying to figure out if a place that offers a choice between boiled ox knee and boiled cow head was really what you had in mind. Because he knows that you are going to settle on the same short rib stew that everybody else in the restaurant is eating, at least everybody under the age of 50. Sullungtang has a definite place in the ecosystem, and you should definitely order a pot to kill time until the main dish comes, but that short rib stew, galbi jjim, is just killer.

So you nibble on the side dishes, which include that turnip kimchi, a rather wonderful plate of bristly Korean chives with chile, and an extremely pungent traditional cabbage kimchi. You will be asked if you’d like white or brown rice: Go for the latter, which is steamed with purple beans.

The one listed appetizer is steamed dumplings, which aren’t bad when the kitchen hasn’t run out of them. The sullungtang is light and nourishing; I suggest the one with brisket unless you really like the chaw of kneecap. A bit of time elapses — the restaurant is temporarily without an alcohol license, although the walls are decorated with ads for beer and soju.

And then the galbi jjim hits the table, hissing and sputtering in a heavy stone pot nearly the size and heft of your emergency spare, a mountain of meat and vegetables rising out of a violently red lagoon of broth, enveloped in its own small universe of steam.

Galbi jjim is one of the standards of refined Korean cuisine, a favorite in the old royal courts and often served on Chuseok, which is more or less the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving. If your grandmother loves you, she might prepare galbi jjim on a Sunday afternoon, and the house will smell wonderful, of meat, soy and sweetness. Galbi jjim is a symbol of prosperity — the cut of beef is not inexpensive, and the dish takes several hours to prepare. I am quite fond of the traditional versions in Koreatown restaurants like Soban and Seongbukdong. Well-made galbi jjim is robust yet delicate, fragile but spoon-tender, flavored with pine nuts and jujube dates.

The galbi jjim at Sun Nong Dan is Hendrix shredding a Bob Dylan song or David Choe slapping paint onto a wall, all the sensations of the dish run through a distortion pedal and cranked up to 10. You’ll be getting the dish extra-spicy (although the waiter will try to talk you out of it), and the amount of garlic that will seep out of your pores afterward is almost surreal. The pot that it comes in is hot enough and thick enough to crisp the cylinders of rice noodles, tteok, put a light char on the meat and keep the scarlet braising sauce bubbling long enough to reduce to a thick, insanely flavorful sludge that both coats and saturates the turned carrots and potatoes.

If you have ordered it with cheese — you have to order it with cheese — a waiter scoops a big handful of white gratings over the top and bazookas it with a torch, creating several small fireballs along the way for effect until the mass breaks down into oozing, char-flecked rivulets that stretch from your chopsticks like pizza goo.

“What kind of cheese is this?’’ I asked.

“Cheese,’’ the waiter replied.

From afar, it looks unassuming: rows of multicolored tents bustling with customers. But up close, it’s a cherished yet common scene that dominates summer dining in L.A. — street vendors slice juicy al pastor off a rotating spit, dicing it with a long knife and tossing the meat into a freshly pressed tortilla topped with a pile of chopped white onion and cilantro. Families crowd around the stand, some recording the spectacle with their phones, colorful aguas frescas in hand.

On the border of Westlake and Pico-Union sits El Gato Night Market, a destination for diverse Latino cuisines and communities that takes over an empty parking lot every Thursday through Sunday. On a typical night, roughly 70 to 80 vendors, many of them immigrants, fill the air with a joyous mix of reggaeton music and carne asada smoke that wafts from their grills.

But on June 28, El Gato was down to just 45 vendors. Two days before, there were around 25. After shutting down for two weeks in early June when Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids began to spread through L.A., the market is slowly regaining its footing.

The night market reopened on June 20, in a much smaller lot across the street from its usual home — the same lot where it first opened back in July 2022, when it only had a handful of booths, according to vendor Geofrey Mejia.

“Hopefully by next week we’re back to normal, slowly but surely,” said Mejia, the owner of Nieves Artesanales, his family’s ice cream cart that sells classic Mexican flavors like nuez, or walnut. “Everybody’s struggling right now. A lot of these vendors actually just live off of this, they don’t do anything else.”

Street vendors’ high degree of visibility, especially at night markets, is part of what makes them such an integral aspect of the L.A. food scene — immigrants find tastes of home at markets like El Gato. They also play a large role in keeping the L.A. food scene accessible — but the simple act of coming to work and setting up their carts on city sidewalks puts them at risk of being arrested by ICE.

“It seems like [ICE agents] are just picking up anybody,” Mejia said. “You feel more like they’re profiling at that point.”

Some street vendors have been directly involved in anti-ICE protest efforts, like the trio behind an aguas frescas stand who poured milk onto the faces of tear-gassed protesters as a salve. But as El Gato and other food businesses in L.A. face a dwindling customer base due to the presence of ICE, vendors are forced to choose between their safety and primary source of income.

“People have been afraid to buy, and that really affects vendors like us,” said Favian Salas of Tacos El Champ at El Gato. “If we don’t sell, there is no economy … and it’s affecting everyone.”

Now, the scene at El Gato Night Market is somewhat of a balancing act: Vendors, many of whom worry for their safety and the future of their businesses, show up for work out of necessity — but also to provide comfort and familiarity for customers, most of whom are Latino and often bring their young children.

Knowing that many vendors rely heavily on El Gato for income, Cristian Bautista, one of the night market’s organizers, was reluctant to temporarily close the market last month. Vendor safety has long been a priority for Bautista, who intentionally chose an enclosed private parking lot as the location for El Gato and hires a security guard during the night market’s operating hours. Bautista is also the owner of Pastas Mr. Cat, a stall at the entrance of the night market where he greets customers with steaming pans of fettuccine alfredo and seafood spaghetti.

“The community feels like a family,” Bautista said of the vendors, primarily Latino but also East Asian. “In various places, usually there are only tacos and Mexican food … [At El Gato] there are many people of different countries. … That’s why it’s popular.”

Inside, the night market feels isolated from the city around it, as vendors hand out free samples of pan dulce and carnitas wrapped in soft tortillas and families fill standing tables with smoked ribs, hibachi fried rice and rolled ice cream.

One of El Gato’s first vendors, Mejia has watched the market grow from less than 10 vendors into a late-night destination. The dozens of vendors can draw anywhere from 800 to 1,000 customers on a given night, according to Bautista — a number that has shrunk significantly since El Gato reopened on June 20.

Mejia estimates that about 30% to 40% of the night market’s customers are tourists. Savanna Deyro, a visitor from Las Vegas, came to El Gato on June 26 with her boyfriend and infant son after the couple saw a video of the night market on TikTok.

“We always like to support local businesses and help out the community as much as we can,” Deyro said after buying pupusas from Vicky’s Pupusas, a Salvadoran food stand. “We know that they’re struggling and we want to support them in any way possible, even if we don’t know them.”

As Jocelyn Arevalo, who has been vending with Vicky’s Pupusas at El Gato for about four months, shaped masa for pupusas and threw them onto a flat-top grill, she said that the last few weeks have brought financial uncertainty for vendors.

“We are afraid that something might happen,” Arevalo said. “Customers are a little [scared] too.”

Located just outside downtown L.A., El Gato also serves a number of neighborhood locals. Jonothan Vasquez has been grabbing dinner at the night market, which is down the street from where he lives, every week for more than a year. On June 26, in between bites of a taco from Tacos El Champ, he said that the night market had noticeably fewer customers since it reopened.

“I love to support because it means the difference,” said Vasquez, who added that the good food and customer service is what keeps bringing him back. “This whole country is built on immigrants. … A lot of people don’t realize the impact.”

One of El Gato’s most popular vendors, Tacos El Champ typically draws large crowds as Salas dices carne asada and another employee uses a tortilla press to flatten fresh masa. On June 26, Salas seemed disheartened by the lack of customers. But two days later, as a bustling crowd filled the night market’s aisles, vendors seemed to match the energy — the music was louder and the displays of food and drinks on their front tables were larger. It wasn’t as busy as it was before June 6, but it was a first step nonetheless, said Salas, who takes pride in his Tijuana-style tacos.

“When people try [our tacos], they practically feel like they’re in Mexico,” Salas said. “We hope [the night market] fills up like before.”

Like many businesses around L.A., the vendors of El Gato implore customers to support them as they navigate the night market’s reopening with uncertainty about its future.

“People should come since we have food from all countries, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico,” said Arevalo, flipping fresh pupusas and portioning out tangy curtido topped with fresh salsa roja. “They should support us. It’s the only source of income we have at the moment.”

On a Friday morning, Maria Sanchez stands next to a construction site. Steel beams are being hoisted into the dusty pink sky behind her. The trunk of her Hyundai Sonata is open. Inside is precious cargo — dozens of carne asada burritos, hand-wrapped in tinfoil. A construction manager approaches her. If he doesn’t like the burritos, she has to leave, he jokes. After a satisfied bite, the manager buys 15 burritos for all of his workers.

“I sell out in 30 minutes — less than an hour, and I’m already gone,” she says. A recent Instagram post says: “Crazy how I first started selling only 10 burritos a day to now selling up to 60 to 75 burritos a day.”

“Maria la de los Burritos” is a Honduran American home cook who’s found social media fame selling burritos out of the trunk of her car. Growing up in a Honduran immigrant household, Sanchez always admired her mother’s cooking. As a mother, Sanchez began cooking for her Mexican husband and their two sons. While battling a bout of depression, she got the idea — why not bring her cooking to the workers on the streets of L.A. and, as it turned out, to millions on TikTok?

As ICE raids have gripped the city and sparked a culture of fear across multiple immigrant communities in Southern California, taqueros have vanished from the streets. The Home Depot parking lot, which was once bustling with day laborers, is empty, Sanchez notes. “A lot of vendors that I usually see around that area weren’t there either,” says Sanchez.

In Inglewood, the Honduran immigrant community is struggling to stay afloat, with their businesses in peril. “A lot of people are affected by it,” says Sanchez. “My mom has a friend who has a business where she cuts hair. It’s been so slow. Nobody wants to come out of their houses.”

Sanchez’s mother urges her to be cautious when selling food, as legal citizens have been targeted in ICE raids as well. During the ongoing raids, Sanchez was nervous about selling burritos but decided to after fervent encouragement on social media. In the morning, she arrived to a line of hungry construction workers.

“Sometimes, eight people are right there already waiting in line for me to come. I get nervous when I see a lot of people. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m doing all this on my own,’” she says. “I always tell people: As Latinos, we make it happen.”

Sanchez adds another element of appeal to her work — long eyelashes, French-tipped acrylic nails, maroon lips and curve-hugging denim. The aesthetic resembles a popular Mexican style of dress called buchona, characterized by flashy accessories and cinched waists.

“I’ve always liked dressing like that,” Sanchez says, laughing. At 3 a.m., before assembling burritos, Sanchez carefully applies her makeup, resembling the timeless beauty of Selena Quintanilla. She loves presentation, she explains.

“People will say, ‘You get your makeup and hair done. You still manage to get ready and still do burritos. They’ll always be in shock,” she says.

Her immigrant parents encouraged her to dress modestly in her childhood. When she moved out, she began experimenting with fashion. “I never got the chance to dress the way I wanted,” she says. “I moved out of the house and moved in with my boyfriend. I started doing what I wanted to do and how I wanted to dress.”

Sanchez’s career as a beloved, now internet-famous burrito vendor began in the Inglewood Home Depot parking lot in October 2024.

“People tell me they never see people selling burritos. I see tamales and empanadas, never just a pure standard burrito. I got the idea — let me try selling burritos,” says Sanchez.

Like most children of Los Angeles, Sanchez has had a lifelong romance with Mexican food. “I do cook some of my culture’s food, but I cook more Mexican food because my husband is Mexican,” Sanchez explains. Growing up in South-Central, she developed a deep affection for Mexican cuisine, visiting La Luz Del Día restaurant downtown most weekends.

Her burritos were an immediate success. She sold out each time, sometimes in just an hour, with her no-frills, crowd-pleasing classics like carne asada, pollo and breakfast burritos, priced at $5 each.

At Home Depot, selling burritos as an attractive 26-year-old woman came with hazards. Occasionally, Sanchez was subjected to men filming her, whistling and harassment. It can be vulnerable, she explains. “I don’t see young girls my age dressed up the way I am, selling food alone,” she explains. At the construction site, Sanchez has befriended many of the workers who eat her burritos, which deters harassment. “I’m super talkative with all my customers,” she says.

Weeks passed, and the mood shifted to uneasiness among the customers as threats of an ICE raid loomed, Sanchez noted. “In that last week in Home Depot, I wasn’t getting as much clientele because a lot of people are scared to go out,” she explains.

In January, Home Depot management was forced to ask Sanchez to leave. Her burritos were becoming too popular and creating a traffic hazard.

In the coming weeks, Sanchez began wandering Inglewood, scouting construction sites for potential customers. By then, Sanchez’s business had already exploded. She began posting videos of her cooking on TikTok and Instagram, which, to Sanchez’s surprise, went viral. She gained over 27,500 followers on Instagram with cooking videos that amassed millions of views.

Sanchez was bewildered by her newfound fame: “That’s what motivates me to keep going because people are watching.”

Sanchez’s business has only swelled since leaving Home Depot. The workers were delighted with her home-cooked and affordable Mexican food, which was a delicious and cost-effective alternative to fast food. “I’ve never had a single complaint to this day,” she says proudly.

If Los Angeles is crowded with amazing Mexican food, what makes Sanchez’s burrito rival the rest? Her breakfast burritos are filled with fluffy eggs and sausage — each hearty bite packs a punch of flavor, evenly distributed throughout the burrito. The carne asada is accompanied by tangy, vibrant homemade sauces that Sanchez makes by hand. For a construction worker, a burrito offers a generous, portable meal — a missile of nutrition.

She starts cooking each day at 4 a.m. “Nothing is made the night before, besides the beans, which take three to four hours to cook,” she says. “I want everything freshly made in the morning. That’s the point for me. “

Sanchez credits her business savvy to her mother. As a child, to instill independence in Sanchez, her mother would send her to downtown L.A. to sell gum on the sidewalks. “She always put into my head: You can get what you want on your own. You can do it.,” Sanchez says. “She’s always by my side.”

Sanchez hopes that her burrito business inspires other young women to start loncheras, or mobile food businesses. Occasionally, she creates tutorial videos about selling burritos and reassures women looking to start their own ventures. “A lot of young girls tell me, ‘I want to do this. I’m only 22 years old, but you’re inspiring me to do it,” she says. “I want to show girls that even though you’re young, you could make it happen.”

Sanchez dreams of one day owning a truck — a proper lonchera. “I want to do it all pinked out,” she says, smiling. “I’m trying to save as much money as I can for that.”

Melody, the Virgil Village bungalow that constantly thrummed with diners who settled into its open-air living room and patio to try burgeoning food pop-ups, swill natural wine and jam to owner Eric Tucker’s genre-spanning DJ sets, is set to close permanently on July 12. Open for nearly a decade, Tucker wants Melody to be remembered not for its status as a trendy bar, but for its inclusive environment that thrived on the curiosity of its diners.

“We were that cultural [and] gender safe space where you could be whoever you wanted to be,” Tucker said, “exposing people to foods that they maybe never had before and giving chefs those chances to shine.”

According to Tucker, Melody began to see a decline in business during the Hollywood strikes in 2023. Combined with the compounding effects of the January wildfires, a tense political climate and L.A.’s high cost of living, the bar-restaurant “just couldn’t do it anymore.”

“I don’t see how places survive anymore,” Tucker said. “I’ve never done this before, closing a business. But I think one of the most special things for me is, how do I get out of this thing without losing it all?”

Prior to Melody, Tucker ran an Italian restaurant and bar in New York City. He opened Melody with his ex-wife Paloma Rabinov in 2017, and at first, the wine bar followed a typical dinner service format with a California- and French-inspired menu. But less than a year later, Melody’s financial struggles prompted him and Rabinov to shift to a rotating pop-up format. They began hosting different chefs for days and weeks at a time — Mexican-Jewish pop-up Malli even earned a two-year residency — with a short house menu offering cheese, charcuterie and other bar snacks.

Within the first few years of opening, Tucker began growing Melody’s wine list, which consists entirely of natural, low-intervention wines sourced from all over the world, with bottles available for retail purchase and many priced under $80. Tucker described that time as Melody’s “golden years.” Customers drank bottles of wine in the parking lot while waiting for hours to get in, where it was a “party every night.” The goal was to offer diners something new, and to give rising chefs, many of whom had yet to open their own restaurants, a space to experiment — all complemented, of course, by great wine.

“We weren’t a restaurant. We weren’t a bar,“ read Melody’s Instagram post announcing the closure. “Thanks to each of you who entered our little bungalow … a unique experience-experiment that was always a best kept secret.”

Tucker hopes to preserve Melody’s carefree, communal spirit when he temporarily reopens the space on July 16 while awaiting a buyer for the bungalow.

“Each night is essentially a ‘rent party,’” a Monday Instagram post from Melody read. “Very few rules with cheap prices may encourage you to stick with me 6 nights a week.”

Along with “maybe only one” other employee, Tucker will be the sole staff at Melody when it reopens. He will be making and serving pizzas as his pop-up alter ego Ugly Pie, which has made previous appearances at Melody — though some customers weren’t aware that the pop-up was run by Tucker himself. He said that he is prepared to operate the restaurant this way — making the food himself with few to no other employees — “if I have to,” whether it lasts for two weeks or two years.

“Melody was a really formative place for me to get my feet wet in terms of tasting a bunch of different wines, “ said Princie Kim, a longtime Melody customer who also works in the local wine industry. “There’s no air of pretension in there … Most nights of the week, I want to feel taken care of, but in a very relaxed and very human, raw way — and Melody gives me that in all ways.”

For its final days of regular service, Melody will serve Ugly Pie on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by burgers and fried chicken pop-up Little Piggy on Friday and Hancock Park butcher shop Standing’s Butchery on Saturday. While Tucker is unsure how long Melody’s temporary reopening will last, he plans to leave Los Angeles afterwards and possibly return to New York.

“It was always really rewarding to look across the room and just see all different types of people in here together,” Tucker said. “We weren’t perfect, but it wasn’t supposed to be.”

When the oil is ready, add the cauliflower and cook, turning the florets as needed to color evenly and adjusting the heat if necessary to maintain the oil at 365 degrees, until the cauliflower is tender and deep golden-brown, 4 to 5 minutes. Using a wire skimmer, transfer to the towel-lined sheet pan to drain and immediately season with salt.

Serve the warm cauliflower with the tahini sauce for dipping and lemon wedges on the side.

My 2 Cents, a soul food bistro that anchors a section of West Pico Boulevard that’s home to multiple Black-owned restaurants, is set to close permanently on July 31. Opened by chef Alisa Reynolds in 2013, the restaurant became a neighborhood favorite thanks to a Southern comfort menu that’s informed by Reynolds’ L.A. upbringing, including turkey meatloaf, grit fries and BLT sandwiches with fried green tomatoes.

“It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for the last few years,” Reynolds said of the restaurant’s closure. “For me, I think the best thing to do is to be able to feed people in their homes, do pop-ups, do collabs, and make the city excited again. I can do more as chef Alisa than I can do at My 2 Cents.”

Moving forward, Reynolds, who was a private chef for the Dodgers and rapper-actor Common before opening My 2 Cents, will focus on expanding the restaurant’s catering arm, in addition to collaborations and pop-ups with local chefs and restaurants. She is also developing a product line.

“I want to inspire the world through my food,” she said. “Sometimes you have to make such decisions, especially during times when everything is changing.”

Listed on The Times’ guide to the 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. for two years running, My 2 Cents joins a growing list of notable restaurant closures this year, including fellow 101 awardee Here’s Looking at You in Koreatown last month.

Reynolds cited a host of reasons for the closure, including significant financial loss following the COVID pandemic, Hollywood industry strikes, January wildfires and, most recently, ongoing raids from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I just kept going. I was like, ‘Nothing’s going to stop us. We have to,’” said Reynolds, who called the decision to close My 2 Cents one of the hardest she’s ever had to make. “I had so many great customers and clients that believed in this restaurant. Because I think that it was more than a restaurant. It was like a little movement of love.”

This is not the first time My 2 Cents has been under threat of closure. In 2017, Reynolds launched a crowdfunding campaign to settle a lawsuit brought by former backers of the restaurant. Multi-hyphenate entrepreneur Issa Rae joined forces with musicians Solange and Earl Sweatshirt on a fundraising dinner that helped keep its doors open.

When pandemic shutdowns forced the restaurant‘s closure in 2020, Reynolds launched Tacos Negros, a takeout and delivery menu featuring tacos that took inspiration from pan-African foodways, including a six-hour-braised oxtail taco that the Food team listed on its guide to the 101 Best Tacos in L.A. The tacos became so popular that after restaurants reopened for dine-in, she added the most-ordered options to the permanent menu.

My 2 Cents is located in a shopping plaza that belongs to a single landlord, who Reynolds says is under immense pressure from developers.

“That’s the hardest part because I love the neighborhood so much,” Reynolds said. “But I don’t want to invest any more money there because it could be gone any day.”

Just a couple doors down from My 2 Cents sits Stevie’s Creole Cafe, a long-standing storefront that serves what late restaurant critic Jonathan Gold once called “the best bowl of gumbo this side of New Orleans.” A few blocks east of that is Sky’s Gourmet Tacos, a Black-owned taco shop that popularized a distinctly soulful approach to tacos that has since proliferated across the city.

“I just wonder if we’re going to recognize Pico in 10 years,” Reynolds said.

When it first opened in 2013, My 2 Cents helped lay the foundation for an L.A.-inspired take on Southern comfort food to flourish across the city. Host of the Daytime Emmy Award-winning “Searching for Soul Food” series on Hulu, Reynolds says the restaurant was one of the first in L.A. to put shrimp and grits on its brunch menu.

“My goal in opening [My 2 Cents] was, and the name is, my perspective on soul food,” said Reynolds, who’s set her menu apart with scratch-made sauces, local produce and plenty of vegan and gluten-free options, including a six-cheese mac and cheese with brown rice penne. “I thought that it would be my love letter to Los Angeles as a French-trained chef and yet, a Black girl who also remembers her mom made pork chops on Thursday.” At My 2 Cents, Reynolds coats her grilled pork chops in a sweet agave jerk sauce, an homage to the origins of Jamaican jerk seasoning, which was first used on wild boars.

In the homey dining room, vibrant art hangs on the walls and seasoning blends popular in Black households — Old Bay, Slap Ya Mama — balance on shelves next to cookbooks, with an array of eye-catching desserts, all of them baked by Reynolds’ sister Theresa Fountain, arranged on the counter behind them.

Diners have plenty of opportunities to make memories at My 2 Cents before the restaurant closes its doors for good. Every Wednesday beginning this week, the restaurant will host a wine tasting alongside a Southern-inspired tapas buffet. A two-drink minimum grants customers access to the bottomless spread and the menu changes weekly based on Reynolds’ whims, with past bites including jerk chicken sliders on pretzel bread and goat cheese with hot honey on naan. My 2 Cents will also continue to host its popular ‘90s brunch on Sundays, with a live DJ and guests encouraged to dress on theme.

Though the restaurant will close its doors at the end of this month, its final celebration will take place in the shopping plaza’s parking lot on Aug. 1, complete with food, drinks and a live DJ. As for the future, Reynolds says fans of My 2 Cents can stay updated about events and pop-ups on Instagram.

“It’s been a 12-year run,” Reynolds said. “It’s going to be a wild ride, but we are not going anywhere and that food is still going to be here forever.”

Susanna MacManus was teaching Spanish at Occidental College in 1997 when the family business came calling.

She had grown up helping out at Cielito Lindo, sometimes falling asleep in the booths of the tiny restaurant while her mother, Ana Natalia Guerrero Robertson, and grandmother, founder Aurora Guerrero, prepped for another day at the Olvera Street classic.

MacManus initially embraced her mother’s admonition that education was the way to get ahead and didn’t make a career out of Cielito Lindo.

She earned a master’s degree in medieval Spanish at UCLA before landing at Occidental, where generations of students enjoyed her classes as much for her humor as for the works of Latin American literary greats such as Borges, García Márquez and Fuentes.

But when her mother retired and the future of Cielito Lindo seemed in doubt, MacManus and her sisters took over.

“She understood the legacy — we all did — but she was the one capable of preserving it,” said her niece, Jacquie Goodman. “She was always the leader of the family, the fearless one. I grew up with my aunt being the one you’re supposed to emulate.”

MacManus died June 25 of cardiac arrest in Pasadena. She was 82.

The vivacious MacManus became Cielito Lindo’s co-manager and public face even as she continued to lecture at Occidental. Blessed with a palate that could catch even the slightest tweak, she made sure that the restaurant’s hallmark meal — beef taquitos in a small paper boat or plate, two to an order and floating in steaming, piquant avocado sauce — always came out crunchy yet supple. She brought the restaurant into the 21st century by participating in food festivals and panels that introduced Cielito Lindo to a new generation of eaters.

MacManus liked to greet customers as they stood in lines that regularly stretched out to the sidewalk of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Tourists took selfies; regulars hugged her. People treated their grandchildren to a Cielito Lindo lunch the way their own grandparents once did for them. Newcomers usually offered immediate praise, among them Anthony Bourdain. In a 2017 episode of his CNN show “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain proclaimed that he was “loving the sauce already” within his first bite of a taquito.

“She felt it was such an iconic L.A. institution,” said Viviana MacManus, Susanna’s daughter and chair of Occidental’s Critical Theory and Social Justice department. “It wasn’t just part of the tapestry of our family, but the tapestry of L.A. and the nation.”

In 2020, Susanna MacManus told L.A. Taco that Cielito Lindo was “a symbol of immigrants’ contribution to this vibrant city.”

“It’s the magic of simplicity,” she said. “There’s nothing artificial. No preservatives. Even the corn is non-GMO. Just simple, fresh and produced daily.”

MacManus was born and raised in Lincoln Heights, on a street filled with relatives and family friends — mostly women — from Zacatecas. Her grandmother had brought them over to work at her businesses, which included a warehouse where the taquitos were prepped and Las Anitas, a sit-down restaurant across the way from Cielito Lindo. Both remain in the family.

“We were always reminded as children, ‘No, we weren’t just pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps,’” said Viviana, who remembered her mother asking her and her brother to wrap gifts for immigrant children every Christmas. “These women were their support system that made our family’s success possible. They all struggled. My mom remembered that. So she taught us you always have to give back — always, always, always.”

MacManus met her husband of 51 years, Carlos MacManus, soon after he migrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1970s with aspirations to make easy money.

“She brought me down from my cloud fast and said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to continue your education if you want that,’” he said. They were driving by Los Angeles City College when “she slowed down and said, ‘That’s your next school.’”

At Occidental, where she worked for 34 years before retiring in 2011, Spanish professor Salvador Perez described MacManus as the “anchor” of their department. She especially loved to teach Spanish classes tailored to native speakers, seeding her lessons with stories from the Chicano movement that she had witnessed in real time.

“Her love was really food and storytelling, but behind the love was a genuine intellectual person,” said Perez, who said that when his wife was pregnant with their first child, the food she craved above all was Cielito Lindo’s avocado sauce. “Susanna inculcated the value of tradition and heritage to everyone she knew.”

Even before she and her sisters took over for their mother, MacManus helped out whenever possible. One year, she noticed that a nightclub up the street from Cielito Lindo was always busy on weekends. She volunteered to stay open late and beckon the crowd for a late-night snack, bringing in more revenue in a few hours than they had earned the whole rest of the day.

“She felt a great responsibility to her family, but also to the city at large and what it meant to everyone,” said her son, Carlos Eduardo MacManus, an attorney.

In her spare time, MacManus liked to travel with family and raise funds for Sacred Heart High School in Lincoln Heights, the all-girls academy she attended. Though a proud torchbearer for what her mother and grandmother had created, MacManus didn’t allow tradition to weigh down Cielito Lindo, as did too many of its Cal-Mex contemporaries.

She “was more hip to new restaurants and cafes than we were,” Viviana said, always checking out trends around town to see if they might fit her family’s stall.

Carlos Eduardo remembers chuckling when his mother introduced soyrizo to appeal to vegetarians — it’s still available in Cielito Lindo’s burritos. When Viviana was finishing grad school at UC San Diego, her parents took her to a local Mexican restaurant, trying carne asada fries for the first time.

“She said, ‘What is this abomination-slash-delicious thing?’” Viviana said. “And she put it on the menu.”

MacManus is survived by her husband, Carlos MacManus; children Carlos Eduardo MacManus and Viviana MacManus; one grandchild; and sisters Gloria Calderon Goodman and Mariana Robertson.

Cole’s French Dip, the oldest restaurant and saloon in Los Angeles, is slated to close its doors Aug. 3. The last day of service for the landmark restaurant, which claims to have invented the French dip, will be Aug. 2.

“The litany of reasons for closing are not unique to Cole’s alone; they are affecting most independent restaurants in Los Angeles,” said owner Cedd Moses in a press release announcing the restaurant’s closure. “The global pandemic, the actors and writers strikes, overall crime, as well as the consistently rising costs of labor and goods, unsustainably high rents and mounting bureaucracy and legal exposure have all led to this unfortunate outcome.”

Founded by Henry Cole in 1908, Cole’s French Dip opened as Cole’s Pacific Electric Buffet, named after the Pacific Electric Building in which it’s housed. Lore has it that the eponymous dish originated when a customer with a bad case of sore gums asked for his sandwich to be lowered into the jus because the French roll was too crunchy for him. (In Chinatown, Philippe the Original also claims to have created the dish.)

The 21st century iteration of Cole’s French dip sandwich comes with a choice of roast beef, braised pork or lamb, or pastrami, served on a crusty roll lined with melted cheese (Swiss, cheddar, American or goat), a pickle spear and a cup of au jus for dipping. It’s still one of the most popular items on the menu.

“We have cherished our time serving the Downtown community, and will continue to craft great drinks and our renowned French dip sandwiches until we shutter,” the press release stated. “We care deeply about our family of staff and are immensely grateful for our amazing guests who have supported Cole’s over the years. We invite you to come in to see us this month before our departure, to laugh, to cry, to raise glasses, to eat, and to say your goodbyes right alongside us.”

Despite its long-standing ties to the local food scene, Brian Lenzo, the senior vice president of operations for Pouring With Heart, the ownership group which took over the restaurant in 2008, said the “writing was on the wall for a long time.”

In addition to rising costs of labor and rent, the historic core of downtown has increasingly deteriorated, he said; nearly every other day Cole’s employees have to clean human feces from the storefront.

Lenzo said he hopes the fate of Cole’s — like other historic L.A. restaurants that have recently shuttered permanently — will serve as a “catalyst” for the community to rally behind local businesses.

“By the time the Olympics get here, all these mom and pops will be gone,” he said. “Hopefully it’s a wake up call for the right people to step up and figure out a plan.”

As news of the impending closure spread on social media, patrons began sharing their favorite memories at the iconic diner. But the announcement has rocked the downtown L.A. community in particular.

DTLA Insider was also one of the first to announce the closure on Instagram on Sunday. Media Moussavy, who runs the popular account, said, “You have to improve the environment before anyone wants to open up a business here. “

“This [restaurant] has lasted the Great Depression, World Wars, every economic downturn, and it’s sad to see that this is the final straw that brings it down,” he added.

Cole’s has seen such a surge in business since the closing announcement that it had to pull in bartenders from sister establishments, said Lenzo. The restaurant also plans to invite past bartenders to come serve the community for a final time.

“We’ve seen a lot of outreach, people in L.A. love L.A., they have pride in L.A.,” said Lenzo. “To have to say goodbye, it’s something that scars the city a little bit.”

At this time, there are no plans to save Cole’s — though Moses, who has been a fan of the restaurant since childhood, said he is feeling “hopeful that someone will buy Cole’s and can carry on the tradition.”

This story is developing.

I will never understand the allure of the fat French fry. Steak fries are contemptible. Wedges of bland starch with no crunch, like a mouthful of molded mashed potatoes. There is no amount of ketchup, ranch or aioli that can save thick fries from the lower depths of tuber hell. Just order a baked potato and be done with it.

Curly fries, when done correctly, are crisp through each coil. I’m never mad at a waffle fry.

The skinny fry has the potential to be a spud revelation. It’s texturally superior to a wedge, with a more even ratio of crunch to fluff. Three skinny fries clumped together and dunked into your favorite condiment will always hit. A single fat fry could never.

For a long time, I held the firm belief that Chateau Marmont was home to the greatest French fries in all the land. They’re served in a decorative silver cylinder meant to elevate, at least via the presentation, the humblest of hamburger sidekicks. The mountain of fries exudes an air of luxury, threatening to spill from the top, showered in Parmesan cheese and smelling vaguely of truffles. Truffle Parmesan fries ($17) in the sceniest of sceney Los Angeles hotels? I can feel you seething as I type this. I can hear the guffaw of annoyance that just escaped your mouth. I know — people feel strongly about French fries.

After years of pawing through orders of fries at Heavy Handed, République and a handful of other places around town, I no longer believe they are the best fries in Los Angeles, but they continue to hover near the top, made even more enjoyable with an ice-cold martini. They are worth enduring the slight chill from the two hosts posted as gatekeepers to the bar and restaurant. I don’t hold a SAG card, and my social media follower count is far lower than what is acceptable, but please permit me to pass, sit and overpay for your very good French fries.

Also vying for the title of best French fries are the tallow fries from the new Happies Hand Made in the Arts District, named for the beef tallow the fries bathe in. They’re long, golden sticks that resemble fine fingers — the sort of fries that appear to have a surface sheathed in an extra layer of speckled coating that provides a satisfying crunch with each bite. They’re seasoned well with salt and pepper, well enough to skip the ketchup. But as our deputy Food editor Betty Hallock likes to say: It’s not a French fry if you can’t dip it in ketchup. Once again, people feel strongly about French fries and their condiments.

I recently stumbled on what could be the best French fry I’ve ever tasted at an Italian restaurant in the Arts District. It was like the world shifted into another universe where the thick fry crawled out of the depths of tuber hell and emerged triumphant.

If you never noticed fries on the Rossoblu menu, you’d be forgiven. Steve and Dina Samson’s restaurant is known best for Steve’s regional Italian cooking, built on his family’s traditional Bolognese dishes, including stellar pasta. But if you read through to the bottom of the menu, you’ll find the fries under the “contorni” or sides section, listed as “Apennine fries, triple-cooked, herbs, balsamic” ($14).

They’re named for the fries Steve remembers eating as a kid in a small mountain village in the Apennines in southern Bologna.

“One time we just went to some outdoor restaurant and I had fries with balsamic vinegar, and it was like, ‘Phew, this is mind blowing,’” he says. “I was probably like 10 years old, but it stuck in my mind and I always wanted to do that.”

Steve’s fries are shy of wedge territory, though I label anything wider than a quarter inch (about the width of a McDonald’s fry) a fat fry. They’re served in a heap in a bowl, the logs of potato annealed, shiny and splotched with balsamic vinegar. The surface of each fry resembles the rugged terrain of good fried chicken, jagged and almost shaggy in parts. Bits of fried rosemary and sage litter the top.

They’re hot and crunchier than I expect for a fry with sizable girth, the exterior layer of potato as delicate and crisp as a chip. But it isn’t just that outer layer that’s crunchy. It’s like the potatoes are fried from the inside out, with a crunch that permeates 90% of the fry’s nearly hollow body and eventually relents to a fluffy core. There is no need to rummage around for a good one. They are all the good one.

Before you have time to process how mind-bogglingly excellent the fries are, you get a bite tinged with vinegar and your mouth is flooded with the sweet and sharp tang of balsamic.

With two bites, I became a fat fry believer. Or at the very least an Apennine fry believer.

After trying multiple varieties of potatoes, Steve settled on Kennebec potatoes, and only Kennebec potatoes, to make his fries.

“They haven’t been consistently on our menu because it’s been hard to keep them consistent,” Steve says. “Sometimes our produce guy says it can be hard to get Kennebecs because In-N-Out uses so many of them. And then the way potatoes are farmed, it depends on the time of year and how long the potatoes have been stored.”

And even if Steve secures the Kennebecs, he won’t know a batch is good until he’s gone through the three-cook process to make them.

The potatoes are cut, rinsed and soaked overnight. They’re laid flat on racks, then steamed in the oven. The fries rest in the walk-in cooler and dry out, then take their first dip in the fryer. Once the fries are cooked through, they go back on a rack and into the freezer. The potatoes are flash-fried at 375 degrees to order.

“I’ve heard that there are ways to see if they float or see if they are going to be good potatoes,” he says. “If you can figure out a way to tell before you go through all the work. But we haven’t figured out a way to know before the third cook whether they are good or not. There have been times during service where we have a new batch, and it’s like, uh-oh, we can’t serve these.”

Sometimes the potatoes absorb too much oil. Other times they fall apart in the fryer.

“Whenever we get a good batch of potatoes, it’s such a good feeling,” he says. “You feel like you’ve won something.”

With the recent relaunch of the restaurant’s menu and a steady supply of Kennebecs, the fries are on again at Rossoblu.

“Things like fries are the hardest to do well because there are a lot of variables and everybody knows what a good fry is,” he says. “You can’t fake your way around a good fry.”

Though Steve intends to have the fries available whenever you visit, there are no guarantees. You may want to call ahead for the good fries.