How the L.A. Wildfires Pushed the City’s Restaurants to the Brink
In 2016, The New York Times signaled its intent to stretch its culinary reach nationwide, with its chief critic Pete Wells looking to evaluate restaurants outside of the five boroughs. His first review took him all the way to the other coast, to Santa Monica, where he gave Bryant Ng and Kim Luu-Ng’s Southeast Asian-inspired Cassia a three-star rave. It was yet another feather in the cap of the ascendant L.A. food scene that had become one of the most exciting restaurant cities in the world during the 2010s. But since then, battered by the pandemic, entertainment industry strikes, and January’s devastating wildfires, the region’s restaurant scene is being pushed to the brink. Cassia has announced it has all been too much to endure; it will shutter this weekend. There may be more closures to come.
When the Palisades Fire ignited on January 7, chef Dave Beran was running service at his new restaurant Seline in Santa Monica. That night, an eerie mood hung over the tasting-menu spot as lights flickered from the severe wind and guests checked their phones constantly to see the fire spreading through the neighboring L.A. enclave. The restaurant would shut down for days after, and air quality in Santa Monica remained poor for a week. Seline—which had been open only six weeks when the fires started—along with Beran’s more casual Pasjoli nearby, took a big hit when they did reopen. “At Seline, week five was our busiest week, but for six, total revenue of the whole week was less than the Saturday prior,” Beran says.
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A little further north in Santa Monica, where Josiah Citrin’s Michelin-star Citrin and two-star Mélisse share a building, the level of business was similarly dire. “The first three weeks of January with the fires are the worst I’ve ever seen,” says Citrin, who has operated at the location for 25 years.
A.O.C. in the affluent west L.A. enclave of Brentwood was shut down for four days as evacuation warnings edged closer and smoke from the nearby blaze filled the restaurant. But restaurateur Caroline Styne says they also saw a big hit to business in the restaurant’s West Hollywood location, too. “I’ve been talking to other restaurateurs, and everybody has been going through it,” she says. “Especially in that first two weeks, we were all really struggling.”
Over on the east side of L.A., closer to where the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena claiming lives and homes, the award-winning restaurant Bar Chelou in Pasadena announced it would close. “We braced ourselves for a drop, knowing we would see a 20 to 30 percent decrease in business,” chef-owner Doug Rankin told Eater LA. “But in reality, it was closer to 50 percent. I love this city so much and thought we’d be here forever. But you have to read the writing on the wall and cut your losses.”
Beran has been hearing the same thing in his conversations. “I’ve talked to four or five different friends who were, right after the fires, saying if this doesn’t improve in the next four to five weeks, they were talking about the potential of having to close,” he says.
While the locals are starting to come back out again, tourism has taken a hit. “When the world outside sees L.A. on fire, they’re not hopping on planes to go here.” Beran says. So the displacement of the neighboring community and the lack of tourists is taking its toll. “It’s a guess, but around 70 percent of our audience is flying in or coming from the Palisades,” he says.
Citrin has been able to fill the tables at his intimate tasting-menu spot Mélisse, but with fewer covers than normal as tables of four just sat two. And he’s still seeing the lag of tourists. For a Michelin two-star restaurant like his, when he opens bookings, they’re usually filled first by people outside of the region who are planning ahead for trips, then get filled closer to the dates by Angelenos. “I look at the reservations for March, which we opened February 1, and it’s not filling up like it usually does,” Citrin says. “And that’s the tourist part.”
The predicament L.A. restaurants are in now can’t be explained by the fires alone. You have to go back to the Hollywood strikes that still hang over the local economy nearly two years later. The prolonged work stoppages by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild took, by some estimates, up to a $6 billion bite out of the economy nationwide, with most of the burden shouldered by California.
“In the first quarter of 2023 that’s when we felt like diners are going out again, our numbers are up, and we’re back to being profitable—and then the writer’s strike happens and it bottoms our entire business out,” Styne says. “And we’ve been treading water now for almost two years.” There was hope that once the strikes ended, business would bounce right back. But productions have been slow to resume in the L.A. area, meaning that people all up and down the entertainment industry—from actors to editors to gaffers to production assistants—have less discretionary income. And it also means just fewer meetings between power players at local restaurants. “There’s a huge fear it will never come back to what it was,” Styne says.
“I don’t think people realize how restaurants were affected as a result of the entertainment strikes,” Beran says. “Even us trying to raise money for Seline was a huge challenge, because as soon as the strikes happened a lot of people said, ‘We don’t know how long these will go, so we need to stay liquid and keep cash reserves.’”
So in the wake of the fires, restaurants couldn’t afford to sit fallow for an extended period of time, because many had exhausted cash reserves. But getting locals to dine has been a delicate dance, as many restaurateurs know regulars who lost their homes in the fires. “It’s difficult to complain about because what we’re losing from clientele, that clientele has lost so much more, so you feel guilty about talking about it,” Beran says. That initial shock and trauma in the wake of the fires is why the entertainment industry postponed awards season events and Angelenos felt awkward about going out and having a good time. It almost led to the annual DineLA Restaurant Week to be canceled. But restaurateurs realized they literally couldn’t afford lose that revenue driver after such a terrible start to the year.
“We were all trying to be sensitive to the issue,” Citrin says about conversations surrounding the cancellation of DineLA. “But then we said, ‘You can’t do that right now, because if you do that, it’s going to be the worst bloodbath.”
Restaurateurs banded together to push for DineLA to go through starting January 24, with restaurants across the city offering prix-fixe menus while receiving marketing support from the tourism board. The event appears to have tapped into Angelenos’ desire to get back out weeks after the fires. “DineLA was busy, one of the busiest we’ve seen,” Citrin says. “Banc of California matched money to donate to fire relief, the tourism board contributed to fire relief and it got people going out.” The DineLA organization reports that it raised $100,000 for fire relief during the event, and the week was so successful that many restaurants were extending their menus and discounts for additional weeks.
What comes next for L.A. restaurants, even the most seasoned operators aren’t quite sure. Citrin has been part of the L.A. scene for decades and remembers previous shocks to the city that date back to the ‘90s, including the L.A. Riots and the Northridge Earthquake. “We’ve been through a lot here, we’re a resilient city,” Citrin says. “Restaurants will be here, restaurants won’t, you just try to fight the fight—that’s all I can do and use all of my experience to keep it going.”
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