Bar Chelou garnered local and national praise from a small corner of the century-old Pasadena Playhouse building when it opened in early 2023, but this month it will take a bow.
Faced with renewing the restaurant’s lease and after seeing its business hurt by January’s Eaton fire, which decimated a large part of nearby Altadena, chef-owner Douglas Rankin said he and his team decided to close the restaurant. Its final day of service will be Feb. 16.
“All the signs were pointing towards: We have no clear path forward,” Rankin said. “When an entire neighborhood burns down that accounts for a certain percentage of your business, it’s like, what do you do? What are you supposed to do? We just don’t know how fast things will come back.”
Rankin said he is considering opening Bar Chelou in another part of the country, possibly in Denver, after his family relocates to Colorado.
“Chelou” translates to “weird,” “unexpected,” “shady” or “hard to believe” in French, and Bar Chelou wanted to live up to all of them in its short tenure. The modern Euro bistro debuted in early 2023 with Rankin at the helm. The Trois Mec and Bar Restaurant vet let loose, serving intriguing takes on the familiar: rainbow trout in an almost tie-dye-like swirl of garlic chive pil pil, fresh crunchy bread beneath a heap of clams and leeks, a large pork chop hidden under an artful display of cabbage and fennel pollen furikake.
It caught on instantly. Bar Chelou landed on the L.A. Times 101 List multiple times, with Food critic Bill Addison recently noting that “the man [Rankin] excels at flavor combinations.” Earlier this year, the New York Times named it one of the 25 best restaurants in the city. Bon Appétit heralded it as one of the most exciting new openings, and Eater LA called it the city’s best new restaurant of 2023. In his 2023 review, Addison said the restaurant was delivering “a jolt of eccentricity” to the neighborhood and serving a “nouvelle cuisine fever dream.”
Rankin closed his previous concept, Bar Restaurant in Silver Lake, in 2022 and wasn’t sure what the future held. When approached about taking over the cozy restaurant space attached to the historic Pasadena Playhouse, he envisioned it as more of a pop-up to employ his Bar Restaurant team. Partnering with Whole Cluster Hospitality — which also operates Dunsmoor in Glassell Park — they created Bar Chelou, as a more permanent fixture.
Everything changed on Jan. 7.
Though the restaurant’s immediate vicinity didn’t catch fire, the smoke was thick in the air and Bar Chelou shut down for days.
When it reopened, Rankin said he noticed a decline in sales of 20% to 30%, and that it gradually got worse. It began to pick back up last week, but Rankin still felt daunted by the uncertainty and the unpredictability.
“No one can know what’s going to happen after the fires,” he said. “No one knows how long it’s going to take for this to get built back. And that level of uncertainty was a little too much for us to keep going.”
His mom and stepfather live in Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood simultaneously ravaged by wildfire. Though the Palisades fire narrowly missed their home, they haven’t been back in a month and a half and are currently living with Rankin, his wife and children — further driving the point home for the chef that these natural disasters can take everything in an instant.
The cost of living in Los Angeles, especially with two young children, was also a determining factor in his family’s decision to relocate, he said.
“To have a restaurant that is award winning and nationally acclaimed should be enough, in my opinion, to be able to live the way you want,” Rankin said, “and it’s just not here.”
But the chef said he will always champion the city. While he is still searching for Bar Chelou’s future home in Colorado, Rankin might pop up around Los Angeles.
“I mean, it’s scary — I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared, but I’m very confident in what I do,” Rankin said.
“If we didn’t get faced with these challenges, I would have never left here. I love Los Angeles. I love all of the people here, especially in our industry, and how much work I’ve put into the restaurant scene over the years, and every restaurant that I’ve been involved in. It’s really defined who I am as a person.”
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