Last Tuesday, Valerie Gordon made an Instagram video about new signs she had posted around her small Los Angeles restaurant reading “Private: Employees Only.” She explained that they marked all nonpublic areas of the restaurant that would be off limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a raid.
The scale of the response to the post shocked her. Ms. Gordon estimated that it had already been viewed more than 500,000 times and shared widely across the Los Angeles restaurant industry.
“What that showed to me is there is a need for this information, there is a deep need, and people don’t really know what to do,” Ms. Gordon said.
But she had some help with the post. The guidance Ms. Gordon described came from the Independent Hospitality Coalition, a small, scrappy advocacy group which has emerged as an organizing hub for the Los Angeles restaurant industry.
Founded during the pandemic, the I.H.C. is one of a number organizations, local and national, which are trying to bring together isolated, competing restaurant businesses. The coalition’s main mission is to help business cut through red tape like liquor permitting processes and promote more restaurant-friendly legislation at the state level. But in Los Angeles in the last five years, a rolling series of major disruptions — from the pandemic itself, to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to the 2023 Hollywood strikes to the wildfires in January — has made operating a restaurant an uncertain proposition.
And then came the ICE raids and the deployment of the National Guard.
“It feels almost worse than Covid, because it’s so localized,” said Eddie Navarrette, a founder and the executive director of the group. “We feel like we can’t catch a break.”
During the height of the fire emergency in January, the I.H.C. helped connect restaurants who wanted to donate food with organizations in need. In the aftermath, it focused on helping restaurants themselves. In February, the group updated its policy and legislative asks with a slew of fire relief-oriented policies, including grants to help those who lost businesses and reopening Pacific Coast Highway as quickly as possible to funnel business up the hard-hit coast.
Over the past week, in addition to providing information about how to handle the increase in ICE activity, the I.H.C. has been lobbying city officials to limit the size of the area under curfew in downtown Los Angeles. Over the six nights it has been in effect so far, the area has encompassed several large, distinct neighborhoods, none of which have seen unrest, which is fairly localized in a few blocks around the city’s civic center.
Mr. Navarrette said the intense media coverage has given a mistaken impression of Los Angeles at the moment, and traffic is down at restaurants all over the city. During the long-planned final week the Koreatown restaurant Here’s Looking at You, owned by his girlfriend Lien Ta and fellow coalition member, some patrons seemed unsure if they could still visit, even though it is miles from any curfew area.
“People are calling me, ‘Hey, is Ktown OK?’ Ktown is fine, come down and dine,” Mr. Navarrette said.
Another founder of the I.H.C., Brittney Valles-Gordon (no relation to Valerie Gordon), said she first saw the need for an organization like this in 2019, though now she thinks of that time as an era when “there were no problems.” She closed her own restaurant, Guerrilla Tacos, in January of this year, in part because she was expecting her first child, but also because the costs and challenges of the industry had become too much.
The silver lining has been an opportunity to pull her head “out of the sand” of running a restaurant day-to-day and focus on what the broader hospitality community needs. Currently, that is helping owners deal with what she described as a widespread fear of ICE raids, regardless of people’s status.
She was spurred to action when a friend who has been a naturalized citizen for more than 10 years, and whose employees all have some form of legal immigration status or citizenship, told her he was scared about what would happen if ICE came to his coffee shop.
“We’re restaurant people. We need action items,” she said. “Unmarked vans coming to a place of work when you’re trying to make a latte — it’s a bit much.”
Originally, the I.H.C. made a series of slides about business owners’ rights during an ICE raid. Then, it reposted Ms. Gordon’s video.
Later this month, Ms. Valles-Gordon and Mr. Navarrette plan to travel to Sacramento to continue lobbying for bills that will help unravel the thicket of regulations restaurants often navigate. They are pushing for one bill that will allow kitchens to have an open window, an obscure regulation that has stymied the designs of pizzerias with showcase ovens or restaurants seeking to flaunt their tortilla-making operations.
Ms. Valles-Gordon said the organization wants a 4 a.m. curfew for bars and the creation of entertainment zones that would allow patrons to carry their drinks from bar to bar. Such changes would make the city, in her view, more dynamic and alive — more fun. “Things that encourage community, going out, having a good time.”
But for now, the I.H.C. is focused on the uncertainty in the local hospitality industry.
“I had a nightmare my restaurant was open and I was going to have to deal with this,” Ms. Valles-Gordon said. “I shouldn’t be feeling blessed that my restaurant is closed.”
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