In 2013, eight years after he opened Providence, which earned its third Michelin star last year, chef Michael Cimarusti opened Connie & Ted’s with the idea of offering Los Angeles an easy and more affordable way to taste of his cooking and seafood sourcing. A taste of New England in West Hollywood, it quickly became known for fried clams and chowders harkening to Cimarusti’s Rhode Island childhood and plump lobster rolls filled with never-frozen lobster.
But on July 1, after years of highs, lows and financial setbacks, Connie & Ted’s will close.
Like many other L.A. restaurateurs, Cimarusti alongside his wife and business partner, Crisi Echiverri, cited inflation and the high cost of labor in West Hollywood, which is one of the highest in the country at $20.25 for non-hotel employees. But the biggest factor, Cimarusti said, was the dip in sales. The pandemic, followed by the 2023 entertainment-industry strikes and the 2025 fires led to a prolonged loss of business.
“I wanted to be able to re-create that food here in Los Angeles and do it the right way, without any shortcuts, and making everything from scratch, and using the finest-quality ingredients that we can buy,” Cimarusti said. “I feel like that cuisine deserves it.”
For a long time, he added, Los Angeles agreed.
The restaurant, named for Cimarusti’s grandparents — Constance and Edward — opened to fanfare, acclaim and “feverish oyster shucking.” It appeared on multiple L.A. Times 101 lists through the years and specialized in a sort of “no shortcuts” pre-World War II philosophy, with everything made from scratch, including its breadcrumbs and crackers. New England-style lobster rolls weren’t always so plentiful in Los Angeles, and Connie & Ted’s offered some of the best and most consistent, spooning lobster shipped fresh from Gloucester, Mass., onto fluffy, griddled rolls.
It also served some of the region’s more unique specialties, such as clam cakes from a recipe hand-written by his grandmother found on the back of a fish-shop receipt. During Cimarusti’s childhood summers on Scarborough State Beach in Narragansett, R.I., he would walk to a small shack and purchase a half-dozen of them in a brown paper bag, sharing them with his sister on the sand. (“That’s the only thing that’s missing from the clam cake recipe at Connie’s,” Cimarusti said. “There’s no sand.”)
The restaurant, led by executive chef and Providence alum Sam Baxter, “is neither a chefly interpretation of a Rhode Island clam shack nor a fantasia on the theme of New England seafood,” as Jonathan Gold wrote in 2013, adding, “there may be no restaurant in Los Angeles that treats its oysters with more reverence.”
Cimarusti said he never imagined how successful the restaurant would be. Some customers still dine there once or twice each week.
“It’s a restaurant that we put lots of work into, lots of capital into, and it operated very successfully for quite a long while,” Cimarusti said, adding of the decision to close: “We just didn’t have a choice anymore.”
To build it they flipped the longtime Silver Spoon diner into their modern seafood shack, alongside their business partners Donato Poto, Amy Specter Nickoloff and Craig Nickoloff. They overhauled the 1930-founded building’s plumbing and electricity, added a raw bar, a wave-like wooden overhang and a fish tank, and adorned the dining room with lobster traps, mounted fish and other nautical decor.
In winter, as they began considering closing the restaurant, they quietly looked for a buyer but held out hope that they could still make it work. Then, in the spring, they decided to call it quits.
“People dine differently now,” Echiverri said. “Now, instead of going to a mid-priced restaurant like Connie & Ted’s, they’ll just order in.”
Providence, even at 21 years old, is still regularly booked. But for “middle restaurants” — between fast-casual spots without extensive table service and high-level tasting menus — restaurateurs often make up for the slimmer margins with volume. Without that, they falter.
Multiple notable L.A. restaurants have already closed within the first five months of the year, even before May’s end, including Cole’s, Socalo, Taix, DTLA Cheese, Rao’s and the Grand Central Market location of Fat & Flour.
“This is a reckoning that we’re seeing here in Los Angeles,” Cimarusti said.
Cimarusti said it was becoming more difficult to charge prices in his more casual restaurant that reflected the true cost of his burgers and lobster rolls.
Seafood, when caught wild, varies in price due to water temperatures, spawning, overfishing and other factors. When Connie & Ted’s first opened, lobster might cost the restaurant $4 or $5 per pound during the summer months, resulting in lobster rolls that sold for roughly $25. Now those same lobsters cost more than $15 per pound — more than three times the initial cost, but Cimarusti said he can’t realistically charge three times as much for the lobster roll at $75. The current price is $39.
On an evening in late May the dining room was filled. Some counted themselves as regulars; others hadn’t visited in years but wanted to say farewell before July 1. Clusters of waiting patrons spilled from the foyer onto the front patio.
Cimarusti and Echiverri say they are grateful for the rush of guests since the closure announcement, but they hope the visits spread through June — past the immediacy of the news.
On June 18, Cimarusti will cook alongside Baxter for One Last Cast, a sold-out $175 dinner where they’ll serve some of the restaurant’s early dishes, such as Angels on Horseback: a vintage-cookbook recipe that involves wrapping oysters in bacon, broiling them and eating them with toast and Champagne beurre blanc.
As Echiverri put it, “We’re gonna finish strong.”
Connie & Ted’s is at 8171 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, and open Wednesday and Thursday from 5 to 9:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and from 5 to 10 p.m.; and on Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and from 5 to 9 p.m. through July 1.
The post ‘This is a reckoning’: Michael Cimarusti on Connie & Ted’s closure and the state of restaurants appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
