The sky is falling.
Ask anyone who owns a restaurant — except Richie Lopez, owner of the three-month-old Pontu in Ocean Park, where he serves Peruvian chicken, sides and cold drinks from a takeout window and at a tiny patio out back, midday to 6:30, seven days a week. The 30-seat interior isn’t ready for dinner service yet, and he’s waiting on a beer and wine license, but he shrugs off any notion of bad timing, even as established places falter citywide.
“Opening a restaurant is like having a baby,” he said. “There’s never a right time. You just do it.”
Across town in West Adams, Alfonso “Poncho” Martinez runs the eight-month-old Lugya’h at Maydan Market, a space he shares with six other restaurants. For more than 10 years he served tlayudas — a large toasted corn tortilla with toppings — to long lines at an outdoor stall, earning a James Beard outstanding chef nomination in the process, long enough for him to hone his definition of success.
He gestures at the small operation he runs with his partner, Odilia Romero. Right here will do just fine. The Michelin Guide, which has added Lugya’h to its roster, seems to agree.
Once upon a time — in the very early days of this century, before the perfect storm of Instagram and food-competition television gave rise to the celebrity chef, before venture capital and endorsement deals redefined aspirations and influencers and Yelp-era revenge reviews could dash them — this was what a life in food looked like. A passionate owner, a neighborhood place, longevity as the primary goal. Expansion and its cousin, brand extensions, were the exception, not the rule. Fine dining existed on another plane, as it does now, and got disproportionate attention for its single-digit market share, as it does now.
Don’t get me wrong: Today’s restaurant scene is a disaster, as one place after another shuts its doors, but the other sound, all over town, is of people setting up shop — small shops, to be sure, but that could be a good thing. They might be part of a vast correction as we shake loose from 20 years of excess, from the earliest Instagram shots — I recall in particular a vertiginous three-scoop ice cream cone doused in gold leaf — to an instant-stardom mentality that too often turned out to be as unstable as that cone.
The correction isn’t painless, whether a restaurant has been open for five weeks or five years. I don’t want to minimize the challenge of higher costs on everything from produce to the gasoline needed to transport it, but the bloat that preceded it carried its own risks. For every Richard Blais, a multihyphenate “Top Chef” runner-up with more than half a million Instagram followers and restaurants on both coasts, there’s a Harold Dieterle, the beloved winner of 2005 “Top Chef,” who opened and closed four restaurants and now has a consulting firm.
Restaurateurs and their customers need to recalibrate. Owner Rose Previte conceived of Maydan Market to “lower the cost of entry” by sharing space and equipment, with a hybrid service model that sits at a hospitable point that’s closer to full service than to the Automat. Menus are pared down as well: Four of Martinez’s main dishes are tlayudas, and at Pontu, Lopez serves just six mains, five sides and a kid’s plate.
They don’t plunge into the surf. They wade in one careful step at a time. And while that may not feel ambitious enough for a generation of food people raised on steroidal dreams, slow and steady might just win this race, or at least offer better odds over time.
As for diners, it’s time for us to knock off the “kill the messenger” attitude that blames restaurants for everything but the weather, because their prices are a response to inflation, not a greed-grab. Read the menu right to left and find something you like at a comfortable price point, or take advantage of cost-saving options, such as kids’ menus that make it more affordable for a family to step out. Look for happy hours that run late enough for people on their way home from work, which is how Michael’s, the 47-year-old fine dining restaurant in Santa Monica, attracted a new generation of customers.
Sometimes good work turns out to be good business: Tomat, in Westchester, serves vegetables from its urban garden and aims for as close to zero waste as possible — good for the climate and for lower food costs.
No one’s immune to the allure of stability promised by a big and profitable operation. Previte likes to imagine that someday we’ll find Poncho’s tlayudas in the prepared food aisle at Whole Foods, and if Lopez develops a retail line of his cold drinks, we will all be better off for it.
But sequence is key. Multiple outlets and branded products and a deal with a national chain and a huge infusion of cash might one day be a consequence of these restaurateurs’ dreams, but they are not the dream itself. That distinction seems central to restaurants’ future, as, in turn, restaurants are essential to ours.
The phrase “third space” is having a moment, 37 years after sociology professor Ray Oldenburg coined it to describe public gathering places that are not home or work but provide a stabilizing, necessary sense of community. We got used to couch living during the pandemic because we had to, only to emerge into what pundits and politicians alike refer to as chaos, which can make hiding your head under a pillow seem like the ideal evening.
It isn’t. We need to get out more. The scrappy little indie upstart is waiting for us. It’s counting on us.
Karen Stabiner is the author, most recently, of “Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream.”
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