Sal’s Place is easy to miss. Almost obscured by bougainvillea. it sits on a corner of North Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, Calif., a jumble of a building anchored by a tent draped over a frame of wood and windows. There is no valet parking — even here in Los Angeles — and no sign. To get to a bathroom, diners walk out the front door and turn left on the sidewalk.
And it’s open only about six months a year.
The story of Sal’s Place is a story of rough East Coast winters, of the continuing mystique of the pop-up restaurant and of a spirited proprietor, Siobhan Carew, who three years ago led a band of waiters and cooks across the country to create a winter outpost for her restaurant of the same name in Provincetown, Mass.
On the Atlantic Coast, Sal’s Place sits on a beach at the tip of Cape Cod. Housed in a former boatbuilding wharf that hangs over the water on stilts, it is not made for winter. And Ms. Carew, 60, who had moved full-time to Provincetown after closing her restaurants in Boston during the pandemic, decided that she wasn’t, either.
The West Coast location of Sal’s may have been founded in the adventurous spirit of the pop-up, but she hopes it will be around for a long time. And why not? The 60-seat restaurant is drawing good crowds — and, it is worth noting, very different crowds (younger, gayer, hipper) than Il Piccolino, the local institution that filled the same space before closing in 2022, in the shadow of the pandemic.
Il Piccolino, which opened in 2005, was revered by a certain niche of Los Angeles, with its high prices ($60 for a veal chop) and moneyed clientele, including more than a few celebrities in the twilight of their careers: Joan Collins, Liza Minnelli and Irwin Winkler, who produced the “Rocky” movies. Its ethos was captured by its menu, which included lobster with white truffle sauce, alongside a spaghetti-with-clams dish named for a Hollywood producer and regular patron: Jerry Weintraub’s Spaghetti Clam Show, “with spaghetti just the way Jerry liked it,” the menu explains.
There are still reminders of the old place. “Il Piccolino” is etched into a glass window that divides the two dining rooms. The striped banquettes remain.
But Sal’s Place travels in a different lane. It has no website. Reservations must be made by phone — either Ms. Carew’s or the restaurant’s, both with a Massachusetts area code — because Ms. Carew will have nothing to do with OpenTable or Resy.
“I hate all that,” she said over a cup of Irish Breakfast tea with milk in the front dining room. “It’s another kind of layer of making it less personal. It doesn’t feel authentic.”
And Sal’s only takes cash.
“The cash thing here fascinates me: no one uses cash anymore,” said Michael Fleming, the president of the David Bohnett Foundation, which focuses on L.G.B.T.Q. causes, and a regular at Sal’s on both coasts. “And yet these studio types have to come in with a bundle of hundreds. They have to think before they come. It’s an intentional place to have dinner.”
The restaurant is open six nights a week, and its menu is driven by the Wednesday farmers’ market in Santa Monica, a favorite of Los Angeles chefs.
The proximity of a bountiful, year-round market was one of Ms. Carew’s first lessons in the advantages of running a restaurant in Southern California. The traditional-with-a-twist Italian menu reflects that: rigatoni cacio e pepe ($40) made with pesto and fresh broccolini; a salad of pickled red onions and fresh herbs ($20); and Sal’s Caesar salad ($20), covered with a blizzard of shaved cauliflower.
The restaurant closes and moves back East as soon as the weather warms up enough for the Cape Cod building, which is not winterized. Ms. Carew and her daughter Michaela Carew-Murphy bought Sal’s in Provincetown in 2016, becoming the third owner of a restaurant that first opened in 1962. (Ms. Carew leases the West Hollywood space on her own).
The Provincetown location has 110 seats and, under Ms. Carew’s eye, draws a crowd that is artsy and eclectic without seeming fussy. (No cash? Swing by back tomorrow to settle the bill, Ms. Carew says.)
John Waters, the filmmaker and a regular who summered in town for 61 years, described the restaurant as “definitely is the coolest restaurant in Provincetown. It’s very Felliniesque. She used to have chairs on the beach and you had to take your shoes off.
“There’s no such thing as an Elaine in Provincetown,” he said, referring to Elaine Kaufman, who owned Elaine’s, the former celebrity gathering spot in New York City. “But if there was, she would be it.”
The vibe carries over, to some extent, to West Hollywood. Marylouise Oates, who was a society columnist for The Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, said Sal’s is unlike any restaurant she has experienced in Los Angeles. “It’s very New England, it’s very Cape,” she said. “There’s just something about the whole spirit of the place. And I think Siobhan herself is a force of nature.”
Ms. Carew calls herself a “hospitality maven” — that is, she spends her time in the dining rooms rather the kitchen. Born in Ireland, she came to the United States at age 17 in 1981. and still has the lilt of an Irish accent. She settled in Boston (actually Brookline: Michael Dukakis, the former governor and candidate for president, was a neighbor).
She was drawn into the restaurant business 30 years ago, eventually opening three Boston restaurants, all of which closed during the pandemic.
“Our restaurants were too small to do social distancing, and we decided to move down to P-town full time,” she said. “We were able to do outside dining there, and it was easy to live there because you could take walks and be outside.”
As Covid waned, Ms. Carew didn’t want to return to Boston, and a quick survey of the staff found no one eager to spend winters on the Cape. So she headed to Los Angeles, ignoring friends’ warnings that she would never warm to this part of the world. “Los Angeles is not where I would have suspected she would pop up,” Mr. Waters said.
Ms. Carew was drawn to the vacant Il Piccolino restaurant at first sight. Like the Provincetown restaurant, it “has a provisional quality, because we are housed in a tent structure,” she wrote in a text. “They both have a semi-permanent vibe.”
And she has indeed taken to the city. “I am very excited about everything about L.A.,” she said. “The accessibility to nature. The weather. I mean, look at this: It’s March, it’s insane.” On the afternoon we spoke, it was 67 degrees and sunny.
This is not an ideal time to open a restaurant. As in the rest of the country, the city’s dining scene is still recovering from the pandemic. Business has continued to drop because of the Hollywood writers’ strike in 2023 and the wildfires in January.
“People didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Carew said. “They felt guilty, even if they weren’t impacted by the fires, going out to eat.”
But customers keep on coming — new faces and familiar ones from Provincetown. It is encouraging for Ms. Carew, as she prepares (not saying exactly when) to put her West Hollywood restaurant into its summer hibernation and take the gang back in Provincetown.
“I find Provincetown a very spiritual place, but I also find L.A. a very spiritual place,” she said. “I really think there’s something very magical about it. Some people miss that — I don’t know why.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
Adam Nagourney is a national political reporter for The Times, covering the 2024 campaign.
The post A Scrappy Pop-Up Restaurant Shuttles From Coast to Coast appeared first on New York Times.
