The sign on the front door of Here’s Looking at You, a restaurant in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, reads “Closed Forever.” Gates cover the windows. Inside, chairs are stacked on tables, and the bar is piled with plates and glassware ready to be auctioned off.
For more than eight years, this was one of the city’s most acclaimed dining destinations. The Los Angeles Times ranked it 15th on its list of the area’s 101 best restaurants last year. “It’s one of the restaurants that define the culinary moment in Los Angeles,” Tejal Rao wrote in The New York Times’s 2022 list of the nation’s 50 best.
Like restaurants all over the world, Here’s Looking at You was stung by the pandemic, closing for 17 months and reopening in January 2022 with help from a GoFundMe campaign to cover back rent. Then came the wildfires this past January, which destroyed more than 15,000 structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, sent smoke billowing through large swaths of the city and kept diners at home yet again.
The fires broke out less than a month after the owner, Lien Ta, closed her other restaurant, All Day Baby in Silver Lake, which she said had struggled since a 146-day strike by television and movie writers in 2023. The wildfires persuaded Ms. Ta that it was time to give up on her showcase restaurant as well, and Here’s Looking at You closed in June.
“It was not sustainable,” she said, sitting in her darkened restaurant. “It just makes a lot of sense that people are kind of throwing in the towel. While the rest of the country and the rest of the world has been incrementally coming back, L.A. has gone backward.”
Closings are nothing unusual in a business run on tight profit margins and sensitive to shifts in the consumer economy, like consumers’ current worries over inflation. And it’s unclear whether the Los Angeles dining scene as a whole is faring any worse financially than those in other cities.
But Here’s Looking at You is just one in a string of high-profile restaurants that have succumbed over the last two years as the city has faced a barrage of forces, including the writers’ strike, the wildfires, immigration raids, the street protests in response to the National Guard presence, and the downtown curfews earlier this year in response to the protests.
Coming just as restaurants were struggling to recover after the pandemic, those disruptions — and the closings that followed — have shaken the morale of many owners and diners.
“Restaurants are always closing, but this is a very accelerated rate,” said Patric Kuh, a former restaurant critic at Los Angeles Magazine who works as a manager at the Strand House in Manhattan Beach. “And very focused on one city. It is now down to the bone.”
The roster of restaurants that have closed includes several whose arrival was heralded by enthusiastic reviews and long waiting lists for tables: Bicyclette Bistro, Father’s Office, Maude, Alimento, Petty Cash Taqueria, Animal and Manzke.
Just this year, they were joined by Cassia, a nearly decade-old Santa Monica restaurant that lamented the impact of the fires and the writers’ strike. In Pasadena, Bar Chelou closed in February, citing a slump in business owing to the fires in neighboring Altadena. Downtown, LA Cha Cha Chá announced in August that it would close this fall, blaming the disruption from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on workplaces and the deployment of troops.
The owners of the West Hollywood restaurant A.O.C., Caroline Styne and Suzanne Goin, said they were forced to shut the Brentwood branch of their restaurant in August after 16 years in business, because of empty tables, which they traced to the writers’ strike and the fires, and rising rents.
“It is a crisis,” said Ms. Styne who, with Ms. Goin, has been a leader in farm-to-table cooking here since they opened Lucques in 1998. “I don’t think the L.A. restaurant scene has ever experienced what it is experiencing in this moment. We’ve been in this lingering period of decline.”
The data is less clear-cut. The sheer size and complexity of Los Angeles County, which encompasses 88 incorporated cities, makes it difficult to measure the constant churn of comings and goings, analysts said. According to estimates by the Independent Hospitality Commission, about 100 of the 29,000 restaurants in the Los Angeles area closed in 2024, and another 50 this year. But the organization said it did not have figures on openings or earlier closings.
“There are always restaurants closing and restaurants opening.” said Chris Thornberg, a founding partner of Beacon Economics, a consulting firm in Los Angeles. “The net result here is when you look at the data it’s not quite as end of the world as a lot of these folks are suggesting.”
Still, seated restaurant traffic — including reservations and walk-ins — fell 5 percent this year from January through August, compared with the same stretch in 2024, according to statistics gathered by the reservation service OpenTable.
And the Los Angeles area lost 369,100 restaurant jobs from July 2019, shortly before the pandemic, through July 2025 — a 5.1 percent drop, even as total nonfarm employment increased 1.5 percent, according to the California Employment Development Department. (In New York City, the number of restaurant jobs dropped by only 2.4 percent during that period, according to the State Department of Labor.)
Los Angeles continues to be viewed as one of the top restaurant cities in the country, a highly visible stage for accomplished chefs drawn by the easy access to locally farmed produce, the influence of a wide variety of cuisines and customs, and its wealth. Southern California has a history of sharp economic swings, leading restaurant owners to hope that this is a passing phase that will be forgotten after burned-out neighborhoods are rebuilt, and as the region plays host to the Olympics in 2028.
Still, every other week seems to bring another announcement of a renowned restaurant — old and new — being put up for sale or shutting down.
“It feels like a part of the soul of L.A. is being ripped away,” said Jason Eskin, a Disney marketing executive who started eating at Here’s Looking at You in 2016. “Losing H.L.A.Y. felt like losing real family, and I really hope, for the sake of community and good food, that the trend gets fixed soon.”
Even some of the city’s most established restaurants have been swept under the tide this year, including Papa Cristo’s, Chin Chin (which closed after a 45-year run on the Sunset Strip, promising to search for a new home); and Cole’s French Dip, a downtown institution that plans to close soon.
“We had to close our business for a whole week because of the curfews,” said the owner of Cole’s, Cedd Moses. “That was kind of the last straw for Cole’s. We were coming into this year on life support. Then the fires hit. And the protests.”
Some of these establishments are being sold to other restaurant owners. Some, like A.O.C. in Brentwood, are slated to become shops, and others are joining the ranks of abandoned storefronts that already line major boulevards.
“These are veteran restaurateurs,” said Eddie Navarrette, the head of the Independent Hospitality Coalition. “When restaurateurs like that can’t make it through this economy, we have to come to terms with where we are as a city right now.”
Earlier this summer, patrons emerged from Antico Nuovo in Koreatown to see police helicopters and marchers protesting the immigration raids.
“Downtown was very intimidating for guests to go and dine while this was happening,” said Chad Colby, the owner. “When people come out to our restaurants, they are either celebrating or doing something that is a pleasure in life. You could see why so many people would choose not to be going out throughout the protests.”
The wildfires also exacted a toll, Mr. Colby said. “There was one day when it was completely orange outside. I was like, ‘I don’t think anyone is going to be driving in today.’ ”
Francesco Zimone, the owner of the L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele group here (and in New York City) said his restaurants, like so many, were already suffering when the fires broke out. “Our revenues are down 35 percent from last year across the board,” he said. “The difficulty is immense. Absolutely immense.”
Some of the difficulties reflect the nature of Los Angeles. Because of the city’s sheer size and volume of traffic, eating out requires a commitment of time and effort. The Covid shutdowns made diners more comfortable with food delivery and appreciative of the virtues of home cooking.
“Angelenos always had a tendency to stay at home,” said Ms. Goin, the A.O.C. co-owner. “It’s not like New York. Once you get home, it’s hard to get people to go out again.”
The last few years have tested the industry unlike few other periods. “Since 2020 it’s been tough,” said Dina Samson, who with her husband, Steve, owns Rossoblu, an oasis of activity in a sparsely populated patch of downtown Los Angeles. “We have questioned ourselves a lot: Do we still want to do this?”
The downturn may offer a silver lining for diners. Tables could be reserved on relatively short notice this week at Mother Wolf and at Horses, Hollywood restaurants that six months ago were nearly impossible to get into.
And some restaurant owners said they remained hopeful that Los Angeles will get through this period — just as it has weathered earthquakes, riots and economic downturns in the past.
“Are we on the verge of closing right now?” Ms. Styne said of her A.O.C. location in West Hollywood. “No. But please, let’s not have another financial disaster.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering government, political and cultural stories in California, focusing on the effort to rebuild Los Angeles after the fires. He also writes about national politics.
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