Socalo, a modern Mexican restaurant from two of L.A.’s most established chefs, will close next month. Its owners, Border Grill founders Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, announced plans to shut the Santa Monica business to staff on Friday afternoon citing losses due to the pandemic, the 2025 wildfires and more.
“Combined with skyrocketing prices and labor shortages and the immigration raids and the uncertainty and fear of recession, we’ve been losing money for a year and a half or more,” Milliken said in an interview. “We just can’t afford to do that anymore.”
It marks one of the first notable restaurant closures of 2026, following a year of more than 100 of them — with many chefs and restaurateurs citing the same factors.
Socalo opened in late 2019 at the base of the Gateway Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard. Feniger and Milliken considered opening a new iteration of their most famous chain, Border Grill, but opted to launch a new concept instead. Socalo debuted as a more Southern California spin on Mexican food, with executive chef Giovanni Lopez leading the kitchen and a menu that involved crispy chicken skin with house-made Tajin, lamb birria, a range of tacos and ample margaritas.
“Everybody thought this was maybe a smart move to sort of refresh the brand,” Feniger said.
The pair behind Mundo Hospitality Group, numerous cookbooks and Food Network show “Too Hot Tamales,” helped popularize Mexican cooking through the 1980s and ‘90s, and encouraged much of the nation to embrace the cuisine beyond Tex-Mex stereotypes.
“They explored regional Mexican cooking a decade before the idea became fashionable,” Jonathan Gold wrote when awarding them the second annual Gold Award in 2018.
Socalo earned sustained acclaim, including a more recent nod in the L.A. Times’ guide to the best tacos in Los Angeles.
But it weathered years of difficulties. It opened less than three months before the global outbreak of COVID. According to Milliken, it stayed afloat for the following two and a half years through federal aid and operational pivots, and for a time things felt almost optimistic. But as restaurants reopened and a sense of normalcy returned, many of Santa Monica’s office workers remained remote — a customer base that the duo said they needed in order to continue. Initially they’d been flooded with the local workforce during happy hours and Friday post-workday service. It never rebounded.
The entertainment industry strikes further hurt sales, and the January 2025 wildfires reduced their local customer visits by 30% to 50%.
They attempted to supplement the losses by catering to studios, launching a monthly storytelling event series, and lowering lunch prices. But they couldn’t make the numbers work.
Socalo will host its final guests on Valentine’s Day.
When they closed downtown’s City Restaurant in 1994, Feniger and Milliken made the best of it: The day after its last night of service they hosted a large party in the parking lot, served Champagne, hired a live band and sold off the restaurant’s furniture and other belongings in a kind of garage sale. They hope Socalo’s end on Feb. 14 will feel every bit as much a “celebration of life,” and while they haven’t nailed down the menu or the entertainment, they expect it to be lively and — fittingly for the holiday — full of love.
“It felt really important for us to keep a presence in Santa Monica because it has been so much a part of our lives,” Feniger said. “I think that’s why we’ve held on even as we’ve seen a number of our peers who have closed over the last three years in Santa Monica. We just kept hoping we could turn that corner, at least break even. But a lot of it is also because we feel a huge responsibility to the team and the people that work for us.”
The owners alerted Socalo staff on Friday afternoon, with one month of notice before the closure. Even before the announcement, they said, they began placing calls to fellow restaurateurs to identify possible job opportunities for staff.
They currently run a commissary kitchen, which might hire some of their Socalo team and serves as a base for fighting food insecurity by making and delivering meals to eight homeless shelters in L.A. In March they plan to open an even larger commissary kitchen, which they hope will diversify their business and could staff even more.
“We realized that the industry is changing so much, and specifically independent restaurants. The financial equation is getting tighter and tighter and harder,” Feniger said.
The new commissary kitchen could help scale up their airport outposts and prepackaged food businesses, including meal kits available for local pickup, and meals that ship nationally through companies such as Goldbelly. They’re interested in diversifying into preparing meals for local schools.
“I think trying to fix Socalo, or get it figured out, has taken a lot of our energies,” Milliken said. “We want to make sure we’re taking care of the core business that isn’t losing money.”
They’ll be focusing more on Border Grill and BBQ Mexicana in Las Vegas, Alice B. in Palm Springs, their outposts in stadiums and arenas, on events, and on their commercial kitchens’ output.
L.A. hasn’t seen the last of Feniger and Milliken. Their combination Border Grill and Socalo food trucks will continue catering in the region, serving some of Socalo’s flavors; the salsa macha, they said, will probably be a permanent fixture. Later this year or early next, they plan to open a Border Grill inside Hollywood Burbank Airport. And they’re entertaining the idea of reopening a standalone Border Grill elsewhere in the city.
“We don’t know if it’s going to happen or when it would happen,” Milliken said, “but we definitely have some irons in the fire that we’re excited about.”
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