Escape From LA Part 2: The Restaurateurs

When I first wrote Escape From LA, I confess that I never expected to write a sequel, but when you live in Dark Blue America, life comes at you fast.

That first essay was written in a fit of despair right after a Los Angeles city election in which a Democrat Machine politician named Karen Bass was elected to run a city that is being pulled rapidly beneath the waves by problems created by other Democrat Machine politicians, and I was in a mood to be black-pilled.

But that was then, and this is now. What black-pilled me enough that I felt compelled to sit down at my desk 15 months later and rage-write a sequel was something that happened this past Sunday.

But we’ll come back to that in a moment.

The war on L.A.’s restaurateurs began about a decade ago. Food trucks were always a feature of life in LA. But in the before times, the trucks were merely functional, rarely anything more than a literal delivery vehicle for quickly prepared food of marginal quality. They were painted a non-descript grimy white, with few if any indications of who might own them. And you mostly saw them parked outside construction sites, where they served up questionable slop to blue-collar guys who didn’t much care what they ate as long as it was cheap and had enough calories to get them through the rest of the day. To quote “Cookie” from “City Slickers”, “You ain't gonna get any nouveau, amandine, thin crust, bottled water, sauteed city food. Food's brown, hot, and plenty of it.”

But the quality of the food delivered by L.A.’s food trucks didn’t stay low for long. Opening and running a restaurant in Los Angeles is an insanely expensive proposition and restaurateurs, by their very nature, are a clever, entrepreneurial and rebellious bunch. They have to be… every restaurateur knows that the minute they open a restaurant in this fair city, a clock starts ticking to the day they’re forced to close.

Knowing this fact, and sensing an opportunity, LA’s food trucks started to position themselves in more advantageous locations… outside popular tourist sites for instance. Places where potential customers were plentiful and where, by their very nature, the brick-and-mortar restaurants couldn’t go. The food quality and variety went way up, the trucks began showing up with expensive and clever new paintjobs, and the gold rush was on. Contra “Cookie”, the nouveau, amandine, thin crust, bottled water, sauteed city food did eventually make it to L.A.’s city streets. Even well-known local chefs eventually got into the act… a classic example of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em-ism.

Oh sure, the traditional brick-and-mortar restaurateurs protested for a while, right up to the point where they realized, and here I hope you will forgive me the use of a crude colloquialism, that their duly elected officials simply didn’t give a shit about them.

And when nothing happened to slow this new wave of elaborate food trucking, an entirely new class of budding “restaurateurs” saw their own opening and siezed it. “Pop-up” restaurants began to show up all over the city. Most are nothing but an awning of the kind you might see fans standing under at a college football tailgate, after all, food trucks are expensive! But other pop-ups are quite elaborate, and the more local Government does nothing to stop them, the more cheeky and expansive they become. Nowadays it’s not unusual to see pop-ups with a dozen tables, red and white checkerboard tableclothes, napkin boxes, condiment dispensers and all the trimmings.

It was exactly this sort of “restaurant” which finally sent me to the keyboard with an urge to rant. A particularly brazen “restaurant”, one of the kind that has all the trappings of a brick-and-mortar restaurant minus the brick and mortar, popped up on the median strip directly across from the front door of my local LAPD precinct. This weekend as I was cruising by, I saw a motorcycle cop swing out of the precinct garage and pull up to this “restaurant.”

Before I could wonder what kind of citation he was about to write, I watched him order lunch.

The problem with big blue cities like Los Angeles is that they don’t work for the people who actually make them go… the entrepreneurs willing to take big financial risks and invest in making these cities better. Empty restaurants and storefronts are like diseased tooth sockets… eventually they begin to infect the other teeth around them, and soon those once-healthy businesses are rotting too.

And not only doesn’t our city work, but it often seems like California government generally, and Los Angeles government specifically, are deliberately putting entrepreneurs through a humiliation ritual.

By their inaction with regard to pop-up restaurants, our oleagenous Governor Gavin Newsom and our 100% charisma-free Mayor Karen Bass are telling Los Angeles restaurateurs that if they pay rent, if they stay current on their small business loan, if they paid for a business license and an alcohol permit, if they endure the incovenience and expense of the periodic health department inspections which produce the window signs without which an L.A. restaurant may not do business, if they pay their employees the mandated $20/hour minimum wage, provide benefits, or pay Social Security and Medicare matching funds, if they endure the constant capital drain of “dine-and-dashers”, if they extract sales tax from their already financially stressed customers, or pay their business income tax… then they are suckers.

Oh, and if you’re really lucky, Gavin might turn off your water and electricty the next time the city gets infected by a bad cold.

(Above: Chili Palmer learns how to order off-menu at The Ivy… and also how to give notes on a script you haven’t read)

And here we can see how the struggles of L.A.’s restaurateurs mirror the collapse of the movie business. There are plenty of fancy offices in the halls of Hollywood’s entertainment firms, but the city’s restaurants have always been where the real business of the movies is done. Most of the biggest deals I’ve been a part of got their start over lunch.

(Above: Lieutenant Ed Exley embarrasses himself at The Formosa)

Hollywood was once a place where millions of tourists came from around the world to eat in famous restaurants, not just because of the chefs or the food, but because they wanted to eat in the restaurants they saw in their favorite movies and hoped they might get lucky and spot a movie star or two. Real cinephiles know the names of reaturants like The Brown Derby, Musso and Frank’s, Bar Marmont, Le Dome, Dan Tana’s, The Formosa and The Ivy as well as they know the stars of their favorite movies. But these restaurants of Hollywood legend are mostly gone now, and those that remain are often shadows of their former selves… much like the Hollywood movie stars themselves.

It’s bad for the movie business, and it’s bad for the State economy of course, but Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass don’t care about that… why should they? These jobs they have are merely temporary resume boosters… way-stations on the long dusty trail to higher office. Gavin wants to be President, as you may have heard, and he’s got bigger fish to fry.

In a not-too-distant future where all the great restaurateurs have relocated to Nashville, Miami and Austin, those of us who remain in Los Angeles will just have to fry our own fish.

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