wow
But a change definitely had to be made, as the current model was definitely not working. I can guarantee that this was not a “mutual decision” per their statement.
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No wonder my Chef’s counter reservation got cancelled last night.The restaurant called me 4 hours before my reservation time and told me that it’s cancelled due to an “unforeseen circumstance” but wouldn’t elaborate…
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I guess not.
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not surprised at all
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Yes, too many bowls, random grains and seeds and little green leaves. So many bowls. That goes for Native too.
And when is this off-set white space trend going to die?
FIFM…
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Marveling at the harshness…
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I’m gonna come out and be harsh and it’ll make me sound like a hater but I’m always supportive of chefs but being in the industry I saw all the death signs before they opened.
First of all - insanely expensive buildout with very rich investors. Since when was this a recipe for success? Only guys in recent history who can pull off this is people like Danny Meyer and Joel Robuchon.
Menu was all over the place. This is the same criticism I have against Native. WTF is the cuisine? Global inspired cooking is very difficult to pull off. How can you pull off a cohesive menu when it has things such as parmesan brodo, kaffir lime, caraway sauerkraut and garlic chive kimchi all on the same menu? Not every chef can pull off a diverse menu like this and even if they can it can be a hard sell to diners who don’t know what the restaurant’s identity is which leads me to my next point:
WTF is Simone? I firmly believe in the saying, you gotta be able to describe your concept in one easy sentence. So what was Simone? Modern Art Deco shared, global inspired, farmers market driven plates? Who is Jessica Largey? Other than the fact she ran Manresa nobody outside of the food-obsessed circles knew who the hell she was. For example Nightshade is killing it business wise and even if you couldn’t describe the cuisine people knew it was Mei Lin’s restaurant who we all saw win Top Chef. I don’t know how they were marketing the restaurant but to me it seemed to mostly rely on the inner food media circles and not the masses.
Tasting menu and regular menu in a large dining room? Why didn’t she do a small chef tasting counter and ditch the a la carte menu and ditch having too many investors? Was the a la carte menu the way to justify for the ability for her to do a tasting menu? Like Hayato and Dialogue, I think she should have followed their business model and start small. I wonder if she had experience running a restaurant that needed to make 3 turns a night on a weekend to make money because doing tweezer food is not how you pay rent for that kind of space.
In the future I hope she does something smaller and ditch the big named investors. It sucks watching a chef with such a pedigree make the same mistakes we’ve seen before.
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Nope. She started at Providence and worked there for 2 years before staging at The Fat Duck for 6 weeks…came back to the States and became the opening chef at Lamill Coffee…then had a stint at Bastide and ended at Manresa for 6 years.
A la carte ain’t her game.
IHarsh truths, for sure. I feel for Arrington at Native only in the sense that Arrington was inspired by who she is and where she’s from. She’s black. She’s Asian. She’s an Angeleno. She’s French trained. If she’s cooking “her” food, it’s going to be globally inspired and all over the map. But that’s also going to be a hard sell and an even harder sell on Santa Monica. And making the menu work while still incorporating all of those influences is really hard. I’m not sure she totally pulled that off in the end, but I liked where she was headed.
Mei Lin, I think, presented a clearer vision of her personal cooking on TC, and she leveraged her celebrity better by opening her restaurant closer to her stint in TC. I hope Nightshade has some staying power.
Simone looked like a hot mess from the get go.
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Here’s the article from LA Mag.
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Holy crap. This sounds like an absolute disaster. Not sure how much to take out of all these anonymous comments. Hopefully Jessica comes back to LA with a different concept so we can taste her food. She sounds like a very talented chef and well regarded by her peers. I listened to the David Chang podcast and she has worked in some great kitchens.
Yikes, that article ain’t going to help their cause.
how much money does a restaurant like that lose per month? Producers/directors make a lot of money, but even the most balling of producers/directors can’t sustain a 6-7 figure monthly burn forever.
Like @JLee says, she needs to open up a place like Hayato, Dialogue, and Maude since that’s been her game since day 1 at Providence.
While interesting in a can’t-look-away-from-an-awkward-interaction way, I don’t imagine there is too much in that piece we couldn’t surmise.
What leapt out at me, though, is the one employee referencing an Eater piece about all of the perks/bennies the staff received, and then saying neither s/he nor any others s/he asked getting them.
I wonder if Eater will address this - strikes me as them carrying a lot of water for Russo et al, if true.
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I’ll have to listen to it again, but to me she came off as kind of full of herself.
I don’t disagree but Chang was hyping her up big time. Called her a prodigy and he was so effusive with the praise for working at Providence, staging at St John then being CDC at Manresa all by the age of like 23 or whatever it was. She certainly didn’t shy away from all the praise.