Stalwarts in the LA restaurant world have closed this year, including Animal in the Fairfax District, Patrick’s Roadhouse in Santa Monica, and The Shabu Shabu House in Little Tokyo. In total, more than 75 restaurants closed this year in LA, according to the latest tally from The Los Angeles Times. One of the latest to shutter is Alimento, the Italian bistro on Silver Lake Boulevard. Zach Pollack is head chef and owner there.
Alimento served patrons for more than a decade, Pollack tells KCRW, and was supposed to stay open through this past weekend. However, due to a power outage, the restaurant shut down on Friday.
In choosing to say goodbye permanently, Pollack considered two questions. The first was whether Alimento aligns with his lifestyle, priorities, needs, and output as he’s now age 40. The second was whether its business model fit with today’s economics. And running the restaurant now, compared to a decade ago, is significantly more expensive, considering the prices of ingredients, rent, and staff wages.
He points out, “The big wrinkle … is a lot of my cooks and dishwashers, they're working two jobs. Even if they're making twice what they were 10 years ago, they're still working two jobs. No one's working two jobs to get rich. You work two jobs to get by. … That is one of the insoluble problems I see moving forward in this business.”
Alimento was part of a wave of restaurants that dominated new openings from the early 2000s to COVID, he says.
“You had chefs and operators with a lot of passion, a lot of pedigree, who had come from higher-end, fancier, expensive restaurants — and wanted to bring the same attention to detail to a setting, oftentimes in a neighborhood or in their hometown, with a lot less pretense, where the service felt more honest. … That model did work for a long time.”
He continues, “But we would get creative with food … or use a … less-known cut of meat. … But if everyone’s doing that … if everyone's doing the hanger steak, well, then now all of a sudden, hanger steaks are prohibitively expensive if you want to keep your price point, well, affordable. … Alimento, our check average … in recent years, it was about $60 a head, and when we opened, it was like $52-ish. So over a 10-year period, that's not a huge difference.”
Pollack says the main conundrum is that restaurants are too expensive for what customers are willing to pay, but wildly underpriced relative to operation costs.
“Five or 10 years ago … if you're going to be one of these neighborhood restaurants, you could just do a really good job and be moderately successful. Now … if you're this small neighborhood restaurant with a lot of attention to detail (i.e., a lot of labor), a lot of high-quality foods (i.e., expensive foods), you really have to hit the bullseye to survive,” says Zach Pollack. Courtesy of Zach Pollack.
Meanwhile, Pollack has another restaurant that’s still open — Cosa Buona, which serves pizza. He’s trying to break even there. Doing so would mark a good year, he says.
It’s not game over for restaurants, he suggests, but the game is now more challenging.
“Five or 10 years ago … if you're going to be one of these neighborhood restaurants, you could just do a really good job and be moderately successful. Now … if you're this small neighborhood restaurant with a lot of attention to detail (i.e., a lot of labor), a lot of high-quality foods (i.e., expensive foods), you really have to hit the bullseye to survive.”