Night Bites

More restaurants put midnight on the menu
By: RACHEL BROWN: Los Angeles Business Journal
Los Angeles is starting to get some late-night eateries, thanks to the influx of residents to urban areas of the city.

For New York transplant Steve Adelman, late-night dining doesn’t mean popping a frozen pizza into the microwave. Before uprooting and coming to Los Angeles three years ago, he frequented places like Soho’s Balthazar, where steak with pommes frites at midnight is standard nosh.




Late Meals: Diners can nosh until 4 a.m. at the Hollywood restaurant Honey.





In his new home, Adelman didn’t find the landscape so accommodating to culinary night crawling. It wasn’t because people didn’t want to eat late, he concluded. It was because they didn’t have many appetizing places to do it.

“L.A. was known as an early night scene simply because there wasn’t a lot to do late at night,” Adelman said. “The more that opens up, the more it becomes a late-night town. A town defines itself by its options.”

As owner of Hollywood Entertainment Partners LLC, the outfit responsible for the Avalon and Spider Club, he decided he would provide two of them: Honey, a restaurant tucked into a Hollywood alley that caters to restaurant goers with a craving for Kobe beef and roasted chicken from 9 p.m. until 4 a.m., and Lift, a 24-hour eatery in the restored Hillview Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard. Honey opened in December, Lift will open in May.

Late night here is evolving – some would say maturing – with a fledgling crop of restaurants staying open later and later to serve sophisticated fare.

“The trend is definitely more people eating late,” said Lonnie Moore, co-owner of the Dolce Group, which has the restaurants Geisha House and Bella Cucina Italiana in Hollywood as well as Dolce in West Hollywood. “People are as hungry in Los Angeles at 1 a.m. as they are anywhere in the country.”

Outsiders often chide L.A. for its seemingly provincial lack of late-night activity.

“New Yorkers, they are vampires. Here, we are not scared of the sun, we kind of like it,” quipped Merrill Shindler, a senior editor of Zagat Survey. “Our roots in a lot of ways are Midwestern: early to bed, early to rise and all that. Things have definitely improved, but it was pretty bad for a while.”

Certainly, Hollywood is at the center of the shift. The changing restaurant business is reflective of the metamorphosis of the neighborhood. The restaurants are staying open later because there’s a market for it: people packing crowded bars and moving into pricey condos provide one.

But Hollywood’s not the only place where late-night bites are possible. In Koretown, BCD Tofu House, a 13-unit chain, dishes out Korean specialty bibimbap at all hours. Toward the Beverly Center, Berri’s Pizza Café is busy late at night with diners chowing on its thin-crust pizza. And downtown, there’s always the stalwart Pacific Dining Car, where the same juicy steak can be had at lunch and at the witching hour.

Club crowds
The restaurant scene and the club scene are closely related. Oft-neglected urban areas can be sparked to life by clubs – and that’s certainly the case in Hollywood. With the clubs now transformed from isolated outposts to mainstays of nightlife, entrepreneurs sense that other businesses, including restaurants, can capture the money that club goers are willing to spend during a night out.

Honey, on the main floor of the Avalon, has taken advantage of those night owls. Adelman estimates 2,000 people filter through the club on a given evening and it takes only a small portion of that crowd to fill up the 110-seat restaurant. At Geisha House, Moore said that late-night diners at the restaurant are often going to or coming from the clubs.

Even as recently as two years ago, Moore said there weren’t nearly as many clubs around Geisha House as there are now. Since then, hotspots LAX and Mood moved in. “There are so many more places open now,” he said. “That has brought all these people into the area and has been great for us.”

In addition to club patrons, Lee Maen, a partner in Innovative Dining Group, which owns the restaurants Sushi Roku, Katana and Boa, said people going to award shows and other events often stop by at his venues for late-night goodies. “They don’t really eat there, so they wind up coming to our restaurants afterward,” he said.
Not all restaurants are looking to capitalize on the shows or clubs. The Bowery and Magnolia, two late-night restaurants on Sunset Boulevard, attract locals who have a hankering for a casual, yet classy, meal as the morning hours draw near.

Co-owner Laurie Mulstay said Magnolia appeals to customers who live in the surrounding areas, including Whitley Heights, Beachwood Canyon and Hancock Park. “Most people think (her customers) are Hollywood kids coming out from clubs. It is not that at all. It is the neighborhood people,” she said.

George Abou-Baoud, owner of the Bowery, said these neighborhood people were yearning for restaurants such as those along Third Street and Beverly Boulevard – AOC, Toast and Grace are among them. Now, restaurants like his are filling in the gap so Hollywood Hills residents, for instance, don’t have to travel so far.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Abou-Baoud and Mulstay, as well as Adelman, are New Yorkers. These restaurateurs have a vision for what a city block should look like: filled with eateries teeming with customers through the night. Names of restaurants created in that mold – Pastis and Blue Ribbon Brasserie, for example – pour off their tongues.

“In New York, it is so fun. You go walking, you are hanging out, and you can go to restaurants,” said Abou-Baoud. In L.A., there wasn’t a similar vibe, but he thought he would try to foster it at the Bowery.

But a crucial element was missing: in New York, people eat where they live. Here, that’s often not the case. In fact, Shindler cites the car culture as one reason late-night dining hasn’t been cultivated. People end up eating at home, not out, if they want a midnight meal because it’s inconvenient to hop in the car.

However, as the middle- and upper-class types take up residence in locales where they’ve been absent – Hollywood and downtown in particular – a walking environment could develop that would lend itself to late-night dining.

Late bill
Opening a restaurant is never simple, and late-night restaurants have their own set of concerns. Abou-Baoud explained that while location is always critical for restaurants, it is even more so for late-night eateries. Also, he said, a late-night restaurant shouldn’t be too pricey: at the Bowery, the $9 burger is one of the most popular items.

Over the long haul, Abou-Baoud believes the more expensive restaurants won’t make it. The loaded check, he believes, precludes dining repeatedly. “There are some of these places that are doing the whole velvet-rope thing,” he said. “If you are spending between $25 and $55 at midnight, you are going to do it once or twice.”

By charging customers less, Abou-Baoud said he maintains the feel of an unpretentious neighborhood restaurant, and people will be able to come often because they are not taking a chunk out of their wallet on each visit.

Adelman said that the clientele dictates the price point. Young people in Hollywood who are eating late are on a budget, he said, and they can be turned off by entrees that cost almost as much as a day’s pay.

“Cool Hollywood people don’t have money. Struggling writers don’t have money,” he said. “You can build a place where they can’t come, or you can build a place where they can come.”

The menu also has to suit a variety of late-night tastes. While some people may devour a late steak, many others are in the mood for lighter fare. Mulstay said she gets customers coming from the movies who order a full dinner, while others simply order calamari at the bar.
Late-night restaurants tend to have their own rhythms. Customers often show up in packs after leaving clubs, movies or theatrical performances. That can mean that the activity peaks from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Most of the operators of the city’s late-night restaurants admit they are still finding their way. But they all agree that they’re filling a niche.

“If you drive around at 12:30, you can count on your fingers the options available,” Moore said.