I haven’t gone but there’s a huge slowdown in the food industry right now. Not just at tasting menus.
I remember last year I couldn’t get a two top at Damian to save my life. Now it’s completely open. Even providence and melisse have really open availability. It’s mostly really hot scenester restaurants or ultra limited cover per nights that are packed now.
I’m not sure what’s causing the slowdown but it’s everywhere. Just had one client ask me today if I feel like business has been slow cause they are having their worst quarter in awhile.
People have depleted their covid money savings and the low savings rates don’t help either most likely due to inflation.
Diners are more picky about where they choose to eat. Its gotta be the best of something or unique otherwise they wont just go out to spend for sake of spending and will eat utilitarian food to save money.
QSR restaurants are up but full service restaurants are down acccording to this: https://www.nrn.com/finance/trade-down-continues-consumers-cut-back-restaurant-dinners
A more obscure answer may be that restaurants are generally playing it very safe these days on their menus as costs are high and so is risk aversion these days but diners who have limited funds or have become more discerning will not go out to a restaurant unless its either hyped up or they think is guaranteed to be good.
While we do have tourist traffic to help as Los Angeles is a popular place to visit, it may only get us thru this summer. Fall might be a harsh reality waiting to reveal itself but that doomsday prediction has always been just around the corner.
also forgot to add that writers strike and looming actors strike don’t help when this town has alol of people working in that industry including all the people who work on the shows and arent writers or actors, it can have a compounding effect.
Anecdotally, it’s not like layoffs have stopped in corporate America. Even if it’s a small layoff or rumors of a hiring freeze as companies plan for a potential recession, people take notice and will likely reconsider their spending. You compound that with other local factors (like the writers strike) and that might help account for more reduced overall spend.
…and I will add that dining out in the past year or so hasn’t been that great unless you go higher-end restaurants which your average person (myself included) can’t afford on a regular basis. I would say that most of my restaurant meals lately have been disappointing— quality and service down and price up. I’d rather just cook at home where I’m getting much better QPR and go out for things that I can’t/don’t cook like ethnic/global regional food or stick to lower-priced items like burritos/sandwiches/salads in a more casual setting. I don’t want to drop $$ and leave unhappy which has been the case too many times-- not worth it to me.
My hypothesis would be that there isn’t a general slowdown. Rather, most restaurants lose their luster over time. I would say Damian is a good example of that. We find the food just okay. The menu is largely the same as when it opened. We’ve eaten all the dishes we want to eat on that menu. So we have no plans on returning. If Damian offered a new fish dish in place of the branzino that we found lackluster and that they’ve had on the menu since they opened, then maybe we’d go back.
This. I’m feeling pretty secure and financially flush, but I’m dining out more like I did back in the early chowhound/Jim Leff/Jonathan Gold days when the point was to experience the diversity of the city, not to experience the pinnacle of service and cuisine.
There’s nothing wrong with a restaurant that always has the dishes you want on the menu. It’s a great business model if enough people want those dishes often enough.
In the SF Bay Area I haven’t noticed any downturn in quality at the places I’ve been going to for a while.
Local media companies had thousands of layoffs this year. Writers are on strike, actors about to be on strike, no productions in town because of said strikes. This is thousands of people who made good money just 12 months ago.
I think it’s underappreciated too how economically diverse many markets are, especially at the luxury level. Those clients that can only afford to spend so much money annually but do so out of passion add up in their own way.
Like me choosing to go out less is easy to miss. I’m not gonna pretend like any restaurants are wondering where I’ve been
“Yeah but what happened to the Dufresnes?! No one seems to care”
But thousands of me making those same decisions becomes more noticeable over time, even if it’s only a tiny dent in the grand scheme
it sucks that 50 or 100 years ago restaurant workers never found the same protections as other trades. Tho that would have its own ripple effect on todays landscape as well
I think a factor that tends to get overlooked is the skyrocketing cost of labor. Since the place I work opened in 2016, the minimum wage in LA has gone up 68%. When you consider that labor is generally the biggest cost for a restaurant, this obviously makes it much, much harder for places to stay in business let alone make a profit. This is true even for places like mine where business has remained steady. I am all for a minimum wage, but coupled with a dining public either unaware of the economics and/or unwilling or unable to pay correspondingly more (and then factor in the strikes and inflation), you end up with a situation where restaurants are responding with semi-hidden service fees, skimping on portions or closing.
And if we’re gauging a slowdown based on reservation availability, fwiw I think the rise of food delivery services has a lot of people eating more at home. I know I certainly do relative to a few years ago.
As of July 1 the minimum wage in LA is $16.78, up from $15 in July 2020 and $16.04 in July 2022, so no big change to explain a slowdown in the first half of this year.
I believe a lot of places offer more than that to get good staff anyway.
I’m not saying labor cost is the only factor, nor do I think any slowdown has necessarily been sudden and isolated to this year. However there is obviously a cumulative effect and it certainly makes it harder to weather things like inflation and a strike by workers in one of the city’s primary industries.
I’m basing this all on my own experience, but for us 2023 is the first “normal” year since 2019 and the first chance we’ve had to catch our breath and see where things stand financially (for reasons I won’t get into here 2022 was by far the most difficult year we’ve had basically due to lingering effects of the pandemic without any more government assistance). There’s no point in comparing the status quo to the previous three years because they were obviously extraordinary, in my eyes to do a true apples to apples comparison you have to go back to 2019 and I promise you even the nearly 20% jump in labor since then has had a significant impact.
I’m not ashamed to say we probably owe our continued existence to PPP (those that were lucky enough to score RRF funds were basically handed a check for their 2019 gross receipts in addition), luckily we’ve landed on our feet once we burned through that money. But burn through it we did and I suspect what we are seeing is a lot of places doing the same and coming to realize doing business in 2023 is a lot harder than it was in 2019.
While not many may get the minimum wage, when it does go up the employer is “required” to raise all wages to maintain good relations with his/her staff.
Not only does the direct compensation of workers go up, but so does the cost of other benefits such as vacation pay, etc.
The employer has little control over the rising cost of supplies - rising in part because supplier’s wage and benefit costs are also going up.
Maybe referred to above, but rent and cam charges are also rising.
The slowdown may also be caused in part by customers finally feeling free to take vacations.
