Later this month, Button Mash owners Jordan Weiss and Gabriel Fowlkes will permanently unplug the beeping and flashing video game terminals at the Echo Park bar and arcade. Along with Button Mash’s closure, so will one of Los Angeles’ most inventive restaurants.
In an Instagram post published early Monday morning, both the arcade and its Poltergeist restaurant shared that they will be closing on September 29.
Faced with rising costs, a slowing summer season and a lease renewal, both teams decided it was time to move on. It seemed like the right time, especially since most of the kitchen equipment had broken down while they were making the decision. Poltergeist's chef, Diego Argoti, was told the equipment could run for another 30 days; he said it only needed 21. It is, the chef says, a bit like playing the violin while the Titanic is sinking.
“We’re at the top right now and the best thing we can do, and one of the best feelings we can have, is to just end this on our terms,” Argoti said. “If I let my ego get the better of me and keep doing this, we’re going to fade away and lose money. Right now we could just walk away and pay everybody and that’s very rare, closing a restaurant with style and grace.”
Los Angeles restaurants remain open At a fast and hopeful pacealthough 2023 and 2024 have been tremendously difficult years for operations, given pandemic-related loan defaults, the city’s economic fallout from entertainment industry strikes and rising costs nationwide. Button Mash and Poltergeist, while often packed with guests and receiving plenty of praise, faced lower guest check averages and slow periods that made it difficult to justify signing another lease.
A row of vintage pinball machines next to the Poltergeist dining room at Button Mash in October 2023.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
“There were nights where I thought, ‘Man, I wish this place was a complete mess because it would be easier to make these decisions and pull the trigger and justify it,’” Weiss said.
“But it always passed the eye test: we’ve got people in the door, we’re getting all the praise, all the things that can be achieved, everyone paying attention, we’re getting all this press, somehow we’ve held on until now,” he added. “Reconciling that with the numbers we were seeing and the operating costs and this sense of a ceiling visibly shrinking with each passing week doesn’t make sense, but I know other people are in the same boat.”
Plus, Weiss said, Button Mash was never designed to maximize restaurant profits — it was built a decade ago to highlight craft beer, creative food and vintage arcade games blocks from Dodger Stadium. That it has survived this long was a pleasant surprise.
Button Mash has been home to several pop-up venues over the years, including the long-running Starry Kitchen. List 101 Award Winner under former LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold.
Weiss and Argoti met during an after-party there before the chef consulted on the menu for Weiss’s opening cidery in Virgil Village, Alma.
Button Mash returned from its pandemic-induced closure, which nearly shut the bar down permanently, Taking advantage of Tacos 1986 to implement the food programWhen that ended sooner than expected, Weiss contacted Argoti to take over.
Argoti’s restaurant, which breaks from traditional styles, serves playful and occasionally subversive dishes. The Bestia alum has used the space to expand his popular pop-up restaurant Estrano, which typically draws crowds of diners to alleys and other corners of Los Angeles in search of fresh pastas and loud music. Since opening in 2023 at Button Mash, Poltergeist’s eye-catching dishes — like Thai Caesar salads topped with fried rice paper towers or herb-mounted Panang lamb collar — have garnered attention and praise from around the country.
“Poltergeist—what a name!—serves up some of the most frenetic, unbridled, outlandish cuisine in Los Angeles, and opinions are duly polarizing,” wrote LA Times food critic Bill Addison in his Review 2023. “When [Argoti’s] “The combinations fit together and register like the gustatory equivalent of a new language.”
The game hen dish with sticky rice, served with pickled papaya and radicchio, bound and photographed in Poltergeist in February 2023.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
At first, diners were unsure what to make of Poltergeist, and while the reception was generally positive, the summer after its release saw fewer tables occupied during a season that is traditionally slow for restaurants.
As Button Mash’s lease was up in March 2024, the team began to wonder if they would make it that far. Argoti, Weiss and Fowlkes considered making the menu more approachable with burgers and sandwiches, but instead went in the opposite direction, offering dishes like batter-fried sea bream — one of the most creative meals Argoti says he’s ever made there.
Praise for the original and irreverent menu began to pour in, including Addison's review. Poltergeist began to attract national attention from outlets such as Esquire and, earlier this year, the James Beard Foundation Awards, which chose Argoti as a semi-finalist in the Best Chef: California category.
Despite feeling critically on top, summer is slow again, costs are rising and rent has gone up. The decision to close took weeks, maybe months, to be made. Argoti won't reopen Poltergeist anywhere else. Weiss says he and Fowlkes will likely sell most of their arcade games to collectors.
“I love Poltergeist, but Poltergeist was always built as a space within Button Mash,” Argoti said. “With the name ‘noisy spirit,’ the goal was to just make noise and get attention and open up opportunities, and show if I can run a business. People see me as the weird kid in the alley cooking frog legs and now it’s like, well, I can and I want to do that. It’s been really cool.”
The next few weeks will be “really crazy,” with frequent menu changes and offbeat specials that Argoti was always hesitant to offer, like a pasta dish with ricotta and calf brains or a rad na lasagna. He wants to bring back frog legs.
Chef Diego Argoti plans to run Poltergeist through the end of the month with wild specials and then appear as Estrano while planning his next restaurant.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
After Sept. 29, the chef plans to host more pop-up events at Estrano and, for the most part, disappear from the culinary spotlight for a while. He may be a consultant, but in the background he’ll be planning another restaurant, hopefully one he’ll run again with Weiss: something smaller, more streamlined, perhaps something that offers a pared-down daytime menu and an unmodified, unrestricted tasting menu at night where he can unleash his culinary weirdness. Over time, he wants to open several small restaurants that spotlight other chefs and offer them equity and identity.
But before he jumps into opening another restaurant, Argoti says he needs to take some time for himself. The day after his father died, he learned of his nomination as a James Beard Award semifinalist. He hasn't taken time to mentally or physically process or get over his loss. He has a new puppy to spend time with and wants time and space to see what form his culinary style will take next.
“I want to treat this like music or albums: What I was cooking two years ago and what I wanted to cook ten years ago is completely different than what I plan to do two years from now or a year from now,” Argoti said. “The growth is accumulating in such a way that I’m excited to see what I cook and what I want to cook and what it’s going to look like.”
Poltergeist and Button Mash, 1391 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles
