In a year marked by tragedy and continued financial hardship, one of Los Angeles' most creative neighborhood restaurants is closing. All Day Baby, the innovative small-dining restaurant inspired by Southern cuisine, Mexican flavor and more, will close Dec. 15 after five years in Silver Lake.
At the end of the day, the reason was simple: The restaurant, owner Lien Ta said, doesn't make enough money on a day-to-day basis to sustain its operations.
“We are literally almost out of money,” he said. “Every week, every day we open, we lose money.”
The restaurant from Here's Looking at You owners Lien Ta and the late Jonathan Whitener opened to great success shortly before the pandemic, with Whitener's fluffy egg cookie sandwiches and a bakery packed with colorful pastries and shells and cookies. filled ones supervised for the first time by an award-winning pastry chef. chef Thessa Diadem, and now by Sam Robinson. The burritos were loaded with house-smoked meats and the cocktail menu featured negroni floats and other whimsical concoctions. The sunny All Day Baby landed on the LA Times' 101 Best Restaurants list for several years and received rave reviews from Condé Nast Traveler, Infatuation and others.
“All Day Baby would have been included again in the upcoming 2024 edition of the LA Times 101 Best Restaurants,” says restaurant critic Bill Addison. “His constant sense of reinvention was a survival tool, but the efforts led to dishes that balanced comfort and creative spark. Cookie sandwiches and loco moco were part of my own weekend breakfast rituals. Saturday morning I saw customers crying over the impending loss of the community.”
All Day Baby's signature ADB cookie sandwich.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
Less than six months after its debut, the pandemic hit, hampering Whitener and Ta's plans for a model that would go from morning to night. Sidewalk bake sales and other incentives helped keep the business afloat until on-site dining could resume. So, as in many restaurants and bars in the regionTwo entertainment industry strikes in 2023 reduced clientele to a trickle, and unrelated interference and costs, such as road construction that lasted months or LADWP bills that tripled last year, made the business unsustainable.
“I think our ambition and our ego really led us to have a lot of optimism that we could do this,” Ta said. “I guess you could say I'm an optimist or I don't give up, and maybe I should give up sooner. I really don't know. “I have struggled with this day and night, in the middle of the night, for years.”
There were days during the pandemic when All Day Baby was making only a few hundred dollars a day; Even in later years, there were still days when so little was obtained.
Ta said he owed thousands of dollars in back rent to the building's owner, which had accrued through a partial rent payment negotiation during the pandemic. When the restaurant suffered multiple break-ins in 10 days in the spring, Ta approached his landlord hoping to discuss reducing the rent to offset the cost of repairs, but was reminded of the outstanding amount.
In April, shortly after that conversation, he realized he would have to sell the business. After struggling with the decision for months, he told staff in October in an announcement at the restaurant; She and some of her employees were crying at the end.
“I just wanted to keep trying,” he said. “I wanted to use what little savings or grant money we received, and be as careful with the cash flow we had, to continue to look for solutions to repair what was a really difficult operation from the beginning. “There were a lot of glimmers of hope that maybe we could see the other side.”
All Day Baby hosted multiple pop-ups and pivots over its five years, but Ta said the most successful by far was Tet-a-Tet, a restaurant-within-a-restaurant that took a Vietnamese food concept by storm. nights and worked for months. After the writers' strike began, what was a bustling service “shut down overnight,” and maintaining later business hours with extra staff no longer made financial sense; Tet-a-Tet ended on July 1, 2023.
There is still an important emotional factor in closing.
“I think in a lot of ways All Day Baby in a different place could pull it off, but I lost my collaborator,” Ta said. “I never intended to do any of this on my own.”
All Day Baby owners Jonathan Whitener, left, and Lien Ta outside the restaurant in 2020.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
In February, in a shock to the Los Angeles restaurant community and beyond, Whitener died at the age of 36.. The acclaimed chef is described as a sister figure to Ta, who months later lost a decades-long father figure and is still dealing with the losses while trying to maintain both restaurants.
“Doing two at the same time and feeling like I want to do it well is very confusing,” he said. “It's hard to cut all that down to get through the day.”
Since the announcement was posted on Instagram on Friday afternoon, hundreds of comments have poured in expressing sadness, sharing memories, and even tagging elected officials in case they could help change this fate. Over the weekend, guests lined up to order tables piled high with food, sometimes several entrees per person. By noon, Robinson's pastry case was decimated.
Ta characterized the public response as “overwhelmingly charming and heartbreaking.”
But the owner doesn't want to focus on the heartbreaking aspects of the restaurant's end, at least not for the next month.
Pork ribs garnished with carrots and potatoes from All Day Baby.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
A series of pop-ups will be held in the space, welcoming faces new and old with some of the restaurant's favorite pop-ups and concepts from years past. All Day Baby bar director Jorge Figueroa will host a tiki evening on Thursday, November 21, led by Joanne Martínez and Jesse Sepúlveda from Bar Flores, also from All Day Baby. Chef Ken Chan is bringing his Hawaiian food pop-up, called Mixplate, to the restaurant on December 6. Ta is considering planning a themed graduation night for staff, as well as other special events and pop-ups before the final day. service.
“In general, I love celebrations,” Ta said. “I think it's important. And, you know, we're not promised tomorrow, so I think we should maximize and squeeze as much juice out of today as we can. “I definitely don’t want this to be about being sad.”
All Day Baby is located at 3200 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. His last day of service is December 15.
