L.A. restaurants thought it couldn’t get any worse. Then 2025 happened

In late October the owners of one of the city’s best pizzerias took to social media, begging for help: Ronan needed an immediate influx of customers to stay afloat, and even ordering one cocktail or piece of merch could help.

“I’m a COVID baby as a restaurant owner, but this is no less serious than that, and it’s probably harder because the relief isn’t there,” co-owner Caitlin Cutler said in an interview. “In 2025 versus 2024, when you think it couldn’t get worse, it got worse.”

Last year restaurateurs said that the state of the hospitality industry was untenable due to the loss of business from the entertainment-industry strikes, cost-of-labor increases and repayment of COVID-era back rent and loans. In 2025 fires, ICE raids, neighborhood curfews and tariffs added to the strain on Los Angeles restaurants.

In early 2025 Cutler and her husband, Daniel, received a $10,000 grant and a $50,000 loan with deferred payments, which they figured would buoy their cash reserves through the end of the year and possibly into 2026. But only months later, summer’s ICE raids and a steep decrease in tourism triggered an unexpected decline, wiping out the funds. Now they’re unsure how to even pay the loan back.

“It’s kaleidoscopic,” said Jot Condie, president and chief executive of the California Restaurant Assn. “Every potential issue is conspiring against the restaurant industry. … The industry is really in a very volatile position.”

A confluence of setbacks led to dozens of restaurant closures this year, including some of the city’s most lauded and legendary places: Papa Cristo’s, Guerrilla Tacos, Here’s Looking at You and more.

Longtime restaurateur Sang Yoon announced in early December the shocking closure of Helms Bakery, the iconic Culver City bread purveyor revived by Yoon in late 2024. He cited a number of factors, but chief among them were affordability as an operator and inconsistent consumer spending.

“The forces that we don’t control might be bigger than the ones we control,” Yoon said. “With very few exceptions, there’s few people doing OK. [There’s] kind of a malaise in town. It feels like L.A. really lost a couple steps. Late-night is gone. People are closing earlier. … It just doesn’t feel right. I grew up here, and it’s probably the weirdest it’s felt in my whole life. And I’ve been through a lot of weird.”

The California Restaurant Assn. represents more than 22,000 members, including restaurants, food trucks, bars, catering companies, breweries and ghost kitchens. This year Condie noticed “a Richter-scale shift in the attitudes of L.A. restaurants.”

The association annually surveys hundreds of California restaurateurs on their experiences and perceptions of the industry. The outlook in Los Angeles was particularly bleak.

“Usually, the San Francisco restaurant owners are very pessimistic,” Condie said, “and with L.A. restaurants, it’s usually the other way around. There’s a lot of people, the weather’s great, there’s year-round outdoor dining. Now, it’s the opposite. They’ve traded places, and I haven’t seen anything like this in our surveys in a while.”

Of the L.A. restaurateurs surveyed, 84.8% said traffic is down compared with last year.

Most respondents said they wouldn’t be raising prices to offset losses, for fear of driving even more customers away. To compensate and drive down costs, 36% of L.A. restaurants surveyed said they are reducing hours of operation, while 25% said they’re trimming down their menus, and 13% said they are closing additional days.

“You’ve got more restaurants and way less spending in restaurants, so the piece of the pie that everybody gets is much, much, much smaller,” said Condie. “With that in the background, it’s like every other issue that’s conspiring against restaurants in L.A. is more intense.”

Those who are opening new restaurants are trying to stay optimistic, and some are streamlining their business plans. Michael Fiorelli and Elizabeth Gutierrez swore they would never turn their pop-up into a restaurant, but they took the plunge anyway and run Fiorelli Pizza with the mantra “less resources, more resourceful.”

Here are some of the largest ongoing factors that shook the L.A. restaurant industry in 2025.

January fires

Nearly one year since the Jan. 7 fires, the communities of Altadena, Palisades, Topanga and Malibu are still reeling and rebuilding. Even surviving businesses across the county report decimated sales in the first months of the year, citing the fires.

Some of the city’s most famous and locally loved restaurants burned. Some restaurants reopened in new neighborhoods — such as the Palisades’ Flour Pizzeria & Cafe, which now resides in Brentwood — while others, such as the Reel Inn, have yet to reopen.

The weeks following the fires saw steep declines in sales as L.A. residents left the city or remained inside. Some chefs and restaurateurs, including Guerrilla Tacos founder Wes Avila, petitioned City Hall to launch a campaign that would encourage supporting local restaurants during the fallout.

“Usually I try to stay out of local politics,” Avila said in February, “but this is something that’s super important.”

Immigration raids, downtown curfews

This year’s federal immigration raids hit industries across Los Angeles. In food service, according to Alba Velasquez of Los Angeles Food Policy Council, immigrants comprise 66% of workers in L.A. County, and 79% of them are Latino. The ICE-raid initiative — and ensuing protests — began in June but continues today, still hurting consumer spending, restaurateurs say.

Some declined to share their experiences on record for fear of inciting more sweeps. One local restaurateur, who requested not to be named, lost two key employees this summer: His head of kitchen prep self-deported to Mexico after his home was raided, as did a dishwasher, who left after his brother was arrested during a raid at a bus stop.

Long-term employees who know the ins and outs of a restaurant can be hard to replace. In addition to the emotional loss, the restaurateur said he and other staff covered their tasks indefinitely.

“Everyone is burned out,” he said. “There’s not enough rowers in the boat to keep the boat going. Everyone is over-stretched, overreached and overworked.”

For restaurants downtown, the temporary curfews in June halted business at peak dinner hours. Others — notably in Little Tokyo — saw looting and property destruction during several days of anti-ICE protests.

While business has steadily improved since the summer, French-Japanese bistro Camélia, one of the city’s top restaurants, hasn’t rebounded to its early-2025 revenue. In July and August Camélia lost 60% to 70% of its expected business.

“Even if we do have a busy fourth quarter,” said co-owner Courtney Kaplan, “I don’t know that we’re going to make up for it.”

When the curfews began Kaplan and her partner, Charles Namba, offered happy hour and a temporary lunch service, pivots that helped keep the restaurant afloat and the staff employed. The curfews’ residual effects hit their Echo Park restaurants, Tsubaki and Ototo.

“This is just one thing layered on top of so many other things that are going on,” Kaplan said, “that I don’t think that any neighborhoods are necessarily immune from it.”

Tariffs and inflation

In a year marked by economic concerns, tariff trade wars and rising utility costs, nearly every restaurant and chef interviewed named steep price hikes for coffee, butter, beef and more.

At Long Beach bakery San & Wolves, which opened at the beginning of the year, guests queue for plant-based Filipino pastries, pan de sal and turon. Owners Kym Estrada and Arvin Torres source many of their ingredients from the Philippines.

In June, as vendors braced for tariffs, the restaurateurs started to see prices increase, and they couldn’t easily find their usual coconut milk — an ingredient in nearly every item at their bakery. In July Trump declared a 19% tariff on goods from the Philippines. The price for a case of coconut milk rose to as high as $20.

In May they were paying $109 for a 50-pound bag of their preferred Filipino brand of desiccated coconut. It became unavailable from June to August, and when it reappeared in September it cost nearly $200 for the same amount.

Filipino frozen ube, which they ordered every few weeks, was detained by the FDA and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol over the summer. Toward the start of 2025 their Philippines-grown Barako coffee beans cost $70 per 5-pound bag. In the second half of the year the price increased to $90.

The costs have whittled away at their profit margin in the last 10 months, and Estrada is unsure how to offset them without raising her prices. Estrada doesn’t want to further alienate her Filipino customers, who might not understand why her pastries already cost more than at a traditional, nonvegan bakery.

“I think if things start to double up,” she said, “like they did with the desiccated coconut, then I think we’ll have to.”

Decline in tourism

Over the summer L.A.’s international tourism fell 8%, according to California’s tourism board, equating to more than 170,000 fewer global tourists than last year.

The city’s bars, restaurants and other small-business owners are feeling it. Most restaurateurs interviewed by The Times noted tourism felt slower than usual.

Le Coupe owner Craig Walker said sales and traffic at his viral Melrose Hill fried chicken shop fell 20% in 2025 from 2024. He characterizes his year as “a roller coaster with more lows than highs” and cites a decline in tourism as a chief factor.

With more than 50,000 followers on social media and copious videos of fried chicken that drips with honey sauce, Le Coupe has drawn guests from Sweden, Germany, Brazil and beyond. Many stop to make video content about their trip to the online-famous chicken stand.

But this year Walker said those visits came to a trickle.

The chef’s also seen his business dip in online sales. This year, he said, with more restaurants struggling and offering delivery discounts like “buy one, get one” deals, it’s harder to compete than ever before.

One major setback can cost the restaurant months of revenue. When music festival Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival rescheduled due to flooding, Walker lost roughly $8,000 in food, equipment rentals and signage.

“I’ve gotta absorb this blow and try to catch myself like a boxer in a ring,” Walker said. “I just got to get up because I got knocked out, and I got to continue on. But we’ve taken a lot of blows this year, and it has been extremely difficult.”

The road ahead

Some local restaurateurs expressed cautious optimism for the coming years, hoping for more spending and tourism due to the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games.

Some are reaching out to legislators, asking for financial aid or pitching new programs that could help independent restaurants. Alba co-owner Cobi Levy saw several restaurants close around his Italian hot spot in August and wrote to West Hollywood’s mayor and council members with a clear premise: “WeHo is dying.”

His email included proposals such as installing “business liaisons” to help restaurateurs navigate the city’s permit process and other red tape.

Levy said in an interview that his own year-plus of Alba’s opening delays cost his team an estimated $2.7 million, not including the loss of potential revenue.

L.A. restaurateurs warned Levy that operating in Los Angeles can be more costly and require more permitting than he’d experienced in New York City. “I didn’t realize it was talking about orders-of-magnitude more difficult,” he said, “and it really put us in a bad place.” By working with the city he said he hopes to build a more streamlined, equitable path for restaurants to open, and to remain open.

Michael Fiorelli swore he would never open his own restaurant. Overhead costs were too great in Los Angeles, and he’d worked for outwardly successful restaurants with sales of $8 million a year that still lost money.

In November he debuted a pizzeria in Beverly Grove anyway.

He and his business partner, Elizabeth Gutierrez, had previously left full-service restaurants behind to launch a mobile pizza oven in a Venice community garden last year. They served 200 pizzas a day, often exposed to the elements, prepping their dough in a commissary kitchen and transporting it to Venice. Getting creative with less, they said, is what enabled their success.

“I’ve heard people say the restaurant business is over, it’s done,” said Fiorelli. “We might not see it the way it was again, but the restaurant business isn’t over, we can’t accept that. … There’s another way to do it and do it proudly and do it well.”

During their search for a more private new commercial kitchen, Fiorelli and Gutierrez stumbled upon a closed, 750-square-foot restaurant space, which they could rent as both a prep kitchen and storage. They signed the lease, and within the month learned the community garden was planned to be demolished this year.

Despite their plans to avoid a bricks-and-mortar, they used their prep kitchen as a restaurant.

“We learned so much in the garden on how to operate only with what we need,” Fiorelli said. “We were like, ‘We can do this without all of that stuff and we can still be successful.’ I’m not defining success by how much money we’re making. We can still run an operation we’re proud of, we can still confidently employ people and know that they’re going to get their paychecks every week, and we can still serve really good food.”

With counter service, a set menu, casual setting and tables that double as prep space, they stripped the need for uniforms, frequent menu printing, professional photographers, linens, a cleaning crew and more. Every employee cleans the space, every employee takes turns washing dishes, every employee preps ingredients and cooks.

“A lot of people told us, ‘The garden is a cute dream, but it’s not going to get you guys financially anywhere,’” Gutierrez said. “I do think that we need to get away from what we think is the standard, because now more and more people need to get creative.”

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