Koreatown’s Here’s Looking at You to close next month: ‘I’ve really, really pushed all limits’
- Share via
- Koreatown’s lauded Here’s Looking at You restaurant will close in June after nearly a decade in operation.
- Owner Lien Ta credits a number of factors for the closure, including the 2024 death of chef Jonathan Whitener.
On June 13 one of the city’s most celebrated, eclectic restaurants will close after nearly a decade of accolades, frog legs and cocktails tinged with fresh fruits and vegetables. Here’s Looking at You, the genre-bending Koreatown restaurant from restaurateur Lien Ta and late chef Jonathan Whitener, is ending its run six months after the closure of its Silver Lake sibling restaurant, All Day Baby.
It currently holds the No. 15 spot on the Los Angeles Times 101 best restaurants list.
A number of factors contributed to the decision, Ta told The Times, but one loomed larger than the rest: the 2024 death of Whitener, at 36, which sent shock waves through L.A.’s culinary community.
“With chef’s passing, I couldn’t really see how we were going to continue,” Ta said.
The restaurateur also credits the loss of business post-pandemic, but says there was no concern of a rent increase, and that she could have found a replacement head chef or flipped the concept entirely.
The biggest factor in the decision was the loss of Whitener.
“The truth is that I created this restaurant with Jonathan, and he’s eternally my collaborator,” she said. “The remaining team are all in agreement that we want this to remain Jonathan’s restaurant. We are missing our leader. Signing on for another five-year lease doesn’t make sense when your leader is gone.”
Ta left a role in entertainment journalism to pursue hospitality full-time, and worked as a manager in the Jon & Vinny’s restaurant group when she met Whitener, then chef de cuisine of Animal.
Jonathan Gold characterized his cooking as “strong flavors, jolts of acidity and torn Asian herbs, and a tendency to stuff hints of umami almost everywhere it might conceivably belong.”
“Eating his food,” Ta said, “lifted my soul.”
She realized that he could be the chef she’d been looking for: someone to partner in a restaurant, the half of the operation that could oversee the kitchen and menu planning while she helmed the front of the house.
In 2016 they flipped a former Philly cheesesteak shop into a nouveau bistro where Whitener’s mackerel mingled with marigolds, baseball steak paired with curly fries and a few dishes — such as the just-charred rib-eye, the shishito peppers atop tonnato, and the frog legs with salsa negra — became modern L.A. classics.
In a Times op-ed a few weeks ago, the architect Thom Mayne suggested Koreatown as a candidate for future hyperdensity, doubling the population of what is already the most densely populated neighborhood in Los Angeles.
It quickly drew national praise, landing on best-of lists from Food & Wine, Eater and more. Locally it became a fixture on the L.A. Times 101 List. It served as the centerpiece for Patric Kuh’s “Becoming a Restaurateur (Masters at Work),” a book on Whitener and Ta’s struggles and triumphs in building one of the country’s trendiest restaurants.
When the pandemic hit, Here’s Looking at You was still going strong. It shuttered for 17 months due to COVID-19, then reopened in 2022 to great acclaim, though Ta tells The Times that the restaurant has been “running slim in the kitchen,” limiting their staff because business never reached pre-pandemic success again. The following years brought additional difficulties.
“I think so many of us have had to contend with [closing] being a possibility or an outcome,” Ta said, “and it’s been slow at many L.A. businesses since the strikes.”
Business began to trickle in 2023 during the entertainment-industry strikes, which halted revenue for multiple local industries, including L.A. restaurants.
In 2024 the unthinkable happened. Whitener died, unexpectedly, in his home; his passing left Ta feeling unmoored. Local chefs rallied around the restaurant, including Ronan chef-owner Daniel Cutler, who served as resident chef for a time.
Jonathan Whitener, celebrated local chef of Here’s Looking at You and All Day Baby, has died at age 36.
Catastrophe struck again in early 2025, when the Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed thousands of homes and other structures. With the city in turmoil, Ta said the restaurant also saw a significant dip in revenue. For the last two years Ta said she’s seen “this pendulum swing” of 30% to 40% of sales losses because of circumstances beyond her control, and would count herself lucky if even half the dining room was full.
She tried to pivot by changing Here’s Looking at You’s business hours, shifting from a Thursday-to-Monday operation to a Tuesday-to-Saturday model. The lack of business on Sunday and Monday nights could be especially depressing. Mondays, long considered an industry night for hospitality workers, were no longer lucrative because those in the restaurant and bar industry lack the disposable income they once had. She hoped that no longer competing with Sunday-evening television premieres and sports would help.
“I’d wake up with this horrible dread all the time, wondering if anyone was going to book a reservation or come in at all, and who we were going to cut [from service],” Ta said. “We were always running half the team, and that just doesn’t feel good.”
It wasn’t until she shuttered their Silver Lake restaurant, All Day Baby, in December that she was able to fully reflect on the future of Here’s Looking at You, and on her own personal needs.
In the months since, Ta says she’s been kinder to herself and taken care of needs as requisite as visiting a doctor. She’s begun to fully allow herself to grieve, not only Whitener, but also a father figure whom she lost months later.
“I was definitely buried in a lot of grief,” she said. “I’m still grieving, but sometimes I wasn’t really sure what to focus on this last year, to be honest … a lot of restaurant owners are sort of programmed to always find solutions, to get through the day or the week or whatever your metric is. I’ve been doing that for a long time.”
Brilliant small plates and wild cocktails mark the return of Lien Ta and Jonathan Whitener’s HLAY in Koreatown
Faced with the termination of the lease and years of professional and emotional turbulence, she made the decision to close this year. Ta said making the Instagram announcement was “deeply emotional,” but that she felt relief in finally revealing the news; she’d alerted her staff in March.
As she entered work Tuesday night, the stress began to dissipate. The restaurant filled with fans coming to get final tastes. A troupe of Magic Castle performers even traveled across the city upon hearing the news, donning matching Here’s Looking at You shirts, then performed magic tricks for the other guests in the dining room (they’ll be performing a magic show Friday night elsewhere, fundraising for L.A. wildfire victims).
Reservations for the remainder of the restaurant’s run are nearly entirely booked, though Ta plans to reserve space for walk-ins beyond the seats at the bar.
The coming weeks will see new merchandise, as well as the return of pop-up Tiki Fever from bartenders Joanne Martinez and Jesse Sepulveda (an All Day Baby vet) on May 19. Other familiar faces will make an appearance, including a June 7 guest-bartending shift from bar alum and No Us Without You co-founder Damian Diaz.
After June 13, Ta isn’t sure what comes next. In the closure announcement she wrote that “this lease is ending, as is [her] era as a restaurateur.” She tells The Times that maybe someday she could reenter the restaurant world again but not for a long while; what she needs first is to rest and recover, and determine what she wants and needs beyond restaurant life.
Operating a restaurant in normal circumstances is demanding and stressful. Operating two through a pandemic, industry-wide strikes that led to economic downturn, and citywide wildfires is anything but normal.
“The last five years have been completely unrelenting and unfriendly, and it’s unhealthy, frankly, and I’ve done the best that I can,” Ta said. “I’ve really, really pushed all limits.”
What she does know is that she will continue to champion small businesses through her volunteer work with the Independent Hospitality Coalition, where her partner, Eddie Navarrette, serves as executive director.
Sometimes she envisions herself moonlighting as a shift supervisor in a restaurant she really cares about, or mentoring younger restaurateurs in need of guidance and business know-how.
“But first thing’s first, I just need to close the [Here’s Looking at You] chapter in the way that I think it deserves,” Ta said. “I’m afraid of a lot of things, but in a weird way, I’m not necessarily afraid of what will happen to me.”
Eat your way across L.A.
Get our weekly Tasting Notes newsletter for reviews, news and more.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
