The Hottest New Restaurant Trend in Los Angeles Is Resurrected Restaurants

Just three months into 2024, a trio of shuttered Los Angeles restaurants have reopened for business. Sweet Lady Jane, Café Tropical, and Souplantation — all closed abruptly — were miraculously revived thanks to new owners taking the operations’ reigns.

While passing the proverbial baton isn’t a novel business idea, at this moment, with the city’s restaurants operating on razor-thin margins, battling rising costs, and closing in rapid succession, it has provided a sense of collective hope among diners. Of course, mourning the loss of a beloved restaurant can be gutting, but it involves nowhere near the level of heartbreak — or financial uncertainty — that owners and workers experience when a small business closes. And while new ownership isn’t an industry panacea, it is providing some of Los Angeles’s most iconic restaurants a path to new life.

Sweet Lady Jane, an iconic Los Angeles bakery known for its triple berry cake, closed all six locations after 35 years of business on December 31, 2023, citing lease obligations and the rising costs of operations for its untimely end. Two weeks later, the Los Angeles Times revealed a class-action lawsuit filed against the bakery by former employees who allege wage theft may have contributed to the closure. In February, the CEO of Pacific French Bakery, Julie Ngu, a longtime Sweet Lady Jane fan, purchased the bakery’s equipment, recipes, branding, website, social media handles, and other intellectual property and declared that #JaneIsBack in social media posts. Though Ngu is not responsible for the company’s alleged mismanagement or the former owner’s debt, she’s making an effort to rehire its former employees.

Café Tropical shared the news of its closing in a handwritten note posted on the shop’s window on November 28, 2023, and served its final cafe con leche days later. Following the closure, which was later attributed in part to a family financial dispute, a trio of hospitality pros — Danny Khorunzhiy (Milk Cult), Ed Cornell (formerly Quarter Sheets), and Rene Navarrette — stepped in to purchase the business. The shop reopened on March 16, 2024, with its glass pastry case lined with guava pastelitos and some former employees behind the counter.

In 2020, Souplantation announced it was closing all 97 restaurants during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The circumstances surrounding the pandemic exacerbated an already grim financial picture for a business that filed for bankruptcy in 2016. When news that a Souplantation dupe with no business relation to the original called Soup ‘n Fresh was open in Rancho Cucamonga, longtime fans showed up in droves and waited over an hour to fill their melamine plates with Wonton Happiness salad and blueberry muffins.

In more recent years, the classic diner 101 Coffee Shop in East Hollywood and the red sauce Italian palace La Dolce Vita in Beverly Hills have benefited from established restaurant groups taking the businesses into the next chapter. Both were acquired by new owners when they closed and received a physical refresh, among other touch-ups, before reopening. While it took just a few months to transform 101 Coffee Shop into Clark Street Diner, La Dolce Vita’s makeover took three years. Ownership of the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles, Saugus Cafe in Santa Clarita, has changed multiple times in its 136-year run, allowing it to thrive for more than a century.

The potential benefits of stepping into an existing business is considerable if the restaurant holds a nostalgic place in the collective imagination. (It may also remove at least some of the financial guesswork in a notoriously unpredictable industry.) Whereas 101 Coffee Shop has provided a comforting and familiar backdrop for many late nights spent catching up with friends, Café Tropical has deeply resonated with the addiction recovery community. Its backroom will continue to host daily meetings under new ownership. A built-in loyal fanbase emotionally tethered to a restaurant is an unquestionably valuable asset.

Traditions, especially those surrounding meals, are often the most joyful parts of our lives. While it might not seem like a big deal to celebrate a birthday without a triple berry cake or forgo dining at Souplantation following a grueling high school cross country meet, it’s these small moments that connect families and friends over time. It is meaningful to be able to return to the same restaurants and eat the same dishes across generations. The food and feel may not be a perfect replica of the original, but sometimes good enough is better than goodbye.