Despite ‘glimmers of hope,’ beloved Silver Lake diner will close next month
- Less than six months after All Day Baby opened, the pandemic hit.
- Then last year came the entertainment industry strikes, along with unexpected costs that made business untenable.
- Earlier this year chef-partner Jonathan Whitener died. “I never meant to do any of this by myself,” owner Lien Ta said.
In a year marred by tragedy and continuing financial difficulties, one of L.A.’s most creative neighborhood restaurants is closing. All Day Baby, the innovative dinette-leaning restaurant inspired by Southern cuisine, Mexican flavor and more, will close on Dec. 15 after five years in Silver Lake.
At the end of the day, the reason was simple: The restaurant, owner Lien Ta said, does not make enough money on a day-to-day basis to sustain operations.
“We’re literally almost out of money,” she said. “Every week, every day we’re open, we lose money.”
The restaurant from Here’s Looking at You owners Lien Ta and the late Jonathan Whitener opened to acclaim shortly before the pandemic, with Whitener’s fluffy-egged biscuit sandwiches and a bakery case brimming with colorful pies and stuffed conchas and cookies first overseen by award-winning pastry chef Thessa Diadem, and now by Sam Robinson. Burritos overflowed with house-smoked meats, and the cocktail menu boasted negroni floats and other whimsical concoctions. The sunny All Day Baby landed on the L.A. Times 101 Best Restaurants list for multiple years and received glowing reviews from Condé Nast Traveler, the Infatuation and others.
“All Day Baby would again have been included on the upcoming 2024 edition of the L.A. Times’ 101 Best Restaurants,” says restaurant critic Bill Addison. “Its constant sense of reinvention was a survival tool, but the efforts led to dishes that balanced comfort and creative spark. The biscuit sandwiches and loco moco were part of my own weekend breakfast rituals. On Saturday morning I saw customers in tears over the community’s imminent loss.”
Less than six months after its debut, the pandemic hit, hampering Whitener and Ta’s plans for a morning-to-night model. Sidewalk bake sales and other incentives helped keep the business afloat until on-site dining could return. Then, as at many restaurants and bars in the region, two entertainment industry strikes in 2023 slowed clientele to a trickle and unrelated interferences and costs — such as months-long street construction or LADWP bills that tripled last year — made the business untenable.
“I think our ambition and our egos really led us to a lot of optimism that we could do this,” Ta said. “I guess you could say I am an optimist or I don’t give up, and maybe I should give up sooner. I don’t really know. I have wrestled with this daily and nightly, in the middle of the night, for years.”
Bill Addison reviews All Day Baby in Silver Lake
There were days during the pandemic when All Day Baby made only a few hundred dollars a day; even in the following years, there were still days it would net as little.
Ta said that she owed thousands of dollars of back rent to the building’s landlord, which had accumulated through a negotiation of partial rent payment during the pandemic. When the restaurant suffered multiple break-ins within 10 days in the spring, Ta approached her landlord with the hope of discussing rent reduction to offset the cost of repairs but was reminded of the outstanding amount.
In April, shortly after that discussion, she realized she would have to sell the business. After grappling with the decision for months, she told staff in October in an announcement at the restaurant; she and some of her employees were crying by the end of it.
“I just wanted to keep trying,” she said. “I wanted to use what little savings or what grant money we received, and to be as thoughtful with the cash flow that we did have, to just keep finding solutions to mend what was a really difficult operation from the start. There were lots of glimmers of hope that maybe we could see it to the other side.”
All Day Baby hosted multiple pop-ups and pivots throughout its five years, but Ta said the most successful by far was Tet-a-Tet, a restaurant-within-a-restaurant that flipped to a Vietnamese-food concept in the evenings and ran for months. After the writers’ strike began, what was a bustling service “went dark overnight,” and maintaining later business hours with additional staff no longer made financial sense; Tet-a-Tet ended July 1, 2023.
A major emotional factor in the closure remains.
“I think in many ways All Day Baby in a different location could totally make it, but I lost my collaborator,” Ta said. “I never meant to do any of this by myself.”
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 brother figure to Ta, who then lost a decades-long father figure months later and is still reckoning with the losses while trying to maintain both restaurants.
“To do two at the same time and to feel like I want to do it well, it’s very confusing,” she said. “It’s hard to sort of push all of that down to just get through the day.”
Jonathan Whitener, celebrated local chef of Here’s Looking at You and All Day Baby, has died at age 36.
Since posting the announcement to Instagram Friday afternoon, hundreds of comments have poured in expressing sorrow, sharing memories and even tagging elected officials in case they could help change this fate. Over the weekend guests filed in ordering tables piled with food, sometimes multiple entrées per person. By noon, Robinson’s pastry case was decimated.
Ta characterized the public response as “overwhelmingly lovely and heartbreaking.”
But the owner does not want to focus on the heartbreaking aspects of the restaurant’s end, at least not for the next month.
A number of pop-ups will take place in the space, welcoming new and old faces with some of the restaurant’s favorite pop-ups and concepts from years past. All Day Baby’s bar director, Jorge Figueroa, will host a tiki evening Thursday, Nov. 21, from Bar Flores’ Joanne Martinez and Jesse Sepulveda, also of All Day Baby. Chef Ken Chan will be bringing his Hawaiian food pop-up, called Mixplate, to the restaurant on Dec. 6. Ta is considering planning a prom night theme for the staff, as well as other special events and pop-ups before the final day of service.
“In general, I love a celebration,” Ta said. “I think it’s important. And, you know, we’re not promised tomorrow, so I think we need to maximize and squeeze out all the juice of today as we can. I definitely do not want to make this about being sad.”
All Day Baby is located at 3200 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Its final day of service is Dec. 15.
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