That Restaurant You Love Will Close One Day. What to Do?

Not long after Birdie G’s in Santa Monica announced it would be closing for good, the staff noticed something odd. Their bistro-style plates, the ones with the green trim and the little hummingbird in the middle, were disappearing.

“Please don’t take the plates,” the owner Jeremy Fox wrote on Instagram. The restaurant was in business for a while longer with plenty of dinners and holiday parties in the books. “We do still need them.”

I don’t agree with stealing from restaurants, but I have to admit, I understand the impulse. (I’ve resisted it.) When a restaurant I like closes, whether it’s two years old or 20, it always hits with a peculiar kind of grief, a sense of dislocation and uncertainty. But there are no established rituals or rites to move through it.

When Birdie G’s first opened in 2019, a fat and exuberant slice of rose-petal pie there restored my faith in plated desserts with its bouncy strawberry and hibiscus jellies suspended in opaque raspberry and rose mousse, the top sparkling with crystallized petals.

Remembering that dish meant I also remembered how I’d sat next to my husband at the bar, before we were married, talking over cocktails and a plate of pickles, dreaming up a list of plants we were going to grow in our garden one day.

Every restaurant is a portal — a way to remember who you were and how things felt when you were, say, 19, or 27, or 35, but also to remember the particulars of a city, a neighborhood, a block.

Sometimes you get a little warning before it closes, enough time to go back for one last dinner, to take it all in and object to the end, even as it approaches. Sometimes it happens overnight, quietly, unexpectedly. You walk by and see the windows papered over and the note on the door that just doesn’t make sense — but I was just there and it was packed!

I’m usually bogged down with regret for not going more often, for not paying closer attention. Would pilfering a plate help? Probably not — don’t do that! — but then how do you mourn for a restaurant?

Mona Holmes, a writer for Eater in Los Angeles, reported on restaurant closures after the wildfires last January, including Foxes in Altadena, where she sometimes spent her allowance as a kid.

When artists and musicians die, Ms. Holmes and her friends share playlists and clips from old performances, mourning collectively. “You can play D’Angelo in the comfort of your home anytime,” she said, “but with restaurants, it’s so much more difficult.”

Closures are a constant specter in the business, which runs particularly tight profit margins, but between the wildfires and ongoing immigration raids, more restaurants in Los Angeles struggled last year.

I had just texted a friend visiting from out of town, suggesting Helms Bakery for a breakfast meeting, when I heard that Sang Yoon’s newest place in Culver City was closing at a year old. Here’s Looking at You, Lien Ta’s restaurant in Koreatown, which had helped to define Los Angeles food culture in the last decade, closed last year, too. (I still think about the frog legs with salsa negra, along with the warm chestnut mochi dessert.)

And across the country, menu prices rocketed to keep up with rising food, rent and labor costs, making a night out prohibitively expensive to so many people finding their own way through economic uncertainty.

Even packed dining rooms weren’t immune and just a few weeks ago, on Christmas Eve, I got a tip that another bustling business had failed to pay its staff. There are so many forces at play when a restaurant closes, you almost never get the full story.

In the face of so much chaos, I’ve found the only thing that helps is to think of a handful of places that make you happy, places that would wreck you if they were to disappear, and to put them in regular rotation.

Last year, I started monthly visits to older restaurants and bars like Cole’s downtown (which recently announced it would close after more than 100 years, though the date keeps getting put off) and the Prince in Koreatown — an excuse to see friends, but also to spend more time outside of food’s algorithmic hype cycles.

I visit new restaurants all year, but these outings are grounding and if I have a resolution for 2026, it’s to do more of this, not just where I live, but in the cities where I travel, too.

In the past, if I’d neglected to go back to an old place, it was because some small, delusional part of me thought it would always be there. But restaurants, like people, aren’t made to last forever. And it’s not stars or reels or lists that give a restaurant meaning — it’s going back, again and again.

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