The Great Good Place

On the Eve of a Major Los Angeles Restaurant Opening in a Historic Hollywood Pub, Writer Joshua David Stein Grapples With the Challenges of Cultivating a Restaurant That Matters in This Modern Era.
 

- Joshua David Stein

IT’S ANOTHER NEAR-PERFECT MORNING in Los Angeles: sunny, 76 degrees, with a southerly breeze and high visibility. Wearing black shorts and a large black Bob Marley T-shirt, Ken Friedman, the New York restaurateur, stands in the courtyard of his soon-to open restaurant on Sunset near Vine, gazing suspiciously at a pair of very large ficus trees climbing up the stucco walls to the red Spanish tile roof. “Overgrown house plants,” he says. “Someone bought them at Safeway 30 years ago and, because this is Southern California, everything just grows and grows.” He shakes his head. “They’re not even native.”

Built around 1927 by silent-movie cowboy Fred Thomson, who called the property Court of Olive, 6530 Sunset Boulevard has a picturesque brick patio with a fountain burbling in the middle of it—and a history with which Friedman is reckoning.

He and his longtime collaborator, chef April Bloomfield, are weeks away from the fall opening of their first L.A. restaurant, Hearth & Hound. For an East Coast restaurateur and chef, best known for their legendary, meat-centric The Spotted Pig in New York City’s West Village, it’s a daunting task—especially so in an altogether sunnier, healthier environment like that of Los Angeles.