Shira Yevin was on her way to grab lunch from the Studio City Trader Joe’s, when she caught sight of a new restaurant on the block called Local Kitchens.
“I was like, ‘That sounds good, sounds healthy,’” she said. “‘Let me see what it is.’”
Excited at the prospect of not eating preprepared grocery store food, she was initially deflated when she saw that the restaurant served Vietnamese food, a cuisine she doesn’t normally eat. Then she noticed that the restaurant also served some of her favorite Mediterranean dishes.
After she placed her order, she started reading the colorful signs on the walls, one of which mentioned an Oklahoma onion burger.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, a burger? What is this place?’” Yevin wondered.
Signage highlighting the five chef-partners at the Local Kitchens in Studio City.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Local Kitchens is a fast-casual restaurant with five distinct menus from five different chefs. The catch is that there aren’t five kitchens operating separately. Rather, the five partnering chefs — a mix of restaurateurs, cookbook authors and chef-influencers — worked with Local Kitchens’ in-house culinary team to design the menus. The food is prepared from scratch by a single team of on-site cooks, ghost-kitchen-style.
But unlike many ghost kitchens, customers can eat on site. Diners are greeted by screens where they can scroll the five menus, then mix and match items as they build their order. When ready, servers deliver the food to the table all at once — not in disposable containers but on white ceramic plates. It’s a touch of restaurant-style service combined with the choice of a food hall and fast-casual convenience.
“It’s a valuable proposition,” said cookbook author and content creator Rick Martínez, who for his first restaurant venture has partnered with Local Kitchens to offer a Sonoran-style Mexican menu. “A lot of my friends are either vegan or pescatarian, or have some kind of allergy. It’s like no one can agree on any one place, right?”
A Jalapeño Ranch Wedge Salad from Chef Rick Martinez’s Mexican menu offerings at Local Kitchen surrounded by other dishes. Chef Rick Martinez’s book “Salsa Daddy.” (Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Local Kitchens and similar ventures, such as Neighborly at the Promenade at Westlake in Thousand Oaks, are part of a new field of fast-casual dining descended from the online ordering boom of the pandemic when convenience and choice became paramount for diners and ghost kitchens, such as takeout titan Wonder on the East Coast, proliferated.
While still rooted in the ease of screen technology, Local Kitchens and Neighborly are betting on customers’ renewed desire for social connection, while also recognizing their demand for high-quality food. Diners get convenience and variety; chefs get the financial backing to scale with minimal risk.
From ghost kitchen to social gathering space
Local Kitchens, launched in 2020 by former DoorDash co-founders Jon Goldsmith and Andrew Munday, along with Jordan Bramble, began as a ghost kitchen servicing Bay Area favorites such as Boba Guys and Humphry Slocombe. By 2021, Local Kitchens had begun offering diners the chance to eat on site.
With time, however, there was a growing awareness, said Chief Executive Jay Gentile, that Local Kitchens was expanding other companies’ brands without cementing its own. Some locations, including the company’s first Southern California outpost in Huntington Beach, have shuttered.
Local Kitchens CEO Jay Gentile at the company’s Studio City location.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
“How do we move away from being this tech platform that does food, and become a restaurant brand that partners with great chefs, that creates menus, that scratch-cooks in our own kitchen, and delivers at a really high level at a fast-casual pace, at a price point that makes sense for people?” posed Gentile, who stepped into the CEO position in March as the company approached its five-year anniversary.
For Gentile, a large part of the answer is teaming up with individual chefs instead of established restaurant brands. On Local Kitchens’ initial chef-partner lineup are Eggslut and Amboy founder Alvin Cailan, who devised the aforementioned Oklahoma onion burger; Einat Admony, the chef-owner of New York’s Israeli restaurant Balaboosta; Ari Feingold, chef and co-founder of San Francisco’s Proposition Chicken; Tuệ Nguyễn, better known among Gen Z audiences as @twaydabae on social media and partner in the currently closed Vietnamese restaurant DiDi in West Hollywood, and Martínez, who took some of the company’s employees to Sonora, Mexico, to help them nail his menu.
Inside Local Kitchens in Studio City.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
While delivery and takeout still comprise a healthy amount of the company’s revenue, the restaurant is dedicated more than ever to a dine-in experience, with front-of-house staff available to guide customers through the touch screen menu or to take their order directly and the addition of ceramic dishware in Studio City and soon in other locations. Think Tender Greens but with a variety of cuisines.
Getting Neighborly
Inside Neighborly, a curated food hall in Westlake Village.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Over at Neighborly, the latest project from DOM Food Group, which previously worked with Gwyneth Paltrow to scale Goop Kitchen, customers at the Promenade at Westlake also order from a screen or they can speak to a front-of-house staff member to build a meal across six menus. As at Local Kitchens, one kitchen prepares the food, which is delivered as a single meal.
Questlove’s “Breakfast-ish” product display.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
But Neighborly largely works with established restaurants and personality-driven businesses. Customers can choose Armenian cooking from Glendale’s Mini Kabob; chicken sandwiches and no-beef burgers from Questlove’s Mixtape; pizza and pasta from the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills; California-inspired salads, bowls and sandwiches from chef-influencer Gaby Dalkin; cookies from Amirah Kassem‘s Flour Shop and the pan-Asian-focused Social Monk, started in 2019 by the Cheesecake Factory in the same Westlake space that now houses Neighborly.
Going a step further, Neighborly’s physical space doubles as a superette, where customers can pick up spreads from Jessica Koslow’s Sqirl, frozen meals from Burritos La Palma and Katie’s Pizza, or any number of clean pantry essentials labeled “woman-owned,” “kid-friendly,” “better for you snacks” or “bespoke local merch.”
Taking its inspiration from Erewhon, founding partner Mario del Pero, known for co-founding Mendocino Farms with his wife, Ellen Chen, said Neighborly’s core customer is the “time poor” suburban mom, who wants to have a nice meal with friends and also grab prepared meals to take home.
Mario del Pero, co-founder of Mendocino Farms, is one of the founders of DOM Food Group, the company behind Neighborly.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
“If we’re best in class in every genre then we’re gonna win the pizza person, we’re gonna win the bowl person, we’re gonna win the Mediterranean person,” said Del Pero, from Neighborly’s ocean-blue patio, bustling with customers.
A lifeline for chefs
For chefs, Local Kitchens and Neighborly offer a place to incubate menus and spread their brands without the risks associated with scaling a small business on their own.
This opportunity is particularly exciting for those who have never dabbled in the restaurant space, yet have sizable online presences, such as Dalkin and Martínez.
But the same can be said for established restaurateurs.
Take Cailan for example, who is largely uninvolved in the international expansion of Eggslut but still personally operates Amboy and says that facing rent in Studio City would have been “100%” impossible.
“Having the yin and yang of having a business like Amboy and being a part of a business like Local Kitchens makes everything work,” said Cailan. “I could still be chef Alvin Cailan smiling and shaking hands with my customers every single day, and also really trying to be a business-forward innovator in the restaurant world with Local Kitchens.”
Similarly, Mini Kabob’s Armen Martirosyan had long been interested in scaling the family business. But facing $20,000 to $30,000 a month in rent for a new location, he said, was “almost a dream.”
That’s when the Neighborly team reached out.
“I explained to my parents, like, ‘Look, we can cook but we’ve never scaled a business,’” he said. “‘You’re tired. I’m tired. Let’s put that creativity back into Neighborly’s hands, and let’s grow with them.’”
Inside Neighborly, a curated food hall in Westlake Village.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Mini Kabob’s has tried expanding before — at the Westfield Topanga shopping center’s Topanga Social food hall. Martirosyan calls the still-operating venture “the bane of my existence.”
“There was no chef coming in and training with us. We literally had to go to Topanga and train 18-year-old kids to make our proprietary recipes,” he said. “Immediately we knew this was bad, and it was either A, we would go everyday to try to save the face of our company and make sure that the quality doesn’t get killed, or B, we just take a step back.”
Local Kitchens and Neighborly, however, are explicitly pitching a higher level of fast-casual food and work with the chefs to ensure quality.
Inside Neighborly, a curated food hall in Westlake Village.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Local Kitchens, for instance, has implemented safeguards such as requiring each store to submit a picture of a specific recipe each day, said culinary head Ashley Torrijos, who got her start in Michelin-starred kitchens Melisse and Providence before working in research and development at the Cheesecake Factory.
And unlike a traditional food hall where small businesses pay rent to the operator, the partnering businesses at Local Kitchens and Neighborly receive a share of revenue. This will continue as both companies look to expand — in West L.A. and beyond.
“We’re getting our brand marketed, and we’re actually getting paid back by tasting all these different products and trying all these new things and having access to a research and development team at zero cost to us,” said Dominick DiBartolomeo, owner of the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills and Domenico’s Foods.
“If I would have tried to come up with this plan on my own, of course we would have done it. But you know how much time and money that would have taken? It’s exactly what you call a win-win.”
