I think it’s so important to have personal metrics of success, separate from the established markers within your industry. Decide what motivates and matters to you, and use those things as your benchmarks and your north stars. Emily and I have always been in agreement that success, to us, is more about community creation, local impact and staying true to our values than about accolades, expansion or even profit. We knew we wanted to build a business devoted to sustainable practices, with real staying power, and that running our business according to our values, day in and day out, would be the most important accomplishment. We’ve navigated  some tectonic shifts in the restaurant landscape since we opened in 2017 – the pandemic, LA’s entertainment industry strikes, labor shortages, exponential cost increases – and today just being here, employing our team of nearly 50, growing creatively and staying true to our foundational values feels like major success.

Impossible to choose a favorite from a lifetime of remarkable food! But here’s one I wrote down recently for a friend’s dinner party with a theme of food + memory: A hot, late-September day, riding a bike on the back roads north of Napa Valley. Trees dripping with burstingly ripe black mission figs, wild blackberries on roadside brambles, wild fennel with shoulder-high constellations of sweet flowers. My boyfriend and I stopped again and again, feeding each other explosively jammy figs, and fat blackberries tucked into sprays of fennel flowers. This taste of sun, heat, fruit, fecundity — of flowers and sweetness and earth — was a baptism in the primal pleasures and elemental magic of California. Years later, I’d uproot my life to move there and build a life and business around produce and flavor — and I think back to this afternoon as an introduction to the wonders of the place I have now chosen to call home.

The materials, the colors, the patterns – everything! They’re all so versatile – dress ‘em up, dress ‘em down; wear with sneakers and a sun hat, or heels and jewelry – and so distinctive, too.