The Brief

Before last month, a young southern sea otter named Rey would never have imagined she’d be a mother.

That changed when she met Sunny, a pup — about two weeks old — found orphaned and alone on Asilomar State Beach in February. The pairing went off without a hitch.

The two otters now live as mother and daughter at the Aquarium of the Pacific. They arrived at the facility last month, paired together as part of the facility’s surrogacy program that it runs alongside the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The program, created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 1990s, was launched in Long Beach in 2024. It pairs maternal-age female otters with young, motherless pups who would otherwise not survive on their own in the wild.

Megan Smylie, the sea otter program manager, says the operation has since rehabilitated and released nine otters into the wild, with the three others expected to leave by the summer.

The aquarium can handle 11 otters at a time, with up to seven in the main tank with rehabilitation pools that can each house two otters. They currently have five otters, including two other females that are preparing for surrogate motherhood.

But Sunny and Rey cannot be released into the wild. Experts say both are already too used to being around people and lack the survival instincts to make it on their own in the ocean.

Sunny searches for shrimp in its habitat while two sea otters make their first appearance at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on Wednesday, April 29, 2026.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Instead, the two are destined for motherhood in captivity. For Rey, Sunny will be the first pup she raises into adulthood. It’s a full-circle moment for her: About two-and-a-half years old, Rey was found stranded herself in July 2023.

She spent a couple of years at another facility before moving to Long Beach.

“Ray has far surpassed my expectations of what I thought was gonna happen,” Smylie said. “She’s fantastic.”

As a surrogate mom, she’s teaching her adopted baby everything she needs to know to fend for herself, regardless of her inability to return to the wild.

The two were seen manipulating an imitation crab shell and foraging for food. Young otters, because of the thickness and buoyancy of their fur, don’t have the strength to get their furry bodies to the bottom of the water tank.

Otters have the thickest coat of any mammal, with as many as a million hairs per square inch. The hairs trap air, which acts as insulation and helps keep the otters buoyant.

In time, she may teach the pup how to use tools. Sea otters are known to be crafty creatures, able to use rocks to crack clamshells, take nuts off bolts and open doors on their own.

When it’s time to calm down, she’ll groom the pup, and when it’s time for a nap, Rey will pull Sunny to her chest and roll onto her back. The maternal bond in the wild is a strong one, and the pup requires constant attention.

Experts say this quick-forming connection, between that of surrogate-raised otters and their wild offspring, has played a significant role in growing the population found along California’s Central Coast.

The animals, which once boasted a population of more than 300,000 along the Northern Pacific Rim from Japan to Baja California, were prized for their fur and hunted down to about 2,000 by the early 19th Century. Officials say they were thought to have been exterminated until a colony of otters was discovered nearly a decade later.

Now a federally threatened species, California’s southern sea otter population has rebounded to about 3,000. Despite efforts to aid their comeback, the species faces a low survival rate for pups and constant threats of parasites, shark attacks and human-caused catastrophes.

This makes the work of every mothering otter like Rey all the more important, as she is tasked with not only providing pups the childhood she never had but ensuring the preservation of her species.

And while Sunny may never see the ocean again, aquarium staff hope she can grow into a mom herself, giving the next generation of young pups another shot at life.

“That is kind of a happy ending, if maybe a little bittersweet,” Smylie said.

When you take a bite of the lomo saltado burrito from Merka Saltao, a fast-casual Peruvian restaurant in Culver City, one of the first things you'll notice is the sauce.

The wok-fried chunks of steak, dressed in a soy-and-oyster sauce reduction spiked with vinegar, saturate the rice inside the tortilla, highlighting the sweet heat of ají amarillo mixed with the velvety texture of pinto beans.

It's a beautiful confluence of flavors. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a creative act of evolution or a betrayal of Peruvian culinary heritage.

Standing on business

The lomo saltado burrito at Merka Saltao wasn't exactly a calculated move. Lifelong friends Alonso Franco and Ignacio Barrios — who met in high school in Lima — came to Los Angeles to bring Peruvian food to the masses, first through a ghost kitchen concept they ran from 2021 to 2023. The burrito happened almost by accident: a member of their kitchen team brought in a tortilla one day, someone suggested wrapping the lomo saltado in it, they ate it, and within three days, it was on the menu.

Merka Saltao co-founders Ignacio Barrios, left, and Alonso Franco, right, inside their Culver City restaurant. The two lifelong friends from Lima opened the fast-casual brick-and-mortar location for their Peruvian concept in August 2025.

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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The data from the ghost kitchen made the case for keeping it there. Franco and Barrios had launched with around 140 dishes — lomo saltado, ceviche, chicken dishes, the works. But the numbers kept pointing to the same thing: wherever lomo saltado appeared on the menu, in whatever form, burrito, bowl, salad, it was the winner.

(Ceviche, for all its cultural cachet, is raw fish with raw onion — a harder sell for a weekday lunch. Lomo saltado, Franco noted, is steak and fries — basically a hamburger.)

The backlash

The two friends made the leap to brick-and-mortar in August 2025, opening Merka Saltao in downtown Culver City. It's one of the more competitive dining corridors in L.A., the kind of block that can support a $16 wellness bowl and a craft beer bar in the same stretch, populated by Amazon employees on lunch breaks, families on weekend outings, and food-literate regulars who will absolutely have opinions about what goes in a burrito.

Those opinions arrived faster than Franco expected. Within the first week of opening, an influencer came in and posted about the restaurant — but instead of showing the full menu, the bowls, the chicha morada, the flexibility of the concept, they showed the burrito. Just the burrito.

Franco working the wok at Merka Saltao. The high-heat wok technique at the heart of lomo saltado traces its roots to Chinese immigrants in Peru

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Christopher Mortenson

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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The comments turned quickly. "No! Peruvians don't eat burritos. ¿Qué car—o es eso?" — roughly, "what the hell is this?" — wrote one commenter. Another said "Burritos? We don't eat burritos in 🇵🇪”. Franco describes sitting at his computer reading the pile-on, feeling something between anger and devastation. "There was a moment where I probably even cried," he said, "thinking, I've made a mistake." But then he looked at the numbers. 30,000 had seen the post…. And half the comments were in his defense.

He took the conversation to Reddit, posting to r/FoodLosAngeles asking the community directly: am I wrong for this? The response was overwhelming — hundreds of comments, almost entirely in his favor, and a surge of new customers walking through the door shortly after.

Fusion by default

This is Los Angeles, where many of the dishes that define the Southern California diet were born precisely from cultures colliding. Roy Choi built an empire on Korean tacos. Al pastor traces its technique to Lebanese immigrants who brought the vertical spit. The California roll, invented by Japanese chefs in Los Angeles in the 1960s, introduced an entire country to sushi. None of these dishes destroyed the traditions they borrowed from. If anything, they expanded their audience. And the lomo saltado burrito isn't exactly a novel concept in Southern California to begin with — everyone from Pablitos Tacos in North Hollywood to Le Hut in Santa Ana, run by 2025 James Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Castillo, has featured their own version. Even Disney's California Adventure got in on it, serving a lomo saltado burrito out of the Studio Catering Co. food truck as recently as last year.

The lomo saltado bowl and burrito at Merka Saltao in Culver City — two versions of the same dish that sparked an unlikely online debate about Peruvian culinary identity.

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Courtesy Merka Saltao

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Franco would also point out that lomo saltado itself — the dish the purists are so eager to protect — is a product of Chinese immigrants bringing the wok and soy sauce to Peru roughly 300 years ago. "Peruvian is by default fusion," he told me. "So we have all the right to wrap it up in a burrito." What the online critics were really doing, whether they knew it or not, was defending a dish that was itself once considered inauthentic — and doing so in the name of authenticity.

Where Things Stand

Since the backlash, Franco says business has been mostly steady — breaking even, which for a concept that requires high volume at a low price point, he considers a good sign. The controversy changed things in ways he didn't expect: people started coming in specifically because of the story, not just the food. He began putting himself front and center in the brand, regularly making videos on social media about what it's like to run the business, occasionally poking fun at himself and the whole debate. When we visited during the weekday lunch rush, there was a steady line of people waiting to order, many stopping to talk with Franco directly.

In a way, he's answered the authenticity question not with an argument but with a presence — showing up, telling the story, letting the food speak. "Honoring my food, if that requires pairing lomo saltado with a salad or wrapping it in a tortilla, I have no problem," he said. "I'm not being less authentic. We are evolving in Peru anytime. I have to be authentic on the individual flavor and then be flexible to reach more people to discover our flavors."

The burrito, it turns out, was never the point. It was just the door.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A few dozen protesters rallied outside of Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s Eagle Rock office Tuesday morning in opposition to a 111-unit apartment complex slated to be built on Huntington Drive in El Sereno.

Residents also say due to the unpermitted demolition at the property, a homeless encampment has grown inside and around the site of the demolished building, inviting drug use, violence and prostitution to the corner of the historic business corridor. 

According to organizers for the community group El Sereno Neighbors, emails from Jurado’s office show a willingness to advance the project despite fierce community opposition. Now, residents are calling for the Council District 14 representative to meet with the community and requesting impact records from the developer, who they say has been reluctant to produce them publicly. 

Am abandoned building at the corner of Huntington Drive and Portola Ave is the site of a proposed five-story, 111-unit development. Residents of the area say the development company is operating outside the rules and creating problems.

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Courtesy of Claudette Contreras

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In an emailed statement to The LA Local, a spokesperson for CD 14 said, “Councilmember Jurado believes affordable housing and community voice should not be treated as opposing values.” 

“Our priority is to make sure residents receive accurate information, the site is made safe, the rules are enforced, and the community’s concerns are represented at every point where the City has authority,” the statement said. It also pointed out that under Mayoral Executive Directive 1, the development does not need to go through the usual approval process. 

“Because this is a 100% affordable housing project, it qualifies for a by-right approval under the City’s Affordable Housing Incentive Program,” the statement said. “That means if a project meets the basic requirements, it can move forward without a public hearing, and neither City Planning nor the City Council has discretion to delay or deny it.”

The statement added that Jurado’s office has been working since April 2025 to hold the property owner accountable for fixing issues at the site.

SoLA Impact did not respond to The LA Local’s request for comment in time for publication.

Protesters along Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock say the issue of ED1 developments isn’t just limited to the Eastside and called for an end to the public safety crisis at the development on Huntington Drive in El Sereno.

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Andrew Lopez

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The LA Local

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Records obtained by the group and reviewed by The LA Local show that the city of Los Angeles opened a code enforcement case against SoLA Impact in April 2025 after a complaint that the building at 5100 E. Huntington Dr. had been left open to the public. City inspectors subsequently cited the South Los Angeles-based developer for unpermitted demolition of the structure. As of late April 2026, the case remained under investigation, with a third order to comply issued just days ago.

But now, over a year since issues began, residents say they’re out of patience.

“The idea that a developer would come in, tear something down illegally without permits, not be held accountable for those permits and start a homeless encampment right across the street from a previous one is upsetting to people. It’s upsetting to the community,” organizer Claudette Contreras told The LA Local. 

Contreras also said the group chose to protest outside the Eagle Rock CD 14 office to show that the issue is city-wide, not just limited to El Sereno. 

Protesters outside Ysabel Jurado’s Eagle Rock office speak with CD 14 representative Troy Carbajal about their issues with a development in El Sereno on April 28, 2026.

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Andrew Lopez

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The LA Local

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At one point, 10 protestors surrounded Troy Carbajal, a spokesperson for CD 14, outside the office and confronted him about what they see as a public safety crisis near the structure. 

“Our community does not need to see that. It’s been an eyesore for months and months, and our children deserve better,” a protestor told Carbajal, who fielded several questions and concerns from the community during the action.

Contreras said she’s also concerned that a five-story high-rise will be out of place in the largely single-family home neighborhood, and she said an additional hundred residents may increase tension over parking between neighbors. 

“Imagine 111 units, five stories, with 150, 200 additional cars in this area with no parking. It’s kind of outrageous. It also is on the business corridor, so it’s kind of devastating to the small businesses in this area who already have minimal parking on a very busy street,” Contreras said.

Am abandoned building at the corner of Huntington Drive and Portola Ave is the site of a proposed five-story, 111-unit development. Residents of the area say the development company is operating outside the rules and creating problems.

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Courtesy of Claudette Contreras

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El Sereno resident Daniela Bailes said she feels like SoLa Impact and the councilmember’s office should have consulted with neighborhood groups to determine the best uses for the property.

“They have tried to do this under the radar under ED1, to allow for this building to sprout up with zero community input,” Bailes said, referring to Mayor Karen Bass’ directive to accelerate the development of affordable housing around the city. 

Signed in 2022, ED1 was meant to address the housing crisis throughout the city by helping eliminate the red tape that affordable housing developments can get tangled in. In 2024, Bass rolled out an amended version of the directive, limiting where and how some developers build in L.A. 

Protesters outside Ysabel Jurado’s Eagle Rock office speak with CD 14 representative Troy Carbajal about their issues with a development in El Sereno on April 28, 2026.

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Andrew Lopez

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The LA Local

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Another El Sereno resident, Ezequiel Olvera, considered the developer’s process problematic because it circumvents the legal process. He said the planning department needs to correct the violations on the property. 

“If you knock down a building, you need to bring it back to code. You can’t just go in there and demolish a building and say, ‘Let’s red tag this building so that we can get permits so we can start our process,’” Olvera said. “The city inspector should have them comply with the rules and regulations of the [Los Angeles Municipal Code].”

Olvera said Jurado has the authority to hold the developer accountable and a responsibility to listen to the needs of her constituents. El Sereno Neighbors has more than 1,100 signatures of affected residents demanding a public meeting with the councilmember.

“We’ve seen the pattern several times with different council members that put developers first and bring in the community at the last minute to get their input. By then, it’s already too late,” Olvera said, adding that residents are growing impatient with Jurado’s office. 

Contreras continued to urge increased communication and transparency from city leadership. 

“There should at least be a voice. There should at least be the normalcies that go with building a large development in an area,” Contreras said. “We’re not even asking for outrageous things. There should be parking and impact and safety reports, those are norms. And everyone is hiding behind ED1.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

For several months, Westlake residents have been waiting for more information about a proposed $2.3 million project to install a permanent fence around MacArthur Park. The locals want to have a voice in how the project moves forward.

“We want to ensure that this $2.3 million fence does not become yet another eyesore in our neighborhood,” residents said in a letter and sent in early March to city officials requesting more details on the project.

The letter, signed by Mireya Valencia, president of the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council, on behalf of the council, adds that residents should help inform the design of the fence before any final plans are approved.

So far, Valencia said city officials have not meaningfully engaged with residents, pointing to a lack of routine check-ins. They were also promised conceptual renderings in January that would show what the fence would look like. Those have not materialized either.

The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners, County Supervisor Hilda Solis and Mayor Karen Bass did not respond to requests for comment and were all addressed in the residents’ letter.

A spokesperson for Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez’s office said in a statement that Council District 1 has been a part of discussions around the proposed fence and attended a MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council meeting when the letter was drafted.

“We appreciate the MacArthur Park Neighborhood Council’s engagement on this issue and have communicated our support for an inclusive community engagement process,” Hernandez’s office said in the statement.

The office added that while the Department of Recreation and Parks is at the forefront of the effort, Hernandez’s office will “support efforts to ensure that community voices are meaningfully incorporated as the project moves forward.”

For several months, Westlake residents have been waiting for more information about a proposed $2.3 million project to install a permanent fence around MacArthur Park.

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Gary Coronado

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for The LA Local

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The neighborhood council wants to know how the $2.3 million project funds would be spent and an explanation on  the project’s timeline and delays. 

Valencia said some neighborhood council members gave public comment when the project was first considered by the Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners last October, but felt the decision had already been made.

“Basically, we were told the fence is happening,” Valencia said. 

The fence would allow the park to close the space overnight and make it easier to maintain and secure facilities, according to what city officials told the LA Local in February.

But some residents and park users, like Josefina Portillo, a local vendor who has sold snacks and drinks in MacArthur Park for more than thirty years, said they worry the fence would make the space even more inaccessible.

Valencia, who has lived in the area for five years, said the council has yet to receive a formal response to its March letter. She added that she understands why some residents support a fence, given the park’s ongoing safety concerns for families, but said a fence alone will not address the deeper issues affecting the park, including homelessness.

“A fence is just going to push the problem somewhere else,” she said. “So instead of money being spent on fencing, I would love to see money be spent on social services.”

Mikaela Ruiz, a Westlake community member who works in the area, believes the fence proposal was created by people who don’t understand all the meaningful interactions that take place at MacArthur Park.

“If you go to MacArthur Park on a regular Saturday, you still see families interacting with the park,” Ruiz said. “You still see the kids football games in the summer, you still see the Levitt Pavilion having shows and events.” 

Westlake residents want to have a voice in how the project moves forward.

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Gary Coronado / For The LA Local

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Ruiz said the city should focus on what she sees as a fentanyl crisis happening at the park and services for unhoused people. She added that she doesn’t believe a fence would make the area feel any safer.

“What we’ve taken from the fences that Karen Bass decided to put on Sixth Street is that they just accumulate the trash,” Ruiz said. 

Valencia said meaningful community engagement would mean city officials change how and when they reach out to local residents.

“I would like to see proactive community engagement instead of reactive community engagement,” Valencia said. “Again, they come to our meetings after the decision has been made and after we write these letters, but they’re not asking us what we think beforehand.” 

If the fence does move forward, Valencia said she hopes it reflects the community and does not make the park feel closed off, pointing to the fence that the Frida Kahlo theater nearby has, as being more welcoming.

“I would love to see it incorporate artwork and our culture somehow,” Valencia said. “I would hate to see it blemished by an ugly carceral fence.”