The Brief

Insane hours, the toxic work environments, low pay and stringent standards — plenty of ink and film have been spent lately rehashing the stressors that come with working in the culinary industry.

Yet, for the most part, the culture has dictated that workers suffer silently, placing their well-being — and their mental health especially — on the backburner.

But after the back-to-back deaths of two prominent figures in the local L.A food scene, a couple of seasoned food pros have decided that this status-quo doesn’t cut it. They’re determined to get food-and-beverage workers into the therapy chair.

For Alyssa Noui, 38, a leading L.A. food stylist, and Kristel Arabian, 41, a food and beverage recruiter and former chef at a Michelin Star restaurant, the last straw came in February. First it was Jonathan Whitener, the celebrated chef and partner at Here’s Looking at You and All Day Baby restaurants. Whitener died at home from a drug overdose.

A couple of weeks later, Jered Standing, the popular butcher and founder of animal-conscious Standing’s Butchery, killed himself.

Noui and Arabian both had known Whitener and Standing. Their deaths, at 36 and 44, respectively, hit hard with “my elder millennial generation of people in the food space,” said Noui, a veteran of shows like Master Chef, Guy’s Grocery Games, etc.

Whitener was a “big loss to the food world,” she noted, adding how his menu items altered the foodscape. “Like, we're seeing things on that page, which were familiar but were never put together, like the chicken-fried rabbit,” a favorite from his days at another restaurant, Animal.

Meanwhile Standing’s Butchery was a once-a-week stop for Arabian, either to pick up something to cook for dinner or for a Sunday social burger. Noui called him a “dear friend.” By all accounts, Standing, a former vegetarian, was changing how chefs and insiders went about animal sourcing. He was readying a second location in Venice.

Noui said it was one of those friendships where 10 years later you laugh trying to place how you knew each other. Was it Lindy and Grundy or Salt's Cure?

“He checked all the boxes you’re supposed to, to be successful,” Noui said, adding “he was a good-looking dude with great people around him.”

“But if you're not right in your mind, you’re not right in your spirit—what do you really have?”

Channeling grief into gathering

When news broke about Standing’s death, weeks after Whitener’s, “It’s almost, you know, when someone tells a bad joke or something and the room gets quiet, and you're like, ‘Oh my God, who's going to say the next thing?’”

Arabian had met Noui through the Santa Monica farmers’ market network some years back. She remembers speaking to Noui about how their grieving community needed support.

She made a passive comment about 'everyone needing a hug', Arabian said. "'I'm like, yeah, how do we do that?"

The two organized an event which they’ve since dubbed the “F+B Community Check-In” and took over the back patio at Tabula Rasa, the Hollywood wine bar and industry hangout whose name translates to a “blank slate.”

Rather than just creating another customary eulogic Instagram post, “I channeled my grief into gathering,” Noui said. Tabula Rasa, which has a “dark, grown and sexy feeling,” is responsible for putting a lot of first-rate L.A. pop-ups on the map, including Burgers by Standing and Broad Street Oyster, according to Noui.

It was a nice place to bring out “our people” who spend most of their time in the back of those type of places, she said.

The next event was held at the quaint and cozy Now Serving, the Chinatown cookbook store run by Ken Concepcion, a former Wolfgang Puck chef at Cut. The store, which “gives cottage vibes with a sick library,” is also a haven for public discussions and meeting places for local makers and creatives.

Alyssa Noui and Kristel Arabian

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Sam Gezari

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LAist

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For that first event, Arabian created a flier in Canva and went through her contacts looking for sponsors willing to donate food. But they didn’t want it to be just a grieving party, so Noui and Arabian sought another angle.

They found the Southern Smoke Foundation, a Houston-based nonprofit offering free “Behind You” therapy sessions specifically for food and beverage workers. Currently operating their mental health program in ten states, the foundation's sessions are administered locally by grad students at California Lutheran University, seeking to fulfill their curriculum hours. The non-profit also offers emergency relief grants for industry workers. The only conditions are that they work a minimum of 30 hours a week — across multiple jobs, if necessary — and that they’ve worked in the industry for at least six months.

After Noui and Arabian went through the Southern Smoke Foundation offerings at the first meeting, a fishbowl was put out where attendees could share anonymously anything they felt compelled to bare, Arabian said. One person wrote, "I know that the food matters, but when will I start mattering?"

"It f—ing crushed me," Arabian recalled. Others used the opportunity to bounce around career concerns: questions related to pricing, tipping, and other ways they could come together to improve the industry or support one another.

Noui doesn’t need the Southern Smoke offerings herself. She has motion picture insurance as part of a local craftsperson union and has just a $5 copay for counseling. She couldn’t afford it otherwise, she said. Now the question is, “how do I hold the door open for more people to have access to it?”

Cutting through the stigma

Southern Smoke founder, the Houston-based, James Beard Award-winning chef Chris Shepherd, 51, says if you talk to any cook they’ll tell you the same thing: “I still hear the ticket machine in my head at night. You know, you can hear that, geeegeee, geeegeee sound. It doesn't stop.”

The foundation was originally conceived through a Houston festival intended to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis. Shepherd was trying to help a sommelier friend battling the disease. The participating chefs and organizers started speaking about opening up the mental health dimension before the 2018 festival, right after the suicide of superstar TV chef Anthony Bourdain.

Within a few days of the celebrity chef’s death, a friend of one of the festival chefs also had taken his own life. So, “with twenty-something of the best chefs in the country coming in,” Shepherd said, there was a special opportunity to have that conversation.

The profession will always be a high-pressure one, but that doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate harm where possible, he said. Beyond the obvious barriers of accessibility and affordability, there’s also the built-in cultural stigma around asking for help. Since the Southern Smoke therapy sessions are conducted via telehealth, “nobody needs to know,” he said.

Kait Leonard, 28, a freelance chef, producer and co-owner of BOH Creative, a marketing agency that works with restaurants and their staffs, decided to attend the second Check-In event at Now Serving, although she wasn’t sure if she was in the right headspace beforehand.

In 2023, a couple of months after cofounding her company, Leonard fell into a deep depression and admitted herself to the ER with suicidal ideation. She wasn’t sure if she was up for attending the meetup, but decided her presence could help someone else.

“Like 'I went to the ER for, you know, I really didn't want to be here. And that's okay'.” Ultimately, her hope most importantly was that these meetups would be a positive outlet and tool for her clients, to help create a healthier workplace. “I wish something like this existed when I was first starting to work in kitchens,” she said.

Brandon Gray, 38, chef and founder of Brandoni Pepperoni, the Los Angeles inspired pizza pop-up, has attended multiple Check-In events thus far. “A lot of trauma bonding,” took place at said events, he said, adding “everyone there has their own story, there’s a lot of overlap”.

“It’s about just figuring out how to be better,” he said. “Because it needs to be better—the people who have been cooking as long as I have, it's not fun anymore.”

Checking in about mental health

The “hospitality industry is excessive,” says Noui. But it’s important to remember that those who are drawn to it, either back-of-house or front, are those who naturally, or are conditioned to, put themselves second. It’s those inherent “masochistic qualities that everyone has,” the same ones we see “romanticized in shows like the Bear” that come “out of service — out of wanting to serve."

At Kitchen Culture Recruiting, the company she started, Arabian says she makes it a point to check in with potential hospitality candidates about their mental health, “but it’s not something you can hit chefs over the head with,” she said. “It takes trust,” from someone who’s been through it. But there are limits, she says. “I’m not a psychologist.”

Arabian remembers her first time working in the kitchen as a cook, after feeling pushed by her family to become a pharmacist. For the first time, it felt like she was doing what she was supposed to be doing. She’d go on to work back-of-house for approximately ten years reaching the level of executive chef. In her last chef role she was working as executive sous chef at a bakery and pizzeria. But after working in front of a wood-burning stove for as much as 110 hours a week, 14-16 hours a day, seven days a week, she developed a chronic illness and had to leave. The safety net just wasn’t there.

While any job can be anxiety-producing, “cooking is one job that has so much “machismo and bravado” around it that physically, “when you become ill, it is life-changing,” she said. Rather than seek out another chef job, she became a front-of-house and back-of-house recruiter. She remembers saying, “Until I find a really great job for myself, in the meanwhile, I'm going to make sure that chefs are taken care of.” Fourteen years later, she says, "I’m still trying.”

Noui has been workshopping her own community resource tool. She bought a phone number that she’s calling the “My Chef” line, 855-My-Chef-8, which she also had printed on pens. This hotline can be used for everything from finding someone to fill a job, like a chef, stylist, or dishwasher or for accountability checks.

Ultimately, Shepherd says it's important for people to know there is help. He's not a fan of all the emerging depictions of extreme kitchen conditions put out there today. “There's these new TV shows that glorify this [toxic workplace elements] when an industry is trying to get away from it…I think it’s wrong. Unless at the end of it you say, ‘hey, you know what? Therapy is available.’”

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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Courtesy

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Hedy Torres

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.