The Brief

Los Angeles has seen several notable restaurant closures in the past few weeks.

Hart House, the vegan fast food chain owned by comedian Kevin Hart, closed all four locations. Pink Taco, located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, abruptly shuttered its doors after 12 years. Otoño, a well-reviewed Spanish-inspired restaurant in Highland Park is now closed. Acclaimed Gorilla Pies in Valley Village has gone on hiatus to “reimagine how we can better serve you.”

Eater L.A has kept a running total of this year’s closures, and it’s 75 so far. Compared to last year’s 65 eateries that closed over the entire year — it’s clear that it’s grim out there.

To get a better picture of the current situation, we reached out to three business owners: Nicole Rucker, owner of Fat & Flour in DTLA and Culver City; Chef Teresa Montaño of the now-shuttered Otoño; and Alex Koons, of Hot Tongue Pizza in Silver Lake, who made the decision last year to add meat to his vegan pizzeria menu with hopes of attracting a larger customer base. All three have been vocal regarding the hardships they’ve faced recently.

(Note: these conversations have been edited for clarity and length).

What’s the situation? 

Nicole Rucker, owner of Fat & Flour

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Alan Gastelum

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Courtesy Fat & Flour

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Nicole Rucker:

“This summer, we experienced a drop in our business that started on June 1st, which came after we had recorded high sales in 2023.

The beginning of the year, it's normally a little bit slower, and then we look to summer for when tourism comes to L.A. [But] this summer, it took a sharp drop down and just kept getting worse. In August, we saw the worst sales that we've seen since 2021.

August was worse than July, and July was worse than June. And in total, it's about a 30 to 40 percent drop. And then the heat wave that came was the nail in the coffin for a lot of people. That was brutalizing."

Teresa Montano:

“A significant part of it is just how much the cost of everything, the cost of doing business in Los Angeles, has gone up. And after COVID-19, so many things changed.

There were just these compounding factors that kept hitting us. We closed for about 15 months during COVID-19. In that time, we did a little market thing, but ultimately, dinner service was down for 15 months, which was nuts.

One of the major things that I noticed was that dining habits changed. People were still scared to come out, so they decided to change their lifestyle and start cooking at home.

The other factor is that third-party delivery apps made a killing during COVID-19 because all the restaurants were down. These parasitic apps came in and stole half the market.

A lot of people have got used to that. And that has become their dining, instead of going out to restaurants. When we reopened the first year, we had an incredible year, of course, because people were excited that we were back.

But I think after that initial pop dissipated, we were in the boat with everyone else."

Alex Koons:

Alex Koons of Hot Tongue in Silver Lake

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Miriam Brummel

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Courtesy Hot Tongue

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“It just seemed the summer was so dead. It was scary. My wife had dipped into her funds to pay for payroll multiple times.

I've been in pizza for almost 15 years, and it feels like I've had to work five times harder for everything these last couple of years.

I'm not saying the restaurant industry was easier before this, but just seeing and hearing about all the struggles, seeing Gorilla Pies close their doors, and other friends, it was just me saying, ‘If we didn't make this decision, [about adding meat] we would have been closed. There has to be a bigger play. And opening up to a bigger demographic.

I think my ego was quite big as a pizza maker. Bread has always been the defining factor that I find to be important in pizza, and it's something that I'm very good at. I thought that would be enough to get people who might not necessarily eat vegan food in the door. But it's so funny, living in a bubble or having a perspective of only your own — you don't realize that.”

What can be done? 

Nicole Rucker:

“I would like to see a small business tax plan that really takes care of small businesses. I would like to see money become available to small businesses that are not from online bank sources that charge exorbitant interest rates. Because something that changed with the pandemic is that it is more and more difficult for truly small businesses.

And by that, businesses who do under a million dollars in sales. It's very difficult for people like me to get money these days from places that aren't charging 17 to 20% interest.

But the other thing is people are scared because there's so much messaging about the economy being bad. And we're all trying to save where we can, and groceries are expensive, but if we do care about the health of small businesses within our communities, then we have to support the places that matter to us.

Because following three months of really terrible sales, that’s when you start to see doors closing. If you're lucky, you have three months of backup in the bank. That would be really great to have, but we just used it all on summer 2024. It's gone now for most people. So a lot more places are going to close before the end of the year because it's so hard to navigate."

Teresa Montaño:

Chef Teresa Montano stands inside of her now-shuttered Otoño restaurant in Highland Park

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Courtesy Otoño

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“It's really just looking at the policy and getting rid of all those old systems, lowering the prices of things and stopping gouging small businesses. We're paying the taxes and employing people, which are way too high in California. There's just so much red tape. And then you open, and there's even more. There's even more. It's just like regulation after regulation.

Thank God we dodged the junk fee bill [a bill to remove extra fees from bills that ultimately exempted restaurants]. Maybe it's a good intention, but it makes doing business harder. And small businesses are leaving California, but huge businesses are also leaving, so that should be an eye-opener to the lawmakers.”

Alex Koons:

"There is no quick fix to this problem. I bang my head against the wall daily, trying to figure out what will hit and stick.

There needs to be something more extreme than just running promotions or trying to pay for a PR agency or get people or influencers in here.

Again, pride and ego are something that I'm dealing with personally, but I don't want to live in a world where I have to have an influencer come into my establishment to tell everybody that my food is great.

And that seems like that's the world we're living in. They come in, and fundamentally nothing changes from the time they were in and the time they were before. You feel it's almost like being trapped in a way. And maybe I need to just swallow that.

But I have a fair amount of friends who haven't felt any pain. And they're doing very well. They maintain a constant flow of social media attention or being on lists and stuff, and I know how helpful that is to business, especially in Los Angeles.

I talk about cutting through the noise. It's very important to stay on people's radar. And that's a constant battle, too with Hot Tongue. So many people don't know about us in our own neighborhood, and trying to combat that, I've done everything.

We're not priced at the cheapest, but also we pride ourselves on the grain that we use, the technique that we use, the equipment that we use, how much we pay people.

It's hard to convey to a customer, to sit down and have that conversation with them a lot of times. It feels like they just want their food on time and want us not to break the bank.”

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024

Nearly every student in the California State University system has used artificial intelligence tools, but most don’t trust the results, are worried about how AI will affect their future job security and want more say in systemwide AI policy.

That’s according to results of a 2025 survey of more than 80,000 students enrolled at CSU’s 22 campuses, plus faculty and staff — the largest and most comprehensive study of how higher education students and instructors perceive artificial intelligence.

Nationwide, university faculty struggle to reconcile the learning benefits of AI — hailed as a “transformative tool” for providing tutoring and personalized support to students — and the risks that students will depend on AI agents to do their thinking for them and, very possibly, get the wrong information. Educators want a say in how and which AI tools are used. Students across the CSU system want to be included in those discussions.

Some professors teach students how to use AI and encourage students to use it, while others forbid its use in the classroom, said Katie Karroum, vice president of systemwide affairs for the Cal State Student Association, representing more than 470,000 students.

“Both of these things are allowed to coexist right now without a policy,” she said.

Karroum said that faculty practices are too varied and that what students need are consistent and transparent rules developed in collaboration with students. “There are going to be students who are graduating with AI literacy and some that graduate without AI literacy.”

In February 2025, the CSU system announced an initiative to adopt AI technologies and an agreement with OpenAI to make ChatGPT available throughout the system. The system-wide survey released Wednesday confirms that ChatGPT is the most used AI tool across CSUs. The system will also work with Adobe, Google, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Campus leaders say the survey and accompanying dashboard provide much needed data on how the system continues to integrate AI into instruction and assessment.

“We need to have data to make data-informed decisions instead of just going by anecdote,” said Elisa Sobo, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State who was involved in interpreting the survey’s findings. “We have data that show high use, but we also have high levels of concern, very valid concern, to help people be responsible when they use it.”

Faculty at San Diego State designed the survey, which received more than 94,000 responses from students, faculty and staff. Among all responding CSU students, 95% reported using an AI tool; 84% said they used ChatGPT and 82% worry that AI will negatively impact their future job security. Others worry that they won’t be competitive if they don’t understand AI well enough.

“Even though I don’t want to use it, I HAVE TO!” wrote a computer science major. “Because if I don’t, then I’ll be left behind, and that is the last thing someone would want in this stupid job market.”

Faculty are divided about the impact of AI on teaching and research. Just over 55% reported a positive benefit, while 52% said AI has had a negative impact so far.

San Diego State conducted its first campuswide survey in 2023 in response to complaints from students about inconsistent rules about AI use in courses, said James Frazee, vice president for information technology at the campus.

“Students are facing this patchwork of expectations even within the same course taught by different instructors,” Frazee said. In one introductory course, the professor might encourage students to use AI, but another professor teaching the same course might forbid it, he said. “It was a hot mess.”

In that 2023 survey, one student made this request: “Please just tell us what to do and be clear about it.”

Following that survey, the San Diego State Academic Senate approved guidelines for the use of generative AI in instruction and assessments. In 2025, the Senate made it mandatory that faculty include language about AI use in course syllabi.

“It doesn’t say what your disposition has to be, whether it’s pro or con,” Frazee said. “It just says you have to be clear about your expectations. Without the 2023 survey data, that never would have happened.”

According to the 2025 systemwide survey, only 68% of teaching faculty include language about AI use in their syllabi.

Sobo and other faculty who helped develop the 2025 survey hope other CSU campuses will find the data helpful in informing policies about AI use. The dashboard allows users to search for specific campus and discipline data and view student responses by demographic group.

The 2025 survey shows that first-generation students are more interested in formal AI training and that Black, Hispanic and Latino students are more interested than white students. At San Diego State, students are required to earn a micro-credential in AI use during their first year — another change that was made after the 2023 survey.

Students in this year’s survey said they want training that will be relevant to their careers. “I want to learn AI tools that are actually used in my industry, not just generic chatbots,” a mechanical engineering student responded. “Show me what engineers are actually doing with AI on the job.”

The California Faculty Association, which represents about 29,000 educators in the CSU system, said in a February statement that faculty should be included in future systemwide decisions about AI, including whether the contract with OpenAI should be renewed in July.

“CFA members continue to advocate for ethical and enforceable safeguards governing the use of artificial intelligence,” the CFA said in the statement, asking for “protections for using or refusing to use the technology, professional development resources to adapt pedagogy to incorporate the technology, and further protections for faculty intellectual property.”