A new type of restaurant lease: three months to make or break it in LA

When chef Elisa Da Prato arrived in Los Angeles from Italy last December, she only planned to visit family for three weeks and then return home to the charming town of Lucca in Tuscany. But after hosting a successful Silver Lake pop-up dinner, Da Prato was introduced to a landlord who offered her a unique opportunity: she could test her culinary concept in a vacant space for three months and then decide to close up shop or go permanent.

Since May, her Tuscan-inspired restaurant Da Prato has been operating out of a 3,000-square-foot condo in downtown L.A. with an initial agreement to stay open until the end of July. (She recently made the decision to extend the lease until the end of the year.)

“I’m not an independently wealthy person and this is not a vanity Instagram project,” Da Prato said. “This is just me doing the best I can to invest in and make a wager on myself, and hopefully come out of it with a nice salary and do some beautiful work.”

Beef and porcini ragú Toscano at Da Prato.

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Oscar Mendoza

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Courtesy Da Prato

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Running a restaurant in L.A. has been challenging over the last few years due to inflation and rising labor costs, the pandemic, entertainment-industry strikes, devastating fires and ICE raids. Chefs like Da Prato have been looking to find flexible and creative ways to run a restaurant that go outside the pop-up model and traditional lease structure. And if California Assembly Bill AB 1679 — which would allow certain pop-up businesses to operate in vacant storefronts for 120 days — becomes law, the landscape of running a business could change for the better for budding entrepreneurs.

Elisa Da Prato preparing her honeycomb and lemons dish.

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Jean Trinh

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LAist

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Right place, right time

Prior to opening in downtown L.A., Da Prato dealt with two closures: Elisa in Barga, Tuscany, due to the pandemic, and the well-regarded Etrusca in Brooklyn, which investors shuttered after just five months. So this new no-strings-attached lease structure in L.A. was particularly alluring for her self-funded project.

Da Prato entered a partnership with her landlord David Mirharooni of Brickstar Capital, a family-owned real estate investment company whose other clients include Danny Boy’s Pizza and Mastro’s Steakhouse. Mirharooni also helps Da Prato with backend support, like insurance and accounting, and assists with construction. While Mirharooni hasn’t done a lease structure like this before, everything aligned because he had a vacant space he needed to fill and he wanted to do a favor for Da Prato, who was a friend of a friend.

The dining room at Da Prato, with a print of Lyonel Feininger's “The White Man” hanging on the wall.

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Oscar Mendoza

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Courtesy Da Prato

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“We're not here just to make revenue for three months,” Mirharooni said of the 40-seat restaurant that’s open four nights a week. “We really see promise with chef Elisa and are hoping that this pop-up is successful enough to be able to convince her to stay in the L.A. market …. because ultimately, if it becomes a long-term deal, it's not only good for us as landlords but it's great for downtown L.A, which is not the easiest place to run a restaurant today.”

Da Prato is a playground for the chef’s hyper-seasonal and regional dishes that are inspired by ancient Roman cooking and the flavors she grew up eating while spending summers at her grandparents’ home in Tuscany. Her farmers market produce translates into experimental dishes like beef tartare on a bed of sliced plums, and lemon slices coated with honeycomb and dusted with rose petals. Edible flowers make an appearance on many dishes, a nod to her mother’s style of cooking. There is beef and porcini ragú pasta, grilled lamb punched up with colatura, a fish sauce, and Italian wines to round out the rustic menu.

While Mirharooni would love Da Prato to stay permanently, she thinks at most she’ll remain in L.A. until the end of this year.

“I don't think that a restaurant is an actual sustainable model, like a lifetime project,” Da Prato said. “For me, it's been, how do we offer something really special to the community that is still profitable for me as a small business owner?”

A new horizon for pop-ups

Eddie Navarrette, the chief consultant of FE Design & Consulting, a company that helps independent owners open restaurants and bars, said of Da Prato’s lease structure: “It’s extremely unique for me, but very welcomed.”

Traditionally, lease terms are for three, five or 10 years — and the agreement can take months to put together, Navarrette said. Oftentimes, landlords require personal guarantees, adding pressure for the owner.

Pop-ups exist in a gray area because no real infrastructure for them exists. Enter California Bill AB 1679, which Navarrette’s advocacy organization Independent Hospitality Coalition is sponsoring. If AB 1679 becomes law, it will help create a framework for the language and codes to operate pop-ups. The bill, co-authored by Assembly members Mark Gonzalez and Buffy Wicks, would require cities and counties to create permits to allow temporary low-risk businesses — like ones serving coffee or tea — to operate in vacant storefronts for 120 days.

Navarrette said lease structures like Da Prato’s “can be conducive in creating a more vibrant restaurant culture by giving restaurants more flexibility and leniency in their commitments, as opposed to making it such a burden to take on a business for such a long period.”

Da Prato is now focused on embracing the temporality of owning a business and controlling when it closes.

“It’s so tough seeing this beautiful thing that you create get blown away,” she said. “So this time, I'm like, then let's just make it a sand mandala that gets blown away.”