What Does it Mean to Open a Restaurant in a Gentrifying Area?
An Interview with Chef Jenny Dorsey
Anyone familiar with the easternmost boundary of East Hollywood knows about the battle being fought on Virgil Avenue over this last decade. Virgil Avenue—located one block west of Hoover Street, which is the boundary between Silver Lake and East Hollywood—was once home to many long-standing local businesses and restaurants primarily owned by immigrants, many of whom have deep roots in the area.
The arrival of Sqirl in 2012 served for many as an unwanted marker of the changing tide, as Virgil Avenue has since become home to some of LA’s most popular restaurants and stores, all of which seem to be owned by people relatively new to the area who do not reflect the primary demographics of East Hollywood. Places like Courage Bagels—located in the building where local panadería Super Pan once operated—are written up in the New York Times. Similarly, places like neighboring Melody Wine Bar take to their Instagram to celebrate what they call “Vino Village,” a play on the neighborhood’s name Virgil Village, in celebratory response to the three other natural wine stores that have recently opened in the area.
Take a weekend morning stroll down Virgil Avenue between Santa Monica Blvd and Melrose Ave and you will see people lined up around the block to brunch at Sqirl or to purchase a $10-$15 bagel breakfast from Courage. In the evenings, you might hear a busy outdoor dining courtyard at Melody or you might have to fight your way past a hoard of people blocking the sidewalk while attending a pop-up event outside of Alma’s Cider & Beer.
In between these newer businesses with their higher price points and their clientele from other parts of the city, you’ll see the residual long-standing local businesses and their local customers. Places like California Grill, Felix’ Barber Shop, the Latino Dollar Store, and El Charrito are still standing, still serving the long-time residents of this rapidly changing neighborhood. Latinx families across generations buy groceries at the local carincerias. Young Latinx kids patron local spots for a bag of chips or a drink on their walks home from school. But for how long?
Gentrification does not only affect our little community here in East Hollywood. It is a phenomenon that neighborhoods across the U.S. are facing, which is where Jenny Dorsey comes in.
Jenny is a professional chef, a food writer, and a social entrepreneur in Los Angeles. She runs the non-profit Studio ATAO, a community-based think tank and educational platform dedicated to tackling issues of social justice in the food and hospitality industry. They are currently pursuing an initiative called The Neighborhood’s Table. According to their mission statement, The Neighborhood’s Table “aims to create a responsible, actionable, and replicable framework for hospitality businesses to organically connect with their local community, collaboratively combat displacement, and invest sustainably in their neighborhoods.”
This spring, The Neighborhood Table conducted a survey of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods—focused primarily on New York and Los Angeles—to better understand residents' opinions on the hospitality industry's relationship to their communities. The team also had similar conversations with restaurant owners. The responses from all involved parties will go toward developing toolkits for those in the hospitality industry who want to address their relationship with the communities in which they operate. The results of the community survey are summarized and visualized at this link.
The folks at The Neighborhood’s Table point out that, “since 2000, nearly 20% of neighborhoods with lower incomes and home values have experienced an influx of wealth and capital, often with the intent to change the area's demographics over time. In Los Angeles county, the number of gentrifying neighborhoods increased by 16% between 1990 and 2015… These neighborhoods that historically suffered from lack of investment are now reckoning with what feels like the choice between improved community infrastructure and resources, at the cost of displacing long-term residents.”
The Neighborhood’s Table believes that “neighborhood revitalization doesn’t always have to come at the expense of its residents. In particular, hospitality businesses—often viewed as proxies for gentrification—are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between neighborhood members, community organizations, private enterprise, and the local government: as spaces for gathering and collaboration, as well as a resource to feed and care for the community.”
The Neighborhood’s Table also notes: “Mainstream food and beverage media further contributes to these cycles of gentrification, by neglecting to evaluate hospitality businesses for their relationship to gentrification in their coverage. They often opt to avoid the topic altogether, or glorify new changes as objective improvements. This lack of accountability disincentivizes hospitality business owners and professionals from seriously engaging with the uncomfortable work of listening to their community and divesting from behaviors that contribute to displacement and exclusion in the neighborhood.”
That uncomfortable work is what recently brought Jenny and I together. Jenny had initially reached out to me because of the overlap between her work in hospitality and gentrification and my work in community organizing. She interviewed me about the neighborhood and its changes, and not long after that, I asked her if she would join me for a Zoom interview. In that interview, excerpted below, we discussed her relationship to neighborhoods and what she hopes to see as a result of The Neighborhood’s Table’s current efforts to connect with community members and hospitality businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods, particularly those in Los Angeles and New York City.
Ali: What kind of neighborhoods did you grow up in and what was your relationship to those neighborhoods?
Jenny: I grew up in the Bronx. My parents were students at Albert Einstein College, and so I grew up in a student complex. It was pretty tightly-knit in that my parents interacted a lot with fellow Chinese-American students because they were in their twenties or having trouble adjusting, helping each other with English. But growing up I felt very sheltered from the outside. Honestly, I have no idea, first of all, where anything is in the Bronx. And to be fair, I was there from ages three to eight, so it was a little early to get geographic reasoning, but still, I truly have no real recollection of basic things, like where the subway was or the grocery store because we were so confined and enclosed. And I always wish that hadn’t been the case.
Afterwards we moved to Seattle, and I grew up in a suburb of Seattle called Bellevue, which has become far more upper middle class since when I was there. I think one of the things that characterizes the situations that I was growing up in neighborhood-wise, is that there just wasn't a great sense of neighborhood. A lot of the kind of idyllic things that people talk about is that there really used to be a sense of time where there were more neighborhood businesses, where people were communicating, where people were supporting each other. And part of that is just probably because of a language barrier with my parents, because not everyone was so friendly to them.
Seattle is a liberal area, but it is definitely not a non-racist area. There were a lot of micro and macro aggressions growing up, so there was that layer as well. But overall I didn't really feel like a sense of community that I could reflect back on when I was growing up.
As I entered my twenties and left after graduating college, most of my life until now has also been kind of transient in that way where I have my own friends and they may live kind of close to me in New York or in S.F. or here now in LA, but I wasn't really deeply rooted in the neighborhood that I was living in. It wasn't until we were able, very fortunately, to buy a place in Highland Park, that I was able to say, I really like this place and I want to commit to doing something good for this area that I live in. I had honestly never felt that way before.
I used to live in Midtown West in Manhattan. I'm not committed to making Midtown West any better, not to hate, but you know. So I just didn't feel that sense like I feel in Highland Park, where people are trying to band together. But I'm still trying to figure out how to redefine my relationship to neighborhoods because I don't really feel like I had a core definition from my childhood.
Ali: That's perfect, because that answered my second question too, which is what kind of neighborhood do you live in now? So you live in Highland Park, right? Do you feel like it's currently predominantly one demographic or another? Or is it really heterogeneous and in flux?
Jenny: I think Highland Park traditionally or more historically has been pretty Latinx and I feel like that is still the case but I don't know what the official stats are. But definitely, depending on where you go, it feels like there are more white couples. There are some Asian Americans. I don't see a ton of them, but occasionally I will see a Lunar New Year thing and I'm like, Oh, look, another Asian American down the street over there!
Growing up, because I was always the minority in the neighborhoods I was part of, I’m used to that. So that doesn't feel super strange to me. It's more like I'm trying to figure out what's the best way to be a supportive member of the community without folks feeling like I'm an outsider. Even if it's not a race thing, it's also an age thing. Most of the folks that live on my street, when I say hi to them, I learn they've been there literally 30 some years. I met one of my neighbors because I was picking loquats off a tree, and she said, “I've been here 57 years.” Funnily enough, it was still her first time eating loquats though.
Ali: What made you pursue The Neighborhood’s Table in particular as a way of tackling these issues? What came first: wanting to address gentrification or wanting to address stuff with restaurants? Or were they intertwined?
Jenny: I think the through-line has been: what are some things that are clearly issues within these industries or communities? Almost nobody wants to talk about this stuff because usually it comes from a place of fear. When we did our first big project around equitable representation in food media, nobody wanted to talk about tokenism. It's awkward.
Similarly, I think with restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and gentrification, we all can see it. There are articles that get written about it. People know, but nobody [in the hospitality industry] wants to actually put it in the limelight and say, “oh yeah, this is like a real issue.” Every time the new awards coverage comes out, how many of those hot restaurants are in a gentrifying area? And how many times do you see that word get thrown around incorrectly? So for us, it was really about saying “this is an issue.”
I really understand the discomfort, though. It even makes me feel uncomfortable talking about it. I live in a nice home in Highland Park that we bought in the pandemic. I don't make very much money, but my husband makes a lot more money than me. I totally recognize that people will say, you're also a gentrifier, you know? And that's why people avoid this topic because they're so afraid of that moral binary.
So how can we create a space where we understand this is just murky waters and that for the most part, people are doing what they can with what they have. And for some people, that is a restaurant in a lower income neighborhood. Maybe they're just trying to figure it out and they're not necessarily trying to do harm, but they might implicitly be doing harm. So then how do we give them more tools to avoid doing harm and do good instead? If it can be that every single person marches three steps in the right direction, I think that does make a difference.
Ali: I think that makes a lot of sense. I think people are terrified of that moral quandary. And especially with your own position, I mean, I’ve had that come up a lot, especially since I started talking about gentrification more publicly. I moved here ten years ago when this neighborhood was just starting to really change. I didn’t know the harm I was causing. I feel very strongly now about gentrification and about preventing those changes from happening in the neighborhood. And yet I am part of that change that's been happening. So does that mean I should never say anything about it and I just keep my mouth shut because I'm complicit? Or is there a way to actually speak about the issue in an effort to prevent further harm?
It gets messy and people get mean, not people in my neighborhood, but for instance, people on the internet who I’ve never met. They’ll say, “you’re a f***ing gentrifier,” when I talk at all about the neighborhood, and yes, I definitely am and I’m not out here trying to deny that. I want to understand what it means to take accountability for that! We have to be able to talk about this stuff without people jumping down each others’ throats about it immediately. That’s a huge reason I wanted to do this interview with you. These are not easy topics to talk about but I hope we can find ways to talk about them.
What role do you think that restaurants play in gentrification and what role do you think they could play?
Jenny: I think right now, regardless of what restaurants are doing, gentrification is such a loaded term. And the media generally use it in very different ways. So then what happens, you have all sorts of individuals who see the term in all sorts of positive, negative, and confused ways.
Everyone doesn't really have a clear definition of gentrification. But one of the media narratives that consistently gets shown is this sort of causation thing, like X business moves in and changes things, and a lot of times it's a coffee shop or hospitality business, also art galleries. There are a couple kinds of buckets of businesses that are always depicted as X business. And then people think, “oh gentrification has now happened.” But no. Gentrification happens way before all of that happens.
That being said, usually hospitality businesses have very low margins and have high overhead in terms of labor, and they're trying to find a space that they can afford. So they end up moving to these neighborhoods where it's less expensive because it was historically redlined or not invested in. And yes, that is usually part and parcel of how the neighborhood changes. So whether a business likes it or not, they do have, I believe, some responsibility.
It really comes down to, what does that responsibility really look like? Because all businesses are time-constrained, resource-constrained. Some business owners care more than others. But what we've heard from our focus group so far, and I think what people have generally rallied around is, if you as a business owner are available for community members to give you their opinions, to help you, they can help you navigate the resources that are available, but you do have to take the time to cultivate and develop those relationships.
I guess what I'm trying to say is we haven't heard a scenario where people did all of this relationship-building work and then nobody responded. There have been scenarios where people don't do the work and so obviously no one responds. But there hasn't been someone saying, “I did all this community outreach and the community just told me to f*** off.” That's usually not the case unless you went and did that community outreach in a way that I guess people found disagreeable.
I think that right now there's just not a great bridge between community members, developers, businesses, especially when that bridge tends to be community board or council meetings, which is not a super neutral territory. It's usually not a relationship-building territory. It's more like a decision making territory. And things get really heated because you come to essentially the last point in what needs to happen. You need to vote yes or no on this. There's not a lot of discussion that happens or relationship building that happens.
I feel like that's actually one of the main things we need to have a solution for, or at least recommend a couple of different other avenues of how hospitality spaces can maybe serve as community relationship building spaces so we don't get such adversarial council meetings and where we don't get such an adversarial us versus them mentality.
And also between businesses that are newer versus legacy businesses, instead of legacy businesses really feeling like the new businesses are displacing them or putting them at a disadvantage. What are some more mutually beneficial ways that they can support each other?
Ali: So then what is your dream for The Neighborhood’s Table long-term?
Jenny: There've been a couple of things that have been suggested to us that I thought were interesting. I think right now what we're vaguely leaning towards is, in the past, all of our toolkits and deliverables have been very long-written PDFs basically, which was fine when we worked with food media because editors are used to reading so much. But developers are not reading that. Small businesses are not going to read that. Individuals are just not going to read it.
So something that we came up with was maybe creating something like a resource hub. We're envisioning some sort of web page or platform, some sort of landing for someone like a small business owner, and it would say: “here are some things that you can do. Here's a template for how you can survey some people in your community. Here are some things to incorporate in terms of community feedback into your business plan. Here's how you can start thinking about employee hiring practices so you can hire locally.” Just so there's this area for small business owners and some sort of discussion board or some way that they can connect to each other.
Hopefully what comes out of our town halls that we’re hosting is some kind of centralized place where a lot of this information can be in small, bite-sized chunks that are a little bit more actionable. So instead of saying, “our recommendations are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” we can say, “here's a little template you can use.” I think that would be great.
Some sort of engagement platform on there would be really cool, but I have no idea what that would look like because a lot of these issues are very neighborhood specific. Someone in Highland Park maybe doesn't want to talk to someone in Bed-Stuy, New York. But maybe some sort of discussion board or some sort of thing where you can ask for help would be helpful. And then a couple of places where you can find case studies and contact information. Let’s say, “hey, this is a guy who implemented this town hall situation before he opened his business and it worked really well for him. Here's a quick little case study on what he did, but if you want to interview him, here's his information.” And he would have consented to that. So some sort of place where people can get a lot more resources with a specific slant in one concise location.
Ali: That sounds so useful. I think, similarly for instance, part of our goal with this substack, which is mostly about Virgil Village in East Hollywood, is to make it appeal to people across the country because we know that there are changing neighborhoods across the country and maybe some of their specific problems are different, but a lot of the structural inequality, the racism and classism, is the same.
Gentrification is mostly happening in neighborhoods that were historically redlined and where there was historic divestment that kind of primed this moment because, when you said gentrification happened way before those new businesses moved in, that's a huge part of it. There was divestment on a massive government-sanctioned scale that allowed for these neighborhoods to be up for grabs for wealthy developers 100 years into the future. Our neighborhood was redlined in the 1930’s, so now we're seeing different kinds of consequences of that. And that's why, along that timeline, we have to intervene.
Maybe if I could say to places like Melody and Courage Bagels, both of whom have been really hard to talk to about these issues, “hey, there are a bunch of professionals in your industry who have talked about this, here are resources,” they might trust that more than they trust me. Because they're just going to see me as someone who doesn't know what it takes to own a business or a restaurant. And that's true. I do not know what it takes. But if I can point to other people who do, they might listen.
Jenny: Yeah, I think it's about giving them options so that there are different ways that they can find the interventions that make sense for them. Maybe right now all you can do is put a discounted item on your menu. Maybe all you can do is have a bilingual menu, but at least you know that there are like 15 other options that are escalating in terms of commitment.
But I think the big message that we want to push is also fundamentally, before you even start that business in that place, really think about questions like: “how do I address the needs of the people here?” Versus, “I singularly want to create this business because it's for me.”
I think we just have a really individualistic kind of perspective on everything in the US. So a lot of this doesn't even cross the minds of a lot of people. And when you retroactively try to figure it out, it is really challenging. But having a dream doesn't give you license to enact your dream on other people in a way that's harmful.
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This interview has been edited for clarity. For more information about Jenny or The Neighborhood’s Table, please view the following video from The Neighborhood’s Table and check out the links below.