Sal’s Place, a Scrappy Pop-Up Restaurant, Shuttles Between L.A. and the East Coast

Sal’s Place is straightforward to overlook. Nearly obscured by bougainvillea. it sits on a nook of North Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, Calif., a jumble of a constructing anchored by a tent draped over a body of wooden and home windows. There isn’t a valet parking — even right here in Los Angeles — and no signal. To get to a rest room, diners stroll out the entrance door and switch left on the sidewalk.

And it’s open solely about six months a yr.

The story of Sal’s Place is a narrative of tough East Coast winters, of the persevering with mystique of the pop-up restaurant and of a spirited proprietor, Siobhan Carew, who three years in the past led a band of waiters and cooks throughout the nation to create a winter outpost for her restaurant of the same name in Provincetown, Mass.

On the Atlantic Coast, Sal’s Place sits on a seaside on the tip of Cape Cod. Housed in a former boatbuilding wharf that hangs over the water on stilts, it isn’t made for winter. And Ms. Carew, 60, who had moved full-time to Provincetown after closing her eating places in Boston throughout the pandemic, determined that she wasn’t, both.

The West Coast location of Sal’s could have been based within the adventurous spirit of the pop-up, however she hopes it is going to be round for a very long time. And why not? The 60-seat restaurant is drawing good crowds — and, it’s value noting, very completely different crowds (youthful, gayer, hipper) than Il Piccolino, the native establishment that stuffed the identical house earlier than closing in 2022, within the shadow of the pandemic.

Il Piccolino, which opened in 2005, was revered by a sure area of interest of Los Angeles, with its excessive costs ($60 for a veal chop) and moneyed clientele, together with quite a lot of celebrities within the twilight of their careers: Joan Collins, Liza Minnelli and Irwin Winkler, who produced the “Rocky” motion pictures. Its ethos was captured by its menu, which included lobster with white truffle sauce, alongside a spaghetti-with-clams dish named for a Hollywood producer and common patron: Jerry Weintraub’s Spaghetti Clam Present, “with spaghetti simply the best way Jerry preferred it,” the menu explains.

There are nonetheless reminders of the previous place. “Il Piccolino” is etched right into a glass window that divides the 2 eating rooms. The striped banquettes stay.

However Sal’s Place travels in a special lane. It has no web site. Reservations should be made by cellphone — both Ms. Carew’s or the restaurant’s, each with a Massachusetts space code — as a result of Ms. Carew could have nothing to do with OpenTable or Resy.

“I hate all that,” she mentioned over a cup of Irish Breakfast tea with milk within the entrance eating room. “It’s one other sort of layer of constructing it much less private. It doesn’t really feel genuine.”

And Sal’s solely takes money.

“The money factor right here fascinates me: nobody makes use of money anymore,” mentioned Michael Fleming, the president of the David Bohnett Foundation, which focuses on L.G.B.T.Q. causes, and a daily at Sal’s on each coasts. “And but these studio sorts have to come back in with a bundle of a whole bunch. They need to assume earlier than they arrive. It’s an intentional place to have dinner.”

The restaurant is open six nights per week, and its menu is pushed by the Wednesday farmers’ market in Santa Monica, a favourite of Los Angeles cooks.

The proximity of a bountiful, year-round market was one among Ms. Carew’s first classes in the benefits of operating a restaurant in Southern California. The standard-with-a-twist Italian menu displays that: rigatoni cacio e pepe ($40) made with pesto and contemporary broccolini; a salad of pickled crimson onions and contemporary herbs ($20); and Sal’s Caesar salad ($20), lined with a blizzard of shaved cauliflower.

The restaurant closes and strikes again East as quickly because the climate warms up sufficient for the Cape Cod constructing, which isn’t winterized. Ms. Carew and her daughter Michaela Carew-Murphy purchased Sal’s in Provincetown in 2016, turning into the third proprietor of a restaurant that first opened in 1962. (Ms. Carew leases the West Hollywood house on her personal).

The Provincetown location has 110 seats and, beneath Ms. Carew’s eye, attracts a crowd that’s artsy and eclectic with out seeming fussy. (No money? Swing by again tomorrow to settle the invoice, Ms. Carew says.)

John Waters, the filmmaker and a daily who summered on the town for 61 years, described the restaurant as “positively is the good restaurant in Provincetown. It’s very Felliniesque. She used to have chairs on the seaside and also you needed to take your sneakers off.

“There’s no such factor as an Elaine in Provincetown,” he mentioned, referring to Elaine Kaufman, who owned Elaine’s, the previous movie star gathering spot in New York Metropolis. “But when there was, she can be it.”

The vibe carries over, to some extent, to West Hollywood. Marylouise Oates, who was a society columnist for The Los Angeles Instances within the Nineteen Eighties, mentioned Sal’s is in contrast to any restaurant she has skilled in Los Angeles. “It’s very New England, it’s very Cape,” she mentioned. “There’s simply one thing about the entire spirit of the place. And I believe Siobhan herself is a pressure of nature.”

Ms. Carew calls herself a “hospitality maven” — that’s, she spends her time within the eating rooms reasonably the kitchen. Born in Eire, she got here to the USA at age 17 in 1981. and nonetheless has the lilt of an Irish accent. She settled in Boston (truly Brookline: Michael Dukakis, the previous governor and candidate for president, was a neighbor).

She was drawn into the restaurant enterprise 30 years in the past, ultimately opening three Boston eating places, all of which closed throughout the pandemic.

“Our eating places had been too small to do social distancing, and we determined to maneuver right down to P-town full time,” she mentioned. “We had been capable of do exterior eating there, and it was simple to stay there since you might take walks and be exterior.”

As Covid waned, Ms. Carew didn’t need to return to Boston, and a fast survey of the workers discovered nobody desperate to spend winters on the Cape. So she headed to Los Angeles, ignoring pals’ warnings that she would by no means heat to this a part of the world. “Los Angeles is just not the place I might have suspected she would pop up,” Mr. Waters mentioned.

Ms. Carew was drawn to the vacant Il Piccolino restaurant at first sight. Just like the Provincetown restaurant, it “has a provisional high quality, as a result of we’re housed in a tent construction,” she wrote in a textual content. “They each have a semi-permanent vibe.”

And he or she has certainly taken to town. “I’m very enthusiastic about all the things about L.A.,” she mentioned. “The accessibility to nature. The climate. I imply, take a look at this: It’s March, it’s insane.” On the afternoon we spoke, it was 67 levels and sunny.

This isn’t a super time to open a restaurant. As in the remainder of the nation, town’s eating scene continues to be recovering from the pandemic. Enterprise has continued to drop due to the Hollywood writers’ strike in 2023 and the wildfires in January.

“Folks didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Carew mentioned. “They felt responsible, even when they weren’t impacted by the fires, going out to eat.”