16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Scrappy Pop-Up Restaurant Shuttles From Coast to Coast
Sal's Place is easy to miss. Almost obscured by bougainvillea. it sits on a corner of North Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, Calif., a jumble of a building anchored by a tent draped over a frame of wood and windows. There is no valet parking — even here in Los Angeles — and no sign. To get to a bathroom, diners walk out the front door and turn left on the sidewalk.
And it's open only about six months a year.
The story of Sal's Place is a story of rough East Coast winters, of the continuing mystique of the pop-up restaurant and of a spirited proprietor, Siobhan Carew, who three years ago led a band of waiters and cooks across the country 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 beach at the tip of Cape Cod. Housed in a former boatbuilding wharf that hangs over the water on stilts, it is not made for winter. And Ms. Carew, 60, who had moved full-time to Provincetown after closing her restaurants in Boston during the pandemic, decided that she wasn't, either.
The West Coast location of Sal's may have been founded in the adventurous spirit of the pop-up, but she hopes it will be around for a long time. And why not? The 60-seat restaurant is drawing good crowds — and, it is worth noting, very different crowds (younger, gayer, hipper) than Il Piccolino, the local institution that filled the same space before closing in 2022, in the shadow of the pandemic.
Il Piccolino, which opened in 2005, was revered by a certain niche of Los Angeles, with its high prices ($60 for a veal chop) and moneyed clientele, including more than a few celebrities in the twilight of their careers: Joan Collins, Liza Minnelli and Irwin Winkler, who produced the 'Rocky' movies. 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 regular patron: Jerry Weintraub's Spaghetti Clam Show, 'with spaghetti just the way Jerry liked it,' the menu explains.
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