This month a local landmark is expected to close in Venice: The Rose, né the Rose Café, lived a few culinary lives during its 45-year run. It opened as a charming cafe boasting neighborhood art nights, and it’s closing as one of the city’s most high-profile day-to-night eateries — helmed by multiple celebrity chefs.
“Forty-five years is really something,” read a social media post from the restaurant on Dec. 1. “A lot of smiles, morning coffees, and celebrations for more than four decades. It is with sincere gratitude and sadness to announce that The Rose Venice is bidding our beloved corner of Rose and Main a fond farewell.”
The last day of business for the Rose is set for Sunday, Dec. 15.
“This decision has not been made lightly but reflects the cumulative challenges we have faced in recent years,” the restaurant’s management team said in a statement to The Times. “From economic shifts to a downturn in tourism and foot traffic in our neighborhood, we have navigated these hurdles with determination and optimism. Unfortunately, these factors have made it unsustainable to continue operating a chef-driven restaurant of this scale in Venice.
“The Rose Venice has been more than just a restaurant. It became a cornerstone of our community — a place where millions of guests gathered to celebrate California’s rich seasonal offerings and connect with one another. It has been an honor to serve as a neighborhood hub and a welcoming space for locals and travelers alike.”
It marks the latest in a number of closures in a year fraught with difficulties for the restaurant industry, including but not limited to sustained fallout from the 2023 entertainment-industry strikes, debt accrued during the pandemic and an increase in labor costs. Other beloved neighborhood institutions have closed this year or will by the end of 2024, including Alimento, Bicyclette, Spartina, Patrick’s Roadhouse, Tempura House and Bloom and Plume. All Day Baby, the Silver Lake dinette from the team behind Here’s Looking at You, will close on the same day as the Rose.
“It hits home, it hurts,” chef Jason Neroni said of the news. He led the kitchen for nine years before departing in late 2023. “It sucks. I thought that place would be there forever.”
The Venice icon had humble beginnings. In 1979 owner-founders Kamal Kapur and Manhar Patel flipped an empty gas-company office to a neighborhood cafe, which quickly became a hangout for surfers and Venice’s bohemian set.
Late Los Angeles Times Food critic Jonathan Gold once called it “an institution in Venice since the late 1970s, a funky bit of stability in a neighborhood that changed its mood every couple of years and a hangout for what remains of the local arts community.” The iconic pink-hued rose painted on the restaurant’s exterior, he wrote, is “widely considered a civic treasure.”
Gold noted the old version of the Rose Café was by no means a culinary destination but a charming neighborhood joint, “a place you went in spite of the food, not because of it.” That all changed in 2015, when a new partnership and celebrity chef permanently altered the restaurant.
The Rose Café closed in February of that year to usher in a new era helmed by Neroni and restaurateur Bill Chait under the latter’s former restaurant group, Sprout — a force that opened some of L.A.’s most notable restaurants, including République and Bestia — while original owners Kapur and Patel remained partners in the operation. They overhauled the space and plotted the integration of a new dinner service in addition to an entirely new daytime menu. They gave the room a more industrial, sleek feel. They generated buzz. They also used this renovation time to rebrand from the Rose Café simply to the Rose.
At the time, these changes proved controversial. Locals and regulars banded together to physically and virtually protest the new ownership in early 2015, also decrying a policy that existing staff had to reapply for their jobs before the restaurant’s reopening.
But when it reopened in November, the “impressive” and “kind of stunning” new iteration retained roughly two dozen of its old staff and placed many others elsewhere in Sprout properties. Gold said the new-old restaurant felt as if it had always been there.
The 8,000-square-foot Rose boasted 400 seats; a custom-designed kitchen with a wood-burning oven; an extensive wine program with around 2,500 bottles; expansive deli and pastry cases that would later incorporate a raw bar; new art from C.R. Stecyk III, a childhood fan of the original Rose Café; a 40-foot cocktail bar; and a hyper-local California-cuisine menu by Neroni.
Neroni, Chait, Kapur and Patel approached the renovation with “a grand vision.” They ran the new Rose with 250 employees, which included a dedicated catering team and a brigade system in the kitchen. They made nearly everything in-house: pastries, sauces, charcuterie, fresh pastas, syrups, ice creams, freshly pressed juices.
“Everybody who worked there was in love with it, and it was a family,” said Neroni, who now primarily works as a restaurant consultant. “Everybody understood the mission. And we used to get our asses handed to us in that place: 10,000 covers a week, [and] 4.5 million people [served] in the time that I was there.”
But the restaurant industry has changed since the Rose reopened in 2015. Neroni notes rising costs especially in California, as well as a change in the way some diners eat: looking for flashier experiences and dishes that can catch the eye of people scrolling on social media. He and the Rose parted ways in 2023 (Chait is also no longer involved with the restaurant).
Toward the start of the year the Rose entered a new phase when lauded B.S. Taqueria and Asterid chef Ray Garcia took over the kitchen. He added his spin to some of the restaurant’s signature dishes and maintained a seasonally driven, farmers-market-sourced menu but added even more global influences while paring down the pizzas and pastas.
Garcia declined to comment on the closure.
His menu includes Moroccan-inspired roasted lamb necks; crispy pork shank in garlic mojo with carrot escabeche; cashew muhammara dotted with feta and chile ancho; Spanish octopus with fennel confit; and chimichurri-laced empanadas .
This version of the Rose, of the many lives it’s lived, can be enjoyed at the corner of Rose Avenue and Main Street for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily, for the next two weeks.