Landmark Watts restaurant Locol is reopening on August 8 after being closed since 2018. Chefs and partners at the restaurant, Keith Corbin and Daniel Patterson, confirmed the reopening to Eater. Los Angeles Times first reported the restaurant’s plans to return in July 2023.
In response to feedback from the community, the revived Locol will serve a menu of soul food dishes. It will also operate as a nonprofit under the umbrella of Alta Community, an incubator founded to address food insecurity and job training in Los Angeles. Locol will serve as an outlet to hire and train workers from the local community, before helping those team members find jobs at other restaurants. According to Alta Community’s website, the duo eventually plans to open for-profit locations of Locol owned in part by its workers.
Locol was first opened in January 2016 by Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson as a way to serve healthy, affordable fast-food meals in Watts. The city has long been impacted by food insecurity, with residents having limited access to grocery stores and fresh foods. Larger-name operators and restaurants have long neglected the South Los Angeles region, leaving traditional fast-food chains and liquor stores as primary sources of food for many locals. The opening menu featured dishes like $4 burgers and fried chicken sandwiches, $6 chili bowls, and $1 spicy corn chips. Its first day saw a massive crowd, with some guests waiting outside for three hours before opening.
In May 2016, Locol opened a second location in uptown Oakland. But, troubles started to show in the business by the end of that year, which were just magnified by the now-infamous zero-star review by Pete Wells in the New York Times. In April 2017, Jonathan Gold named Locol his restaurant of the year for the Los Angeles Times, but just months later the restaurant closed its uptown Oakland location. By the end of the year, its west Oakland location and original Watts location were both put on a hiatus. At the beginning of 2018, the Watts and West Oakland locations had reopened, and the restaurant entered a partnership with Whole Foods to continue to scale.
In June 2018, the West Oakland location of Oakland closed again, with the San Jose Whole Foods outlet and the original Watts location shuttering just two months later in August. The restaurant put out a statement via its Instagram account saying that it was not closing, but instead pivoting to catering full-time. Days after the shift, Choi shared on Twitter that the business had run out of money after its three-year run, saying, in his post, that sometimes “success is not immediate.” An LAist report partially attributed Locol’s closure to a mismatch in what the restaurant was serving and what the community was looking for. While the restaurant served healthier options like its rebranded taco called a “foldie,” the food was unfamiliar to the community and the price point couldn’t compete with other fast-food restaurants.
In October 2018, Patterson partnered with chef Keith Corbin to open Alta in West Adams, while Choi continued development on his Las Vegas restaurant, Best Friend, and food TV show, Broken Bread. Between 2018 and 2023, the Locol Instagram account posted sporadically about catering, or merch sales. On June 21, 2023, Corbin and Patterson announced that the restaurant would reopen as a nonprofit and that Choi would not be involved in its next iteration. The post went on to thank Choi for his “spirit of generosity and caring.”
When Locol reopens on August 8, it’ll come back to life in the original space it called home, and go back to serving the community it always intended to.