I suspect the author and I would see eye-to-eye about the Los Angeles restaurant scene. She's not really asking if the world needs her restaurant... she's asking if she and the East Village agree about what restaurants are for.

I know foodies in LA. I've gone to foodie places. I've worked with big names in the fancy-pants food industry. It's not dining, it's branding. It's been branding since this:

Prune opened in 1999. Scripps took over "The TV Food Network" in 1997. Gourmet Magazine ran an article (and a cover) decrying the celebrity chef industry and the spectation of cuisine in 2003 then ran that David Foster Wallace article after a rebrand in 2005. They were dead by 2009; their heart was never really in it and they'd always been about making food, not looking like you're making food.

The basic problem is one of gentrification. $3 beer in the East Village? That's a loss leader, like the 10 cent PBRs at the college bar. Economics don't support it like the author points out. If you want to serve food that people can afford, you suffer somewhere.

I meant to create a restaurant that would serve as delicious and interesting food as the serious restaurants elsewhere in the city but in a setting that would welcome, and not intimidate, my ragtag friends and my neighbors — all the East Village painters and poets, the butches and the queens, the saxophone player on the sixth floor of my tenement building, the performance artists doing their brave naked work up the street at P.S. 122. I wanted a place you could go after work or on your day off if you had only a line cook’s paycheck but also a line cook’s palate. And I thought it might be a more stable way to earn a living than the scramble of freelancing I’d done up until then.

Those people are gone, replaced by the lapdog lady asking about brunch. And fundamentally? This is an article complaining that the lapdog ladies have won New York.