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Luke Stone and Curtis Stone, co-owners of Gwen, a LA-based steakhouse.<\/p>\n
Gwen<\/p>\n
Los Angeles lost more than 100 restaurants and bars in 2025 alone<\/a>, a wave of closures that swept up Michelin-starred names like Gucci Osteria and Shibumi alongside beloved neighborhood spots like Guerrilla Tacos and Post & Beam. The New York Times<\/a> captured the scale of it, reporting that the city lost 18,700 restaurant jobs between July 2019 and July 2025, with some owners describing revenue down 35% year over year. The closures continue in 2026 with food magazine Eater<\/a> tracking them regularly. <\/p>\n Against that backdrop, Curtis Stone’s Gwen<\/a> just marked 10 years in business, having weathered many challenges. The National Restaurant Association estimates about 35% of restaurants survive past 10 years (so only 1 out of 3).<\/p>\n A decade in a city that chews up restaurants<\/p>\n Gwen opened in Hollywood in 2016, pairing a European-style butcher counter with an 83-seat dining room built around Stone’s meat-driven tasting menus. Stone runs it with his brother, Luke, and named it after their grandmother, who lived on a farm outside Melbourne. A decade later, it still holds a Michelin star, a run of longevity that stands out starkly next to the closures piling up around it. Plus, the restaurant sources directly from farms across the US and Australia that are using regen farming practices, and works on being low-waste (or zero-waste, if possible).<\/p>\n Culture, not shortcuts<\/p>\n Asked what he thinks has been the secret to surviving 10 years, and particularly the last few brutal ones, Stone pointed to his team.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s all about your team,\u201d he says. \u201cI’ve been in the restaurant business since I was seven, eight years old, and I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen restaurant cultures that are disgruntled and disappointed. And I’ve seen some that are super loyal and diligent, and I’ve seen some that are really entrepreneurial.\u201d<\/p>\n Opening a restaurant, he says, means \u201cinviting 50 or 60 people that have no idea about who each other are\u201d from different cultural backgrounds, and the job is to get them working toward something together. \u201cYou’re just one person. And if you think you can do it alone, you’re crazy. You can’t.\u201d<\/p>\n Stone built the restaurant to give cooks room to grow beyond the stove, whether that is making charcuterie in-house or working the live fire that the restaurant cooks everything over. \u201cI think the cooks that come to us stick around much longer because we can cycle them through those different areas of our business,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n The payoff shows up in retention. Three chefs on his team recently worked a shift together representing more than four decades of combined experience with him: one he has known for 30 years since they worked together with chef Marco Pierre White, another who joined when Stone opened Maude 12 years ago, and a third who came on shortly after Gwen opened. <\/p>\n \u201cThere’s no bigger compliment,\u201d he says, \u201cwhen someone says to me, \u2018Oh my God, your team’s amazing.\u2019 That lights me up more than anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Stone is candid that he cannot always out-pay competitors. \u201cThe truth is, you can’t afford to pay people more necessarily than another restaurant,\u201d he says. What he can offer, he says, is a place people want to be, built on teaching and treating people \u201cwith fairness and kindness and diligence.\u201d<\/p>\n Fighting for margin without cutting corners<\/p>\n Gwen’s business is built on beef, and beef has gotten more expensive at nearly every step, driven by inflation and, more recently, tariffs on imports. Stone’s answer has been to cut out layers between the farm and the plate wherever he can.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can work directly with a farm, and buy direct from them, that’s a dream,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause then you cut out the middlemen.\u201d He and his team hit the farmers market every week to buy direct and build relationships with growers.<\/p>\n The other lever is waste, or the lack of it. Stone says he came up in an era when chefs were trained to use the whole ingredient, cooking one component a dozen different ways across a menu. \u201cEvery restaurant will have waste, but how much waste do you have,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you can cut that right back and find a use for everything, I think it makes you more creative as well.\u201d<\/p>\n He is unapologetic about how far that discipline extends. He described walking past a cook in the kitchen who had folded a full sheet of parchment paper in half to line a tray. \u201cI walked over and I cut it in half,\u201d he says. \u201cI was like, \u2018you just doubled the cost of one sheet.\u2019 But if we do that every time, we literally spent twice as much.\u201d He jokingly calls himself \u201ca tight ass\u201d about costs, by design. <\/p>\n \u201cYou’ve got to be generous with your guests, but you’ve got to be tight in the way you manage it because at the end of the day, it is business.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, he is blunt that the math has gotten harder. \u201cWe’re working off slimmer margins than we ever have, even at our price point,\u201d he says. \u201cIngredients are expensive, labor is expensive. So dining out has become a pricey exercise. That’s the truth. But we don’t want people to stop doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n On sourcing, Stone says he is not chasing certifications so much as relationships. The farms he buys from avoid practices he considers non-negotiable, like added hormones and GMOs, and he visits them, if possible, to see first-hand the operations. His broader philosophy on beef cuts against the volume-driven habits of the wider industry: \u201cI think we should eat less, but better quality beef,\u201d he says, adding that precise portioning matters too, so guests are not \u201cleaving 30% of their food on the plate.\u201d<\/p>\n Creek Stone Farms <\/a>supplies the beef the restaurant dry-ages in-house for its tasting menu. Klingeman Family Farms<\/a>, the first non-GMO verified farm, supplies whole hogs that go into Gwen’s charcuterie program. Anderson Ranch<\/a> supplies whole lamb. And O’Connor Beef <\/a>supplies the beef sold through the restaurant’s retail butcher counter.<\/p>\n Reed Anderson of Anderson Ranch has been raising animals since the 1980s on the grasses of Willamette Valley in Oregon. He calls himself a regenerative rancher: \u201cIt makes sense to do it out here. There\u2019s abundant rain, the grasses grow easily, and it all enriches the soil.\u201d He goes on to explain that since the price of wool has dropped, they\u2019ve been turning it into pellets, and burying it in the soil to make it more fertile. <\/p>\n \u201cI doubt anyone\u2019s doing that. But we\u2019re all about supporting the soil. When we started no one was talking about this stuff. The interest in where your food comes from is growing,\u201d he says, and more people are looking for grass-fed, regenerative meats like his, which has led them to offer their meats online in addition through food service. Anderson, explains, that he\u2019s been so fixated on the nuances of soil health and animal health that he is taking it one step further on his land, by even breeding the grasses that the animals will graze on.<\/p>\n After tending to the animals, they\u2019re taken to Kalapooia Valley Grass Fed Processing, which Anderson runs, allowing the operation to go from birth to butcher under his supervision. While his meat is slightly more expensive, he argues that it\u2019s still price competitive in the market.<\/p>\n Riding out what you cannot control<\/p>\n Stone is willing to invest in his ingredients but is also frank that some of what has hurt Gwen, and other restaurants, has had nothing to do with how the establishment is run. \u201cThere\u2019s been times in LA that you\u2019re like, oh my God, we would be doing 150 covers tonight, but we\u2019ve got 15 because of whatever the event is,\u201d he explains. There have also been the larger challenges the city has face, pointing to the fires, riots and the pandemic. \u201cI think you’ve just got to learn to ride that wave.\u201d<\/p>\n The January 2025 wildfires hit at a particularly bad moment, he says, just as the restaurant was rebuilding momentum after COVID. \u201cWe were really on track for a great year of rebuilding after COVID and then the fires came to LA, and who felt like going out for dinner during that,\u201d he says. \u201cIt took a long time for Angelenos to sort of get back out into great restaurants again.\u201d<\/p>\n He also points to delivery apps as a structural shift the whole industry is still adjusting to. \u201cI think it’s changed everything,\u201d he says of DoorDash and Uber Eats. Gwen has chosen not to put its food in delivery boxes, a call he says is different for every restaurant depending on how well the food travels and how much a to-go program would strain a busy kitchen. The bet, instead, is on the in-person experience being worth leaving the house for: \u201cHopefully we’re substantial enough experiences to still draw people out to get dressed up and come out and have a good time for a night.\u201d<\/p>\n A different model: cooking out of the living room<\/p>\n Not every operator is fighting to keep a storefront open. In Angelino Heights, Sydney Wayser and Isaac Watters run Granada<\/a>, a coffee shop that operates out of the lower level of their own home. They’re permitted through LA County’s Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation program, known as MEHKO, a state law passed in 2019 that lets residents cook and sell food from their private kitchens like a small restaurant, provided they pass inspection and complete food safety training. <\/p>\n Granada is open just six hours a day, 9am to 3pm, timed around the couple\u2019s daughter\u2019s school schedule, and on its busiest days serves up to 300 drinks. The program limits how many meals a week they can serve, but it also sidesteps the two costs that have flattened so many LA restaurants: commercial rent and the buildout required to open a traditional storefront, which is what attracted the couple to the idea. It\u2019s less stressful and can be bent around their lifestyle.<\/p>\n