HOLLYWOOD — By the middle of a Thursday lunch that should have filled the room, the family that runs a small restaurant on Franklin Avenue had seated nine tables and was watching the door.
The place — two dining rooms and an open kitchen where a father and daughter cook side by side — has had the kind of year a lot of Hollywood’s independent restaurants describe when you ask them honestly. Weekday lunches are thinner. The reliable industry business, the tables of six that a nearby production office used to book without warning, has dwindled as productions have slowed and the offices around them have quieted. And the family, like everyone else, is watching costs climb on everything from eggs to insurance.
“We used to be able to tell when a show was shooting nearby, because the orders came in at one o’clock, twelve of them, all at once,” said Odalys Prieto, who runs the front of the house while her father cooks. “That business just isn’t there right now. Some months the difference between a good week and a bad one is whether a crew is working in the neighborhood.”
Now they are pinning the year on its final weeks. December, for a restaurant like this, is a season of its own: holiday parties, family dinners, the awards-season entertaining that fills a private room, and the foot traffic that comes with the Christmas parade and the shoppers who trail it. A strong December, Prieto said, can carry a restaurant through a slow January and into spring.
The family has done what small operators do to court it. They have added a holiday prix-fixe menu, taken out an ad in this newspaper for the first time in years, and started calling the offices and clients who used to book their back room, reminding them the room is still there. Prieto’s father, who does not like the phone, has been persuaded to make a few of the calls himself.
The strategy carries its own strain. Staffing up for a holiday rush that may or may not materialize is a gamble; so is buying the extra inventory a party season requires. Prieto said she had built this December’s plan on a hope and a spreadsheet, and that the spreadsheet was the more nervous of the two.
There were bright spots even on the slow Thursday. A table of regulars came in at their usual hour. A woman booked the back room for a birthday dinner. A delivery driver picking up an order mentioned that a production might move into a building down the block after the new year, which Prieto filed away like a forecast she wanted to believe.
She turned back to the room, counted her tables again, and went to greet a couple lingering at the entrance, because in a year like this one you do not leave anyone standing there deciding.