HOLLYWOOD — By Sunday afternoon the general manager of a Vine Street restaurant had sent two servers to three different stores in a borrowed hatchback and come back with eleven bags of ice, which is roughly forty minutes of a Sunday dinner service.
“You plan for the heat,” she said. “You order more water glasses, you get the misters out, you tell the patio people to expect nothing. Fine. What you do not plan for is that at four o’clock on the hottest Sunday of the year, there is no ice in Hollywood.”
There was ice. There was simply not enough of it in the right places at the right hour, which for a restaurant is the same thing.
The mechanism was straightforward and instructive, because it will happen again. A commercial ice machine is rated at an ambient air temperature, usually around 70 degrees. Above that, output falls — a machine rated for 500 pounds a day may make 350 at 90 degrees and less than 300 above 100. Most Hollywood restaurants keep their machines in a back room or a service corridor that is hotter than the dining room by design. So on the four days when demand for iced drinks roughly doubled, the neighborhood’s own production capacity fell by something like a third.
Every kitchen then did the same thing at the same time, which is buy bagged ice. The wholesale ice houses that serve the basin were, by Saturday, on allocation. Retail bags at grocery and liquor stores went in the afternoons. Three separate operators described the same Sunday: calling a distributor, being told Tuesday, and sending an employee out with a company card.
“I paid retail for ice on a Sunday and I will do it again on the next hot Sunday, because the alternative is telling a table of six there is no iced tea,” said the owner of a Cahuenga taqueria, who spent $214 on bagged ice across the four days and considers it the cheapest of the week’s problems.
The expensive problem was refrigeration. A walk-in cooler is also rated at an ambient temperature, and a walk-in in a back kitchen with a failing compressor discovers this fact during a heat wave rather than in March. Two refrigeration contractors serving the neighborhood said their weekend was almost entirely emergency calls — one counted 31 between Friday and Monday, against a normal weekend of six — and that they triaged by whether product was already at risk. A repair that takes four hours in April took two days last week because the part had to come from a supplier who was also on allocation.
At least four Hollywood restaurants dumped product. A Franklin Avenue café threw out roughly $600 worth after a Thursday power outage on its block, which is a separate story and, for that owner, the same week. A rooftop bar lost a batch of prepped citrus. Nobody interviewed had insurance that covered it; spoilage coverage exists and, at the premiums quoted to small operators, is generally declined.
The revenue side was not uniformly bad, which surprises people who do not run restaurants. Patio covers collapsed — three operators reported patio traffic down 60 to 80 percent — and indoor covers rose, in two cases past capacity, because a dining room at 72 degrees is a public service in a heat wave. The rooftop bars, which have been the boom story of this year on the Boulevard, had the worst four days of their summer and know it.
“We are a rooftop. Our entire product is being outside at night,” said a manager at one, who reported Saturday covers at less than half of the prior Saturday. “At eleven at night on Saturday it was 91 degrees up there. You cannot sell that. There is no version of that we can sell.”
What the week produced, apart from receipts, is a small amount of shared infrastructure. A group text among eight Vine and Cahuenga operators — started, like the one on Franklin, in the middle of the trouble — spent Sunday coordinating who had ice, who had a working walk-in with room in it, and which store still had bags. Two restaurants stored a competitor’s product overnight.
The general manager with the borrowed hatchback said she has ordered a second ice machine, to be installed, at her insistence, somewhere cooler than the last one. It arrives in September.