La Brea's Sycamore Kitchen Has Closed. A GoFundMe Is Backing Its Staff.

Karen and Quinn Hatfield's bakery-café on La Brea Avenue closed Sunday after nearly 15 years, and the owners are telling fans to stay tuned.

At least two fans say they picked their neighborhood partly so they could walk to the Sycamore Kitchen. One wrote on Instagram that they'd "literally moved to this neighborhood so I could walk to this place for lunch every weekend," What Now Los Angeles reported Friday. A Reddit poster told much the same story, according to the California Post.

That walk is over. The bakery-café at 143 S. La Brea Ave., run by chefs Karen and Quinn Hatfield, announced on Instagram that it was closing for good after nearly 15 years. The restaurant said only that its last day would come this week, the Post reported, and the owners didn't answer the Post's request for comment. The staff fundraiser named the day: Sunday, Oct. 25.

The people behind the counter are the ones scrambling. A GoFundMe for the staff, launched Tuesday, had raised $14,050 from 101 donations as of Oct. 25, against a goal since raised from $11,000 to $16,000; it says the owners get none of it. Its organizers wrote that for some workers the café "has been home for over a decade," and they blamed a tough economic climate and the strain of running a business.

The Hatfields opened the place in 2012, six years after Hatfield's, the restaurant that earned them a Michelin star. Sycamore was meant to be the easygoing sibling, What Now reported: house-baked bread, pastries, Stumptown coffee and a patio, inside a building that used to be a print shop. The Post credits it with helping turn a sleepy strip of La Brea near the Fairfax District into a place people actually went for coffee and lunch.

Ask the regulars what they'll miss and you get specifics. "My kids were raised on the sticky pecan bun," one Instagram user wrote, What Now reported. Another remembered spotting the late Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold there, per the Post, which noted Gold had gushed over the BLT and turkey sandwich, even the chips. When a café's fans run from kids who grew up on its pecan bun to a Pulitzer-winning critic, I don't think La Brea replaces it quickly.

The restaurant's website was still listing hours on Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends, with no word of the closing.

As for the Hatfields, the goodbye post said they're looking forward to what's next and summed it up in two words: "Stay tuned." For the people who chose a neighborhood by how far it was to walk to a pecan bun, that's the only forwarding address so far.

Source: whatnow.com, retrieved October 23, 2026. Other sources: yahoo.com, the Sycamore Kitchen's website.