If you’re looking for a gritty-meets-polished corner in Hollywood, look no further than Alma—the restaurant renegade itself. Expect good taste in music (we’re talking Outkast to Future to Biggie) and of course, impeccable taste in food. Alma’s residency at The Standard Hollywood came after the closing of their stand-alone restaurant in downtown—but don’t worry, they’re still one of the most coveted seats in town. Moral of the story: You can move Alma, but you can change it. It's always delicious, always forward thinking, and never conforming.
We sat down with Founding Partner and Chef, Ari Taymor, to talk about all things Alma—there may or may not have been Aquemini playing in the background.
How has it been transitioning Alma from a stand-alone restaurant to a residency at The Standard?
We started as a pop-up and our initial existence was impermanent, even as a permanent restaurant, because we never had investors or financial backing. We were literally week-to-week from day one. It was a miracle that we made it through our first year and then three-and-a-half years without a single investor. It was shocking to us.
Even when we were very impermanent in the beginning, my background was restaurants, and I still respected the restaurant experience and the fact that people spend their money here—I don’t take that lightly at all. So we always approached everything in a very professional environment from day one.
How has the food changed with the move?
It’s not a tasting menu anymore, but the same things we did downtown inform it. I don’t think we could have gotten the food to where it is without having gone through that evolution. It taught us where we can and can’t push and how to better run a business that’s informed by comfort and creating an environment where people feel really welcome.
It seems like you’re doing more interactive experiences by integrating music (@nitejewel) and different environments. Are you looking to make Alma more of an interactive experience?
That’s always been our goal with Alma. We always felt that food was one facet of what we do and the rest of it was creating a collaborative environment—through eating or a space where people could disarm themselves and just be. Music, the way things look, textures—it’s all a really important part of a well-rounded experience.
What inspired you to start cooking brunch?
We were asked to do it and it kind of felt like the next logical step in terms of us being able to feed more people. I have a lot of cooks with a lot of ideas and this allows them another service and environment to create new dishes.
Do you have any favorite brunch dishes you’ve been putting out? We heard you’re doing donuts every week!
I love all of our pastries—our sticky bun is amazing. It’s an obscene size and good for four—I mean, I eat myself—but it’s good for four. We also do a different donut every week and they’re really fun because we play with colors and flavors. I love that feeling when you were a kid and you got a candy bar, but your hands were so small you didn’t know where to start. That’s what we’re bringing back.
Also, one of my sous chefs made this Kimchi and Tassled Ham Hash and he took 90% of the creative on it and I helped him finish it. It’s balanced layers of flavors: fermented, spicy, fat from the avocado, and meatiness from the ham—there are so many layerings of the same flavors that it tastes very familiar, but unique. You just can’t tell how much work went into it—you don’t know that we made the ham and the kimchi, and it doesn’t matter. That’s for us to know.
As far as local farming and local agriculture, that's related back to Alma’s Community Outreach. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
That’s really my business partner Ashleigh’s baby. She worked in after school programs straight out of college and has a Education Master’s Degree from Harvard. We want to demystify eating healthy. We work with three different schools in Obama’s Promise Zones, and we have gardens where the kids can cook and take nutrition classes. Sometimes the kids come up with recipes and sometimes they get programs— we have a whole host of volunteers and different creative people that come spend time there.
I feel like people are empowering each other on both sides and everyone participates—it feels better for it. It’s not so much about teaching anybody, as it is about exposing. The kids are exposing our volunteers to their culture and the reality of their lives, and similarly, on our side, they get to see a different perspective and a different way of viewing the world both on food and outside. We’re not there to colonize in a way the new food projects are, we’re there to learn and we’re there to share.
How long have you guys been doing the program for?
Since day one. It started side by side in the restaurant. Ashleigh left some promising academic and research offers to do this, and her need was for fulfillment as both an entrepreneur and a true member of the community.
What’s a normal day in the life for you?
Wake up, eat, exercise—sometimes farmers market, sometimes meetings, sometimes just do nothing for a while and reading or finding a quite moment to not stress. If I’m in town I’m at the restaurant for a little bit everyday, if not longer, especially when we’re championing a dish. Afterwards I’ll go home or hang out with friends. I definitely have a lot more freedom now than when we were downtown. I basically worked from 22 until now, so for about 8 years I was working 90+ hours a week—I didn’t have a life and I think that definitely affected my work and the restaurant. Now we really focus on quality of life for the ownership and the staff. We want to retain our staff, so we celebrate them.
What’s up next for Alma?
On an organizational level, we’re looking to expand our reach at The Standard, especially when it comes to buying power. We have the ability to change the direction sourcing wise and we have the power of an entire hotel to take it from imported products and conventional farming into small local agriculture.
It’s especially important right now when small farmers are really struggling and starting to disappear around the drought and the economic conditions around labor. I think the ability to flush that much money into local food systems at this point is really, really important. Our goal is to get as big as we can without watering down what we do.