After more than a year of discussion, L.A. is ready to make outdoor dining permanent

When the L.A. Al Fresco dining program was established in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Christy Vega said it saved her 67-year-old family-owned restaurant.

The program let restaurant owners bypass red tape to quickly set up outdoor dining areas, a necessity during the pandemic.

For Vega’s Sherman Oaks restaurant, Casa Vega, this meant converting two parking lots into outdoor dining space, a change that made it possible for Vega to continue to serve customers and pay her employees.

“It was wildly vital to our survival,” she said.

The city is now moving to make the program’s relaxed regulations permanent, allowing restaurants to continue operating outdoor space without pre-pandemic zoning restrictions. The Los Angeles City Council signified its commitment to al fresco dining with a vote Friday requesting the city attorney draft an ordinance to make the program permanent.

It’s a victory for the restaurant industry and for communities accustomed to eating outside, but some business owners and residents say the city’s new version of the program isn’t perfect.

A last-minute amendment to the ordinance mandates that restaurants include one parking spot for disabled people on their property, a requirement that would effectively eliminate outdoor dining space for smaller businesses, Vega said.

“It’ll kill al fresco for anybody that doesn’t have a giant parking lot,” she said.

Vega said she would have to take down her patio and lose $1 million in revenue if she had to make space for a disabled parking spot that also includes room for a vehicle to back out and turn around. To avoid that, she said, she’s spent $60,000 trying to obtain a conditional use permit to keep her patio permanently.

In an effort to protect small businesses, the City Council on Friday added an exception to the parking space requirement for restaurants with 3,000 square feet of indoor space or 1,000 square feet of parking space or less.

Vega said she is grateful for the exemption, but other owners say it’s not enough.

“Square footage has nothing to do with the size of the business,” said Brittney Valles, who sits on the board of the Independent Hospitality Coalition and owns Guerrilla Tacos in downtown Los Angeles. “It shouldn’t be a requirement at all.”

Valles, who has enough outdoor space for dining and a disabled parking spot, said the rule could be devastating for many restaurants who don’t.

“I think that there are a lot of restaurants that would have to rethink whether their business is feasible without outdoor dining,” she said.

Councilmember Tim McOsker, who introduced the exception to the parking requirement, said at Wednesday’s council meeting that he was trying to strike a balance between supporting al fresco dining for small businesses and ensuring accessibility for disabled customers.

Implementing a permanent al fresco program has been a long road for the City Council and the restaurant community. City officials first drafted an ordinance in November 2022 and have spent more than a year receiving public comment.

The initial ordinance required restaurant owners to navigate a complicated process to get their outdoor dining approved, Valles said.

“It was going to be this overbearing process that costs restaurants a lot of money and made it very complicated to do basically what we’re already doing,” she said.

To reach a compromise, Valles and her fellow restaurant owners agreed to a ban on outdoor ambient music, which is prohibited by the temporary program. Live music is also prohibited.

Venice resident David Feige said the current ban on ambient music is not enforced in his neighborhood, and the new version of the al fresco ordinance doesn’t do enough to create enforcement mechanisms.

There are several unpermitted outdoor speakers at restaurants on his block near Washington Boulevard that are disruptively loud, he said.

“If we close all the windows, turn on the noise machine and we can still hear the music in our bedroom, that’s a problem,” he said.

Although the ordinance includes the establishment of a hotline for complaints and says the public can contact the Department of Building and Safety to report a violation, Feige said those measures will be ineffective.

“The minute they see the cops coming, they turn it down,” he said of the restaurants with speakers, “and 10 minutes later, they turn it back up. There is no meaningful ability for redress here.”

Feige spoke at Tuesday’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee meeting and said he was representing more than a dozen of his neighbors. He called for a complaint-based system, in which a restaurant gets cited or shut down if it receives too many complaints.

Vega also said enforcement is an important issue. Only a handful of restaurants play disruptive music, but she doesn’t want them to ruin the reputation of the al fresco program.

But Vega said she is most worried about the parking space measure and the restaurants that may have to lay off employees after shutting down outdoor space.

“Restaurant workers have not had any financial security or job security since the pandemic,” she said. “The No. 1 gift of this program was that we were able to get our employees back to work.”

Restaurant owners say they hope the new version of L.A. Al Fresco will run just as smoothly as the first. The original program during the pandemic was “the absolute easiest thing” to take advantage of, Valles said.

“This was such a beautiful, simple win for restaurants when it launched in 2020,” she said. “We just want to keep it that way.”