La Cañada’s Sleepy Strip Mall Restaurant Flintridge Proper Has Closed

Quiet La Cañada restaurant The Flintridge Proper has closed. The place initially garnered a fair bit of buzz when it first opened five years ago thanks to its ambitious gin-heavy back bar and its upscale menu, both rarities for the wealthy hillside neighborhood northeast of Downtown.

Now the cozy mid-century restaurant is all closed up, with tipsters writing in over the weekend to say the final service came and went without much of a peep. Indeed, a paper note taped to the front of the door this morning says only that “The Proper is closed,” while thanking customers for half a decade of dining. The restaurant’s Yelp page now lists them as closed, and their OpenTable page is defunct as well.

The loss of an upscale restaurant like Flintridge Proper is certainly a blow to the community’s dining scene, but La Cañada has always been a quieter stretch of Southern California when it comes to dining and nightlife. Next door strip mall neighbor Constellation Coffee has instead found success as a morning option, one of the only specialty coffee shops available in the area.

The closure of The Flintridge Proper also comes on the heels of several prominent shutters last week, including eight-month-old Tintorera in Silver Lake and marketplace and restaurant XO on Beverly. With the continued rise of minimum wage, high rents across the county, an influx of new restaurants, and the already-tough margins of the dining world, it’s a certainty that more big closures are in the works for 2018.

• The 38 Essential Los Angeles Restaurants [ELA]