Atwater Village’s Most Interesting New Restaurant Closes Just One Year In

Atwater Village restaurant Journeymen has closed, lasting just over a year in one of the neighborhood’s most iconic restaurant spaces. Moving forward, chef David Wilcox has a different plan for the property, to be fully revealed later this week.

Journeymen opened in August of last year as a follow-up to the long-tenured restaurant Canele, which survived for a decade under chef/owner Corina Weibel. Canele was in many ways considered to be one of LA’s most quintessential neighborhood restaurants, but Weibel decided to move on and gave her blessing to Wilcox and partner Guy Tabibian to open Journeymen. They both hail from the Gjelina group in Venice, and wanted to open their own kind of sustainable neighborhood restaurant, with a focus on quality produce and meats and a service model that would benefit customers as well as employees.

The resulting restaurant was a mix of table and counter service, with a tax and tip-inclusive pay scale and lots of early energy. The late Jonathan Gold found the place rather fascinating as a new kind of dining experience, and fans of the place were charmed by the laid-back format, especially when the restaurant transitioned to an almost tapas-style counter service system.

In the end Journeymen was unable to capture all of the same magic that Canele had, and officially ended service as of last night. Wilcox still holds the lease to the place and is planning to reopen on Friday with an even smaller staff and simply sell pizzas and some sides, which had (along with a rotating burger) become a growing focus of the menu in the past few months. He’s considering it a pop-up inside his own (now former) restaurant, and will be rotating the simplified menu as time allows, so check Instagram to see what’s next.

Wilcox himself is unsure how long he’ll run the unnamed pizza nights, but plans to keep them up as simple, rowdy weeknight meals for as long as the Atwater Village neighborhood wants. From there it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen with the Canele space, though Wilcox tells Eater that he plans to stay in Los Angeles (he previously spent a few years up in the Bay Area) working on other projects. Expect pizza hours to start up on Friday night, running 5:30p.m. to 10 p.m., or sellout.

Journeymen. 3219 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles, CA.

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