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Star Seattle Chef Renee Erickson Has Already Closed Her Lone LA Restaurant

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The casual General Porpoise at Palisades Village is gone

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Doughnuts from General Porpoise
General Porpoise [Official]
Farley Elliott is the Senior Editor at Eater LA and the author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks. He covers restaurants in every form, from breaking news to the culture, people, and history that surrounds LA's dining landscape.

Well that was fast. Just about six months after opening at the tony new Westside Palisades Village, star Seattle chef Renee Erickson has closed her only Los Angeles-area restaurant. Her casual coffee and doughnut shop General Porpoise is no more, as the corner space has been completely papered over.

Curiously enough, the Pacific Palisades location does still show on the Erickson company website, but it’s been removed completely on the Caruso side. A call in to the listed phone number does not indicate that it is closed, but doesn’t ring through to anything other than a voicemail, either. Yelp has listed the location as defunct, and the below tweet from FoodGPS shows the status of the building as of a couple of days ago.

The quiet shutter of General Porpoise is something of a surprise, given the status that Erickson enjoys in her home city of Seattle, but Los Angeles is littered with coffee and doughnut options already.

There’s no word yet on what may come to the shuttered space, though no doubt billionaire property owner Rick Caruso will have some final say. His newly-built Palisades Village project has been hailed by Westsiders as a place for wealthy families and locals from the near-seaside community to gather, though the development has struggled to be an inclusive and diverse place for retailers and customers since first opening last fall.