Button Mash and Poltergeist to close in Echo Park this month
At the end of this month Button Mash owners Jordan Weiss and Gabriel Fowlkes will permanently unplug the blipping, blinging video game terminals in Echo Park’s bar and arcade. Along with Button Mash's closure, one of L.A.’s most wildly inventive restaurants will shutter.
In an Instagram post that went live early Monday morning, both the arcade and its restaurant Poltergeist shared that they will close Sept. 29.
When faced with rising costs, a slowing summer season and a lease renewal, both teams decided it was time to go out on top. The timing simply felt right — especially when most of the kitchen equipment died as they made their decision. Poltergeist chef Diego Argoti was told the equipment could run another 30 days; he said he only needed 21. It is, the chef says, a little like playing the violin as the Titanic sinks.
Read more: A new restaurant from one of L.A.’s wildest chefs opens inside a video game arcade
“We are on top right now and the best thing to do, and one of the best feelings to do, is just stop it on our terms,” Argoti said. “If I let my ego get the best of it and continue this, we'll fade out and we'll lose money. Right now we could leave and pay everyone out and that's very rare, closing a restaurant with style and grace.”
Los Angeles restaurants are still opening at a rapid and hopeful clip, though 2023 and 2024 have proved tremendously difficult years for operations given pandemic loans coming due, the city’s economic fallout from entertainment industry strikes and national rising costs. Button Mash and Poltergeist, while often filled with guests and showered with accolades, were facing lower check averages from guests and slow periods that made it hard to justify signing another lease.
“There were nights where I was like, ‘Man, I wish this place was just a flat-out dud because it would just be easier to make these decisions and pull the trigger and explain it away,’” Weiss said.
“But it always passed the eye test: We’ve got people in the door, we get every accolade, everything you could possibly achieve, everyone paying attention, we get all this press, we've somehow stuck it out this long," he added. "Reconciling that with the numbers that we were seeing and the operating costs and this feeling of a ceiling getting visibly lower with each passing week makes no sense, but I know that other people are in the same boat.”
Besides, Weiss said, Button Mash was never designed to maximize dining profit: It was built a decade ago to spotlight craft beer, creative food and vintage arcade games blocks from Dodger Stadium. That it survived this long was a pleasant surprise.
Read more: The undefinable cooking at Poltergeist will haunt you
Button Mash was home to a number of pop-ups throughout the years, including the long-running Starry Kitchen, a 101 List awardee under former L.A. Times Food critic Jonathan Gold.
Weiss and Argoti met during a subsequent pop-up there before the chef consulted on the opening menu of Weiss’s Virgil Village cidery, Alma.
Button Mash returned from its pandemic-spurred closure, which almost closed the bar permanently, tapping Tacos 1986 to run the food program. When that ended sooner than expected, Weiss contacted Argoti to take over.
Argoti’s genre-bending restaurant serves playful, occasionally subversive items. The Bestia alum has used the space to expand on his popular pop-up Estrano, which often draws throngs of guests to alleyways and other corners of L.A. for fresh pastas and loud music. Since its 2023 launch inside Button Mash, Poltergeist’s head-turning plates such as Thai Caesar salads crowned with fried rice paper towers or Panang lamb neck mounted with herbs have garnered attention and accolades from around the country.
“Poltergeist — what a name! — serves the most manic, unchecked and wildly envisioned cooking in Los Angeles, and opinions are duly polarizing,” L.A. Times Food critic Bill Addison wrote in his 2023 review. “When [Argoti's] combinations click, they register as the taste equivalent of a new language.”
At first diners didn’t know what to make of Poltergeist, and while reception was generally positive, the summer after its launch saw fewer tables filled during a season that’s traditionally slow for restaurants.
With Button Mash’s lease up in March 2024, the team began to wonder if they’d even make it that far. Argoti, Weiss and Fowlkes considered making the menu more accessible with burgers and sandwiches but instead veered in the opposite direction, offering dishes like masa-fried whole dorade — some of the most creative food Argoti says he’s made there.
Accolades for the funky, irreverent menu began to trickle in, including Addison’s review. Poltergeist began garnering national attention from the likes of Esquire and, earlier this year, the James Beard Foundation Awards, which tapped Argoti as a semifinalist in the Best Chef: California category.
Despite feeling critically on top, summer is slow again, costs are rising and rent has increased. The decision to close took weeks, maybe months, to make. Argoti won’t reopen Poltergeist elsewhere. Weiss says he and Fowlkes most likely will sell most of their arcade games to collectors.
“I love Poltergeist, but Poltergeist was always built as a space into Button Mash,” Argoti said. “With the name being ‘noisy spirit,’ the whole point was just to make noise and get attention and open opportunities — and prove if I can run a business. People see me as the weird kid in the alleyway cooking frog legs and now it's like, hey, I could and I want to. It's been really, really cool.”
The next few weeks will be “really, really crazy,” with frequent menu changes and off-the-wall specials that Argoti was always hesitant to run, such as a ricotta-and-veal-brains pasta dish, or a rad na lasagna. He wants to bring back frog legs.
After Sept. 29 the chef plans to host more Estrano pop-ups and, for the most part, disappear from the culinary limelight for a bit. He might consult, but in the background he’ll be planning another restaurant, hopefully one he’ll again run with Weiss: something smaller, more nimble, maybe something that offers a pared-down daytime menu and a no-modifications, no-guardrails tasting menu at night where he can unleash his culinary weirdness. Eventually, he wants to open multiple small restaurants that spotlight other chefs and offer them equity and identity.
But before he dives into opening another restaurant, Argoti says he needs to take time for himself. The day after his dad died, he learned of his James Beard semifinalist nod. He hasn’t fully taken time to process or mentally or physically sort through his loss. He has a new puppy to spend time with. And he wants the time and breathing room to see which form his culinary style will take next.
“I just want to treat this like music or albums: What I was cooking two years ago and what I wanted to cook 10 years ago is completely different than what I plan to do two years from now or a year from now,” Argoti said. “The growth accumulates in a way that I'm excited to see what I cook and what I want to cook and how that's gonna look.”
Poltergeist and Button Mash, 1391 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
