Locol

A Watts Restaurant That Asks a Harder Question

Most conversations about Los Angeles dining in 2024 orbit a familiar axis: the omakase counters of the west side, the tasting-menu rooms drawing comparison to Somni or Kato, the Italian institutions like Osteria Mozza that anchor certain neighborhoods to their cultural identity. Locol, at 1950 E 103rd Street in Watts, sits outside every one of those conversations by design. It appeared on the LA Times 101 Best Restaurants list for 2024, ranked at number 101, and the placement feels less like an afterthought and more like a deliberate editorial statement about what a restaurant can be asked to do.

The question above the front doorway says it plainly: "We are here." That declaration is not hospitality branding. It is a neighborhood claim, and understanding it reshapes how you read everything else on the premises, from the menu to the staff to the reason the place closed and reopened at all.

2016, 2018, and the Reopening

Locol first opened in January 2016 as a collaboration between Daniel Patterson, the founder of the Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant Coi, and Roy Choi, with a concept built around reimagined fast-food formats and a mission to bring quality employment to Watts. The original menu leaned on what the founders called "foldies," griddled stuffed tortillas that became the format's signature item. The restaurant closed in 2018 after the broader Locol chain contracted. The current version operates under a different structure: Patterson and Keith Corbin, who had been a kitchen manager in the original iteration and is now co-owner and executive chef of both Locol and Alta Adams on West Adams Boulevard, run the restaurant through their nonprofit, Alta Community. The stated purpose, in their own words, is economic empowerment first, food second.

That ordering matters when you consider how Locol compares to other mission-led restaurants across the country. Emeril's in New Orleans built a foundation with restaurant work at its center. Lazy Bear in San Francisco operates a nonprofit arm alongside its dining room. But Locol inverts the model more completely: the restaurant exists to fund the employment program, not the other way around. The food is excellent, but it is instrumentalized toward a goal that goes past the plate.

What the Menu Actually Does

The editorial angle assigned to this page is wine, and it is worth noting that Locol does not fit a cellar-depth or sommelier framework, because it is not that kind of operation. A thoughtful wine program would be contextually inconsistent with the price point and the community Locol serves. What Corbin has built instead is a menu rooted in California soul cooking, the register he established at Alta Adams, brought down in price and simplified in format for Watts. Smoked brisket, ribs, oxtail, and fried chicken sandwiches anchor the current offering. The foldies from the original run have survived: griddled, cheesy, toasty, they are the clearest line of continuity between 2016 and today.

A practical note: the menu posted online or described in reviews may not fully reflect what is available on a given visit. The kitchen can run short of specific items, which is partly a function of the training-focused staffing model and partly the reality of running a community-embedded operation without the procurement infrastructure of a larger group. Arrive with some flexibility about what you order.

For context on how Locol sits within the broader Los Angeles scene, our full Los Angeles restaurants guide maps the city's dining range from Watts to the westside. For comparison against the city's highest-end Japanese counters, Hayato operates at the opposite end of the price and formality scale. The gap between those two restaurants describes the actual range of what Los Angeles dining encompasses in 2024.

Service, Staffing, and What That Means on the Floor

The service at Locol is young and genuinely warm. On most visits, a manager is visibly training team members during service, which is not a failure of polish but the explicit point of the operation. The youth center partnership that feeds trainees into the restaurant means the floor is regularly absorbing people at early stages of their hospitality careers. For diners accustomed to the practiced invisibility of rooms like Providence or Le Bernardin in New York City, the register here is different in kind, not in intent. The intent is attentive and the energy is genuine; the execution varies by shift.

That variability is a feature in the sense that Locol is transparent about its model in a way most restaurants are not. The mission is visible in the room, not archived in a press kit. Whether that trade-off works for a given diner depends entirely on what they are asking a restaurant to do for them.

Watts, Not the Westside

The address matters. Watts sits in South Los Angeles, approximately 15 miles southeast of the dining clusters in West Hollywood and Brentwood that generate most of the city's restaurant press. It is not on a route most diners travel for food unless they are going specifically to Locol. That isolation is part of the point: Patterson and Corbin are not trying to transplant a Watts restaurant into a more visible neighborhood. They are making the argument that Watts itself is worth the trip, which the LA Times list placement supports.

For visitors planning a broader Los Angeles itinerary, the Los Angeles hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the wider city. For fine dining rooms that have built comparably clear missions around place and identity, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg and The French Laundry in Napa represent how the northern California end of that conversation looks at price points several multiples higher. Atomix in New York City and 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong show what the model looks like when moved into different cultural contexts entirely. Alinea in Chicago sits at another pole altogether, where formalist precision replaces community mission as the organizing principle. None of those comparisons diminish Locol. They clarify how differently the question "what is a restaurant for" can be answered.

Planning Your Visit

Locol is located at 1950 E 103rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90002. Walk-ins are the standard mode of arrival; the Google review count is modest (4.4 across nine reviews), which reflects a local clientele rather than destination-dining tourism traffic. Phone and website details are not publicly listed at time of writing, so arriving in person or checking current social channels is the most reliable approach for confirming hours and current menu availability. Given that individual items can sell out, a lunchtime visit early in service gives the widest selection. Dress code is casual; the neighborhood context and price point make anything else unnecessary.

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