When Lydia Clarke and Reed Herrick opened their cheese shop in 2013, it was the realization of a years-long dream and part of an early wave of restaurants and stores underpinning what many called downtown’s renaissance.
But after more than 12 years in business, Clarke and Herrick are shuttering DTLA Cheese Superette. Friday will be its last day. Their next-door wine bar, Kippered, remains open.
“It was a tidal wave of factors that bear down on you,” Herrick said earlier this week about the closure. “This is a process that has been happening for years. Nobody is spending, there are protests, strikes, war, all of it comes to bear here.”
A selection of cheeses in the central refrigerated case at DTLA Cheese Superette, which first opened more than 12 years ago in Grand Central Market downtown.
(Jennelle Fong)
Clarke and her sister, Marnie, who is also a partner, are third-generation dairy purveyors whose family founded Alta Dena Dairy. Cheese was more than a calling; it seemed like a birthright.
They opened DTLA Cheese in Grand Central Market, a tribute to spoonable Époisses and crumbling hunks of Jasper Hill Farm cheddar, celebrating cheese makers from Petaluma to Parma. Herrick, the chef, created a menu of chunky salads, creamy raclette and butter-schmeared sandwiches that featured the same cheeses.
In spring 2023, they expanded to a new, larger location on the corner of 4th Street and South Broadway, down the block from Grand Central, launching DTLA Cheese Superette as a cafe, market and cheese counter with a next-door wine bar, where the culinary currency is tinned fish, served with bubbly wines.
Herrick said the mounting cost of goods and rising utilities contributed to the decision to close.
“We hate the word pivot,” Clarke said. “It makes it seem like a choice. It wasn’t. It was survival. Each thing was, will this allow us to survive another month, another year? The last six months we were getting momentum, then you have one more big bill. … At what point do you say this isn’t working?”
Downtown has been particularly hard-hit since 2020. Office vacancy rates have climbed to 34%, retail vacancies are as high as 40% and “No Kings” protests and clashes with police last summer resulted in a neighborhood curfew that hurt small businesses. Some never recovered.
Many critics of city government also point to failed policies and bureaucratic obstacles.
On this specific corner, downtown’s beauty and blight collide across the street from DTLA Cheese and Kippered. The view from their windows is the abandoned O.T. Johnson Building, gutted by fire nearly two decades ago and reimagined as pirate-themed “Chateau Broadway” by street artists S.C. Mero and Wild Life and as a showcase for the graffiti of Piccle P until it was recently painted over.
At DTLA Cheese, regulars filed in for Herrick’s grilled cheese sandwiches, to stock up on quarts of frozen soup and to chat with Clarke about seasonal cheeses.
“We love our community,” Clarke said. “We love being here. We see the same people all the time. Kippered is now a little neighborhood spot, and everybody is from the neighborhood.”
DTLA Cheese Superette is located at the corner of Broadway and 4th Street in downtown Los Angeles, where the number of retail businesses have declined since 2020.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Besides Grand Central Market, on the first floor of the 1917 Beaux Arts-style Homer Laughlin Building, this stretch of Broadway is home to the Million Dollar Theater and the stunning landmark Bradbury Building.
“We’re bound together by this desire to get people downtown and to experience something fun and quintessentially L.A.,” Herrick said. “We need feets on streets. Then businesses stick around. It starts with your block, your side of the street, cleaning the sidewalk, watering the plants. I’m not going to solve hunger or war or homelessness or drug addiction. I’m going to solve the mess right in front of my place and transmit that to some people around me.”
Clarke plans to continue to host cheese classes at Kippered and offer cheeses for pick-up. On April 26, Emilia D’Albero, a Philadelphia-based cheesemonger who won last year’s Mondial du Fromage in Tours, France (the first American to do so), is scheduled to visit Kippered to talk cheese.
“I wish we could have been successful,” Clarke said. “I can look back and think of all the things I did wrong. And what I did right. The joy of what we built. There wouldn’t be Kippered without DTLA Cheese.
“I still love this,” she said. “There will still be cheese.”
A wedge of the Shabby Shoe Cheese, from Blakesville Creamery, one of Lydia Clarke’s favorite cheeses.
(Jennelle Fong)
