How Covid Pushed One Young LA Chef to Reimagine How His Dream Restaurant Would Open—and Run

FOR Josh Buckwald, 2020 began with the kind of fear any young chef would find relatable. After working in some great Los Angeles kitchens, he was ready to go out into the world and open his own restaurant.

As far as the food went, it wouldn’t be a radical departure from what he had been doing for the previous two-and-a-half years. Pasta is his comfort food and at Rossoblu—Steve Samson’s ode to northern Italy in Downtown LA—Buckwald ran the program making some of the city’s best handmade noodles.

He left his job in December and was pushing hard to open this year. With plans and an investor deck in hand, he had a preliminary lead on a location, but as the lease got closer to reality, reality got strange.

“I was going through all the scary craziness of opening a place, but then I heard murmurings of a shutdown coming,”