Queen St. Is The Stunning New Seafood Spot From LA’s Found Oyster Crew

Brand new, you’re retro. Los Angeles chef Ari Kolender and Last Word Hospitality create transporting, nostalgic, convivial, hyper-specific restaurants that make guests alter their schedules, that prompt Angelenos to leave their homes or offices in the middle of the day and line up before 4 p.m. in neighborhoods that they might not typically frequent.

On a sweltering 90-plus-degree Wednesday, the queue started forming at Kolender’s two-week-old Queen St. raw bar and grill in Eagle Rock by 3:50 p.m. A half-dozen guests sat down right when the restaurant opened at 4 p.m. By 4:30, more than 20 people were eating and drinking inside Queen St., which occupies the site of what once was a 1940s auto service station. By 5:15, the 80-seat restaurant was packed and more than 10 visitors were waiting outside.

If you’ve been to the perpetually busy Found Oyster, Kolender’s New England-inspired seafood bar in East Hollywood, this might not surprise you. But what’s happening at Queen St., a restaurant that nods to Lowcountry flavors and Kolender’s childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, is even more remarkable. Queen St. has three times the capacity of Found Oyster. Kolender is bringing in big crowds for old-school esoteric dishes like tomato bread pudding (the recipe for which he found in Charleston Receipts, which was first published in 1950 and is the oldest Junior League cookbook still in print). That tomato bread pudding, which Kolender makes with Bub & Grandma’s bread, has become a popular item at Queen St.

“Tomato bread pudding is literally canned tomatoes and old Bub’s bread, with a little brown sugar and butter,” Kolender says during an interview earlier on Wednesday. “You can’t use fresh tomatoes for it. You want canned tomatoes. You cook it in a cast-iron. It’s just amazing. It feels like a Southern pizza. So I couldn’t help but throw anchovies on it. It just seemed like the natural choice.”

Queen St. is a restaurant that’s about writing your own path. Kolender grew up in a kosher household in South Carolina. He was exposed to shellfish on weekends when he would go fishing and crabbing with friends.

“We’d be able to sneak in some crab boils at their houses,” Kolender says.

Plus, his parents were chill about not keeping kosher when they ate at restaurants. And now at Queen St., Kolender has she-crab soup (with a sherry topper that’s poured at your table or at the 19-seat bar) and crab fritters and raw clams and uni-and-caviar-topped raw oysters. There’s also a smothered pork chop.

“It’s a very rustic sense of cooking,” says Kolender, who prepares seafood, meat and vegetables on a wood-fired grill. “I definitely didn’t even for a second think about trying to cook any other way here. It just kind of seemed like the grandma food technique and approach was the right way to go.”

In fact, Kolender has desserts, including a Derby pie, that are inspired by recipes passed down by his grandmother.

Kolender enjoyed taking his Last Word Hospitality partners to Charleston as they conceived Queen St.

“It was fun to give them the tour of the city and the architecture and the wrought-iron fences and the stained glass and then be able to bring that kind of stuff back to Eagle Rock,” he says. “Being able to create this food and give it to people in this kind of space has been something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. This space has such an old-school charm, and the light just comes in here, and it just seems like the perfect vessel. From the outside, it kind of reads as a boat.”

Eagle Rock is also home to other architecturally distinct nostalgic newcomers like Dunsmoor and Bub & Grandma’s (both of which, not incidentally, share a landlord with Queen St. and also East Hollywood hot spot Saffy’s). This is a neighborhood that enjoys throwback experiences.

So it feels appropriate that Queen St. is making pimento cheese just to put it on loaded baked potatoes.

“Going back to that Junior League cookbook, it’s fun to read through these old recipes that no one really makes anymore and then trying to take the essence of that and turn it into something else,” Kolender says.

So Kolender also revamps Lowcountry recipes with local seafood he gets from famed Santa Barbara sea urchin diver Stephanie Mutz and from Dudley Market’s Conner Mitchell.

“Steph’s about to roll in here with a hundred pounds of halibut and a bunch of crabs and uni,” Kolender says.

Meanwhile, Kolender has restaurants with bars as centerpieces, so guests can see beautiful displays of chilled shellfish and interact with the staff but also so he can include his kitchen in the service model and pay all his employees equitably. His restaurants might feel retro, but he knows that doing the right kind of new things can make a big difference.

Another thing that’s notable about Last Word Hospitality is its big bet on Northeast LA. In Cypress Park, Last Word Hospitality recently opened cozy Portuguese restaurant Barra Santos and will debut Shins Pizza next door in August.

“We just feel that this area is so underserved and that’s why we’re focusing on projects over here like Barra Santos, like Queen St.,” Kolender says. “We don’t have any intention of taking our business west. We’re only focusing on this part of the city.”