Bay Area Chef, Coskun Abik, Lands at 7505 Melrose, Los Angeles

An ABC filing turned up last month at 7505 Melrose Ave., and the applicant was an SF name with no prior LA footprint. Coskun Abik, the Kurdish-Cypriot chef behind Blind Butcher in the Castro, told What Now Los Angeles a concept is heading to the location with an end-of-June opening target, though name, menu, and design remain unconfirmed. That kind of news peg reads as one more restaurant story. For SoCal sellers, it functions as a signal about who is buying.

Where Abik Comes From

Abik started in kitchens in 1994 and has spent three decades building an independent portfolio across San Francisco without hospitality group backing. His first concept, Dunya Bistro on Polk Street, opened in 2010 as a coastal Mediterranean bistro drawing on Greek, Kurdish, Turkish, and French influences. He followed with Lark on 18th Street in the Castro in 2015, a Mediterranean-New American wine bar that ran for nearly a decade before closing. Blind Butcher opened two doors down from the former Lark space in 2019, taking over the old Beso location and repositioning it as a New Urban American steakhouse and wine bar with a deep wine program. His most recent SF opening was Anatolian Table in the Mission in early 2025, a Turkish street food concept on Valencia Street built around pide and small plates. Outside the city, he runs Ophelia in Los Gatos, an Aegean and Anatolian Mediterranean concept.

Each project reflects the same hands-on approach, with Abik involved in construction and design alongside the kitchen. These are independent builds across a range of formats and price points, not franchise plays or group properties.

A chef-operator with that track record choosing LA for the first time is not filling a gap in his portfolio. He is expanding his market, which means the unit economics, the brand visibility, or the lease structure penciled out cleaner than another Bay Area opening would have.

The Out-of-Market Buyer Pattern

Out-of-market buyers make up a consistent share of the qualified pool for second-generation SoCal restaurant space. The pipeline includes Bay Area chef-operators looking for a coastal foothold, Boston and NYC operators with a California concept they want to prove out, and Phoenix and Vegas groups looking for a credibility unit on Melrose or in Venice or on Abbot Kinney.

The buyer who walks a SoCal space often does not know the block the way a local seller does. They need more lease structure, more landlord intel, more clarity on the corridor’s foot traffic patterns. Deals close when the seller can hand an out-of-market operator a verified picture of what the space delivers.

A filing like Abik’s represents the kind of operator demand that expands the pool for comparable-profile spaces on similar corridors. The buyer universe for a working full-service space on Melrose runs wider than the local list most sellers assume.

The Cost Stack That Does Not Travel

The structural difficulty for an SF operator coming into LA is the cost stack. Bay Area rent on a Castro corner is one set of numbers, and Melrose mid-block is another. Wages are close enough across the two metros to take them off the table. The variable is occupancy cost as a percent of revenue, and the customer that supports that revenue line on Melrose is a different customer from the one filling a Castro steakhouse on a Saturday.

An operator who has run units in one metro for over a decade has lease patterns baked into the underwriting model, and those patterns do not always travel. First-time-into-LA operators who underwrite to their home-market assumptions can miss in year one. The operators who close that gap early walked in with verified corridor intel before they signed.

Watching the End-of-June Open

End of June is roughly three weeks out from this writing, which is an aggressive build-out window for a concept whose name and menu remain unconfirmed publicly. The timeline could mean a turnkey takeover with minimal reconfiguration, or it could mean the open slips. For SoCal sellers, the filing itself is the data point. A Bay Area chef-operator with a three-decade track record and six concepts behind him chose a mid-block Melrose space as his first LA bet.

How the opening runs and how the first ninety days settle will be worth watching. For operators considering a sale of a similar-profile SoCal space in the next twelve months, the buyer pool is broader than the local list. The setup that works for an out-of-market buyer is one where the space can be underwritten without guesswork about what the corridor actually delivers.

Sources

• What Now Los Angeles, “San Francisco Chef Bringing Restaurant To Los Angeles”
• SFist, “Cook Shoppe and Blind Butcher Both Quietly Open in the Castro”
• What Now San Francisco, “Anatolian Table Coming to the Mission District”