From a booth in the back of Found Oyster’s new dining room, Adam Weisblatt and Holly Fox are admiring the view. The pair started the buzzy East Hollywood raw bar in a tiny shopfront on Fountain Avenue in 2019, and it has proved such a runaway success that they’ve recently been able to expand into this space next door. ‘When we opened this new room, and I was looking at Found Oyster from a perspective I physically had never been able to see it from before, it was wildly emotional,’ says Fox, sunlight glinting off her gold hooped earrings. ‘It was like an out-of-body experience.’
Found Oyster is a masterclass in doing a lot with a little. Weisblatt and Fox took an empty, narrow shell and transformed it with checkered tiles, custom-built oyster stands and a glittering disco ball into an intimate, 26-seat hideaway set around a bustling wooden bar where multi-talented bartenders move between mixing drinks and shucking oysters. Starting small made sense for their first restaurant opening. ‘There were lots of reasons for that,’ explains Weisblatt, his tattooed arm reaching for his Goombay Smash, a rum punch made with apricot liqueur. ‘One being that we didn’t think we could raise the money to build a big restaurant! But also in a smaller space, I truly believe it’s easier to create the sort of energy we wanted.’
That energy now fills a room that’s doubled in size, and Weisblatt and Fox’s ambitions have grown too. Over plates of Sicilian crudo, fried calamari and squid stuffed with tuna ’nduja, they explain how they started Last Word Hospitality as a consultancy five years prior to opening Found Oyster.
In the years since, they’ve applied what they learned here to build a miniature empire of unique restaurants across Los Angeles, including Portuguese tapas spot Barra Santos in Cypress Park, another raw bar Queen’s in Highland Park, Malaysian-inspired hotspot Rasarumah in Historic Filipinotown and, most recently, classic martinis-and-cheeseburger bistro Hermon’s in Montecito Heights. They’ve also teamed with Pioneertown Motel owners Matt and Mike French for two openings out near Joshua Tree: the Old West saloon Red Dog and the Rat Pack-approved jetset lounge The Copper Room in Yucca Valley. A third desert project, a revamp of Rancho Mirage’s historic Lord Fletcher Inn, is set to open this spring.
