After opening Downtown’s Lost Rooftop Cocktail + Taco Bar in late September and four Hilltop Coffee + Kitchen locations throughout the Southland since 2019, Yonnie Hagos and Ajay Relan will debut their first Los Angeles restaurant in the same View Park-Windsor Hills retail complex as their original cafe. Named Somerville , the full-service restaurant will offer American food with cocktails, a hearty wine list, and live music beginning November 22, 2024. As South LA natives who live in the surrounding area, Hagos and Relan have been looking at View Park for some time.
Relan and Hagos found their future restaurant in a vacant 5,000-square-foot space almost a decade ago but focused all efforts on being independent coffee operators in corporate coffee-heavy South LA. “We passed on this Slauson space in 2015,” says Relan. “We’re from here but didn’t know if we would ever open anything here.
” The partners studied Los Angeles history, specifically Historic South-Central’s vibrant scene from 1921 to 1956 centered around the Dunbar Hotel (originally named Hotel Somerville , hence the name of their new restaurant) and Central Avenue’s bustling jazz venues . The area developed due to traveling Black musicians who were prohibited from entering LA’s white-owned bars and clubs. “We became obsessed with these spaces and ideas,” Relan says.
“Hilltop was a step in that direction for us. We wanted to create a 2020s version of that era, but not [necessarily do] a jazz .