Did anyone have a good year in 2025? While I’m rational enough in general to recognize that the temporal segmentations separating one year from the next are artificially imposed, and hence, any attempt to designate one temporal chunk as “lucky,” another “unlucky” is absurd; yet, it did seem as if 2025 was an exceptionally accursed stretch of time. From the beginning, 2025 announced its insidiousness, here in SoCal, with no less than five major wildfires simultaneously wreaking havoc in multiple locations across the city. Those unseasonable wildfires exacted heavy economic, emotional, and health tolls on Angelenos collectively. The resulting smoke covered much more ground than the actual fires and was more toxic than usual as the fires burned through residential areas and incinerated not only dry brush and trees, but plastic, paints, and the other poisonous building blocks of our modern lives. Though none of the conflagrations touched me or my neighborhood, living near one of the burning areas (the Eaton fire) meant there was no escaping the fumes. By the second day of inhaling that caustic air, my body started to feel weird. I was subsequently to realize that prolonged exposure to the toxic fumes had awoken an autoimmune flare of some kind. The exact name of my disease has yet to be officially diagnosed; following months of maddening, debilitating, constant pain triggered by the wildfire fumes, what my doctors know (at least, what they’re willing to tell me) still amounts to little more than, “So yeah, there’s this terminal disease, and you have a marker for it. Have a nice day!” Whether at a collective or personal level, undeniably, 2025 had set itself apart as an unpoppable bulbous pimple, inoperable brain tumor, bleeding hemorrhoid kind of year. 

When such a year winds down to its end, you want to celebrate that conclusion, and aggressively. Our determination to send the year off with an emphatic, “Fuck off!” led Charlie and me to L’Appart in DTLA.

On its website, L’Appart describes itself as a “Restaurant + Bar + Café,” suggesting perhaps that even its owners don’t quite know how to categorize their business. Besides the name and unmistakably Gallic, quaint décor, there are other clues here that call to mind, “French bistro.” Yet, other factors compete with this categorization. For one thing, this cute little bistro, where customers can imagine themselves dining in an actual Parisian café on the Rue de Buci, is rather incongruously embedded within the Arcade Building on Spring Street, which is currently as drab and run-down as any other building on Spring Street. Other restaurants at this center include Guisados and White Elephant (Thai food). Nothing wrong with those establishments; I’m just trying to convey the disorientation one experiences walking into this bewildering juxtaposition of international cuisines. Upon entering this plaza, my initial instinct was to walk right back out again, especially when I learned that L’Appart doesn’t have its own restroom; instead, customers have to awkwardly go out to the main walkway, go past a security guard (and prove to him that you’re worthy of using their facilities by saying a password and correcting answering a series of riddles), and climb a flight of stairs (past another restroom on the ground level, which, according to the guard, we are NOT to use. I didn’t ask why) to arrive, finally, at a restroom on the second floor. It’s a bit of a hassle and seems like an ill-advised design from the standpoint of any business that sells alcohol.

For the reason described above, related more to the plaza’s floor plan than to anything directly related to L’Appart’s food or service, I would hesitate to recommend this bistro to my fussier friends. If, however, you’re someone who can overlook such shortcomings in a business’s layout, a dinner at L’Appart is by no means deficient in things to charm. Between the two of us, we sampled the negroni, blackberry mint julep, and a concoction called a “So Flute” (vodka and grapefruit syrup) from their cocktail menu, and all were perfectly satisfying, if unexceptional. The bartender (perhaps one of the owners?) who mixed all our drinks was solicitous without trying too hard, attentive without being obtrusive.

Like any proper French restaurant, L’Appart offers duck confit and beef Bourguignon on its menu, but, as if to cater to the provincial American palate, it also offers multiple pizzas among the menu options. Apparently, these pizzas have been Frenchified in some way; by topping it with Gruyere cheese, or snails, etc. True to our provincial form, Charlie and I ordered a vegetarian pizza, which was topped with bell peppers, zucchini, eggplant, and tomato sauce. An odd order, perhaps, when one is at a French restaurant, mais je ne regrette rien, it was good pizza. We also had, as appetizers, the mezze plate (again, weirdly un-French) and escargots. It’s greatly to its credit that the escargots at L’Appart, as I told our bartender, were way better than what I had at Perle in Pasadena (to be fair, I might just have eaten there on the one day the chef at Perle burned the escargot garlic). Notwithstanding my praise, the bartender humbly explained to us that L’Appart had no pretensions to being a fancy French restaurant on the same level as Perle; it’s a bistro (which I had already gathered). As such, it is a cozy and comfortable one (unless one needed to use the restroom); however, prospective patrons should realize that one’s tab at this French bistro isn’t that much less than what they would spend at a restaurant like Perle. All in all, I give this place a B, and I could see myself returning, with unfussy friends, and hopefully, in a far less wretched year.