If all goes according to plan, nightlife and hospitality veteran Jeremy Fall (who’s spent the last few years dabbling in crypto and NFTs) will open a new gourmet mini-mart named SUPERMARKET in Pasadena’s Playhouse District by this summer. Though most of the L.A. chef and restauranteur’s projects shuttered several years ago, he is also the founder of Venice’s Nighthawk Breakfast Bar, which just closed, purportedly for renovations, at the end of last year.
According to Fall’s representatives, SUPERMARKET is inspired by Japanese and Taiwanese convenience store culture. Neighborhood locals, including a handful of people on Reddit, first noticed and snapped photos of the chef inside the former Pasadena MIX space at 55 South Madison Avenue. The back of SUPERMARKET will also house Fall’s “innovation kitchen,” where the chef plans to create limited-edition dishes meant to generate the same level of hype and demand as streetwear drops.
In a similar vein to David Kuo’s Fatty Mart in Mar Vista, Fall plans to focus on a line of high-quality grab-and-go options, including salads, grain bowls and other handheld foodstuffs. All menu items will be made in house, with inspiration directly taken from Japanese 7-Eleven and Family Mart. SUPERMARKET isn’t the first L.A. restaurant or eatery riffing on Asia’s convenience store culture: Daniel Son’s Katsu Sando in Chinatown and San Gabriel, as well as the now-closed Konbi, are both famous for sandwiches inspired by the ones sold in Japanese konbini.
From 2014 to 2018, Fall opened a Beverly Boulevard diner, a Fairfax gastropub, a liquor and grocery store, a pizzeria and two different Hollywood nightclubs: Golden Box and Genesis. All have since permanently closed except for Nighthawk, which lived on in some form in Venice until December of last year. (In 2019, Fall sold all of his L.A. restaurant ventures to K2 Restaurants, ending his relationship with the current version of Nighthawk.) While most of those concepts closed following the acquisition, we’re crossing our fingers SUPERMARKET finds its footing within the San Gabriel Valley.