Business
After the fire, a crisis for Altadena's small-business owners: 'Who is going to want to come here?'

The blackened remains of the neighborhood pet store next to a bank untouched by the fires.
A burned-down museum of bunny memorabilia separated by red caution tape from a strip mall, all of its businesses still standing.
A longtime bike shop, reduced to a heap of twisted metal, steps away from a pristine Thai restaurant with a handwritten note taped to the door: “Sorry, we are closed due to power outage and extreme winds. Come back soon!”
Up and down Lake Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare in Altadena, are stark signs of the Eaton fire’s aftermath: the businesses it subsumed and the ones it spared. More than 9,400 residential and commercial structures were destroyed by the blaze, a catastrophic loss for the tight-knit community nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
All told, estimates of the total economic loss from last month’s wildfires in and around Los Angeles have swelled to more than $250 billion, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. Nearly 1,900 small businesses were located within the fire burn zones and were probably affected, according to an estimate from the L.A. County Economic Development Corp. Those businesses supported roughly 11,400 jobs.
Now, whether their stores survived the flames or not, small-business owners say they are facing a crisis. Those who lost their businesses are wading through insurance claims and loan applications while wrestling with whether to rebuild. For owners whose stores remain, there’s damage from smoke and ash, utilities that have yet to be restored and the fear that customers won’t return for a long time, if ever.
“There’s no community anymore,” said Leo Bulgarini, whose eponymous gelateria and restaurant narrowly escaped the fire. Just on the other side of the parking lot, the neighboring Bunny Museum burned to the ground, as did his home about a mile away.
“Who is going to want to come here?” he said. “I keep hearing, ‘Bulgarini is alive!’ It’s not alive.”
Here are three stories from Altadena entrepreneurs and the businesses they built.
Burned down but not out
When he was 14, Steve Salinas got a job at Steve’s Pet and Bike, getting paid $3.75 an hour to tinker with bicycles. The combination shop was like something out of a child’s dreamland, a place where a kid could walk in to admire a shiny Schwinn and leave with a pet turtle.
Through the years, Salinas honed his skills at bending back damaged bike frames and building custom five- and six-seater bikes, but his favorite part was the connection he forged with his customers.
Steve Salinas visits the site of his burned-down bike shop. He began working at the store when he was 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
The pet and bike shops eventually split into two separate businesses — one right around the corner from the other — and Salinas bought the bike side in the late 1990s.
The morning after the Eaton fire started, Salinas drove to check on his mother’s house. It was safe. He then went to a friend’s house and saw the home two doors down was engulfed, so he climbed onto the adjoining roof with a hose until a water truck arrived.
The home made it, but he soon learned that his bike shop had not.
A few days later, Salinas walked through the charred ruins in disbelief, inhaling the smell of burnt tire tubes and noticing that even items made of aluminum had been destroyed. He estimated he lost about $250,000 in tools and merchandise.
Now in his mid-50s, he is determined to rebuild the shop that has been a part of his life for four decades. Since the pandemic began, Salinas said, the company had been doing very well — he estimated that business had picked up by about 30%.
Although Salinas had general liability insurance, he didn’t have fire insurance — it would have more than tripled his premium costs, he said, to around $4,000 a year.
He has one employee, a longtime bike mechanic who started a GoFundMe for the business. Salinas said he plans to use the money to reopen in a pop-up location until Steve’s Bike Shop is rebuilt.
These days he is staying busy collecting donated bikes, tuning them up and gifting them to residents who lost their homes.
“We’ve got to keep going,” he said. “Now it’s just a matter of gearing your head toward how to move forward and try to put it back together.”
Four walls and no customers
Three weeks after the Eaton fire began, Ashima Gupta unlocked the glass doors at Code Ninjas, a learning center for kids that she bought in October for $80,000.
The center had been a cheerful place where children ages 5 to 14 would come after school and on the weekends to build Legos, practice their coding skills and design and print 3D toys on site.
To help grow the franchise location, Gupta, 45, had spent $10,000 in marketing and reached out to local companies to pitch partnerships. New members were signing up in droves, and she had six part-time employees. By the end of the year, she said, she was pulling in $15,000 in revenue a month from the center and was breaking even financially.
When the fire swept through Altadena, Code Ninjas survived along with Bulgarini and eight other strip mall tenants. But Gupta said they are “silent casualties” of the inferno: technically intact, but effectively put out of business for the foreseeable future.

Ashima Gupta, owner of Code Ninjas, stands inside the learning center.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“Who will bring their children here? We need families, and they’re gone,” she said as she made her way through the center on a recent Tuesday morning. The utilities were still out, and a fine layer of ash coated the floor, the orange benches, the foosball table.
Scrawled in pink marker on a white board were the words, “Tuesday, January 7th. What was the spider’s New Year’s resolution?” An eerie reminder of the day everything ground to a halt.
She said 95% of her customers have already canceled. So many lost their homes and relocated to neighborhoods far from the Code Ninjas location that it didn’t make sense for them to continue paying their memberships.
Gupta herself doesn’t think the center — an untouched island in a vast landscape of wreckage — is currently suitable for young children. She wouldn’t bring her own 10-year-old daughter here, she admitted.
“I just can’t get my head around what to do,” she said.
Gupta anticipated it will take two to three years to recover. She and some of the other strip mall tenants are considering writing a letter to their landlord to ask for a reduction in their rents; an invoice just arrived for the nearly $6,000 a month she pays for the 2,500-square-foot space.

Shawn Shakhmalian, right, the owner Nancy’s Greek Cafe and adjacent bakery, visits Gupta at Code Ninjas three weeks after the Eaton fire. Both were waiting for the utilities to be restored in the strip mall plaza, which survived the flames.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
She’s also waiting on her insurance, which has been backed up with more pressing residential property claims, she said.
Since the fire, people have kept asking her: “‘Is your house burned?’ No. ‘Is your center burned?’ No,” she said. “‘Then just wait.’”
After five decades, pet shop calls it quits
Carrie Meyers started running the register of Steve’s Pet and Bike as a teenager in the 1980s.
Her uncle Steve Segner owned the shop, and she grew to appreciate the cacophonous menagerie of birds and loose crickets. In 2000, Meyers bought the pet portion of the business, officially turning what had begun as a side gig into her life’s work.
Under her ownership, Steve’s Pets sold puppies, kittens, rabbits, rodents, birds, fish — even goats and small pigs. Meyers was greeted each morning by a green parrot named Pesto, who became the shop’s mascot and would caw, “Hellllow!”
When Meyers’ children were young, they napped in a crib in the shop as she zipped around, tidying up and taking inventory. Grooming services became a bigger part of the business in recent years, as had selling organic chicken feed and dog food made from avocados.
Like many small-business owners, she found it harder and harder to compete with retail giants such as Target and Amazon. But she weathered those challenges, along with economic ones like the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Hollywood strikes, all of which hurt her sales.
“I’m still here,” Meyers would tell customers who called to check in. “I made it again. I’m lucky.”
Until last month, when the Eaton fire tore through Altadena, destroying both her home and her pet shop.
“There’s nothing left,” she said. “Nothing.”

Meyers, with her dog Jojo, said she doesn’t plan to rebuild Steve’s Pets.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
When Meyers evacuated from her home in the dark of night on Jan. 7, the fire was still a good distance from the shop and she knew shoving the animals into her car would have stressed them.
The next morning, Steve’s Pets was still standing and she drove over to evacuate the animals. On the way there, she received a call saying the shop was engulfed in flames.
All the animals, including beloved Pesto, were gone.
Distraught and grieving the losses, Meyers also had to worry about the livelihoods of her seven employees. She sent a group text encouraging them to get on unemployment, and after receiving $25,000 from insurance, she issued paychecks. Her daughter, Hannah, started a GoFundMe to help the employees.
Meyers doesn’t plan to reopen. She said she needs to focus on rebuilding her home, and at 56, she’s ready for a break.
A post on the shop’s website thanking former customers now uses the past tense: “Steve’s Pets was a family-owned and operated pet store and grooming shop in business for decades.”

Business
Paramount and YouTube TV extend deadline for a new carriage deal

Paramount Global and Google’s YouTube TV agreed to a short-term contract extension late Thursday, keeping CBS and other networks available as the two media companies worked to negotiate a new distribution agreement.
The eleventh-hour reprieve spared about 8 million YouTube TV customers from losing access to nearly two dozen networks, including BET, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and TV Land. Broadcast stations KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KCAL-TV Channel 9 in Los Angeles also would have been dropped.
“We’ve reached a short term extension as we work toward a deal with Paramount to keep their content on YouTube TV,” YouTube said in a statement directed at users. “We appreciate your patience as we continued to negotiate on your behalf. We also value Paramount’s partnership and willingness to work towards an agreement.”
Clashes between programmers and distributors have become increasingly common in recent years. Pay-TV providers are motivated to control costs in an effort to attract and retain subscribers who have an abundance of viewing options.
At the same time, Paramount and other traditional Hollywood programmers are struggling to maintain their financial footing amid ratings declines and cable customer defections. They can ill afford cuts to one of their most important revenue streams: pay-TV distribution fees.
The current dispute centers on the fees Google must pay for the rights to carry Paramount channels.
“We’re fighting for an agreement that avoids passing along additional costs and offers you more flexibility in how you watch your favorite sports and shows,” YouTube said earlier this week in a blog post.
The negotiations come at a troubled time for New York-based Paramount.
CBS is separately sparring with Sony Pictures Television to retain distribution rights for Sony’s hugely popular game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune.” The company also is trying to fend off a $20-billion lawsuit filed by President Trump over edits made to a “60 Minutes” interview of former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall.
Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone struck a deal last summer to sell the company her family has controlled for decades to David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The $8-billion deal has encountered turbulence at the Federal Communications Commission. The agency must sign off on the transfer of the CBS television licenses to Ellison for the deal to go forward.
Paramount’s cable channels, including Nickelodeon and MTV, have lost millions of subscribers amid a migration to video-on-demand streaming services such as Netflix. In August, Paramount took a $6-billion write-down to account for the declining value of its cable television portfolio and so it entered the negotiations with Google with a weaker hand.
“We have made a series of fair offers to continue our long-standing relationship with Google’s YouTube TV, providing subscribers access to the full array of Paramount’s entertainment, news and sports programming,” Paramount said Wednesday in a statement.
YouTube TV, which launched eight years ago, is hoping to sharpen its edge.
The service has quickly grown into a major player in television, appealing to younger viewers and sports fans. It has successfully plucked subscribers from the legacy cable- and satellite-TV providers.
YouTube TV is now the fourth-largest multichannel distributor in the U.S., behind Charter’s Spectrum, Comcast Xfinity and DirecTV, based in El Segundo.
The service made a big bet on sports when it took over the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” offering in 2023 after that package became too expensive for DirecTV, the longtime rights-holder. However, the nearly $2-billion-a-year price for the Sunday afternoon NFL games drove up the cost of operating YouTube TV, prompting Google to scrutinize other contract costs.
YouTube TV’s fees also are on the rise.
Last month, the service hiked its charge to customers to $82.99 a month, up from $72.99 a month.
The company said it would offer YouTube TV customers an $8 credit a month “if we can’t reach an agreement and [Paramount] content is unavailable for an extended period of time,” Google said in a blog post.
Business
The Restaurant That Started Panda Express

This orange chicken has not been waiting for you on the steam table. It has not been bouncing and sweating in the darkness of a clamshell container while you wheel your luggage to the gate.
At Panda Inn, the Pasadena restaurant that started Panda Express, the orange chicken is made to order, strewed with whole dried chiles, scallions and a few threads of orange zest. It arrives craggy and glistening on a blue stoneware plate.
Is it good? Trick question! It is sticky, and it is familiar. It is relentlessly crunchy, with a flatly precise and habit-forming ratio of sweetness to acidity to heat. It is better, though not dramatically different from the one that waits on the steam table — always there, always waiting — but sometimes presentation can be everything.
Orange chicken, all dressed up, reminds me of when my parents set out cloth napkins and silverware while unpacking boxes of takeout, transferring everything to serving plates (yes, even pizza). I used to find this absolutely unhinged, but now I see it as a tender gesture that underscored the luxury of their taking the night off from cooking — they did it so rarely.
When the Cherng family opened Panda Inn in 1973, it was a popular Chinese restaurant that catered to the neighborhood. Early menus from the 1970s and ’80s included a bone-in tangerine-peel chicken, sizzling beef hot plates and a “Chinese Pasta” section of noodle dishes.
It was a nice, sit-down restaurant that also did a bit of takeout and catering. It appealed to local families, but also local developers, who asked the owners to come up with a restaurant concept for the expansion of the Glendale Galleria mall. That restaurant was Panda Express.
Panda Express developed its orange chicken in 1987 and, depending on whom you ask, the dish was either the natural evolution of tangerine-peel chicken or a lightning invention of Andy Kao, a chef for the chain. Either way, it helped to embed a sweet, crowd-pleasing idea of American Chinese cuisine into the global culinary consciousness, now deployed through 2,500 or so fast-food counters.
It also propelled the family’s small business into a privately held empire: Along with Panda Express, the group owns Uncle Tetsu, Hibachi-San and more, and the Cherng family has a net worth of more than $3 billion.
At the end of last year, the company completed a major renovation to the Panda Inn in Pasadena, with a red carpet that leads into a sprawling, glamorous, wood-paneled dining room. The ceilings are high and vaulted. There are lush pots of violet orchids at the host stand and bar.
The vibe would seem clubby if Panda Inn weren’t warm and welcoming, always peppered with shouty families celebrating birthdays and special occasions. On my most recent visit, an impeccably well-dressed man in his 70s enjoyed a multicourse meal on his own, while the two men next to me chatted in Armenian over beers, kung pao chicken and sushi.
Why is sushi on the menu? Because people love sushi, and because honey walnut shrimp was begging to be converted into a sloppy but delightful roll, but also because the restaurant’s founder and first chef, Ming-Tsai Cherng, lived and worked for some years in Yokohama’s Chinatown.
Why Taiwanese popcorn chicken and stone bowls of Taiwanese braised beef on rice? Because in the 1950s, Mr. Cherng worked as a chef at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan.
You’re not thinking about all this as you sit down for a big meal at one of the round tables for 12, spinning the lazy susan with glee until the dish you want most is finally in front of you. But Panda Inn in Pasadena isn’t just a place for Panda Express superfans to come and pay their respects; it’s a devoted corporate flagship — a grand, Disneyfied spin through the family’s story that reframes this restaurant as proof of the American dream.
On the newly designed menu, there’s a photo of Ming-Tsai Cherng, born in Yangzhou, wearing a cook’s shirt and tossing food in a wok. Below, in a story about the immigrant family’s journey, Panda Inn describes itself as “a restaurant that embodies the pursuit of a better life for all.”
Such a frictionless story of the American dream seems fanciful if you so much as glance at the news, but it also doesn’t have much to do with why the dining room is consistently packed.
Even though Panda Express was never my go-to, the orange chicken will occasionally stand in for the fried and glazed thing that I genuinely long for, but can never have again: the sweet-and-sour pork at a restaurant called Peking Inn that once existed in suburban London.
For my ninth birthday, I asked my parents to make me that sweet-and-sour pork, along with the sweet corn and chicken egg-drop soup. We had just moved 300 miles away, to France, and I was still angry and depressed about it, but I didn’t know how to say all that.
Instead, I dared them to try and make me happy. I dared them to recreate a dish from my favorite Chinese restaurant (impossible!), one whose vast pleasures and disappointments are still hard-wired into my brain.
Those particulars are different for everyone, but they fill out the story behind Panda Inn’s greatest hits, embedded like core memories. On any given night, there’s an order of orange chicken on nearly every table — a dish that isn’t just tangled up in its own corporate mythologies, but tangled up in our own.
Business
Their grandfather came to America and opened a nursery. A century later, it's closing

For the better part of a century, generations of the Nakai family have kept the shelves at Hawthorne Nursery stocked with seeds and fertilizers, the lot outside full of fruit trees, potted plants and succulents.
The job, for the past many years, has fallen to Kei Nakai, 70, and his brother, David. But they will be the last. When the brothers retire at the end of the month, the 97-year-old nursery and, with it almost a century of family and local history, will go too.
“It’s time,” Nakai said.
Kei Nakai is shown in the garden center at Hawthorne Nursery.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The nursery dates to 1927, when it was started by Kei and David’s grandfather, Minegusu Nakai, who had emigrated from Japan to Vancouver, Canada, in 1898 and moved to Hawthorne after marrying. Today, it is one of the few remaining plant nurseries in the Los Angeles area that were opened by Japanese Americans before the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941. Shortly after, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S., many of them citizens, were forced into incarceration camps under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Taking what they could carry, they sold or left behind their homes, possessions and businesses.
To avoid being imprisoned in a camp, the Nakai family fled to work on a sugar beet farm in Colorado, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. Another nursery owner in Gardena leased the property while they were gone and when they returned at the end of the war they purchased more land to expand the nursery into what it is today.
Kei Nakai says he’ll miss the most his parents’ home — a skinny, green two-story building that adjoins the nursery on Grevillea Avenue.
He pointed out his childhood bedroom window and said he wants to take a pane of glass and part of the old molding to make a commemorative frame before it’s bulldozed when they sell. He said he hopes the land is turned into something nice.

A scale from 1927 is among the items at Hawthorne Nursery in Hawthorne. There is so much “old stuff” everywhere, owner Kei Nakai says.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
There is so much “old stuff” everywhere, he said, it’s hard to decide what to keep and what to toss. Antique items are part of what’s left on display across the nursery’s walls: A scale that’s been there since the nursery opened. The ‘50s retro blue sign outside. A letter board above the register that reads, “Beautifying Hawthorne for 97 years. Enjoy the outdoors. Go gardening.”
A weathered train car used for storage — older than the nursery itself, he thinks — might go too, Nakai said. He isn’t sure where it came from or how old it is, though he remembers his father bringing it onto the property at some point. The conservancy expressed some interest it in, but he hasn’t heard anything in a while.
The closure isn’t for a lack of business, Nakai said. He declined to share revenue information but said the business was doing well and there’s been an additional boost since the closure — and sales to clear inventory — was announced.
Early on a recent Monday morning, the nursery was quiet other than an occasional phone call answered by his brother, David, in a back room. It was a far cry from the days during the COVID-19 pandemic, when South Bay residents were stuck at home and came looking for plants to cultivate and distract.
“This place was packed,” Nakai said. “It was never empty.”

Kei Nakai said he has been discussing retirement over the last 15 years and was just waiting for the right time.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
A man wheeled his baby boy into the store to ask when the doors will shut for good. “I love this place,” he told Nakai.
Kevin Baker, 45, frequented the shop when he first moved to the area from Pacific Palisades four years ago, drawn by the rare or interesting offerings not easily found at other nurseries, he said. He visited weekly, then monthly, then less frequently after his two children were born and his schedule got busier. “I’m glad I got to see it before it closed,” he said.
Nakai said he has been discussing retirement over the last 15 years and was just waiting for the right time. As a kid he worked for his parents in the shop and made 25 cents a day. When he graduated from UCLA in 1976 as an engineer, he said, government layoffs at the end of the Vietnam War meant he’d be jockeying for work right out of college. It made sense for him to take over the business instead.
His own children, now in their 30s, are happy with their own careers and have no interest in taking over, he said.

Memorabilia cover the walls of Hawthorne Nursery. The Nakai family “really did live, breathe and thrive in the plant world,” another nursery owner said.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The Nakai family brings a century of knowledge and skill to its horticulture work, said Russell Akiyama, a third- generation owner of the nearby Sunflower Farms Nursery in Torrance. “They really did live, breathe and thrive in the plant world,” he said.
Nakai spent time studying the Dudleya genus, succulents native to the West Coast, and contributed to its taxonomy, or scientific classification. In a presentation recorded in 1992 at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, a younger Nakai flips through pictures and describes different species of Dudleya plants.
And David Nakai “could make something grow out of a rock,” Akiyama joked. He recalled once seeing David propagating a flourishing flat of white wisteria, which is particularly hard to grow, and wondered how he’d managed to do it. And the nursery’s passion fruit, which Akiyama called “the best passion fruit you’ve ever tasted,” will live on in Sunflower Farms’ own collection, he said.
As Hawthorne Nursery prepares to close, Akiyama said he takes solace in seeing the influence the Nakai family and other Japanese American nursery owners have had when he drives through neighborhoods in Torrance, Gardena and other cities nearby and sees trees cultivated by the nursery owners decades ago.
“Our landscaping is just as much of a monument to who we are as our buildings,” he said. “There is no full, total goodbye. It’s just an, ‘I’ll see you later.’”
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