The Wild Chive has announced via social media it will be permanently closing its doors in Long Beach.
“We’re working on a specific closing date,” Chef Soozee said. “But there are a lot of moving parts with closing, and we didn’t want to give conflicting information. Just wanted to let our audience know immediately so they can plan their visit accordingly. Will let you know when we have a date.”
An idea that started as a pop-up, The Wild Chive evolved into a weekend ritual that made vegans feel seen, omnivores feel suddenly curious, and was dubbed one of the best brunches in the nation. Before there was a dining room in Bluff Heights, there were those early mornings and makeshift lines at Portfolio Coffeehouse and MADE, where Chef Soozee Nguyen turned folding tables into a test kitchen. In 2020, in the harsh glare of a complicated year, she opened the doors in her Bluff Park brick-and-mortar and made it official: the pop-up had grown up without losing the scrappy ingenuity that built it.
Now, with news of an upcoming closure, Long Beach is preparing to lose more than a restaurant. With this one, joining the loss of Seabirds in 2024, we’re losing one of the city’s most inventive culinary voices, one that pushed vegan cooking past substitution and into invention.
The Wild Chive is a decade-long tale of a queer woman’s drive—something Long Beach can always hear about.
The pop-up community is at the heart of Chef Soozee and The Wild Chive. In Brooklyn, it taught her how to cook under pressure. In Long Beach coffee shops, it was how to communicate. And with her move into the now-closed MADE in DTLB, it was how to build a brand that could withstand a much-desired brick-and-mortar.
Wild Chive popups made the food feel intimate in a way that brick-and-mortar spaces often struggle to replicate: you weren’t just ordering; you were watching a chef build a vocabulary with a very astute understanding of the difference between blatant plant-based food and the much broader picture of pleasure-driven grub. Layered textures. Sauces with dimension. Masterful recreation of non-vegan comfort foods.
That concept—vegan food could move beyond uninformed stereotypes of rabbit kibble—was harnessed by Chef Soozee when The Wild Chive began doing weekend brunches at the now-shuttered Portfolio Coffeehouse. And it fully solidified when it made its way to DTLB, as mentioned beforehand.
When the Bluff Heights restaurant opened, Chef Soozee didn’t simply upscale the pop-up. Dishes came out with the same let-me-show-you swagger. Crispy-to-creamy contrasts in a carne asada bánh mì. Fat where fat belongs (even if it’s plant fat) in plates like Cajun fried “chick’n” and pancakes. Umami turned up without leaning too heavily on salt with chicken pot pie croquettes. And it wasn’t about mimicking meat; it was about building good food without meat.
The bittersweet now as The Wild Chive preps for closure
So yes, the looming closure hurts. Partly because it’s an ending, but mainly because The Wild Chive became a place. A place for queerts to openly express while starting their weekend plans. A place where women could witness, in real time, woman-led entrepreneurship. And, of course, a place where people who couldn’t always eat everywhere could feel catered to rather than simply accommodated. The Wild Chive made vegan dining feel less like a carve-out and more like the center of the room.
The sadness is complicated by gratitude: for the years Chef Soozee spent building this, for the crew who learned to cook this way, for the regulars who felt like shareholders in a very neighborhood kind of enterprise. Closures are often framed as failures. This is not that. This is a small team that proved a city’s appetite could expand—and did.
The shifting ground under vegan dining in not just Long Beach, but region-wide
Here’s the hard truth that sits beneath this story: vegan restaurants don’t hold the same singular leverage they did a decade ago.
That’s not because the cooking is less compelling—that is actually the opposite: vegan cuisine has never been more innovative, and The Wild Chive is proof of that. But it’s because the broader dining landscape got the memo on being inclusionary of vegan diners. Omnivore-leaning spots now field thoughtful plant-based dishes and entire sections that “cater to both sides of the aisle.” Many places—Ammatoli immediately comes to mind—are just naturally vegan friendly because their cuisines are naturally produce-centric.
On good menus, vegan isn’t an afterthought; it’s a lane to drive patrons. That’s progress for diners, but it also means dedicated vegan restaurants are competing not just with one another, but with everyone. And in a group of friends where vegans and non-vegans collide, it is pretty much a guarantee that the group will be driven to a place which offers both rather than one.
The Wild Chive helped write that playbook locally. It normalized the expectation that plant-based food can be smart and satisfying. Ironically, that success dilutes the novelty that once protected vegan restaurants from the sharp edges of a crowded market. When your ideas become mainstream practice, your lane fills up.
The Wild Chive is located at 2650 E. Broadway.
beyond bummed. Seabirds, now this. I rarely eat out, and this was one of the few places I would treat myself to.