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Los Angeles’s Newest Healthy Place to Eat — and Shop

Botanica, which started as an online magazine in December, now has a restaurant and market in Silver Lake.Credit...Julia Stotz

Though the new restaurant and market Botanica just opened today in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood, it already has a signature (and highly Instagrammable) dish: a two-tiered tower overflowing with fresh farmers’ market finds that have been thoughtfully prepared and arranged in a rainbow heap. The recipe first appeared on Botanica’s website, an online food and entertaining magazine that launched in December.

Served with addictive little bowls of handmade dips, sauces and spreads — smoked labne, olive oil and dukkah, tahini sauce — it’s a radical approach to the celebratory plat de mer and, according to Botanica’s co-founder Emily Fiffer, “an edible version of everything we stand for.”

Fiffer and her business partner, Heather Sperling, extend the we-are-what-we-eat aphorism to their whole business model. Like the grand vegetable plate, everything about the way Botanica is designed, staffed and served echoes an environmentally minded, globally inspired, locally sourced and community-oriented ethos. A concern for positive social impact permeates hiring practices and incentive programs, and success is measured in more than monetary gains.

Before Botanica, each woman spent a decade entrenched in Chicago’s food media world — Sperling as an editor at Tasting Table and Fiffer as an editor at DailyCandy. Then the friends began hosting large-scale indie flea markets and social gatherings centered around food and shopping. “We felt a really strong desire to make a physical space that could be a nexus for community — and also create a community,” Sperling says. So Fiffer went on to train at two London restaurants (Moro and Nopi), and Sperling moved to New York to work with chefs and consult on the then-burgeoning food hall trend. The seed for Botanica was planted; and two years ago, the women moved to L.A. to help it grow.

Botanica’s menu skews vegetarian and is predicated on healthfulness. Turkish eggs are served with sheep’s milk yogurt and Aleppo-Urfa butter; grilled lamb kebabs are hidden under a bright herb salad. There are ancient grains, aromatics and infusions. And in the plates’ descriptions, words like “herbaceous” and “moreish” are mentioned often.

Perhaps as a vestige of their former lives as market editors, Fiffer and Sperling aim to unearth, promote and collaborate with local talent through Botanica. They recruited the French design firm Weekends (who recently relocated to Silver Lake) for the interiors, their next-door neighbor Lawson-Fenning for the restaurant’s ethereal constellation of globe lights and the local woodworker M.F.E.O for custom tables and shelves. There’s also a large mural by the artist and family friend Alexis Gourguechon and an outdoor terrace planted by Tigers to Lilies. (The owner lives just up the hill.)

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The all-day restaurant is breathing new life into what was an old liquor store in a midcentury building.Credit...Julia Stotz

A small marketplace adjacent to the dining room stocks local, high-quality groceries, natural and biodynamic wines, specialty pantry items from their travels and house-made offerings from granola to marinated olives. A percentage of sales goes toward reconciling the usual discrepancy between behind-the-scenes kitchen workers and their (generously tipped) front-of-house counterparts. Additionally, Fiffer and Sperling are lining up field trips, workshops and demos to educate all levels of staff, equally.

“We want to teach people what a fava bean is,” Fiffer says, “but we also want to teach people what it’s like to work for someone who really cares about you. It’s important for us to create an environment built on positive affirmations and gratitude.”

Botanica is located at 1620 Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, botanicarestaurant.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: In Store; Fresh Start. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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