Outside of Horses in 2022.
Photo: Adam Amengual/The New York Times/Redux
Two days before Christmas, the staff of Horses, the Sunset Boulevard restaurant that opened in 2021, gathered for a meeting with head chef Brittany Ha and general manager Steve LaFountain. The duo had bad news. The money, they said, might not be there to continue operation. Payroll was in question, following months of uncertainty, and to make matters worse, they’d discovered two tax liens filed by the state of California against the restaurant for a total of $530,000, related to loans against the business taken out by the owner and principal investor, Stephen Light. A collections notice had arrived in December. Ha and LaFountain didn’t want their staff to run the risk of working without getting paid, and, frustrated with what they described as a lack of communication from Light, they made the decision to stop operations.
Horses closed unceremoniously, not even five years into its run as both an A‑list clubhouse and a hub for scandal: In 2023, the restaurant’s founding couple — chefs Liz Johnson and Will Aghajanian — began divorce proceedings. The animal-abuse allegations that emerged from Johnson’s filings and New York’s reporting transformed Horses into something other than a place to see Beyoncé and enjoy an endive Caesar — it became a site of morbid fascination. According to people who worked at the restaurant, the scandal permanently altered the business. Horses was still heavily booked, but revenue declined year over year, partially due to a decline in pricey private events. After remaining profitable in 2024, Horses lost money in 2025. And after five years in operation, the lease was due for a renewal in March of 2026. The landlords informed Light that they were planning on raising the rent. (Aghajanian, meanwhile, just opened a restaurant in New Delhi, India, called Kaspers.)
Whatever was happening behind the scenes — unknown to the staff — didn’t affect the mood in the dining room. “We’re busy,” Ha tells me. “We do, like, sometimes 320 covers on the weekends. We’re open seven days, and even Mondays, Tuesdays, we’re hitting, like, 150, sometimes 200. So it definitely seemed like we were doing fine.” But the first signs of trouble had started to emerge about a year earlier when Horses stopped paying staff via direct deposit and moved to paper checks. “Over this past year, a lot of us have had checks bounce,” one employee tells me. “My checks would be held for insufficient funds all of the time.”
Ha says she and LaFountain immediately told Light, “This is a huge problem, a huge liability.” She says the restaurant would have “a few good weeks,” and then another check would bounce. “It’s always just felt like it was a gamble.”
When Ha and LaFountain found out about the tax liens, they were similarly frustrated. “The biggest thing, I think, for Brittany and I has always been we’ve just wanted transparency and communication,” LaFountain explains. Their relationship with Light, they say, was strained by what they describe as a long-running communication gap. It came to a head on December 22, when Ha texted Light to tell him they didn’t have enough produce on hand to make it through the week. “He never replied,” LaFountain says. Ha says they were concerned about payroll as well. They estimated there were “60 employees” who might not get paid. “We decided that morally,” she says, continuing to operate under those conditions “didn’t sit well with either of us.” They felt they had only one option: “We just decided to not operate.”
Light says that at the same time, he was exploring options for outside buyers to keep the restaurant going past the end of the lease. The sudden closure made that more difficult. “I got a call a day after Christmas saying, ‘Hey, staff doesn’t want to work,’” he tells me. He replied, “We have 150 reservations. I’m gonna personally fund everything … we’ll make sure we’re good.” It didn’t sway the staff. Light theorizes this was an attempt by Ha and LaFountain to renegotiate their salaries ahead of any sale: “What’s coming out of the media is pure leverage tactics.” As he sees it, “We should have been open,” he says. “That’s the hill I die on.”
Ha and LaFountain insist the decision to stop operating was the only leverage they had to protect their workers. “It’s a hard call,” Ha says, “knowing that it affects so many people.” They are both quick to dismiss Light’s accusations of a leverage play, too. “The only time negotiations — the word ‘negotiations’ — ever came up was in saying that if the restaurant does get sold, we’ll have to negotiate our salaries, which, I mean, that’s with any sale,” LaFountain says.
“It was never about that.” Ha adds. “For him to characterize us as trying to be greedy, to say that’s why we decided to close, is totally false.”
The two resigned from their positions on December 30 and say they never asked for a pay increase. What they did ask for, they say, is reimbursement: Ha and LaFountain claim they’re both owed tens of thousands of dollars for money they personally put up to keep the restaurant in business — covering bounced checks, paying vendors, and dealing with restaurant repairs. “Brittany and I were told we were going to get our reimbursements the following week after our resignation,” LaFountain says. “And that never happened either.” (Light says they’ve been informed th that they will be reimbursed in full.)
A number of the staff, meanwhile, are still waiting on final paychecks and PTO to be paid out, which Light insists will happen in due course. “I really want the place to end up in good hands,” Light says. “I mean, I love the place; I put years of my life into it.”
