From the Coulons of San Diego to the Langers of Los Angeles, daughters and granddaughters give Southern California’s restaurant traditions a tasty future.
By Holden DeMayo, PillartoPost.org Dining Guru--In the Coulon family, the route from childhood to a restaurant kitchen was a short one. The children went there after school. They watched, helped, learned and, when they got home, sometimes played restaurant. Years later, three granddaughters of Don and Arlene Coulon opened Little Lion on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. By then, the family business had supplied both an education and a powerful suggestion about what to do with their lives.
Their aunt, Michele Coulon, had already made her own choice. Once a computer-industry professional who hurried back to the family restaurant to bake desserts, she built a La Jolla business around the proposition that something sweet ought to be worth eating. Between her pastry shop and her nieces’ coastal café, the Belgian Lion’s descendants have given San Diego several good reasons to remember the name.
Up the coast to Los Angeles, a comparable story has unfolded around another celebrated surname. Trisha Langer, granddaughter of Al and Jean Langer and daughter of Norm Langer, carried her deli apprenticeship from Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park neighborhood to West Hollywood. Her restaurant is called Daughter’s Deli. The name supplies the genealogy; the food has to do the rest.
These families offer a particularly appetizing answer to the question of what happens after the founders. A restaurant can survive through its recipes, its standards and the people who learn them. Sometimes the next generation also needs a place of its own.
In San Diego. the Coulons, the American restaurant story began in 1977, when Don and Arlene opened the Belgian Lion in Old Town. They later moved it to Ocean Beach. Over its long run, the restaurant became a local reference point for European cooking and attentive hospitality. Its influence would continue after the original dining room closed.
The preparation had begun abroad. During Michele’s high-school years, the family lived in Paris and visited her father’s relatives in Liège. Her Belgian grandmother, also named Anne-Marie, made waffles and fruit pies that remained vivid in Michele’s memory. Arlene attended cooking school in France and passed the pastry lessons along to her daughter.
At home, they took turns whipping ingredients by hand. The education required effort, and it ended with something good to eat.
Arlene initially talked of opening a dessert shop when the family returned to San Diego. Don proposed a restaurant instead. That decision created the Belgian Lion, where Michele made desserts while studying computer science and working in the computer industry.
Eventually, she left that career and took on restaurant jobs while developing her dessert business. It was an apprenticeship in the less glamorous requirements of independence: earning enough, finding time and doing whatever needed doing. Michele Coulon Dessertier, at 7556 Fay Avenue in La Jolla, gives that history a deliciously specific address.
The menu includes a flourless chocolate Cognac cake layered with chocolate ganache, alongside other cakes, tarts and sweets. There is a savory side, too, including quiche and café fare. A visit need not depend on a birthday, although the cakes make a persuasive case for finding something to celebrate.
Michele’s stated philosophy favors excellent ingredients and proper methods, however much time they require. Her cakes may be decorative, but their purpose remains wonderfully practical: someone is going to eat them. That is a useful priority.
The third generation gave the family story another dining room. Little Lion’s founders are sisters Anne-Marie, Jacqueline and Dominique Coulon, granddaughters of Don and Arlene and nieces of Michele. The original division of responsibilities put Anne-Marie in the kitchen, Jacqueline in charge of beverages and the front of the house, and Dominique on marketing and branding. That arrangement recognized a restaurant’s need for several different talents.
At 1424 Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, the café occupies a small building near the place where the neighborhood gives way to the curving coastal road. It is an appropriate setting for a family tradition finding its own Southern California expression. The sisters’ early statement of purpose acknowledged their grandparents while making room for a different restaurant and menu.
The guiding family motto was brief: “Food is love, love is family.”
There is substance behind the sentiment. San Diego Magazine’s August 2026 profile singled out the Belgian waffle, made with batter fermented for two days, and the Belgian potatoes, along with housemade granola with passionfruit curd and a power bowl with pesto and cashew cream. Those dishes suggest the range: inherited Belgian pleasures sharing a menu with the way coastal Californians eat now.
The same profile recounts Anne-Marie’s decisive visit to the smoothie shop that would become Little Lion. After a catering mishap in her car, she went to the shop and asked its owner about selling. The owner had just decided to retire. Anne-Marie eventually hung plates from her grandparents’ restaurant on the walls of her own. The objects came along; the next chapter required her own work.
Little Lion’s present offerings extend beyond daytime meals to dinner, take-home food and other services. Its small scale makes reservations sensible. For an admirer of the Belgian Lion, it offers a chance to follow the family forward. For someone discovering the Coulons over a waffle, the ancestral connection can be a pleasant second discovery.
The Los Angeles chapter begins three decades earlier than the Belgian Lion. Al and Jean Langer founded their deli in 1947. The original restaurant had only 12 seats. Norm began working for his father in 1963, and the business grew into the MacArthur Park institution familiar to generations of Angelenos.
Survival through changing neighborhood conditions became part of its history, alongside the sandwiches.
Langer’s reputation rests on a highly disciplined pleasure: hot pastrami and good rye bread. The famous No. 19 adds Swiss cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing to hand-cut pastrami on double-baked rye. It is a particular arrangement of rich meat, sharp and creamy accompaniments, and substantial bread. Reproducing that arrangement day after day is the sort of achievement that can look easy from a booth.
Norm’s explanation to Michelin emphasized consistency: customers should receive the same quality that established the restaurant’s reputation. That kind of teaching gives a successor something exacting to inherit. The family name may bring people through the door, but it also gives them a very clear expectation of lunch.
Trisha’s training began before she could reach all the equipment. In her own account, her grandmother supervised her first job rolling Swiss cheese for catering trays. After college, she returned to the family business and spent 14 years learning from her father.
Her husband’s favorite courtship story involves her coming home from a busy day of hand-cutting pastrami alongside Norm. Restaurant work was already part of the conversation. In November 2018, Trisha and her husband opened Daughter’s Deli on the Sunset Strip.
It was her own venture, with a smaller menu and a different style of service. Family connections appeared in the sandwich names: Papa honored Al with a version of the No. 19; Nana honored Jean with corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on grilled rye.
Here was a family album that could also serve lunch. The resemblance to Little Lion is compelling. Both businesses were created by grandchildren who had spent years close to the founding restaurant.
Both used that experience to establish something personally their own. The names acknowledge the relationship openly, while leaving room for the next generation’s choices.
Daughter’s Deli is also in a period of transition. Its website identifies a forthcoming location at 8618 Sunset Boulevard in Sunset Plaza. The move is part of the continuing story, and diners should confirm reopening and service arrangements directly before making the trip.
Meanwhile, Langer’s original restaurant continues at Seventh and Alvarado, approaching eight decades in business.
What joins these Southern California families is the patient transfer of knowledge: a mother teaching pastry in a Paris apartment, grandparents making room for children in a restaurant kitchen, a father showing his daughter how to carve pastrami. Such lessons accumulate quietly, long before anyone designs a sign for the next restaurant.
Don and Arlene Coulon, and Al and Jean Langer, founded places people wanted to return to. Their children and grandchildren have undertaken the harder part of the tribute: opening the doors, doing the work and giving another generation a reason to come hungry.
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