The booths at Tallyrand are full on a rainy Thursday, a scene that hasn’t changed in decades. What is changing, however, is the leadership. The iconic family-owned restaurant is in the midst of a generational handoff, as Karen Ross begins to pass the torch to her 26-year-old daughter, Katie. It’s a move that honors sixty-plus years of tradition while securing its future.
“The number one question I am asked is, ‘So, what’s the first thing you’re going to change?’” Katie said. “And I say the magic is what it is. I don’t plan on changing the menu. I don’t plan on reinventing the wheel here. We’ve done so well for so long for a reason. I’m not going to mess with that magic sauce.”
A 26-year-old leap of faith
For Karen, Katie’s arrival is history rhyming. She was also 26 when her brother Mark Thomas called with news in 1989 that their parents might sell. At the time, Karen was building a corporate career in mortgage banking. But the pull of the family business was too strong.
“I gave my notice and came here,” she recalled. She arrived to find a restaurant untouched by modern technology, where cooks deciphered handwritten tickets. Karen became the engine of modernization, introducing a point-of-sale system, adding the patio in 1995, and hustling for business everywhere from Chamber mixers to the lines for Johnny Carson’s farewell shows. “I was a hustler,” she said. “Just trying to drum up business wherever we could.”
A childhood dream in second grade
If Karen backed into the business, Katie ran toward it. “We recently found a craft from second grade,” Katie laughed. “It was, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, Tallyrand owner.’”
Despite a detour into public policy at USC and an internship on Capitol Hill, the restaurant world called her back. She took a job on the corporate culinary and operations team for the fast-casual chain CAVA in Washington D.C., testing new menu items for profitability and scalability. The experience was a revelation.
“If I liked the food industry there, and it’s not even a place that I own or have any tie to,” she realized, “surely I’ll like the restaurant.” After negotiating “one more year” away with her mother, she moved back to California at the end of June 2025.
“It’s the most fulfilling job ever,” she said.
Third generation, shared vision
For Karen, watching her daughter step into the role feels both emotional and rare.
“Not a lot of parents can work with their daughters,” Karen said. “We’ve had this discussion about how it could either work or not. We have the dynamic where she’s really excited to come in and continue the legacy my parents started, that Mark and I continued. It means a ton to me to have her here.”
The staff’s response made the transition easier than Karen imagined. Many employees have been with Tallyrand for decades; some watched Katie grow up, babysat her, and now take direction from her.
“I didn’t want to come in and just be their boss one day,” Katie said. “That never felt right to me. I ask them questions all the time.”
She spends most of her week working shifts on the floor, typically as a night shift lead, learning the front-of-house operations from the ground up. Mondays are “office days,” where she and Karen sit down to debrief the week, identify issues and prioritize projects.
Katie’s corporate experience is evident in her current projects, which focus on behind-the-scenes innovation. She is writing formal standard operating procedures, replacing tangled group texts with Slack for internal communication, and enhancing food-safety standards in the kitchen.
Karen appreciates the new level of discipline, noting that she herself only took over managing the kitchen after her brother retired last June. “The crew has been very open to any changes. They’re very respectful.”
For Katie, this backend modernization is key. The goal isn’t to change the customer-facing experience, but to strengthen the foundation it’s built on.
“I look at every room and there’s this art that doesn’t say anything about what we are,” Katie explained, gesturing to the paintings of street scenes and still lifes on the walls. “I’m interested in adding old school photos of my grandparents, photos of the building, old menus…really leaning into how long we’ve been around.”
Tradition with a twist
That doesn’t mean nothing new ever appears on the menu. Some ideas just grow out of curiosity.
Katie describes looking at the classic corned beef on rye and thinking it sounded “so boring” with just meat and bread. So she improvised with ingredients the kitchen already had: coleslaw, Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, grilled rye to melt the cheese.
She loved it. Her brother Matt loved it.
“Let’s call it the 818, because it’s our area code,” he said.
They ran it as a Wednesday special, made a simple Canva flyer, posted it on social media, and waited.
“Boom! It’s a big hit,” she said.
These kinds of tweaks fit within the boundaries of tradition. The cornerstone items, such as the turkey dinner that’s been on the menu since the earliest days, aren’t going anywhere. The homemade tartar sauce and blue cheese dressing still taste the way Karen remembers them from childhood.
The recipes once lived only in the heads and hands of longtime kitchen staff, particularly Karen’s brother, Mark, who worked at Tallyrand for more than 50 years before retiring in 2025.
When he decided to retire, he and his daughter Jenna gave Karen a parting gift: an 80-page “transfer of knowledge” document that reads like a bible of Tallyrand operations — from cleaning procedures to equipment schedules to the detailed playbook for their massive Thanksgiving service.
“We had no recipes written down,” Karen said. “But somehow the tartar sauce, the Thousand Island, the blue cheese, they all tasted the same. Now we have the recipes written down and stored on the computer. It’s progress.”
A place that feels like home
For regulars, the appeal of Tallyrand transcends the menu. They talk about a feeling. One customer described it as the place she and her husband go to navigate life’s biggest decisions, a booth that feels like home when everything else is uncertain.
“My goal is to create that warmth when people come here,” Karen said. “I want them to choose Tallyrand over a myriad of other options.”
That warmth starts with the staff. Tallyrand employs around 63 people, many from the same families — siblings, cousins, parents and children. A “new” server has often been there four or five years.
“You look around and see a lot of smiling faces from our crew,” Katie said. “Our bartender hugging regulars goodbye, servers checking in on people like old friends. There aren’t a lot of places where you get that much investment from your crew and your customers.”
“It’s just longevity,” Karen said. “I’m proud of it.”
Holding the past, building the future
The ghosts that haunt Tallyrand aren’t scary; they’re sentimental.
One employee swears he felt a tug on the leg while napping in the closed dining room, convinced it’s Karen’s mother reminding them to get back to work. Karen still sees her parents’ handwriting on old Rolodex cards upstairs, and the office door still carries a sign her father hung decades ago: “Leave your worries at the door.”
“I sense them here a lot,” Karen said quietly.
She’s spent nearly 40 years at Tallyrand, never having a traditional Thanksgiving at home, always working. What once felt like sacrifice now feels like a calling: serving customers who make Tallyrand their tradition and those whose holiday plans fell apart.
“It means so much to the people who come in that day,” Karen said. “It took me a long time to see Thanksgiving here as a treasure, but now it is.”
Looking ahead, Karen doesn’t see herself stepping away anytime soon. She loves the work too much: the bustle of the floor, the familiar faces, the daily problem-solving that comes with operating an aging building and a busy kitchen.
But she and Katie both know that over time, the balance will shift.
“In the next year or so, I’ll take on more of the boring or messy stuff,” Katie said, smiling at her mom. “So she can just enjoy the good parts and maybe take a few more trips here and there.”
For now, they’re side by side: one foot in the past, one in the future, both grounded in a place that has defined their family and their city for generations.
“When I don’t work a full shift, I just love to be here,” Karen said. “I’ll pop in, have a coffee, and run some food. I just love being here.”
And if Katie has her way, that feeling — and the “magic” she refuses to disturb — will still be there for the next generation of Burbank families walking through Tallyrand’s doors.
