Alex Carrasco is opening Durango Cantina on Melrose Avenue.
The pace of Los Angeles restaurant openings has ramped up recently, with high-profile chefs and operators making big bets around the city even while facing challenges like staffing issues and permitting delays. The customers are back, too, and you can feel their pent-up energy in packed dining rooms. Every night out in Los Angeles can (and in many ways should) feel like a big night now. Here are three newcomers that are ready for the spotlight.
Alex Carrasco, the accomplished LA chef who earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand nod for West Adam’s Bee Taqueria (where he shook up the taquero scene with a taco omakase), is about to take Mexican food in another direction on Melrose Avenue. Durango Cantina, the new restaurant that Boulevard Hospitality Group and Carrasco are opening on Friday, will offer hearty, soul-warming dishes inspired by Mexico’s Durango region.
Lamb shank (prepared in the style of Durango wedding feasts) with ancho chile and dred chipotle will be braised for six hours and served with three kinds of handmade corn tortillas. Beef ribs will be braised overnight. Discado estilo Duranguese is a mixed grill extravaganza with homemade chorizo and linguica sausage, finished in a charcoal oven. Desserts like buñuelos topped with ice cream and strawberry powder are no less festive.
The restaurant, like Bee Taqueria, is clearly a way for Carrasco (a veteran chef who’s worked in prominent kitchens for Nancy Silverton, Phillip Frankland Lee and Ricardo Zarate) to showcase his own vision.
Bar Monette puts caviar and truffles on a margherita if you want an over-the-top pizza.
Sean MacDonald, a talented and multifaceted chef from Canada whose accolades include being one of The Art of Plating’s 16 Rising Talents for North America, has big plans for a fine-dining restaurant and more in Los Angeles. For now, he’s getting things off to a more casual but still elegant start with Bar Monette, a new-school Santa Monica tapas bar that serves beautifully arranged, evocative and deeply delicious plates of local citrus, foam-topped pasta and truffled creamed corn. This hot spot, designed by MacDonald himself, is sexy all-around, with a striking green hue in a cozy and transporting space that might make you feel like you’re in the hottest restaurant in New York’s West Village instead of a quick stroll away from the Santa Monica beach.
Neapolitan pizzas, including one topped with pesto and Dungeness crab and also the baller “Monette’s margherita” with caviar and truffles, are crowd-pleasers. Dipping sauces like jalapeno tonnato are in no way an afterthought. And MacDonald is also a pastry ace, so you’ll probably want pavlova and cake, too.
Shigenori Fujimoto gives Ventura Boulevard another stellar sushi option.
This sprawling, 5,000-square-foot Studio City restaurant from chef Shigenori Fujimoto (formerly at Asanebo nearby and Matsuhita), restaurateur Frank Leon (who turned both his legendary La Loggia space and the adjacent Ceremony restaurant into Leona’s) and actor Evan Ross offers a crowd-pleasing array of distinct experiences. You can visit the living room or garden for a meal of genre-blending dishes like oxtail bao, sweet shrimp tiradito, udon carbonara, chaufa paella and shimeji risotto or just enjoy a loungey night with fireplace-adjacent cocktails and beautiful-people-watching.
But the most luxurious experience is sitting at the counter in the sushi room, where Fujimoto serves both a la carte nigiri and omakase with top-tier selections like nodoguro, toro, aji and hotate as well as caviar-topped oysters, uni-topped oysters and truffle-topped halibut sashimi.
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