Jessica Koslow

What a difference a year (or a little more) makes. Since March 2025, Westchester’s beloved Californian farm-to-table restaurant Tomat was added to the California Michelin Guide, received a 2026 Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence and was named one of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America and added to the LA Times 101 Best Restaurants list.

It is almost too good to be true — but not when the chef is Harry Posner, who is of Persian heritage and has worked at The Clove Club in London and INUA in Tokyo, and your general manager is Miley Aryucharoen, who was named one of Punch’s Best New Bartenders of 2026. . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

Summer at Artelice Patisserie is special. Its three locations — West LA, Burbank and Studio City — are now serving mini fruit pastries and fruit Pavlovas made with produce sourced from farmers markets. Think peach, mango and strawberry — or peanut and pistachio.

Although the summer brings seasonal sweets, the pastry case at Artelice Patisserie is a sight to behold all year. 

“In our culture, whenever anything happens — you have a child, you go to anybody’s house, you buy a car, you marry someone — it’s a cultural thing that you buy pastries,” said Artelice co-owner Farid Azarang. “It has to visually look great, and it also has to taste great.” . . .

Read the entire article at Pasadena Weekly.

Level 8 is like the board game Candy Land but for adults. Instead of Lollipop Woods and Peanut Acres, guests can visit Japanese eatery Lucky Mizu and Mr. Wanderlust piano bar and jazz lounge. This first-of-its-kind dining, drinking and entertainment experience, which spans 30,000 square feet indoors and outdoors, occupies the entire eighth floor of the Moxy and AC Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. It includes eight establishments, ranging from The Brown Sheep food truck serving street food favorites to Sinners y Santos, a cathedral-inspired nightlife playground. 

Inspired by their travels around the world, twin brothers Mark and Jonnie Houston of Houston Hospitality partnered with Lightstone to debut Level 8 in 2023. 

Celebrated L.A. chef Ray Garcia helms both The Brown Sheep and Qué Bárbaro, a steak and seafood live fire grill restaurant. He was drawn to the opportunity to create a concept that could bring live-fire cooking and a strong point of view into a larger hospitality experience. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

Mastro’s opened its first location in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1999. Today, it has 20 locations across 15 major markets. Yet, there are a few things that have remained the same: The seafood tower arrives over a cloud of dry ice. The butter cake arrives warm. The steaks are cooked 28 days, wet-aged in a 1,500-degree broiler.

“We feel that 28-day wet aging is the optimal time for flavor and for the beef to tenderize,” said Patrick Barrett, the Divisional VP of Mastro’s. “We use a house steak dry rub that’s proprietary and then put them on a broiler at 1,500 degrees, and those broilers get a nice sear on the steak, a nice crust, and lock in all the flavor.”

Mastro’s is a place to celebrate special occasions, indulge before or after a game at Crypto.com Arena or Dodgers Stadium or dine after a long day at the Los Angeles Convention Center. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

Last week, Camélia celebrated its second birthday with a week of by-the-glass pours featuring some of the wine world’s most coveted producers.

“We opened a bunch of bottles of wine that are meaningful to us and that are sort of rare and in some cases fancy,” said Camélia’s beverage director and co-owner Courtney Kaplan. “Things that normally we would not be pouring by the glass, but we decided to open them up and share with our guests coming in as sort of a celebratory gesture.”

This week, from July 13-15, Camélia is offering Bastille Day (which is actually on July 14) specials, including plateau de fruits de mer, steak frites au poivre and bubbly (both wine and sake) available by the glass. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

Frozen sweet fans are in for a treat. It is almost too good to be true: Ice Cream Alley. Through Labor Day Weekend, Smorgasburg LA fans can turn left instead of right when entering and walk down a row of L.A.’s independent ice cream makers serving frozen treats. 

This summer marks the 10th anniversary of Ice Cream Alley, which made its first appearance at Smorgasburg LA on National Ice Cream Day in July 2016. In honor of the special occasion, on July 19 (this year’s National Ice Cream Day), Smorgasburg will host The Great Ice Cream Fair featuring exclusive treats, activities and DJs.

The evolution of Ice Cream Alley was very organic, according to Zach Brooks, Smorgasburg LA’s General Manager. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

Eating outdoors has always been in style. The pandemic made patios mandatory. Nowadays, it seems like every eatery has an outdoor seating area, and some are more magnificent than others. Some offer views of the sand and sea, while others are perched atop tall buildings overlooking the city and expansive sky.

There’s just something special about eating outdoors. Sometimes the food even tastes fresher. Here are some spots to grab patio snacks while you’re out on the town or chillin’ at the beach.

Located in the Maguire Gardens right next to the Los Angeles Public Library, where Café Pinot operated for 25 years until 2019, Settecento DTLA is an Italian restaurant that honors every part of Italy and offers a big outdoor patio. Its pizzas and pastas are made from scratch in-house with flour imported from Italy. The handful of salad options include insalata de farro, Caprese, insalata de Settecento (lettuce, raddichio, frisee, cucumber, radish, tomato, carrot, hardboiled egg and balsamic dressing) and prosciutto crudo e melone with 24-month aged parma prosciutto. Happy hour is every day from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. featuring menu items like bruschetta trio and Napoletano sliders with wagyu beef. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

Laura Francisco’s father was a welder. Her mother was a seamstress and stay-at-home mom of four. Once they arrived in California from New Jersey, the couple became quite successful restaurateurs. Their influence, from vibe to veal cannelloni, is felt everywhere at Radici Ristorante and Wine Room, Francisco’s very own establishment in Hermosa Beach.

Francisco’s mother, Lucia Gasbarri, is Radici’s executive chef, and she has her hands in everything. Gasbarri grew up in Pacentro, a tiny village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, watching her mom prepare homemade Italian dishes from family recipes.

The cuisine in Pacentro is fresh, made from high-quality ingredients and simple, which is hard to do, according to Francisco, “because there aren’t enough ingredients to hide any flaws. We don’t layer. Our food is very authentic. It’s a lifestyle, and that’s how we grew up.” . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

When Lynne Davidson, owner of Tito’s Tacos in Culver City, was going to step down from the Board of Directors for the LA County Chapter of the California Restaurant Association, she knew exactly who to appoint to replace her. Wilman Medina had been working for her for the past 12 years — it was his first job after graduating from Animo Inglewood Charter High School in 2013.

“As director of restaurant operations at Tito’s Tacos, Wilman brings a tremendous amount of hands-on experience to the California Restaurant Association due to his overseeing what has become a pretty popular Mexican food restaurant which my grandfather founded back in 1959,” said Davidson, the granddaughter of founder Benjamin Davidson. “We are all extremely proud of Wilman, who conscientiously worked his way to the top during some of the most difficult years for restaurants to survive in America.”

“It’s really an honor being asked to serve because it feels like a recognition of all those years of hard work and dedication,” said Medina. “It’s an opportunity to give back to the industry that has given me so much. I also want to learn from other leaders across California and help make sure that other restaurants continue to thrive.” . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

There’s a story that goes along with the Mardi Gras bead-covered grand piano at Evangeline Swamp Room, located next door to the beloved eatery, The Little Jewel of New Orleans. It is the work of John K. Lawson, a New Orleans-based artist, and it was once a fixture at Ralph Brennan’s Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney. In 2023, Brennan’s was looking to rebrand and, in doing so, remove the piano. Since Doug Legacy was the resident pianist for the past five years, it was offered to him.

“Doug would come in over the years,” said Eunah Beniger Kang, one-half of the husband-wife owners of The Little Jewel of New Orleans and Evangeline Swamp Room. “He’s from Louisiana. When he found out that we had the idea for a bar — because we had been talking about this for a long time — he said, ‘I have this grand piano that I think would be a great fit for your space.’ We’re like, ‘How about rolling it on over to our bar and you can play it on the weekends?’ So, that’s what we’re doing now.”

Legacy plays on Saturdays from 2 to 6 p.m. and Sundays from 5 to 8 p.m. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.