About Bestia
When Ori and Genevieve Menashe opened Bestia in a converted industrial space on E 7th Place in 2012, they created something Los Angeles had been conspicuously lacking: a restaurant with the technical seriousness of a fine dining kitchen and the energy of a room that genuinely wants you to have a good time. Fourteen years later, it remains one of the most sought-after reservations in Southern California — and one of the very few that fully justifies its difficulty.
The menu is nominally Italian but more accurately described as Ori Menashe's cooking — deeply personal, uncompromisingly from-scratch, and organized around a whole-animal, fermentation-forward philosophy that begins with the charcuterie program. The salumi and house-cured meats produced in Bestia's curing room are among the finest in the country: coppa aged for months, nduja that goes into the wood-fired pizza, housemade lardo that appears as a garnish and as a sauce and sometimes simply as itself on warm bread. Order the salumi plate without reservation; it is the frame through which everything else should be understood.
The handmade pastas represent Menashe's other obsession: chestnut and mushroom agnolotti stuffed with mascarpone and dressed with fried sage and fennel pollen; roasted bone marrow with spinach gnocchetti; rigatoni with Sicilian pork sausage and broccolini rabe. The Acunto wood-fired oven that dominates the kitchen produces blistered, charred-edge pizzas that would headline any restaurant that didn't also offer this pasta. The whole grilled fish and dry-aged steaks serve a room that comes hungry and expects to leave satisfied rather than merely impressed.
The dining room is high-ceilinged, loud in the best way, and always full. This is a place to eat well with people you like, not to contemplate in reverent silence. The wine list is serious about Italian producers and reasonably priced. Reserve two to three weeks ahead for weekdays; longer for weekends.
