The blocky, three-story building at 9575 West Pico Blvd., plastered with an ornate Second Empire facade, looks out of place and out of time. By Los Angeles standards it has stood for an eternity, housing long-gone institutions like Osteria Romana Orsini beginning in the 1960s.
Its basement level, though, has a modern history all its own, where an improbable number of right-moment, right-time restaurants have operated since early last decade — including its latest, exceptionally thrilling occupant.
It began in 2010 with Test Kitchen, a pop-up concept that restaurateur Bill Chait helmed to help pay the bills while the floor above was built out to showcase Ricardo Zarate’s Peruvian cooking. The jostle of chefs (Michael Voltaggio, Bricia Lopez and Jordan Kahn among them) gave emerging and established talents a high-energy playground, and sell-out crowds furthered the truism that Los Angeles audiences will flock to impermanent spaces for inspired experiments.
Steve Samson and Zach Pollack had cooked at Test Kitchen and turned the address into Sotto in 2011. During its eight-year run, the pair advanced our then-nascent pizza scene with handsomely charred neo-Neapolitan pies, often porky with guanciale or ’nduja (it was the era of the in-house cured-meats craze), plus smart vegetable plates and pastas in regionally specific shapes. Walter and Margarita Manzke took over with their bistro Bicyclette in 2021, giving the pandemic-battered city some needed joie de vivre with Champagne cocktails, caramelized onion tarte tatin and golden gnocchi Parisienne before closing in 2024.
Which brings us to Lielle, one of the decade’s most exciting and assured debuts, in this or any other L.A. restaurant space.
Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark moved to town four years ago, his résumé trailing a string of Michelin stars from Stockholm and Singapore. Jernmark did not announce himself grandly. He didn’t rush into a project. He learned the city. He considered what might be lacking in the dining sphere, what niche he was most suited to carve. After a lifetime of working for others, he opened Lielle (named for his daughter) in February, remaking the familiar room into a subterranean lair with glamorous wine-cave trappings and leaning into finer-dining realms.
“Finer,” meaning: four substantial set courses, which change every six or so weeks, for $150 per person. In an era of $400 tasting menus, the cost lands as reasonable given the meal’s many junctions of meticulous artistry and down-to-earth deliciousness.
Jernmark’s genius doesn’t jump out through a perfunctory scroll of Lielle’s dishes on social media. Pretty piles of precisely snipped vegetables; little hills of crunchy doodads and luxe seafood; meats strewn with leaves and surrounded with sauces just so; an icy something among perfect California fruit presented in a silver goblet to finish: Well-fed obsessives have seen the aesthetics before.
But I’ll zoom in on an opener from a late June menu. A clear glass bowl arrives, its center filled with diced dry-aged tuna, wax beans in tiny pale triangles, bits of charred green peach, slivered green almonds (which, shelled, are ghostly white) and pinkish preserved gooseberries, their grapey tartness echoing through a dressing of shoyu infused with the fruit. Crudo but not crudo, salad but not salad, a gorgeous rummage of ingredients popping off flashbulb-bright acidity.
Trailing right behind: a small loaf of visibly crusty sourdough, which one of the affable staff members will briefly mention was fermented for 36 hours and incorporates an umami-boosting variation of miso made from bread. Alongside, another person whisks over a tall, yolk-yellow block of butter, churned in-house for 48 hours and formed into the craggy shape of one of Rodin’s intentionally incomplete sculptures.
All the data equate to a bread-and-butter moment of outsize pleasure — salty, melty, nutty-malty, crunchy, porridge-y pleasure.
And while bread and butter has been a trope of restaurant meals in Western culture for centuries, it’s rarely this sublime, and its place as a counterpoint to an acid-blasted dish is deliberate.
The specificity of cured, fermented, smoky elements? The precise tension of fruits paired with meats, a recurring theme I’ve tasted over the months at Lielle in lamb offset with Oroblanco grapefruit, duck matched to just-ripe plum and squab zinged with black apple caramel? The penchant to serve gently sour flavors side by side with triumphs of dairy and wheat, two foodstuffs that embody comfort and warmth?
These qualities all strike me as fundamentally Scandinavian.
Jernmark laughed when I rattled off this checklist in a phone interview. “Nordic food is ultimately only rooted in one thing: survival,” he said. “But yes, we do apply these techniques to build flavors, and, you know, to create good food.”
Los Angeles was spared the worst of last decade’s New Nordic trend, which produced restaurants (many short-lived) that were oddly chilly and begat plates of astringent, piney punishments. Jernmark favors “bistronomy” to describe Lielle, a term with more meaning in Paris than the United States, but employed here in honest spirit: smaller space, smaller menu, pared-down operations (as opposed to a lofty temple of gastronomy), incredibly high execution.
In other words, Jernmark is a master of symmetry: He can embrace sumptuousness, evidenced in the room’s redesign steered by the firm Lovers Unite. Arches of barrel-vaulted cork ceiling span overhead. Dark-clay brick floors lead to cherrywood tables and burgundy leather banquettes, many built as side-by-side love seats.
He chose a front-of-house team full of distinct personalities. Some are endearingly earnest, others polite and serious. Vitally, they coalesce as a unit. They whiz around tables with intent but not ostentation. The menu usually includes a couple of opulent pastas as optional additions — buttery spaghetti with uni and red prawns, or agnolotti stuffed with veal and Gruyère and dotted with grilled morels — and you trust them when they suggest that ordering one, even if you’re curious about both, is enough.
Returning to bread: Dinner’s conclusion is usually sweet but also sharp. Maybe Harry’s Berries strawberries with elderflower granita, tangy sake-lees ice cream and ultra-fragrant lemon verbena, or a brainy play on tres leches encased in dried-milk skin that crackled like candy. Palate-cleansing, complex, but also leaving an urge for a more primal satisfaction.
And here it comes: a golden round of cardamom buns, as gratifying to pull apart as Parker House rolls. They’re baked, and then soaked again, in a Jernmark concoction riffing on Swedish punsch, steeped with rum and apricots and handfuls of spices. Separating them (with your hands, or even the scissors hardly anyone uses) is a childlike delight; savoring the boozy burn feels very adult. Emotional regulation? Complete.
A pattern has existed in L.A. over the decades in which accomplished chefs from elsewhere show up intent on enlightening us, certain our dining populace needs education, or they disappear into some blurry interpretation of “California cuisine” that no one, including the creator, winds up understanding.
Lielle transcends those perils. The restaurant, packed nightly, doubles as a master class on how to conduct an effective introduction to Los Angeles. No universal formula exists, but Jernmark stayed true to his refined style, his instinct for balance and, subtly, his background and culture. Then he tailored his exhilarating cuisine to a concise format within a lavish cocoon.
There’s more. The space upstairs, most recently occupied by tasting-menu cathedral Manzke, is now Jernmark’s casual outpost, a bistro he launched a month ago called Marée. From an early visit, I can recommend tossing back Marée’s escargot beignets like savory bonbons, and the saucy, peppery burger delivers.
His divided attention also meant Lielle’s summer menu of tomato salad, monkfish in bouillabaisse and beef with grilled corn was its most understated. Granted, the California heat waves could blunt any Nordic survival instinct. I’m excited for Jernmark to revert his keenest devotion to downstairs, a new crown jewel in Los Angeles dining.
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