Four days a week the line for Wilde’s stretches down the block, even in the rain. One of the city’s buzziest new restaurants sees guests queueing for lightly battered sea bass fried to a shattering crisp, or the pucks of tender duck rillettes, or the rich slices of Welsh rarebit — a rarity in Los Angeles. The modern-British menu at Wilde’s is making waves far beyond Los Feliz, and so is the line to get in.
Owners Natasha Price and Tatiana Ettensberger envisioned Wilde’s as a kind of walk-in restaurant built for the neighborhood. They’d never imagined the immediate clamor for its 10 tables, nor the lines that begin forming before they open the doors each day.
“The response and turnout that we’ve gotten has been so deeply flattering and incredible,” said Ettensberger, a former manager and wine buyer at Café Triste, “and also painful in that there’s only so many people we can seat.”
About 80% of their seating is reserved for walk-ins, with the 20% of reservations spread throughout the night. Guests put their names down and receive a text when the table is ready, usually one and a half to two hours later. If there are seats available at the small counter along the restaurant’s front window, one can sit and order wine and small plates until the table is available.
By 9 p.m., Ettensberger said, there’s almost always space for walk-ins in the dining room. Her best advice is to line up early or arrive late, or put your name down expecting a wait, and then stop in for a drink at one of the neighborhood’s multiple other mom-and-pop bars and restaurants until that text notification.
During daytime service the white tablecloths disappear, turnover time is quicker, guests order at the counter and little glass pedestals of sausage rolls, persimmon tea cakes, scones and quiche line the shelves near the register.
Price and Ettensberger view British cuisine as the throughline of their menu, but Wilde’s also incorporates the light touch and seasonality of California cuisine.
“There’s a lot of interesting flavors that run through British cuisine,” said Price. “At the same time a lot of it, to me, is just rustic and using local ingredients, and we also have that here.”
Their whole-hog program means cracklings in the kohlrabi salad, house-made coppa di testa served with garlicky whipped lardo, and freshly ground bangers — or sausages — atop mashed potatoes with brown-sauce mostarda. That program is inspired and led by chef de cuisine Sarah Durning, formerly pastry chef of Dunsmoor and a butcher at Gwen.
British cuisine, they agreed, gets a bad — and false — rap for blandness. They try to pepper in those “surprises,” like nods to curry or HP sauce, in hidden methods to form what Price calls “this little question mark that happens,” keeping diners intrigued or on their toes.
Their partnership is a long one. Price and Ettensberger met at the ages of 1 and 2; their families would spend every Friday night together, usually dining through L.A.’s independent restaurants.
“It was all we knew,” said Ettensberger. “That’s how you socialize, that’s how you spend your weekends: going to restaurants and enjoying it with the people that you love.”
That shared foundation is what led to opening a restaurant together, and the restaurant is named for Price’s niece: the first child in a new generation from either of their families, who all grew up around dinner tables together.
Ettensberger and Price separately moved to the Northeast in early adulthood, with Price cooking at Mina’s NYC in MoMA PS1. When they’d both moved back to L.A. they launched a popular backyard ticketed dinner series called Seconds — and began planning their full restaurant.
Price was born in England and visited family there throughout her life, but when she began her culinary career, British food was never a focus. It wasn’t until they began mapping out Wilde’s that her mind kept circling to what felt most like home: savory pies, hearty fare and “simple food on a plate,” all of which synched with Ettensberger’s wine tendencies toward rustic pairings. Her spotlighting of independent vintners, she said, echoes Price’s local-farm mentality.
Desserts are helmed by Durning, and are what Price calls “rustic but really intentional,” like a fluffy wedge of sticky toffee pudding with a just-brûléed aged vanilla jaggery crust.
That menu is what’s drawing guests to Wilde’s for hours-long waits. But the team hopes it mellows into a neighborhood stalwart once the opening rush dies down.
“I don’t think it’s always going to be this way,” Ettensberger said. “Obviously it can’t. If we’re lucky enough where people still really want to eat here that often, maybe we’ll have to switch in some way to reservations. But it is definitely something we’re experimenting with and trying to figure out.”
Wilde’s is open Wednesday to Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and from 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.
1850 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 284-8178, wildesla.com
Clark’s Oyster Bar
First Clark’s Oyster Bar touched down in Montecito and the Bay Area. Now the popular seafood restaurant founded in Austin is shucking oysters, slicing crudo and ladling thick New England clam chowder in Malibu.
Clark’s restaurant group, MML Hospitality, operates more than 20 restaurants across Texas, California and Colorado, but Clark’s is the company’s seafood gem, serving oak-grilled Spanish octopus, lobster rolls with drawn butter, rockfish with grits, linguine with clams, crab omelets, cioppino and more. Its Malibu location also spotlights Pacific Coast seafood, along with its wine list that also draws from the Central Coast. Non-seafood options include steak, a burger draped in Gruyère and salads.
The Malibu location sits along an edge of the new Cross Creek Ranch development project and boasts a raw bar, 175 seats, an aquarium, a fireplace and a patio. Clark’s Oyster Bar is open in Malibu Sunday to Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
23465 Civic Center Way, Suite 210, Malibu, (310) 879-8508, clarksoysterbar.com
The Ramona Room
Echo Park’s Elf Cafe closed in the spring after nearly 20 years in business, but its owners recently brought the space back to life with Ramona Room.
The new amaro bar’s team also owns Middle Eastern restaurant Dune and European cafe Bar Sinizki, and their latest operation features a few nods to both. Bar Sinizki’s beverage director, Shawn Shepherd, also heads the program at Ramona Room, where he’s built a menu around California and Italian amari, plus European ports and sherries. They can be ordered a la carte or as highballs or house cocktails.
Head chef Marc Lopez — formerly of Little Dom’s, Budonoki and Mírate — is cooking up a globetrotting menu of bar bites such as house-smoked mussels escabeche, a Cubano sandwich, and a range of tacos on fresh tortillas, including a nopales variety that comes smeared with Dune’s hummus. Ramona Room is open daily from 5 to 11 p.m.
2135 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, instagram.com/theramonaroom
Cafe Matcha
A diner-inspired riff on matcha is now open in Studio City, offering pastries, milkshakes, whimsical drinks and a selection of imported tea from a familiar coffee brand.
Cafe Matcha is a new project from prolific chain Alfred Coffee, and from a corner of the Laurel Promenade mall in Studio City it’s serving waffles under matcha milk jam, ham curry buns, and hojicha apple galettes alongside cream-top matcha lattes, hand-whisked rare matchas and more.
It builds on the tea focus of Alfred Tea Room, the coffee chain’s tea-based offshoot that ran from 2017 to 2023. But at Cafe Matcha it’s entirely about powdered green tea, which the shop sources from multiple provinces across Japan. Matcha apparati, such as whisks, shakers and tumblers, are also for sale. The food menu, created by Konbi vet Kiyoshi Tsukamoto, fuses traditional Japanese ingredients with Americana stalwarts, resulting in items like miso cinnamon buns under a shio koji vanilla glaze. Cafe Matcha is open Tuesday to Sunday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
12070 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, cafe-matcha.com
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