Providence’s Michael Cimarusti opens Best Girl, the new restaurant at the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles
It’s midafternoon at the L.A. Chapter restaurant inside the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, and the dining room looks like a scene out of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” A woman carrying two tiny terriers, one with its hair dyed pink and another with its hair dyed Dodgers blue, breezes through the restaurant, on her way up to the rooftop bar, her entourage in tow. A slight man with dark shoulder-length hair saunters in like a rock star. And a couple of women seated near the window toast full glasses of rosé.
“Everyone here is just so cool,” says Michael Cimarusti, sitting at a table in the middle of the dining room.
The chef, who is known for helming the kitchen at Providence, one of the most lauded restaurants in the country (it was No. 1 on Jonathan Gold’s Best Restaurants list four years in a row), is taking over the almost 4-year-old L.A. Chapter.
When the restaurant opens Tuesday morning, it will have a new name, Best Girl, and a new menu by Cimarusti and chef de cuisine Adam Walker (formerly of Del Posto and Spice Market). The name comes from the movie “My Best Girl,” the first film shown in the adjacent Theatre at Ace Hotel, which opened on Halloween, 1927.
It’s a departure for the chef, known for his seafood-centric tasting menus at his Melrose Avenue fine dining restaurant, as well as the upscale seafood shack Connie and Ted’s in West Hollywood.
“The whole vibe is very different, obviously, than Providence and Connie and Ted’s, but it offers an opportunity to do something that’s just different than what I’ve been doing the last 13 years,” says Cimarusti.
Cimarusti and Walker will be responsible for breakfast, lunch and dinner at the restaurant, located adjacent to the hotel lobby, as well as room service for hotel guests. Room service from one of the best chefs in the country? Indeed.
“The food that we’re going to be serving here is very much like the kind of food you’d have if you came to dinner at my house, including pastries from my wife, who is a former pastry chef. ” says Cimarusti. His wife is Crisi Echiverri, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., like her husband who worked in the kitchens of Wolfgang Puck and Pierre Hermé, and she’s making all the desserts for the restaurant. “There are a lot of influences from everything that we’ve experienced in our lives. We eat in the San Gabriel Valley more than anything else. It reflects L.A.”
For breakfast, there’s chilaquiles, overnight oats, and buckwheat pancakes, which Cimarusti insists were unintentionally gluten-free. He’s making a burger with Cabot cheddar, caramelized onion and umeboshi mayonnaise served on a potato bun that he’s having Clark Street Bread’s Zack Hall make for him. And larger entrées include calamarata pasta with Calabrian pork ragù; Duroc pork chop with turnip and apple; and grilled hanger steak with squash, cipollini onions and horseradish.
Cimarusti is still serving oysters and clams, but don’t expect the full spectrum of seafood the chef is known for at his other restaurants, as well as his Fairfax seafood market, Cape Seafood and Provisions.
All the wine, beer and cocktails on the menu were designed by partner and Providence co-owner and General Manager Donato Poto and beverage director Mary Bartlett (formerly of Honeycut) to be the “best version of the things you already want.” Exhibit A: Bartlett’s version of a pisco sour, called Lucky Girl, and made with pisco, a hibiscus-infused vermouth, grapefruit and lime.
Cimarusti’s return to downtown is part opportunism and part kismet. Before opening Providence, the chef worked at the Water Grill downtown for seven years. He and Poto, who runs front of the house operations for all of Cimarusti’s restaurants, looked at around 10 properties downtown in the 13 years since he left Water Grill.
And although the restaurant is in a hotel, Cimarusti insists it’s not a “hotel restaurant.”
“The idea of doing a hotel restaurant, everyone thinks that the food has to be safe, it has to be approachable,” says Cimarusti. “We haven’t dumbed anything down. It’s a distinctive restaurant that people can come back to because the dishes draw them back; it just happens to be in a hotel.”
So, when the new signage goes up Tuesday morning, nothing physical in the dining room will have changed. The clientele will still be cool. The celebrity illustrations (a distraught Britney Spears on one wall, a young Michael Jackson on another) on the walls will still stare back at you. The soundtrack in the dining room will still be one of the best around. But you’ll be digging into a burger made for you by one of the best chefs in the country.
927 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 235-9660, www.bestgirldtla.com.
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