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Gjelina didn’t invent kale, wood fires, or the vegetable staples of a restaurant. But when it opened its doors in Venice Beach in 2008, it did bring all of those elements together in a format that shook up the restaurant world like a shot of ginger root. The food at Gjelina wasn’t the California treats that had come before. The cooking borrowed the respect for ingredients of Chez Panisse without embracing its simplicity; the sophisticated mash-up pizza of Spago without its Eurocentric arrogance; the culinary precision of the French Laundry without its fussy formality. Chef Travis Lett was passionate about almost everything—produce, sourcing, seasonality, herbs, spices, the texture of sourdough or pizza crust—and that passion resulted in a restaurant that was practically flawless. Even today, stepping off the hot sidewalks of Los Angeles into Gjelina’s cool, rustic interior feels like donning a full-body pair of sunglasses. The menu is huge, printed in tiny type, creating a sense of shocking and awe-inspiring abundance. Nearly every dish is a triumph of prep cuisine: silky sauce, homemade pickles, vibrant salsa, curious sourdough. I confess, it’s one of my favorite places in the world.
Many pizzas from Los Angeles menus have found their way to New York.
Gjelina’s New York outpost has been in the works for nearly a decade. It first broke in 2016, when a partnership was announced between the Gjelina team and influential New York restaurateur Ken Friedman, who at the time owned the restaurant’s space, a two-story building on a cobblestone street in NoHo. Then came the woes. Friedman faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct (he denied the charges) and exited the project. The pandemic ebbed and flowed. In 2023, just four weeks after the initial grand opening, a fire broke out in the restaurant’s vents. Finally, Gjelina New York opened in November, though all these years later, it’s been hard to recapture the same thrilling sense of anticipation I felt when it was first announced. Mostly, I felt a little sour that New Yorkers barely had time to enjoy the glory of their Gjelina before another one opened at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Vegas, of all places! They don't even have enough farm there to call it “farm-to-table.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
