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…