Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon-based award-winning food writer and author of 10 cookbooks. She is a regular recipe tester and editor for Eater as well as for restaurants and appliance brands.
I once skipped several sessions of an expensive culinary conference in Los Angeles just so I could sit in a cab for something like two hours in heavy traffic to make it to Gjelina. In 2016, Gjelina was all anyone at the conference would talk about, so I played hooky to experience the low-key Venice restaurant with all the hype and man, I was glad I did.
My fellow colleagues/truants and I dove into the hyper-seasonal, vegetable-driven menu with the zeal of sun-starved non-Californians, ordering nearly everything and eating like it was our job, because it is. There were some very lovely salads done with the sort of insouciant minimalism that put California cuisine on the map, a few astonishingly delicate handmade pastas, and the star of the show, Gjelina’s famous Neapolitan-style pizzas. All floofy, charred edges, they were topped with things that made me, a former pizzaiola, swoon. The bold anchovy, roasted tomatoes, and smoked mozzarella pie was so impressive that I picked up a copy of then chef Travis Lett’s 2015 Gjelina cookbook on my way out the door…