The Best New Restaurant in Los Angeles Is in a Former Church

There's a particular kind of restaurant that opens in Los Angeles every few weeks. It has a name made of two unrelated nouns. It has a chef who trained in Copenhagen. It has a menu printed on butcher paper and a wine list of nothing but skin contact. It is photographed beautifully and discussed exhaustively and then, six months later, it is closed.

Hermon's is not that restaurant.

Hermon's opened in December in a former church banquet hall on Monterey Road, on the edge of a neighborhood most Angelenos couldn't find on a map. It has 14-foot ceilings, a U-shaped bar, half-circle booths the size of small lifeboats, and a menu that includes a loaded potato fritter and a two-sheet lasagna vongole. It is the new project from Last Word Hospitality — the people behind Found Oyster, Queen Street Raw Bar, Barra Santos, and a handful of other places that share a kind of unfussy seriousness about cooking. It is, by a small but growing consensus, the best new restaurant in Los Angeles.

It also, somehow, already feels like it's been there forever.

That trick — the new place that doesn't feel new — is the hardest thing to pull off in restaurants. You can't fake it with reclaimed wood or vintage neon. It comes from a kind of confidence that's almost impossible to manufacture. You either have it or you don't.

The team here has it. Adam Weisblatt, the co-founder, lives in South Pasadena and had been eyeing the church banquet hall for years before the deal came together. Chef DK Kolender — brother of Found Oyster's Ari Kolender, formerly a menswear designer in New York — runs the kitchen. The mood is what they call "American chophouse," which is shorthand for: we will cook you a ribeye but we will also make you a scallop crudo so bright it tastes like a window being opened.

What you should order: the lasagna vongole. It looks more like a flatbread than a lasagna, two thin sheets of pasta layered with clams, cream, guanciale, parmigiano, and breadcrumbs, and it is the dish people are leaving the restaurant texting their friends about. The loaded potato fritter — bacon, chives, parmesan — is being aggressively guarded across tables citywide. The mushroom bourguignon could convert someone. The whole branzino is bronzed and impossible. The lemon baked Alaska arrives like a small theatrical event.

The room itself does most of the heavy lifting. Art Deco bones, handmade California tile, hickory floors, vintage artwork that looks like it might have been left behind by the previous tenants. It's the kind of space that doesn't try to be anything in particular and ends up feeling like everything you want a restaurant to feel like.

The neighborhood — Hermon, named after Mount Hermon in Lebanon, dating to 1903 — has spent most of its existence in the shadow of Highland Park to the north. That is, presumably, about to change. Reservations are already getting harder. The booths at 7:30 on a Friday are already what the booths at Musso & Frank are at 7:30 on a Friday: full of people who look like they've found something they intend to keep.

Hermon's, 5510 Monterey Road, Los Angeles. Reservations recommended.

If you go: the bar is first-come, first-served, and the lasagna vongole is on the bar menu. Show up at 5:30, ask for the bar, order one. You'll thank us.