One of L.A.’s best French restaurants is closing, plans to reopen with a new look and menu
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- The temporary closure of Pasjoli shows that in the current economic climate, even the best of L.A.’s restaurants might struggle to keep dining rooms full.
- The new Pasjoli will be a revamped, more playful version of the original restaurant.
- Some of the restaurant’s signature dishes will survive the menu overhaul, including the showstopping pressed duck.
At bistro Pasjoli, chef Dave Beran crammed a duck carcass into a gleaming, bell-shaped, medieval-looking contraption, and table-side dining in Los Angeles was never the same.
When Beran opened the restaurant in Santa Monica in the fall of 2019, he ushered in a new wave of French dining in L.A. He reimagined French classics like the whole pressed duck, caramelized onion tart and foie de poulet à la Strasbourgeoise (brioche stuffed with chicken liver that mimics the velvety texture and offal funk of foie gras), sending food obsessives into a butter-fueled tizzy.
Then COVID-19 hit, and ever since, the restaurant has undergone a series of changes to its menu and format, ever striving to embody the spirit of the neighborhood French bistro in Beran’s mind.
Bill Addison reviews the haute French cooking at Dave Beran’s Pasjoli in Santa Monica
“It was starting to become this thing that maybe wasn’t the restaurant that I was trying to shape it into,” he says. “In my head, I’d always had a vision for it. Over time, the neighborhood evolved one way, I evolved one way and the restaurant evolved one way. And the visions weren’t really aligned.”
On May 31, Beran will close Pasjoli, with plans to reopen with a revamped dining room and an entirely new menu two weeks later.
“We’re essentially treating it as a reopening,” he says. “A new restaurant, but not a new restaurant.”
The reopening could be seen as the third iteration of Pasjoli. When Beran, the former executive chef at Next in Chicago, first moved to Los Angeles in 2016, he had planned to open Fleur Jolie, a dual restaurant that included a tasting-menu service on one side and a casual French bistro on the other. Instead, he opened Dialogue, an 18-seat, genre-bending, tasting menu restaurant in 2017. Pasjoli followed in 2019 with a name that playfully translated to “not pretty” in French.
There was the initial a la carte menu that included the table-side duck presentation. During the pandemic, there was takeout and decadent grilled cheese sandwiches. The dining room reopened, but without the table-side duck. New items like duck wings were added to an expanding bar menu. The restaurant switched to a prix-fixe model.
Like with countless restaurants across the city, Pasjoli’s financial health was a month-to-month roller coaster.
“Some months it loses, some months it makes a little bit,” he says. “I wouldn’t deem it as a failure, but definitely wouldn’t deem it as a success financially. We were bobbing away in the water.”
But Beran says the refresh is something expected for a restaurant that’s been operating for half a decade.
The croque Matthieu sandwich from Pasjoli is crisp with a buttery layer of toasted cheese and creamy with jammy caramelized onions and Mornay sauce. It’s the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich.
“After five or so years, restaurants need refreshes,” he says. “They look worn out, beat up. With all that, we sat down and said maybe it’s time to really rethink what this is for ourselves and for the neighborhood.”
That refresh will include lighting, plants, rearranging of furniture, paintings and artwork as well as a complete overhaul of the back patio.
The bar and lounge area, a focal point of the restaurant, will expand with seating in the front window that looks out onto Main Street. Beran is also looking at how he can rearrange labor.
“We want to make sure there are hints of the Pasjoli we know, but that it clearly looks like it has evolved in some way,” says Ann Hsing, chief executive and chief operating officer of Beran’s restaurants. “We don’t want it to go away completely.”
Beran and his staff have already started reworking the menu, but plan to keep a few of Pasjoli’s signature dishes. The pressed duck will remain in limited quantities, with a return to the table-side presentation on rolling carts. Currently, the duck press presentation is relegated to one an evening, at a counter in front of the open kitchen.
The burger, the chicken cordon bleu wings and a version of the grilled cheese will be available, along with a broadened spirits and cocktail program. When Pasjoli opened, it exclusively featured French spirits.
“As we were looking at the food, there’s a difference between the really photogenic and thought-out, meticulous dish and that just kind of trashy, devious plate that you want to take a nap in,” says Beran. “We captured that with the grilled cheese, whereas I think some of our food, even though I think it’s cool and intelligent, I don’t think it’s as craveable.”
To hear Beran, the hyper-ambitious chef who just last winter opened another cerebral, high-end tasting-menu restaurant named Seline, talk of “trashy food” of any kind, is as jarring as it is exciting. For the new Pasjoli, he’s thinking about mini versions of French onion soup (“souplettes”) and French onion fondue, duck poutine and table-side cocktails.
The goal is to be more approachable, more interactive and a lot more fun. And at Seline, he can continue to flex his fine-dining muscles.
“I do wonder if personally, my own kind of drive to create kept pushing Pasjoli fancier than it was ever supposed to be,” he says. “I don’t really know, but it helps that I have the creative outlet at Seline as well.”
The new Pasjoli is slated to open June 12.
“There are a lot of ideas being thrown around,” he says. “Throw out a bunch of absurd ideas and one of them is bound to be good.”
Where to find the old, and new Pasjoli
Pasjoli, 2732 Main St. Santa Monica, (424) 330-0020, www.pasjoli.com
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