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Everything About Gjelina’s Return Is Quiet
Photo: Matthew Schneier
After establishing its reputation as a standard-bearer of a certain type of veg-forward, designer-breezy California cooking, Gjelina did what many West Coasters swear they never will: It came to New York. Seven years in the making, the Venice restaurant (which has since expanded to include a takeaway spot and a hotel) touched down in Manhattan on a block of Bond Street that is now home to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop store and Gigi Hadid’s cashmere brand, Guest in Residence. The two-floor space, with an open kitchen and a pizza oven like the Abbot Kinney original, opened on the last day of 2022, and I went not long after, when the hype was at its fullest (and, to be honest, most annoying) crescendo. “The first time I tried to eat at Gjelina, I figured it would be no big deal,” my colleague Alan Sytsma wrote back then. “It was one o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, not exactly a busy hour for most restaurants. Then I saw the line of customers snaking out the door and realized I’d underestimated the anticipation that had been building up for the better part of a decade.”
I was never a Gjelina regular in Los Angeles, though I did, for many years, make it a point to stop for breakfast or lunch at Gjusta, its more casual deli sibling, on the way to LAX when I went through the city for work. But I endured the lines out the door for the now-Gjelina-standard wood-oven pizzas and Greenmarket composées.
Then, a mere month after opening, a fire shut it down. There were occasional pop-ups (at the Standard East Village’s No Bar, at the mysterious co-working space WSA), but the Bond Street space sat vacant until, as quietly as the original opening was loud, it reopened right around Thanksgiving. On a recent weekday evening, the downstairs bar and front room were sparsely filled, though the action was a bit rowdier up on the second floor, where a large party celebrated boisterously on one end, and Manhattan dining’s Zelig, Antoni Porowski, sat two tables away from me before the large loft windows that overlook Herzog & de Meuron’s filigreed 40 Bond condos.
The menu is much as it was (and much as it is at Gjelina’s L.A. and Las Vegas branches), with an emphasis on designer vegetables and wood-fired pizzas. You have to give yourself over to the California of it all. I had to settle for an espresso-and-tonic rather than a commercial soda; a table next to mine declared their conehead-cabbage order “the new cauliflower.” Still, what works works. New York’s Greenmarket bounty may not rival California’s, but follow your server’s guidance and you can still find vivid veggies, even in gray January: “The kabocha is most in season at the moment,” and so it was, craggy and painted with miso and a scattering of pomegranate arils. Apple-shaped slices of celeriac were doused in cream and dill. But the safest bet remains the pizzas — stretchy, blistered, bubbled rounds.
Now, of course, L.A. is fighting enormous fires of its own. At the time of writing, the Palisades Fire, which has destroyed thousands of homes and counting, is only 21 percent contained; the Eaton Fire, which blazed through Pasadena and the historically Black community of Altadena, 45 percent. New fires crop up — the city is bracing for heavy winds that may spread it all the more.
It’s impossible to imagine, from the safety of New York, how it feels to be in L.A. at the present time. I wouldn’t try. (An Angeleno friend, in town for work, told me he’d had the uncanny experience of looking out from his Eastside house and seeing smoke billowing over Runyon Canyon.) Giving, I suspect, is more effective than empathy at this moment. I’ve been contributing to the California Fire Foundation and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which accepts both money and in-kind donations. But eating my feelings had, as it often does, its own appeal. I recommend the potato-and-taleggio pizza, a house classic, and the gamy funk of lamb sausage and slow-roasted tomatoes.
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