Celestino Drago

The Path

At Pierino in Pisa, the work began in a restaurant setting that gave Celestino Drago his first professional rhythm and anchored him in the pace of Italian kitchens. That grounding carried into Beverly Hills in 1979, when he came from Tuscany to work for this restaurant and took on the role of chef. The move mattered less as a break than as a transfer of methods: Tuscan training, applied in a new room, under a new market. The progression stayed internal to the craft. In Beverly Hills, Drago moved from chef to pasta chef and back to chef, a sequence that points to the discipline required in a kitchen where pasta sits at the center of the work. Each step added responsibility, but the through-line remained the same: a chef building range without losing the structure of the cuisine that shaped him. That arc leads directly to his current position as Executive Chef and Owner of DRAGO Centro.

The Work Today

Contemporary Italian cooking, in Drago’s hands, is not a departure from tradition so much as a working method that keeps the cuisine active in the present. At DRAGO Centro in Los Angeles, the restaurant bears his name and his authority, with the menu language and pacing shaped by a chef who has spent decades refining what Italian food can say in a different city. As Executive Chef and Owner, Celestino Drago holds both the line and the room. Longevity is part of the read on the work. After more than three decades in the same broad corridor between Tuscany and Beverly Hills, the cooking carries the steadiness that comes from repetition, correction, and staying in the trade. "After 33 years I'm still here."

Signature

The Law Firm sits in his signature list as a name that is memorable without needing explanation, the kind of dish title that signals confidence in the room. For Celestino Drago, it reads as part of a Contemporary Italian register: direct, distinct, and built to stand on its own.

In Their Words “After 33 years I'm still here.”