Dan Tana’s

Thirty one years holding the red sauce line

The chicken parmigiana stays under sauce and cheese because Neno Mladenovic, chef at Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, has treated return as part of the work. By May 2019, the Croatian chef had spent 31 years as executive chef in the same kitchen, a tenure built less on revision than on keeping a plate recognizable when it lands at the table. His station belongs to a room founded in 1964 by Dan Tana, born Dobrivoje Tanasijević, who bought the former Dominick’s hamburger restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard and turned it toward New York City style Italian cooking. The founding kitchen began with chef Michele Diguglio; Mladenovic’s long chapter comes later, tied to pasta, steaks, ribs, marinara with meatballs, Caesar Salad, and the chicken in tomato sauce stuffed with cheese that regulars know without needing it explained. He has described chicken parmigiana as a dish that has remained the same for 50 years and brings people back. That is the discipline here. The hand does not announce itself through novelty; it holds the sauce, the cutlet, the cheese, the plate, and the expectation that the next visit will taste like the last one.

A menu built for repetition

The method at Dan Tana’s is not a tasting-menu language. It is à la carte, red-sauce, steakhouse-adjacent, and direct: fettuccine, lasagna, eggplant parmesan, veal parmigiana, chicken piccata, spaghetti and meatballs, shrimp scampi. The restaurant’s history gives the kitchen its measurements. Tana bought the site for $30,000 on a three-year payment plan; early business moved at about 25 dinners per night before a 1966 Los Angeles Times review sent the room toward 200 dinners nightly. Those figures belong to the house’s origin, but they still explain the cooking. The plates had to satisfy quickly, late, and plainly, with enough weight for actors, musicians, agents, and neighbors coming off the street or from the Troubadour nearby. Forbes later connected Nenad “Neno” Mladenovic with Veal Scaloppine Florentine at Dan Tana’s in Los Angeles, and Bon Appétit Magazine has pointed readers toward the Caesar Salad. The kitchen’s craft is continuity: marinara, cheese, steak, pasta water, the steady grammar of a menu that has not had to chase fashion to keep its place.

Twenty tables under Chianti bottles

The room works close to the pass. Dan Tana’s sits in a 1929 bungalow on Santa Monica Boulevard, with a green neon sign outside and 20 tables inside, red booths, checkered cloths, dim light, and Chianti bottles hanging overhead. The scale matters. Plates move through a crowded room where the noise rises, drops after a toast, then comes back. The small bar belongs to the same folklore as the booths, not as decoration but as part of the house’s working memory. The restaurant has long allowed Hollywood to sit without performance, from studio heads to actors to musicians, yet the craft remains at table level: a Caesar set down, a steak cut, a parmigiana carried through a room with very little empty space. Nothing in the room asks to be updated. That is part of the job.

One house, not a copy

Tana resisted expansion, saying in 1997, “if you really want to be successful with a restaurant, you can have only one—it’s like a wife.” He sold the restaurant in 2009 to Sonja Perencevic and retired to Belgrade, but the house kept its singular address and marked its 60th anniversary in 2024. Mladenovic’s work sits inside that decision: one kitchen, one room, one menu whose regulars can still ask for chicken parmigiana at Dan Tana’s.