Love & Salt

Two stations held in one set of hands

Season decides the work before service begins at Love & Salt in Manhattan Beach, where Rebecca Merhej, Chef de Cuisine and Pastry Chef, works across the full arc rather than handing the last course to another room. Her title matters here because it binds two disciplines that often separate after prep. Chef de Cuisine asks her to hold the savory kitchen in time, the pass moving with Italian bistro cooking shaped by California produce. Pastry Chef asks for another kind of attention, where texture, temperature, and finish carry the meal out cleanly.

Merhej’s path into that breadth moved through Los Angeles kitchens before this Manhattan Beach address. She worked at Simon LA, then in 2009 was Sous Chef at Terranea Resort. The same year she became Chef de Cuisine at mar’sel, a role she held from 2009 to 2012. That period put kitchen leadership on the line early in her career, before Love & Salt widened the station into savory command and pastry responsibility. The house does not frame her work as a single signature dish. It is closer to a discipline: seasonal Italian cooking, held from the first plate to dessert.

Seasonal Italian cooking under a skylit dome

Love & Salt’s program sits in the Italian register without treating it as ornament. The cooking turns on timing, produce, and restraint, the useful grammar of a kitchen that has to move from antipasti and pasta toward a final sweet course without changing its voice. In Merhej’s hands, the method is not split between savory ambition and pastry decoration. The same palate has to decide where bitterness belongs in a radicchio salad, how much richness a pasta can carry, and what kind of finish a dessert should leave after salt, fat, and acid have already done their work.

The room is a refined, contemporary dining room beneath a sky-lit domed ceiling that gives the cooking a particular kind of stage. Italian bistro fare can look casual from the table, but the bench-side demand is exacting: vegetables must arrive at their point, pasta has a narrow window, and pastry allows little forgiveness once texture is set. Merhej’s dual appointment keeps those pressures close together. The pass and the pastry station answer to the same maker.

The counter beside the pass

From the bar, guests can sit close enough to face the sous chef near the kitchen, watching the room move without the separation of a formal dining room wall. That proximity suits a restaurant built around the energy of Manhattan Beach rather than the hush of a temple. The counter, the pass, and the dining room share the same current; plates leave the kitchen into a warm, buzzy room, then return as the next course begins its work.

What the place gives Merhej is a visible kitchen rhythm inside a neighborhood dining room: Italian cooking with enough polish for the room, enough ease for the beach city outside, and enough precision for a chef who carries pastry and savory together. The useful close is on the craft she still holds in public view, under the sky-lit domed ceiling at Love & Salt.