Margot

Fish to flame on the rooftop

Dough stretches before service, fish meets flame, and Michael Williams, Chef at Margot in Culver City, keeps the work close to the hand. His station here sits in a Mediterranean register, with Spain and Italy supplying the grammar rather than the costume: pasta shaped for softness and structure, seafood handled for heat, grilled meat marked cleanly, and vegetables given enough acid, fat and texture to carry a plate without excess. Williams came to that discipline through formal kitchen training at Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco, then through rooms where pace and repetition mattered as much as intention. At Our Place dining room in Victoria, he cooked in a public-service setting, a different kind of pass, where communal appetite set the terms. At Urban Forage, from 2020, he held menu, execution and hospitality together as a self-employed chef and catering business owner. Margot asked for authorship inside a restaurant room: the timing of a service, the appetite of a rooftop table, the discipline of returning the same gesture plate after plate.

Handmade pasta, grilled fish, Calabrian heat

The cooking at Margot turns on contact. Culurgiones with ‘nduja, arugula pesto and Calabrian honey place filled pasta against chile, bitterness and sweetness; the dish needs a seam that holds and a filling that stays generous without becoming heavy. Whole grilled sea bream is a different test, closer to fire and bone, where the structure of the fish gives the cook little room to hide. Prime rib-eye and grilled meats bring the station back to smoke, char and timing. Kampachi crudo asks for cutting and restraint before heat enters the conversation. Fried chicken with Calabrian-chili honey folds the same Southern Italian accent into crisp texture and sweetness. The lunch work has included focaccia sandwiches, setting bread, filling and appetite into a quicker rhythm, while dinner leans toward handmade pastas, seafood, grilled meat and vegetables. It is not a kitchen built around one signature flourish. The method is tactile, heat-led and plain enough to show where the product has been touched.

The room above Washington Boulevard

Margot works from the rooftop of PLATFORM at 8820 Washington Blvd Ste 301, with the room and outdoor deck set above Culver City rather than tucked behind it. Natural light reaches the tables, floor-to-ceiling windows look out toward the city and the metro line, and the deck gathers people around fire pits while the kitchen keeps its own heat on the pass. The setting could easily pull attention away from the bench. Williams’s food answers with material pressure: house made focaccia with Spanish pimento cheese, charred broccoli with garlic yogurt and black garlic vinaigrette, grilled blue prawns with chili marinade, herbs and lime. These are not decorative rooftop plates. They rely on grill marks, cut greens, emulsions, dough, shellfish and the small corrections that happen between pick-up and the dining room.

A coastal grammar that kept moving

Williams’s later work at Juliet in Culver City uses another seasonal register, bright, French-inspired and seafood-forward, with Southern California product at its center. Seen beside Margot, the continuity is less allegiance to a single cuisine than a way of handling coastline: clean ingredients, disciplined technique, and plates carried by fire, acid, fat and texture. At Margot, that line remains clearest in the whole grilled sea bream.