Pace

Since 1998 at the same pass

The ciabatta crust takes its shape before the room fills, a practical gesture that fixes the evening’s pace. Sandy Gendel, Chef at Pace in Hollywood Hills West, Los Angeles, keeps that line close to the hand: Italian training, organic produce, and a kitchen that has favored continuity since 1998. Gendel is also the owner, which matters here. The creative decisions and the operating discipline answer to the same person, so the menu does not read like a seasonal mood board. It holds to a grammar.

Gendel trained at California Culinary Academy, and the education shows less as citation than as restraint. The kitchen’s Italian-Californian language depends on familiar pressures: dough handled for the pizza program, salmon held to cedar wood, vegetables and organic ingredients placed where they do not need ornament. His tenure gives the place its lineage. There is no published roster of mentors or apprentices around him at this address, so the clearest succession is the one between training and repetition: a chef staying on the tools long enough for the house style to settle into muscle memory.

Ciabatta crust and cedar wood

The program at Pace is built around traditional Italian method with Californian sourcing habits, not a split identity but a working combination. The Zeus Pizza carries the house’s preference for ciabatta crust, a bread-led decision that changes the bite before any topping speaks. Cedar Plank Salmon gives the grill another register, with cedar wood setting the fish in a warmer, resinous frame. Those are not decorative signatures. They are anchors, dishes that make the kitchen’s priorities legible across an à la carte menu.

The wine program is curated rather than expansive for its own sake, a fit for a room where the food already carries a clear line. Gendel’s cooking leaves space for acidity, smoke, dough, and the green edge that organic and local sourcing can bring when the pass does not bury it. The discipline is in proportion. Italian technique supplies the frame; the local pantry supplies the pressure inside it.

The basement room in Laurel Canyon

The room sits below grade in a 130-year-old building in Laurel Canyon, and that fact changes the temperature of the meal before the first plate arrives. The dining room has the close, cave-like feel of a basement kept for conversation rather than spectacle: dim light, rustic surfaces, benches softened with pillows, eclectic pieces gathered into corners. It is upscale casual in service, but the mood stays domestic, almost cellar-like.

At the counter and through the pass, the food belongs to that room. Ciabatta-crust pizzas make sense in a space that already feels hand-built; cedar wood-grilled salmon carries the smell of the bench into the dining room without making a performance of it. Gendel’s next move here is not announced as a pivot. The held station is Zeus Pizza.