Parkway Grill

Fire, garden, and a Pasadena habit

Knife work comes before the fire at Parkway Grill in Los Angeles, the Pasadena dining room that has kept mesquite and oak at the center of its kitchen since the early days of California cooking in the San Gabriel Valley. The kitchen works as a collective of chefs, with an in-house pastry chef turning out the Crème Brûlée Napoleon and new homemade ice creams. The house itself carries a long continuity. Parkway Grill opened in 1984 at 510 S. Arroyo Parkway under Bob and Gregg Smith, positioned at the front of the emerging California cuisine movement, and it has long worked from a vocabulary of seasonal cooking with French, Italian, Californian, Asian and Latin inflection, mesquite smoke, oak heat, and produce from the organic garden behind the building.

Mesquite, oak, garden, cellar

The method is unusually legible here because the tools have stayed visible. Parkway Grill built its identity around an exhibition kitchen, a mesquite-burning grill, and an oak wood oven, elements that arrived before such theater became common in dining rooms of this kind. The first wood-fired oven in the San Gabriel Valley is part of that history, and the menu still leans into the same grammar: wood-fired pizzas, mustard-grilled beef short ribs, angel hair pasta, black bean soup, flatbreads, lobster crêpes, whole ginger fried catfish, and grilled meats carrying smoke rather than ornament. Behind the restaurant, the Gourmet Organic Garden has supplied herbs, produce, berries, and tropical passion fruit for more than 25 years, feeding plates and the bar without turning sourcing into a slogan. The wine program works at a larger scale, with a cellar of upwards of 3,000 bottles and a Wine Spectator Best Of Award every year since 1999. The bar has its own handwork too, including a house-made Café Negroni cold-dripped through crushed coffee beans over ice.

The room around the work

The room gives the cooking its frame. Brick walls, linen tables, fine art, a fireplace, large floral arrangements, mood lighting and high wooden ceilings make the dining room feel settled rather than staged. The pass is close enough to read the rhythm of the kitchen, and the bar carries another layer of the house's lineage: an original 1920s piece from Chicago, brought to Pasadena in the early 1980s. Music sits inside the room rather than on top of it, with piano or jazz at the bar and Friday jazz duos programmed by Music Director David Arnay, who has shaped that part of the house for over 20 years. The scale is large, but the noise stays conversational, the kind of room where regulars can keep their table and still hear the grill. What keeps returning to the pass at Parkway Grill is the mustard-grilled beef short ribs.