The Tasting Kitchen

Since 2009 at the same kitchen

Hand-made pasta and in-house cured meats set the day’s pace for Casey Lane, chef at The Tasting Kitchen in Venice, Los Angeles. Lane has held this kitchen since 2009. His record continues: chef at The Tasting Kitchen, later chef at Viale dei Romani in West Hollywood from 2018 to 2020, culinary program lead roles at Ghisallo and Jyan Isaac Bread, and since 2022, creative director of food and beverage for Palisociety.

Lane has described himself as the child who kept asking why, drawn to how things are done and where they come from. At The Tasting Kitchen, that question lands in practical places: how a pasta holds sauce, how cured meat sits against bread and acid, how a seasonal menu can change without losing its hand.

A scratch kitchen built by the market

The program at The Tasting Kitchen is modern Italian by vocabulary, with a seasonal approach and a kitchen that works from local farmers’ market produce. Its stated distinction is the daily changing menu, hand-made pastas, in-house cured meats, and a scratch kitchen philosophy. That is enough to tell the reader where the discipline sits. The menu has to be rebuilt in motion, not protected as a fixed object.

The known signatures give the kitchen a working range: Branzino, Tagliatelle, Amatriciana, and a Charcuterie Board from the restaurant’s own cured-meat practice. Lane’s wider signature list adds Fried oyster poutine, Tomato Bisque, Rapini over Lentils, Sweet Breads, and Tagliarini pasta with Squid and Serrano. Taken together, the plates lean on contrast rather than ornament: richness answered by brightness, soft textures cut by bite, familiar forms tightened by the station. The dining format allows à la carte ordering, a tasting menu, and small plates, but the craft question is the same across them. Each dish has to arrive with enough clarity that the work of the bench survives the movement of the room.

The pass in a dim room

The room is dimly lit and intimate, built for upscale casual service where people linger over wine rather than rush the table. That matters to the kitchen. A conversational room changes the pressure at the pass; plates move into a slower register, wine stays in the glass longer, and the food has to hold attention without raising its voice. The restaurant’s wine program is curated, which places the cooking beside a cellar-minded rhythm rather than a purely transactional pour.

At the counter and through the room, the craft is less about spectacle than repetition: pasta handled by hand, meat cured in house, produce brought in with the market as the calendar. The atmosphere is elegant and close, but the useful detail is the daily reset. A dish like Amatriciana carries the weight of a known form; in Lane’s kitchen, it has to meet the day’s ingredients and still leave the pass as Amatriciana.

Continuity as the craft

The Tasting Kitchen holds 1 current award, but the stronger fact for this page is duration. Lane’s tenure since 2009 makes the restaurant a working record of a chef staying with a place while also shaping other food programs beyond it. That kind of continuity can make a kitchen quieter from the outside and more demanding within it, because repetition leaves fewer places to hide.

If the next movement is not named, the present one is concrete enough: Lane keeps the program at the bench, with the daily menu. The close of the work is still the pass at The Tasting Kitchen, with Tagliatelle and Amatriciana carrying the house’s hand.