Toscana

Fire, pasta, and the Brentwood grammar

Miguel Martinez checks the timing of meats against the wood-burning oven as Executive Chef at Toscana in Brentwood, Los Angeles, where the kitchen keeps Tuscan cooking close to heat, pasta, produce, and wine. His station is one of continuity rather than reinvention. The restaurant was founded in 1989 by Kathie and Mike Gordon as a neighborhood trattoria built around Italian tradition, simplicity, and the feeling of a table that could hold friends, family, regulars, and the occasional familiar face without changing its voice.

For Miguel Martinez , the work is a daily translation. Seasonality arrives as vegetables, not ornament. Pasta stays central without becoming heavy for its own sake. Fire carries both method and flavor, especially in the meats that move through the oven and onto the pass. At Toscana, continuity is not passive. It has to be cooked again in each service.

A menu paced for the glass

The program is built à la carte, with antipasti, primi, pizza, secondi, and dessert carrying the Tuscan trattoria structure. Spaghetti pomodoro depends on tomato, basil, and olive oil doing their work without cover. Gnocchi al pesto genovese asks for the dough to stay soft enough to receive basil, garlic, pine nut, and parmigiano. Pappardelle ai funghi brings wild mushrooms, thyme, parmigiano, and mascarpone into a broader register, while branzino, veal chop, Florentine Bistecca, Prime T-Bone, Prime Filet Mignon, and the Al Michaels Prime New York Steak place the grill and oven at the center of the kitchen’s discipline.

The wine program gives Martinez another frame. Toscana’s list runs to more than 300 options, with Italy and California doing most of the work and over a dozen wines poured by the glass. Five-course wine dinners change the build: a course has to meet the next glass, acidity has to answer richness, and warmth from the oven cannot flatten the sequence. For a Beckmen Vineyards dinner, Martinez prepared a winter menu inside that format, using Tuscan influence as a working method rather than a costume.

The room around the pass

The room keeps the trattoria close. White tablecloths sit against brick walls and art; the open kitchen lets the pass remain part of the evening rather than a hidden engine. When the room is full, the sound rises. That noise is part of the address, not a defect in the craft: plates moving, regulars greeting one another, servers carrying pasta and steak through a narrow rhythm that has been practiced for decades.

The intimacy matters because the food is not built for distance. A bowl of spaghetti pomodoro, a grilled branzino, a veal chop with its heat still present, or gnocchi in pesto all ask to be read at the table, beside wine, while the room keeps moving. Toscana has expanded beyond its earliest tiny frame, and Martinez’s kitchen keeps the same Tuscan grammar alive through the next plate of Pappardelle al Cinghiale.