METRONOME: Gjelina in Los Angeles

Located in the hustle and bustle of Venice, Gjelina is a beautiful restaurant and serves up delicious American Nouveau fare. The space is enormous, with the main dining room that includes two communal tables, a charming outside patio with a fire pit for those chilly winter nights, and smaller semi-private rooms, lit by a wine bottle chandelier. The wooden walls and ceilings in the dining rooms add an air of warmth to the space, and the floor to ceiling wine shelves show off the restaurant’s arsenal of wine. [1]

For the last five years, chef Travis Lett, has helped steer the success that is Gjelina: a constant swirl of diners who spill onto the Abbot Kinney Boulevard sidewalk waiting for a turn to eat in the open-all-day, brick-floored, Edison-bulb-accented restaurant. They come for his thin-crusted pizzas from the wood-burning oven, straight-from-the-farm vegetables such as roasted okra or grilled kale, and plates of rustic chickpea stew or stuffed eggplant or pork meatballs ; food that's seemingly simple but made exactingly. At the heart of Gjelina is a kitchen staff that has grown from about 10 to nearly 50 people, cranking out a menu of several dozen dishes for which they make each component down to the crème fraîche and grainy mustard: ricotta, sauerkraut, knife-cut buckwheat pasta, guanciale, merguez sausage.... It takes three days to make the pizza, starting with the dough's pre-ferment. On any given Saturday, from morning to night, 1,000 people will have filled the 100-seat restaurant. The Gjelina Take Away (or GTA), is a next-door annex that has Lett baking breads, jarring pickles and curing meats for what he envisions as a neighborhood deli selling "everyday stuff" ; pizza, antipasti, sandwiches. [2]