La Dolce Vita. Credit: Shelby Moore

A Second Act for Old Hollywood Dining

10 Minute read

10 Aug 2026

Caitlin White

Journalist

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At La Dolce Vita and Sky Room, preserving the past means balancing storied dining rooms with contemporary food, service, and hospitality.

The first sign of La Dolce Vita’s particular brand of glamour is the gleaming handle on its front door. A slender brass cheetah, mounted vertically against the forest-green door, replaces the standard pull. Grasping the big cat and stepping inside, you enter a cool, dark dining room that feels intimidating and inviting in equal measure, an apt introduction to the experience. At this Beverly Hills classic, red sauce reigns, martinis arrive ice-cold, and Old Hollywood lives on. But the restaurant nearly disappeared.

La Dolce Vita opened in 1966 with Frank Sinatra as an investor and frequent patron. After the restaurant closed during the pandemic, Marc Rose and Med Abrous stepped in to revive it. The new owners preserved the Sinatra connection by bringing his daughter, Tina, on as an investor, then set about updating the space without erasing its history.

“If you walk in, and you've been there 40 years ago, you’ll feel like you’re back in the same place,” Rose says. “If you’ve never been, you can still feel that sense of history but it doesn’t feel stale.” Rose and Abrous, the duo behind hospitality group Call Mom, have a knack for bringing old-school haunts into the present without stripping away their character, as they did with Genghis Cohen. That preservation-minded approach offers a counterpoint to forces remaking Los Angeles at the expense of its past, cheetah door handles and all.

Making Old Hollywood new again requires more than decorating a dining room or reviving classic dishes. At a time when redevelopment is transforming the sites of longtime Los Angeles institutions, including the 99-year-old Taix in Echo Park, thoughtful restorations offer one way to carry the city’s dining history forward.

As a food journalist covering the city, I’m often asked: What’s your favorite restaurant in LA? I never have a single answer, but the memories that rise to the top rarely involve fine dining, omakase counters, or Michelin-starred restaurants. Instead, they come from the city’s old-school haunts: icy martinis and a ribeye at Musso & Frank on a milestone birthday; a buyout at Dan Tana’s, where red-and-white checkered tablecloths buckled under the weight of fried ravioli and veal Parmigiana; too many margaritas at Casa Vega, followed by restorative enchiladas.

Those places stay with me for more than their food, drinks, and service. Their rooms hold decades of memories, and dining in them makes me feel part of the ongoing story of Los Angeles.

In Long Beach, another historic restaurant is attempting to recapture the allure of Old Hollywood. Perched atop the restored Fairmont Breakers Long Beach, Sky Room reopened in 2024 with chef Maxwell Pfeiffer . A Long Beach native who spent four years at Michelin-starred Knife Pleat in Costa Mesa, Pfeiffer had long dreamed of leading a distinguished kitchen in his hometown. Reviving one with nearly nine decades of history raised the stakes.

“Cooking food of this caliber for my neighbors and community makes reopening this restaurant a dream come true,” Pfeiffer says. “Long Beach has its own identity, of course, but Old Hollywood as an idea is such a West Coast thing and it’s been part of greater Los Angeles culture for a long time. The weight of the history behind the hotel has lent a bit of gravitas.”

The Breakers opened in 1926. Conrad Hilton acquired the hotel in 1938 and transformed its penthouse into Sky Room, which quickly became one of Southern California’s most glamorous dining rooms. The restaurant underwent numerous changes and closures in the decades that followed, but its 2024 return evokes its early heyday, when Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth, Cary Grant, and other stars reportedly dined there.

Open for dinner and Sunday afternoon tea, the rooftop restaurant is rendered in shades of dark blue, copper, and gold, with a central chandelier and panoramic views stretching from Long Beach Harbor to downtown Los Angeles. Like the rest of the hotel, the dining room underwent a meticulous multiyear restoration. For Pfeiffer, however, the project extends beyond aesthetics to a style of cooking that draws on the past without remaining stuck there.

“We use techniques that were developed during this era to bring out the best flavors,” he says. “The food was opulent and luxurious, but coming into the modern palate with lighter sauces, so it’s really ingrained and comforting. Extracting flavors from these fine ingredients is something the best chefs have been doing for decades, and even generations.”

That approach is evident across the menu, where Parker House rolls and a magnificent crab cake sit comfortably alongside roasted sunchokes. The service was equally attentive: I left with a handwritten note from my server containing personalized book recommendations, a gesture that felt delightfully old-fashioned in more ways than one.

Because most Old Hollywood restaurants sit closer to Hollywood, Sky Room’s waterfront views set it apart. Yet nearly every restaurant in this loosely defined category has a visual signature: the neon sign at Smoke House, the Italian murals and wood paneling at Musso & Frank, the red-and-white checkered tablecloths at Dan Tana’s, and the exposed brick at Casa Vega. Red booths recur throughout these restaurants, becoming a kind of visual shorthand for the experience. At La Dolce Vita, they define the room.

Bordeaux-colored leather booths and banquettes provide all the seating in the compact, windowless dining room, apart from seven stools at a bar near the entrance. Updates include lilac-painted brick walls, cheetah-print carpet, and a black horse head that nods to The Godfather, but the room still feels a little like a time machine. The low light makes social media photos and videos difficult, gently nudging diners to put away their phones during dinner.

During my first visit to La Dolce Vita in 2023, I was struck by the down-to-earth service, something not always easy to find in chi-chi Beverly Hills. My server treated me like the most important person in the room, and his charm quickly dispelled any self-consciousness I felt. The hospitality stayed with me almost as vividly as the classic 50/50 martini with its glistening sidecar or the New York strip dressed with vin cotto. More striking still, when I returned for dinner a few months ago, the same server came to our booth and remembered my name.

In that moment, I understood part of what people seek from an institution: recognition, belonging, and the sense that, for one night, they might be the most important person in the room. “A big reason we got into this business is that magic,” Rose says. “Which I wouldn’t say disappeared from everywhere, but it’s harder to find. Coming out of the pandemic, when we reopened La Dolce Vita, we understood that if people are going to get dressed up for the evening and spend their hard-earned money, we’ve got to make it worth it. That experience should start with service and hospitality.”

The allure of an Old Hollywood restaurant is the feeling of entering a storied room and briefly belonging to its world. Its pleasures lie in familiarity rather than surprise, comfort rather than novelty. La Dolce Vita and Sky Room have been deliberately reinvented, but by honoring what made them matter, they give a new generation the chance to make them their own.