The Best Restaurant Openings in Los Angeles - May 2026

Opening alongside the annual bloom of Los Angeles’ jacaranda trees, Jacaranda marks Daniel Patterson’s long-awaited return to fine dining. Opened with his wife, music journalist Sarah Lewitinn (also known as Ultragrrl), the restaurant follows years spent focused on more casual projects, including Alta Adams with Keith Corbin and the socially minded LocoL with Roy Choi. Before that came Coi, Patterson’s groundbreaking San Francisco restaurant, which helped shape modern California fine dining and earned three MICHELIN stars. Designed by Preen Inc., the intimate dining room balances refinement with personality. A central ceiling installation nods to the restaurant’s namesake trees, while artwork from Lewitinn’s family collection keeps the space from feeling overly polished. That same balance carries into the food. Patterson’s cooking remains precise and confident, but warm and distinctly Southern Californian. Case in point: a vivid dish of grilled and raw vegetables arrives in a bright green broth scented with hoja santa, nopales, and lime. Desserts and breads, overseen by Matt Tinder, are already among the most exciting in the city, including a stunning shaved ice dish with cherry, cherimoya, and green almond. Take it all in alongside Lewitinn’s alt-rock soundtrack and down-to-earth hospitality, and the experience avoids the serious ceremony that still defines so much contemporary fine dining. In a Los Angeles dining scene increasingly skeptical of formality for formality’s sake, Jacaranda feels notable not simply because one of California’s most influential chefs is back in the fine dining game, but because the restaurant suggests a more personal, relaxed version of what serious California dining can look like now.

After years of pivots and reinventions in Los Angeles, Joshua Skenes’ latest offering to the city takes shape at Lynx, less a traditional restaurant than a self-described product bar built around pizza, cocktails, and that Skenesian obsessive detail. Carrying the unmistakable intensity and perspective that defined his work at Saison, pizzas arrive with dramatically inflated crusts blistered and topped with everything from roe to zucchini, while thinner versions come layered with anchovy and charred chile, often pushing well beyond standard pizza formulas. The cocktails, overseen by beverage director Brandyn Tepper, match that same finesse. Drinks lean smoky, savory, and unexpectedly layered in creations like clarified cacao punch scented with anise or a cocktail built around charred banana peel. Like the food, they feel designed less for mass appeal than for curiosity. At a moment when many ambitious restaurants are leaning toward comfort and accessibility, Lynx’s sharper edges are also what make it one of the more interesting openings in Los Angeles right now.

Perched above Wilshire Boulevard at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, Gemma reframes the property’s sprawling terrace around a California-meets-Southeast Asia menu from chef Peleg Miron that moves between dim sum, raw bar dishes, and richer comfort-food-leaning plates without locking itself into a single regional identity. Lobster wontons in chili ponzu, orange-chili glazed beef lettuce cups, and a decadent lobster burger with yuzu kosho aioli lean into the kind of polished excess Beverly Hills does particularly well. Elsewhere on the menu, wagyu wontons with truffle black vinegar sauce and Singapore noodles with Maine lobster keep things firmly in indulgent territory. The cocktail program, overseen by Jim Kearns, takes a similarly refined approach to tropical drinking. The Watermelon Mirage combines rum, aloe, watermelon, and mint, while the oversized Scorpion Bowl layers rum, cognac, gin, passion fruit, and orgeat into something built for lingering rooftop afternoons that gradually turn into dinner service.

This new Mid-Wilshire bakery from Sahar Shomali focuses on Iranian breads rarely seen in Los Angeles beyond home kitchens, drawing from recipes and fermentation methods tied to distinct regions across Iran. What makes Kouzeh exciting isn’t simply that the breads are excellent, though the sesame-studded barbari alone would justify the trip, but that there’s nothing else quite like it in the city. A former Spago pastry chef, Shomali applies her seasoned expertise to herb-filled flatbreads like kelaneh, braided saffron-and-raisin shirmaal, and a range of hyper-regional specialties flavored with fenugreek, grape molasses, dill, and caraway. The result feels like an important contribution to the broader conversation around Los Angeles baking right now.

Los Angeles hardly needs another omakase counter, but Sushi Nakazawa arrives with the kind of pedigree that still cuts through the noise. The long-awaited West Coast debut from Daisuke Nakazawa, the former apprentice featured in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, brings the New York institution’s polished, slightly more relaxed interpretation of Edomae sushi to Robertson Boulevard. The room, designed by Studio UNLTD to resemble an underwater cavern, is dramatic without becoming theatrical, a fitting backdrop for one of the state’s deepest sake programs alongside wine and non-alcoholic pairings designed specifically around the omakase. At a moment when Los Angeles’ sushi scene can often feel oversaturated with transplants and sameness, Sushi Nakazawa still feels genuinely significant and exciting.

San Gabriel Valley has never lacked for excellent Sichuan food, which is precisely why Mountain House opening its largest and most ambitious location there feels significant. The MICHELIN-recognized restaurant, which built a cult following in New York and landed on The New York Times list of the 100 Best Restaurants in America, arrives in the SGV not by softening its identity for California, but by doubling down on the maximalism and theatricality that made the original so compelling. Led by culinary director Zhi Min Zhu, the restaurant leans hard into the deep heat, numbing spice, and layered chile complexity that define uncompromising Sichuan cooking. Signature dishes like the Chongqing la-zi chicken, buried beneath a mountain of dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorns, and the tableside Swinging Pork Belly have already become social media fixtures in New York. The SGV location pushes the experience even further with a dining room designed to resemble an old Chinese mountain tavern, complete with koi ponds, wooden pagodas, vine weaving, and traditional blue-dye textiles sourced from Sichuan craft traditions.

Travis Lett’s and Ian Robinson’s cooking at RVR rightly draws crowds for its market-focused, California-centric take on an izakaya. Now the restaurant is expanding into Friday lunch service, building on its weekend brunch with a menu designed more for lingering into the afternoon than grabbing a quick midday meal. Alongside brunch favorites like the tamagoyaki omelette, new Friday-only additions include a seasonal Japanese curry, currently a wagyu beef keema version, and a Wagyu brisket burger with dashi aioli and tonkatsu sauce, both worth a special trip on their own.

The return of Broken Spanish Comedor already felt significant for Los Angeles: Ray Garcia reviving one of the city’s defining modern Mexican restaurants. Opening to justified fanfare, the restaurant’s new brunch gives diners just as much reason to visit as its dinner counterpart. The menu moves easily between lighter dishes and richer, slower brunch fare. Masa pancakes arrive with citrus butter and maple syrup, while huevos rancheros layer refried lentils, carrot chorizo, avocado, and over-easy eggs over crisp tostadas. There’s also a deeply satisfying chicharrón hash with crispy pork belly and braised nopales, alongside enfrijoladas filled with requesón and salsa de frijol that feel especially true to Garcia’s style of cooking.

On the cocktail side, a brunch punch made with white wine, sherry brandy, and market fruit sits alongside palomas, carajillos, and a mezcal-and-passion fruit drink called Destilando Amor that feels built for stretching brunch well into the afternoon.