Bestia

Bestia opened in 2012 in the Arts District, on a dead-end block of converted warehouses near the train yards by the river, from the chef Ori Menashe, the pastry chef Genevieve Gergis, who is his wife, and the restaurateur Bill Chait. Menashe was born in Los Angeles, raised in Israel, and spent nearly a decade in the city's Italian kitchens, much of it as Gino Angelini's chef. From the street it still looks like a warehouse, faded sign and all.

Jonathan Gold's review is still the best way in. He called it 'anti-California' Italian: food not amplified or perfected, simply presented as itself. He meant it as praise. The cavatelli with sausage, black truffle and cheese tasted to him of wild Umbria, and he counted it among the most purely Italian dishes he had eaten in the city. The chopped beef heart with pine nuts, he wrote, was one of the best steak tartares you will ever taste. There is house-cured salumi from a glassed-in curing room, mussels in 'nduja broth, and the oxtail agnolotti in cocoa pasta. Gergis's chocolate budino tart, with olive oil, salt and caramel, is the dessert.

There is house-cured salumi from a glassed-in curing room, mussels in 'nduja broth, and the oxtail agnolotti in cocoa pasta.

The wine list, from the start, leaned toward oddball natural bottles, the kind you cannot pronounce and are glad you ordered.

The room is bare rafters, stripped brick, Edison bulbs, an open kitchen and a din, and it was a tough reservation from its first weeks. Go late, with someone who likes noise. 'It's a place where the cooks know where to stop,' Gold wrote.

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