Zaytinya – Culver City

As we kicked off 2024, there seemed to be no chance that by year’s end, Southern California would have satellite locations of two top restaurants from chef José Andrés – Washington DC’s Turkish-Mediterranean small plates experience Zaytinya and the authentically Mexican Oyamel. But when Andrés unexpectedly took over food and beverage operations at a Culver City boutique hotel named The Shay, he chose Zaytinya for the first floor, and Butterfly as a distilled rooftop version of Oyamel, opening both in mid-December 2024.

Like Zaytinya’s Ritz-Carlton New York NoMad location, the Culver City restaurant doesn’t feel precisely like the DC original, but it’s pretty close – enough to rival top local Middle Eastern/Mediterranean places such as Ammatoli in Long Beach. Nearly all of Zaytinya’s DC’s menu has survived the cross-country flight to LA, though DC’s family-style whole sea bass has become a dry-aged branzino, and salmon has been swapped for two cod dishes (black cod and local vermillion rock cod, each delicious through sparingly plated). The menu is smaller during brunch hours (until 3pm) than dinner, but even on a lunch visit, there were still dozens of small dishes to choose from, and the quality was consistently very good.

Paired with Zaytinya’s freshly oven-baked pitas, which were smaller than at other locations but comparatively free-flowing throughout our lunch and dinner experiences, the baba ghannouge eggplant and red pepper h’tipiti dips were perfectly balanced in flavors. That said, the baba portion was underwhelming for the price, and we found the sweet eggplant and pine nut Imam Bayildi to be at least as delicious, and a far better value. Freshly made grape leaves packed sweetness and crisp texture that put typically canned restaurant versions to shame, while excellent crispy brussel sprouts with coriander and barberries only suffer by comparison with the even more wonderful pumpkin seed and chile de arbol version served at Butterfly upstairs.

Perhaps the strongest single item of our first meal was the lamb baharat – sliced (rather than ground) lamb kabab presented on a hammered copper plate with skinned cherry tomatoes, tabbouleh, and tahini: the ingredients’ individual flavors were powerful, and even better when mixed together for bites. Our second meal’s standout was a kabob platter loaded with four skewers worth of meats and vegetables, beautifully assembled to fill a large plate with three separate dips on the side. It almost made up for the absence of the lamb shoulder, which we’d expected to order but found missing from the latest lunch menu.

By contrast, plates of sea scallops and octopus santorini, a normally gorgeous highlight at other Zaytinyas, were unimpressively plated with too little protein – a problem that persisted on the octopus from first to second visits. Between uneven plating, not great protein value, and atypically dim lighting (particularly at night), classic Zaytinya dishes don’t make their typically strong first visual impressions here.