If you have spent any time on this stretch of Pico Boulevard, you already know the building. It sits unassuming from the sidewalk, and it has never once managed to be just one restaurant. For years, whoever takes over the address at 9575 W. Pico Blvd. has split it into two concepts stacked on top of each other, a downstairs and an upstairs with different menus, different price points, and different reasons to walk in. What changed this year is not the split. It is which floor gets the tasting menu.
For most of the building's recent history, the casual restaurant lived downstairs and the serious one lived above it. That arrangement just reversed for the first time.
A Decade of the Same Split
Long before this year's news, the building already ran on this two-restaurant logic. Sotto Pizzeria and Picca occupied the space for years, two distinct dining rooms under one roof, before chefs Walter and Margarita Manzke took over in 2021. Their version kept the arrangement: Bicyclette, their Parisian-inspired bistro, opened downstairs in the former Sotto space with roughly 80 seats, baguettes with Normandy butter, and a classic French menu. Upstairs sat Manzke, their Michelin-starred tasting menu restaurant, the formal counterpart to the bistro below.
That was the order for years. Casual on the ground floor. The serious cooking, and the Michelin recognition, one flight up.
The Order Flips
This February, that order inverted. Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark, whose résumé runs through Restaurant Frantzén in Stockholm, Restaurant Zén in Singapore, Per Se in New York, and Aquavit, opened Lielle in the same building on February 12. But he took the downstairs room this time, the one Bicyclette used to occupy, and turned it into the formal half of the pair. Lielle is a subterranean 42-seat dining room with cork-lined vaulted ceilings and wine-toned leather banquettes, running a four-course prix fixe at $150 per person built around California ingredients cooked with Nordic technique. Wine Spectator pegged the bottle list at 250 selections, heavy on Burgundy and California names. The restaurant picked up Michelin recognition within months of opening.
Jernmark has said the choice to land in this exact building felt deliberate in a personal way. His first night in Los Angeles, four years before Lielle opened, he had dinner at Bicyclette in this same space. Opening his own restaurant there this year, he has called it a full circle moment.
Now the upstairs is getting its turn to be the casual one. Marée, Jernmark's sister restaurant, is set to open directly above Lielle in early September, a 70-seat French bistro with an open kitchen, a zinc bar, and a green marble table at its center. Where Lielle asks for a reservation and a fixed menu, Marée is built around à la carte ordering and a wine-forward, drop-in feel, blending California produce with Parisian bistro cooking. It is Jernmark's more relaxed counterpart to the room downstairs, the kind of place you can return to on a random Tuesday rather than save for an occasion.
Here is the arrangement, then and now:
| Downstairs | Upstairs | |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 to 2026 | Bicyclette (casual bistro) | Manzke (Michelin tasting menu) |
| 2026 forward | Lielle (Michelin, $150 prix fixe) | Marée (casual bistro, opening September) |
The building never stopped being two restaurants. It just swapped which one gets the fixed menu and which one gets the walk-in energy.
What You're Actually Walking Into This Fall
If you live nearby, the practical question is not which restaurant is better. It is which floor matches your evening. Lielle runs Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 8:30 p.m., and at $150 per person for four courses plus whatever you drink, it reads as a booking for something specific: an anniversary, a visiting parent, a night you already planned around. It is not a restaurant you wander into on a whim, and the reservation calendar reflects that.
Marée is designed to solve the opposite problem, the one where you just want a glass of wine and something to eat without committing to an event. Based on the restaurant's own description of the concept, expect lighter, brighter design than Lielle's cellar-like room downstairs, and a menu built for repeat visits rather than a single big night. One detail worth knowing before your first check arrives: Marée includes a 4 percent line item it calls Healthy LA, an optional charge that funds health coverage for full-time staff, removable if you ask your server to take it off.
There is also a small naming quirk locals will recognize faster than a search engine will. Depending on which era of write-up you find online, this stretch of Pico gets filed under either Beverlywood or Pico-Robertson, sometimes in the same sentence. Both are accurate. The building sits close enough to the line between the two names that longtime residents use them interchangeably, and neither is wrong.
A few things to know before you go:
- Address: 9575 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90035
- Lielle: Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 8:30 p.m., four-course prix fixe at $150 per person, reservations recommended well ahead
- Marée: opening early September, upstairs from Lielle, à la carte menu, walk-ins expected to be part of the model
- Both concepts come from the same chef and design team, so expect a shared design language, aged mirrors and dark wood, even though the two rooms serve very different nights out
Why the Flip Is the Actual News
A new restaurant opening in Beverlywood is not, on its own, unusual. Chefs open and close rooms on Pico every year. What makes this particular address worth watching is that it keeps proving something about how a two-restaurant building actually works: the format survives even when the concepts inside it do not. Sotto and Picca gave way to Bicyclette and Manzke. Bicyclette and Manzke have now given way to Lielle and Marée. Three different ownership groups, three different cuisines, and the same basic idea every time, a formal room and a casual room, stacked on top of each other, sharing an address and a front door.
The interesting part this round is that the hierarchy flipped. For a decade, the casual bistro got the ground floor and the Michelin cooking happened above it. Now the Michelin room is the one you walk down into, and the easy weeknight version is the one you'll climb the stairs for. If you have eaten in this building before, under any of its previous names, that reversal is worth noticing the next time you walk in. It is a small detail, but it says something about how differently Jernmark is thinking about which experience should feel elevated and which should feel like a neighborhood habit.
Either way, the block just got its two restaurants back. Whether you book the downstairs room for something specific or wait for the upstairs one to open its doors in September, the building on Pico is doing what it has done for years: giving Beverlywood two very different nights out from a single address.
If you're curious what a corner like this says about the neighborhood's daily rhythm, or just want a local's read on where Beverlywood is heading next, Simon Mashian has spent his career reading these blocks up close. Let's Connect.
