Four years ago, on his first night in Los Angeles, Marcus Jernmark went out to dinner. He had just landed in a city he barely knew, carrying a résumé that included Frantzén in Stockholm and Zén in Singapore, two of the most decorated kitchens in the world. He picked a spot on Pico Boulevard called Bicyclette, from chefs Walter and Margarita Manzke.
He didn't know it yet, but he'd just eaten in the room he would eventually take over. This past February, four years later almost to the day, Jernmark opened his own restaurant, Lielle, in that same Beverlywood basement.
The address that keeps outlasting its restaurants
If you've lived in Beverlywood for any stretch of years, the building at 9575 W Pico Blvd has probably gone by three or four names in your memory. It was Sotto. Then Picca. Then Bicyclette. Now it's Lielle. Chefs keep changing, ownership keeps changing, but this particular basement keeps drawing serious cooking back to it, over and over, for more than a decade.
That's the part the national food press tends to skip when it covers Lielle as a story about one chef's arrival in Los Angeles. For residents, the more interesting fact isn't that a Michelin-caliber chef picked LA. It's that he picked this specific building, on this specific stretch of Pico, the same one his neighborhood peers had already staked out for years before he showed up. Jernmark himself called returning to that room a "nice full-circle moment" when he spoke to the Hollywood Reporter about the opening. For anyone who has eaten at all three prior versions of this room, the moment is bigger than his.
What $150 is actually betting on
Here's the detail that's easy to miss if you only read the design writeups. Jernmark trained in kitchens where a tasting menu can run several hundred dollars and stretch past a dozen courses. Lielle charges $150 for four. That's not a discount out of necessity. It's a deliberate design choice, and it tells you something about what kind of restaurant he's trying to build.
He explained the thinking to Wine Spectator using a Swedish word: lagom, meaning roughly "just enough." Rather than the tasting menu convention of piling on courses to justify the price and the pedigree, Lielle trims down to four and lets the ingredients carry the weight. There's no formal wine pairing either. Guests choose off a list that runs somewhere between 250 and 300 bottles by most published accounts, with flexible corkage and by-the-glass pours the restaurant describes as invitations rather than instructions.
That's an unusual bet for someone with this résumé. A shorter, cheaper menu at this pedigree level is a wager on repeat visits over one-time spectacle. It only works if the neighborhood actually comes back.
"Fine dining has spent too long trying to impress people instead of taking care of them."
That's Jernmark's own framing for the choice, and it lines up with a restaurant that's clearly aiming for regulars, not just reviews.
What's actually on the plate
The kitchen calls its approach "survival cooking." The idea is to use whatever California is producing right now, and to preserve part of it for later. This spring, that meant the peels from Oro Blanco grapefruit, used fresh in an artichoke dish, then zested and fermented into a condiment that carried over into the following season's menu. It's a small detail, but it explains why the menu changes as often as it does, and why a dish you loved in March might not be there if you go back in July.
The sourcing list reads like a map of Northern and Central California rather than a generic "local ingredients" claim:
- Abalone and seaweed from Monterey Abalone Company
- Cheese from Andante Dairy in Petaluma
- Beef from Motley Crew Ranch
- Wild game from Broken Arrow Ranch
The bread program alone took the team two months to dial in: a 36-hour Rouge de Bordeaux levain served with house-cultured butter. It's the kind of detail that shows up on a menu almost as an afterthought but represents most of the actual labor.
If you're planning a fall dinner
This is the part that generic coverage tends to leave out entirely, and it's the most useful thing for anyone who actually lives near Pico and Robertson. As of this week, Lielle's dining room is dark. The restaurant went on its planned summer break starting June 28 and is set to reopen in mid-August. Reservations for September and October are already open, and going forward, the restaurant is releasing its book two months out at a time, according to its own announcements page.
If you're thinking about a birthday dinner or an anniversary this fall, that's your planning window. A few other things worth knowing before you book:
- The restaurant typically runs Tuesday through Saturday, with seatings from 5 to 8:30 p.m.
- The four-course menu is $150 per person, with supplements available.
- The room seats 42, in a subterranean space you enter by descending a staircase past a small brass plaque with the restaurant's logo, drawn by Jernmark's wife and creative partner, Andrea.
Andrea's fingerprints are all over the room itself: the handmade linens, the kintsugi ceramics on the table, the cork-lined vaulted ceiling and cherry wood tables that architecture studio Lovers Unite built around a midcentury Scandinavian sensibility. The restaurant earned Michelin recognition for the menu earlier this year, a fact Lielle's own team has acknowledged directly, thanking their staff and guests for the honor on their site.
The room upstairs
The part of this story that hasn't happened yet is arguably more relevant to daily life in the neighborhood than Lielle itself. Above the current dining room, Jernmark and his team are building a second restaurant called Marée, set to open later this year in the same building.
Where Lielle is a special-occasion room built around a fixed menu and a reservation two months out, Marée is designed to be the opposite. Jernmark describes it as a "Parisian Californian" neighborhood bistro: à la carte, many wines available by the glass, an open kitchen, a zinc bar, and a green marble table anchoring the room. It's meant for the kind of casual, walk-in-friendly dinner that Lielle, by design, doesn't offer.
For residents, that's the restaurant to actually watch. A $150 tasting menu is a special occasion, not a Tuesday night habit. A casual bistro with an open kitchen and wine by the glass, sharing a building with a restaurant this well regarded, is a much more realistic addition to a regular rotation.
One address, two rooms, and a longer story than the headlines suggest
Strip away the national press coverage of "a Michelin chef comes to LA," and what's left is a more local story. This basement on Pico Boulevard has been home to serious cooking since long before most people outside Beverlywood had heard of Sotto or Picca. Lielle didn't put this stretch of the neighborhood on the map. It's the fourth serious restaurant to occupy the same room in a little over a decade, and by the end of this year, it will have company upstairs.
That continuity says something about this part of Beverlywood that a single restaurant opening never could: the building keeps attracting chefs who could open anywhere in Los Angeles, and they keep choosing this one address instead.
If you're weighing whether now is the right time to make a move in Beverlywood, or simply want a clearer read on how the neighborhood's day-to-day character continues to evolve, Simon Mashian is always happy to talk through what's changing on the ground here and what it means for you. Let's Connect.
