Best Restaurants in Santa Monica and the Westside (2026)
The Westside is where Los Angeles keeps its tasting menus. The nine restaurants we carry from Malibu down to Palms, three of them in Santa Monica itself and six in the MICHELIN Guide, organized by how far you are willing to drive.
Best restaurants in Santa Monica and the Westside
The Westside is where Los Angeles keeps its tasting menus. That is the thing that separates it from the rest of the city: Melrose and Beverly Hills have the scene, Downtown has the volume, and the beach side of the 405 has the counters where a chef cooks fourteen courses for twenty people and the room is quiet enough to hear them explain it.
We carry nine restaurants on the Westside, three of them in Santa Monica itself and the rest spread from Malibu down through Brentwood, Westwood, Venice, Culver City and Palms. Six of the nine are in the MICHELIN Guide, which is a higher proportion than any other part of the city we cover. This is not a complete list of Westside restaurants - it is the ones we carry, and the geography below is organized so you can book by how far you are willing to drive.
Santa Monica
Citrin and Melisse share one building at 1104 Wilshire, at 11th, and both are Josiah Citrin's. They are not the same restaurant and should not be booked interchangeably. Citrin is the modern Californian dining room and carries one MICHELIN star. Melisse is the fourteen-seat tasting room behind it - five tables, fixed nightly seatings, and the more serious commitment of the two.
Seline is Dave Beran's room on Main Street, fourteen to seventeen courses, also with one MICHELIN star. It sits in the quieter southern end of Santa Monica rather than up near the pier, and it is the Westside reservation that most often surprises people who thought they knew the city.
Three rooms, all three tasting-menu-led, all three booking weeks out. If you want a straightforward dinner in Santa Monica on short notice, the honest answer is that we do not carry one - the beach-side casual category is not a market we have built here.
Venice and Culver City
Gjelina on Abbot Kinney has been the Westside's most reliable table since 2008 - produce-led cooking, pizza and pasta, a back patio that stays warm, and the one room on this page you can reasonably walk into. It is in the MICHELIN Guide's Venice selection.
Vespertine in Culver City is the opposite of walkable: Jordan Kahn's four-story restaurant built with the architect Eric Owen Moss, and the most formal and most unusual dining experience in Los Angeles. Treat it as an evening rather than a dinner.
Palms, Brentwood, Westwood
n/naka on Overland is thirteen courses of California kaiseki and one MICHELIN star in the 2026 selection. It is small, it books further ahead than anything else on this page, and it is the Westside's best-known restaurant outside the city.
Baltaire on San Vicente is the Brentwood steakhouse, with a glass-walled terrace and a deep global wagyu list - the neighborhood dinner that still works for a business table. STK in Westwood Village is the steakhouse that runs like a club, under ceiling ribbons of shifting light, and it takes a group better than anything else out here.
Malibu
Nobu Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway, overlooking the Malibu Pier, is an hour from Santa Monica in weekend traffic and the most contested sunset table in Los Angeles County. Book the deck, go early in the week if you can, and treat the drive as part of the plan rather than a problem.
How to think about the drive
The Westside is the part of Los Angeles where distance genuinely decides the booking. Santa Monica to Culver City is fifteen minutes on a Tuesday and forty on a Friday. Santa Monica to Malibu is twenty-five minutes or an hour and ten, depending entirely on the hour.
So book by where you are sleeping, not by what you most want to eat, unless the restaurant is the reason for the evening - and with Melisse, Seline, Vespertine and n/naka, it usually is.
Elsewhere in the city
If the Westside is not where you are staying, the rest of our Los Angeles coverage is organized the same way: the MICHELIN restaurants in Los Angeles, the hottest see-and-be-seen tables, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Downtown.
Booking
Every restaurant above books on its own platform, and the link sits on its venue page here with hours, the address and what the room is actually like. For the tasting-menu rooms the reservation opens on a fixed schedule - usually a set date each month - so going direct is the only way that works.
For a group of ten or more, a private dining room, or an evening that needs to run from dinner to somewhere else, our Los Angeles partner can help.
Build a custom itinerary with our concierge team. Pair the venues mentioned above into a single concierge-confirmed evening. See the full Las Vegas events calendar for every upcoming DJ and pool party across the city.
Keep reading
- The Hottest Tables in Los Angeles: Where to See and Be Seen (2026) · Our ranked guide to the twelve see-and-be-seen tables in Los Angeles, hardest reservation first. Who is in the room, what the night feels like, and the best night to go.
- GRAMMY Week 2027 in Los Angeles: Where to Book · The 69th GRAMMY Awards are Sunday, February 7, 2027 at Crypto.com Arena, with nominations on Monday, November 16, 2026. Unlike Oscars season this is a Downtown week, so the Arts District and South Park rooms are the ones that matter.
- Best Italian Restaurants in Los Angeles 2026: The Ranked Guide · Our ranked guide to the eleven Italian restaurants we book in Los Angeles for 2026, from Evan Funke's Roman cooking at Mother Wolf to Nancy Silverton's one-MICHELIN-star Osteria Mozza, with the booking condition for each room.
- Best Italian Restaurants in Vancouver 2026: The Ranked Guide · Our ranked guide to the best Italian restaurants in Vancouver for 2026, from the Michelin-starred Kissa Tanto to Railtown pasta at Ask for Luigi and Friulian cooking at Carlino.
- Best Nightclubs in Los Angeles 2026: The Ranked Guide · Our ranked guide to the nine Los Angeles nightclubs we book, ordered the way we would send a guest - the La Cienega table rooms, the Hollywood cluster, Downtown's scale room and the two that start with dinner.
- Best Restaurants in La Jolla 2026: The Ranked Guide · Our ranked guide to the best restaurants in La Jolla for 2026, from the oceanfront Marine Room and the Michelin-starred tasting menu at Lucien to the Italian rooms Marisi and Catania.
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