Vespertine: How Los Angeles’ Most Divisive Restaurant Came Back and Won Its Stars Again

There is no gentle way to arrive at Vespertine. You drive into Culver City's Hayden Tract — a stretch of deconstructivist architecture that has been Eric Owen Moss's redevelopment project for some three decades — and stop in front of a four-storey tower of red steel latticework known as the Waffle. It looks less like a restaurant than something that landed there. Chef Jordan Kahn has said the building exerted an indescribable pull on him, a sense of familiarity paired with the feeling that something remained to be discovered inside it.

That was in 2017. What he built there went on to become one of the most argued-about restaurants in America — adored and derided in roughly equal measure, sometimes by people at the same table. Then it vanished for four years. Its return, and what it has become since, is one of the more interesting second acts in modern fine dining.

The First Life: 2017 to 2020

The original Vespertine was conceived as a total sensory environment rather than a meal with decoration attached. Food, architecture, music, ceramics, scent and choreography were treated as a single composition. Kahn once likened the experience to a spaceship, and diners tended to agree — the question was whether they wanted to board one.

The accolades arrived quickly and from serious quarters. It took the top position on Jonathan Gold's 101 Best Restaurants list, appeared among Time magazine's World's 100 Greatest Places, and won Atmosphere of the Year at the World Restaurant Awards. It held two Michelin stars. It also generated a genuine critical split: for every diner who found it transcendent, another found it cold, cerebral and more interested in ideas than in dinner.

Then, in March 2020, it closed with everything else — and unlike almost everything else, it did not come back. The pandemic became a hiatus, the hiatus became years, and Kahn's attention moved to Meteora, the Melrose Avenue restaurant he opened in June 2022. Vespertine lost its stars in the 2022 guide. For a long time it looked as though one of the strangest restaurants in the country had simply ended.

The Second Life: Vespertine 2.0

It reopened on 2 April 2024, and the version that emerged was deliberately not a restoration. Kahn has described the revival as reflecting his own growth over the intervening years, developed with new collaborators and a reconsidered idea of what the restaurant should be. Observers who knew both iterations have noted a shift in register: still cerebral, still unlike anything else in the city, but less like a spacecraft and more grounded — with commentators identifying a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican thread running through the newer menu.

The scale remains formidable. The tasting menu runs to sixteen-plus courses across the building's various spaces, accompanied by a purpose-composed musical score built from swells, pulses and textures, a signature scent, and a collection of custom ceramics and glassware chosen so that the physical sensation of each vessel forms part of the course. The kitchen leans heavily on Californian ingredients, with a menu-building process Kahn characterises as intuitive rather than systematic.

Michelin's response was emphatic. In August 2024 — four months after reopening — Vespertine Los Angeles regained both stars, with inspectors describing a singular operation returned with renewed creative vision. Michelin's write-up singles out a scallop with passionfruit, ají amarillo and horseradish tuile, and an "obsidian mirror" built from smoked mussel cream and salted plum, praising a meal that finishes as strongly as it starts. In the same cycle the restaurant took a green star for sustainable practice — the only new Californian restaurant to do so that year — while Meteora earned its first star, making 2024 a remarkable twelve months for Kahn by any measure.

What Actually Arrives at the Table

For all the conceptual scaffolding, the reason to make the journey is the cooking, and the signature dishes have become recognisable enough to function as landmarks.

The scallop with passionfruit is the one most frequently cited, and it does the thing Kahn does best — acidity and sweetness holding a raw shellfish in tension without overwhelming it. The mussel preparation, dark and lacquered, has become the restaurant's calling card. Quail, in various treatments including one infused with heather, has drawn consistent praise. Fish is handled with a precision that reflects sourcing from Japan as well as California. Desserts are ambitious to the point of controversy, arriving in sequence and in a separate setting.

That last point is where opinion divides most sharply, and it illustrates something worth understanding about this Vespertine restaurant experience: it is not a place that seeks universal approval. Some diners find the avant-garde register of the sweet courses the most thrilling part of the evening. Others feel the conceptual ambition outruns the flavour, and would trade six ideas for two perfect ones. Both reactions are legitimate, and both are common.

The Question Everyone Actually Asks

Is it worth it? At $$$$ pricing for a sixteen-course evening in a building on an industrial side street, that question deserves a real answer rather than a press release.

This is where first-hand testimony becomes far more useful than accolades, and where one account stands out for a specific reason: continuity. La Reine Gourmande's Vespertine review is written by a diner who ate at the original in 2019 and returned to the reopened version — a comparison very few reviewers can offer, since most critics writing about 2.0 never experienced 1.0, and most who knew the first iteration have not been back.

The resulting piece is unusually candid. It records what the reboot has retained — the scallop, the mussel elevated by a generous supplement of caviar, an outstanding quail, the sheer technical work visible in a buckwheat course — and what has changed, including the loss of the old arrival ritual, a dining room that felt more compressed than remembered, and desserts that struck the writer as more conceptual than delicious. It is also warm about something rarely discussed in fine dining coverage: Vespertine's willingness to accommodate dietary requirements without treating the request as an imposition, in a city where the reviewer found that courtesy conspicuously absent elsewhere at the same level. The verdict is neither a rave nor a dismissal, which is precisely what makes it worth reading before booking.

Practical Notes Before You Book

Vespertine sits at 3599 Hayden Avenue, Culver City. Reservations are released in advance and go quickly; the tasting menu is the only format, and the evening runs long — four hours or more is typical, so plan the night around it rather than after it. Dress accordingly: this is a room where a suit is the sensible baseline. The wine programme leans international, with pricing that