It’s nighttime in Beverly Hills in the swinging 1960s. As commuters speed by on Santa Monica Boulevard, they probably don’t even notice the squat, windowless building with a single entrance.
But on any given night, Hollywood legends like Frank Sinatra, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, George Raft, Don Rickles, Jack Lemmon, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Kirk Douglas, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Stewart, Anthony Quinn or Henry Fonda may be dining inside, away from the paparazzi, drinking scotch and swapping stories in slick red leather booths, while eating hearty red sauce Italian meals served by discreet waiters in sharp tuxedos.
This was La Dolce Vita, which the LA Time’s Jean McMurphy once called “a neighborhood restaurant for the rich and famous.” A clubby, tiny eatery where reservations were essential — even Sinatra occasionally had to wait. For over five decades, new generations of high-flying insiders would frequent La Dolce Vita, including George Clooney, designer Tom Ford, Tom Hanks, Charlize Theron, editor Graydon Carter, and former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.
But during the pandemic, like so many L.A. area restaurants, the lights went out at La Dolce Vita. In 2023, after a three-year closure, it was reopened by international dynamos Marc Rose and Med Abrous of hospitality group Call Mom, who also own L.A. staples The Spare Room and Genghis Cohen.
“The first day Med and I walked in here with the actual keys, I looked at him and was like, ‘Well, it's ours to f— up,’” Rose says.
And true to La Dolce Vita’s A-list atmosphere, the new owners are keeping the restaurant’s secrets they have heard from old-timers to themselves.
“We get a lot,” Rose says. “We tend to want to keep those stories internal and share them with people when the times are right, because that's what it's for. When you build a clubhouse, you kind of want those stories to be here permanently.”
In many ways, Rose and Abrous are a throwback to La Dolce Vita’s original founders. There have been many celebrity mainstays over the years — The Brown Derby, Chasen’s, The Formosa, Perino’s, Romanoff’s, Ma Maison, Musso and Frank — and few are left. But La Dolce Vita survived, perhaps because it served up nostalgia to celebrities who had already become past-their-prime legends themselves and were tired of the rat race — they were looking for a bit of home.
George Smith and Jimmy Ullo were second and third generation Italians — East coast transplants who had spent decades working in the upscale eatery industry in Los Angeles. According to a 1976 profile by the LA Times Lois Dawn, they met at the popular Italian restaurant Villa Capri, where Smith was a bartender and Ullo was maître d’hotel. When Smith and Ullo decided to start their own Italian restaurant, they went to two Villa Capri regulars, 1930s movie star (and known Mafia associate) George Raft, and old blue eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.
“[They] went to Frank and said, ‘we're going to open our own place,’” Rose says. “So, I think Mr. Sinatra agreed to become an investor and a backer of the place. I think — this isn't written anywhere — it was like, ‘well, I'm going to do it, but I want it to be my clubhouse too.’ And I think that when you see a building … that has no windows, it's an easy place to make your clubhouse and to do things behind closed doors.”
La Dolce Vita opened in 1966 at 9785 Santa Monica Blvd. In true Hollywood fashion, the interior was designed by Jerry Wunderlich, an Oscar-nominated set decorator for TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the film The Exorcist. “La Dolce Vita is designed with seeming simplicity. Brick walls, wine bottles, straight, uncluttered lines, a marvelous use of glasses on the back bar,” Lois Dawn wrote in a review. Little did she know- the brick was fake.
“The layout was also something that really had this clubhouse feeling,” Rose says. “It's all booths. There's no loose seating or anything. It was really built for groups in a certain kind of dining, this kind of familial dining that is associated with American Italian restaurants.”
La Dolce Vita soon became a Rat-Pack era staple, where the Hoboken, New Jersey-born Sinatra felt right at home. The expansive menu featured entrees with names like “Steak Sinatra” and “Veal Fellini” which was a “marvelous melting combine of eggplant, prosciutto and mozzarella.” The mozzarella was a guest favorite, with tomato sauce as “fresh as a garden.”
The chefs were also glad to whip up anything patrons desired, even if it was off menu. And when Chef Gino Giglio found himself an ingredient down, he improvised. “Film producer Robert Evans wanted rigatoni one night when they were out of ricotta cheese,” The Los Angeles Times reported in 1976, “so they made up a dish with bechamel and parmigiana and now serve it often.”
Beloved, longtime maître d’ Reuben Castro started working at La Dolce Vita in 1974 when he was 21 and became an expert at knowing what his celeb clientele wanted. '[Sinatra] always pasta or steak, nothing else,” he told Piers Morgan of The Mail on Sunday in 2013. “He loved veal Milanese or rigatoni pomodoro, and arugula salad with shaved parmesan ... Red wine, like a Sassicaia, if he was with his wife. But if it was a boys' night then Jack Daniels all the way. It was always Daniels, and always on the rocks.”
Celebrities like the Reagans, Don Rickles, and Sinatra had their preferred booths, and the telephone was always ready to be whisked to a table for important industry calls. “Frank Sinatra would hold court at booth No. 1 and tip royally, announcing to anybody that the staff at the restaurant was family,” Castro told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. When a kitchen worker’s watch broke, Sinatra gave him a Rolex.
Another time, the Times reported that George Raft “put the keys to his white 1974 Coupe de Ville on the table and told Castro he was too old to drive. ‘It’s over,’ he said.’ I’m giving you my car.’”
Things were perhaps too comfortable at La Dolce Vita. Castro remembered one uncomfortable moment when President Ronald Reagan suffered from gas. “He once stood up and farted very loudly,” Castro told The Mail on Sunday. “I couldn't ignore it, so I stood to attention and said, ’Salute, Mr. Presidente!’ And he laughed so loudly I thought he would fall over!"
But an air of menace occasionally swirled around La Dolce Vita. Sinatra, his daughter Tina (who is a part of the restaurant’s current ownership group) recalled, refused to sit with his back to the door.
“We once had a hoodlum shoot up the outside of the door after an argument over a reservation,” Castro recalled. “Frank heard about it, and a few weeks later he came in and said to me, ‘Don't worry about that guy again, we took care of it.’ I never found out what that meant, but that guy never came back to shoot at my door again!'”
The old timers would patronize La Dolce Vita until their deaths. Some of its mystique and popularity died with them. "Here was a piece of real Hollywood history that was at risk of going away forever. It was criminal," film producer Alessandro Uzielli told Town and Country in 2013.
In 2003, Uzielli and his producing partners Ben Myron and David Simmer purchased La Dolce Vita. They refurbished it and honored the past by putting plaques up at departed regulars’ favorite booths. All was going well, until the pandemic hit.
That’s where Rose and Abrous stepped in. “Med and I grew up together and we grew up in New York City,” Rose says. “We grew up going to restaurants very much like this… These are the restaurants I've been going to with my dad who was also in the business, which I swore I would never be. And here I am. But these are the restaurants that I remember seeing my dad walk in and tip every single person on the way to the table. And I'm like, ‘how do you even know that that guy's going to be your table?’ And one time he said to me, he goes, ‘I don't, but I guarantee you my bread's going to come out warm.’”
For Rose and Abrous, reviving La Dolce Vita was a no-brainer. “We like to amplify the richness of history, both architecturally design wise and in a city in which we live,” Abrous says. “Our families are here; our kids go to school here. Why not do something kind of small and special? And that does give us all that kind of nostalgic feelings that really sparked our passion for hospitality in the first place.”
The duo worked with designer Victoria Gillet of We Are Dada to enhance the restaurant’s interior. Without changing the clubby layout, they gave it a modern twist — adding stained glass windows depicting cheetahs in empty coves, a cheetah carpet, pearly wood walls, and a revamped bar.
“The words sexy and chic came up a lot, which you don't always associate with spaghetti and meatballs, but we felt that they could be because we felt that way when we went into those restaurants,” Rose says.
“We always make the joke that when we first walked into the restaurant, it looked like it was right out of Goodfellas and now it looks like it's in Casino,” Abrous says.
They focus on locally grown produce and have curated a small red sauce menu which includes spaghetti and meatballs, tuna tartare, Caesar salad (made tableside), Veal Parmigiana, Clams Oreganata, and Bucatini al Limone — which can appeal to the health conscious and hearty eaters alike.
“We understand that people's palates have changed, the way they eat has changed. Even the way in California versus New York is different- the way people eat. And we paid attention to that,” Rose says. “Of course, there's a veal parm on the menu that is amazing and incredible … but there's also the most beautiful branzino piece of fish that you could eat.”
In the 10 months since it reopened, La Dolce Vita has proved that Angelenos are eager to see their history saved, and to savor the intimacy of a service-forward, secretive spot. It’s also a wonderful place for people watching, where grizzled rock stars sit in a booth next to sunny starlets, and old timers talk to friendly waiters at the bar while serious men in designer suits streak past to their booths. But it doesn’t feel pretentious, but rather like an upscale hole-in-the-wall that happens to be in the middle of Beverly Hills.
“It’s arguably the most famous zip code on the planet,” Abrous says. “And you think about the Rodeos of it all and the tourism and all, and you forget, it's a real neighborhood. There's so much residential up and down the streets here. People have a restaurant to go to where they feel good and they feel safe and they feel- I hate to say it, this sounds like an ad for Olive Garden — like you're at home. It's a special feeling.”
