88 Club

Beverly Hills and the New Guard

Beverly Hills spent much of the last decade watching Los Angeles's dining energy migrate toward Downtown, the Arts District, and Culver City. The city's more adventurous critical attention followed Kato and Hayato east and south, while the 90210 zip code retained its luxury infrastructure but shed some of its culinary relevance. That has been shifting. A cluster of newer openings along and around Santa Monica Boulevard signal that Beverly Hills is repositioning itself — not by chasing the tasting-menu format that defines Michelin attention at spots like Somni, but by building a different kind of dining gravity: rooms where the social contract between kitchen and table feels calibrated to a more relaxed, higher-stakes register.

88 Club, at 9737 S Santa Monica Blvd, is part of that repositioning. Its 2025 Resy Hit List recognition places it in company that, in prior years, skewed heavily toward east-side and mid-city addresses. That the list now includes a Beverly Hills entry reflects a broader rebalancing in how critics and bookers are reading the city's dining map.

What the Menu Architecture Signals

Without a publicly detailed menu, reading 88 Club requires inference from context and category. The Resy Hit List recognition in 2025 suggests a kitchen operating at a level that generates booking pressure — the kind of sustained demand that makes 88 Club reservations a planning consideration rather than a walk-in decision. Resy's editorial team tends to recognize venues where the format is doing something legible but not predictable: menus that have a clear architectural logic without tipping into the high-ceremony tasting format that defines the city's Michelin tier.

The restaurants that earn Hit List placement without accompanying starred recognition typically fall into one of two structural camps in Los Angeles: those running assertive à la carte programs where dishes are built to be shared and ordered in multiples, and those running tightly sequenced formats that function like abbreviated tasting menus without the full commitment. Either approach points toward a kitchen with a point of view about how meals should move , not a venue where the menu is incidental to the room's social function.

In this, 88 Club occupies a position in the Beverly Hills dining tier that has no obvious single comparison. Osteria Mozza, further west, runs a long-established Italian program that anchors a different generation of the same zip code's dining ambitions. Providence, a few miles east on Melrose, represents the Michelin two-star ceiling for the area's seafood-led fine dining. 88 Club's positioning appears to sit between those registers: more serious than legacy power dining, less ceremonially demanding than the city's tasting-menu tier.

Beverly Hills Dining in 2025: The Tier It Sits In

Los Angeles's restaurant scene has stratified in ways that mirror what other major American cities experienced five years earlier. At the leading of the formal tier: Somni's molecular precision and Hayato's kaiseki discipline. Further east, Kato's New Taiwanese program holds a Michelin star and a devoted allocation-style following. These venues require advance planning measured in weeks or months and carry price points that anchor a distinct tier of the city's dining economy.

Below that ceiling but above the neighbourhood-restaurant register, a mid-premium tier has been developing: venues where the kitchen is operating with serious technical ambition, the room carries social weight, and the format doesn't require a full ceremonial commitment from the diner. This is the tier where Beverly Hills has historically underperformed relative to its zip code's economic weight, and where 88 Club appears to be staking its claim. The Resy recognition suggests the market has noticed.

For context, what this tier looks like in other American cities: Lazy Bear in San Francisco redefined mid-premium dining through its communal format; Le Bernardin in New York remains the template for technically serious dining without tasting-menu formality at its price point; Atomix in New York operates a hybrid format that has influenced how other cities think about menu sequencing. In Chicago, Alinea remains the reference point for the fully theatrical end of fine dining. 88 Club's Beverly Hills address and Hit List status place it in a conversation with how that mid-premium tier is developing on the West Coast.

Planning Your Visit

The Resy Hit List placement in 2025 creates booking pressure that warrants planning ahead. Venues that earn this recognition typically see their reservation windows tighten in the weeks following publication, and Beverly Hills addresses with strong social visibility tend to hold that pressure longer than east-side equivalents. Given the available data, approaching 88 Club reservations with at least two to three weeks of lead time is prudent; peak weekend sittings may require more. The venue's South Santa Monica Boulevard address puts it within walking distance of Beverly Hills's hotel corridor, making it a logical anchor for evenings that begin with pre-dinner drinks further west.

For those building a broader Los Angeles dining itinerary, the city's full picture is covered in our Los Angeles restaurants guide. Supplementary resources for the trip include our Los Angeles hotels guide, our Los Angeles bars guide, our Los Angeles wineries guide, and our Los Angeles experiences guide. For those extending the trip to Northern California, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg and The French Laundry in Napa represent the region's tasting-menu tier. Further afield, Emeril's in New Orleans and 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong offer useful reference points for how award-recognized restaurants perform across different dining cultures.