Dear John's

The Red Curtain, the Darkness, and the Drink Already on Its Way

There is a particular kind of Los Angeles restaurant that has nothing to prove. No open kitchen, no DJ, no Instagram-optimised plating. Dear John's, a classic steakhouse in Culver City, is that kind of place. You part the heavy red curtains, hold a beat while your eyes adjust to a darkness that feels less like poor lighting and more like permission to exhale, and settle into cool leather. The sound is ice in a shaker. The architecture of the room is from another era, and deliberately so. This was a working dining room in the early 1960s, the sort of place where Frank Sinatra and his orbit filled the booths, and the bones of that original character, the low light, the banquettes, the sense of suspended time, remain largely intact.

That continuity is not accidental. When the building faced demolition in 2019, restaurateurs Hans and Patti Röckenwagner and partner Josiah Citrin stepped in to preserve it. An initial two-year lease has since been extended through 2028, which tells you something about the room's staying power with its audience. The LA Times placed it at #49 on its 101 Best Restaurants list for 2024, recognition that sits in the same field as technically complex contemporaries while belonging to a completely different register.

What the Regulars Already Know

The regulars' perspective on Dear John's is the only perspective worth having, because the room is designed for people who come back. The menu reads as a set of fixed points that a loyal diner navigates by feel rather than by browsing. Chicken parm here gets the chicken Kiev treatment: the mozzarella is sealed inside the breast, so it oozes when you cut through. That is not a reinvention of the dish, it is a considered refinement of the mechanics, the kind of decision that a kitchen makes when it wants the eating experience to be a small, recurring pleasure rather than a talking point.

The creamed spinach occupies a similar position: a steakhouse standard that the kitchen treats as a signature rather than a side. Tater tots arrive with petite dollops of caviar, a pairing that reads as self-aware without tipping into parody. The chopped salad, by multiple accounts, assembles what the LA Times critic described as an entire deli case of ingredients. These are dishes built for repetition, the kind that a regular orders without looking at the menu, because the order has already been placed in the mind on the drive over.

Martini belongs in that same category. At Dear John's, the bar is not a secondary operation. The cocktail program functions as the room's first act: the drink arrives early, made to order, and the rest of the evening is calibrated around it. In Los Angeles, where the cocktail bar has increasingly split between high-concept technical programs and nostalgic neighbourhood formats, the restaurant sits firmly in the latter camp, and owns it with more conviction than most.

Where Dear John's Sits in the Culver City Dining Context

Culver City's dining scene has shifted considerably in the past decade. The neighbourhood now holds a range of serious restaurants, and LA's broader restaurant culture runs from austere omakase counters to ambitious tasting menus. Hayato carries two Michelin stars and represents the precision end of that spectrum. Kato holds one Michelin star for its New Taiwanese format. Somni operates in the molecular-progressive register. Further afield, Providence and Osteria Mozza anchor the city's more formal dining tier.

The restaurant does not compete with any of them directly. Its comparable set is the category of American supper club, rooms where the atmosphere is the product as much as the food, where the kitchen delivers on a short, repeatable menu, and where the value proposition is comfort executed at a high level rather than ambition demonstrated course by course. In that comparable set, which is genuinely sparse in Los Angeles, the restaurant is doing one coherent version of the format currently operating in the city.

For visitors comparing dining options across the country, the register is closer to the mood of Emeril's in New Orleans, rooms with a strong identity and a loyal base, than to the tasting-menu tier represented by The French Laundry in Napa, Alinea in Chicago, or Le Bernardin in New York City. It is a different proposition entirely, and the LA Times 2024 ranking is notable precisely because it places the restaurant alongside technically demanding kitchens without treating the comparison as incongruous.