Salt’s Cure

Hollywood's Counterargument to Fine-Dining Excess

Los Angeles spent much of the 2010s building a reputation for technically ambitious, high-ticket New American cooking. The city's upper tier, represented by rooms like Vespertine and Camphor and concept-driven counters pushing tasting menus past the $200 mark, earned deserved national attention. But alongside that trajectory, a quieter current ran through the same city: restaurants grounded in American preservation traditions, whole-animal butchery, and a casual service register that looked back toward the country's regional food culture rather than forward to European technique. Salt's Cure, on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, opened as a deliberate expression of that current, and it has stayed there consistently since. Its founding was rooted in house-cured meats and whole-animal sourcing at a time when those ideas were just beginning to move from chef-world conversation to actual neighborhood restaurant practice.

The Opinionated About Dining Signal

Among the guides that track American casual dining seriously, Opinionated About Dining occupies a specific lane: it ranks restaurants by surveying working food professionals rather than anonymous consumers or single critics. That methodology tends to surface technically focused casual rooms that general-interest critics miss or underrank. Salt's Cure has appeared on OAD's North America Casual list in both 2023 and 2024, ranking #98 in the Gourmet Casual Dining category in 2023 and receiving a Highly Recommended notation the same year before climbing to #149 in the broader Casual in North America ranking in 2024. A Google aggregate of 4.4 across 595 reviews holds alongside those professional recognitions, which is a more telling combination than either data point alone: professional credibility and consistent civilian satisfaction rarely overlap by accident. For context, the Los Angeles restaurants that tend to collect OAD recognition at the high end, places like Hayato or Kato, operate in entirely different price and format brackets. Salt's Cure's recognition in the casual tier is a separate achievement, measuring something different: value-weighted execution.

Whole-Animal California and the Regional Identity Question

The editorial angle worth examining at Salt's Cure is not the menu itself but what tradition it draws from. New American is a broad designation that can mean almost anything from coastal fusion to farm-table rusticity. At the casual end of the spectrum, the most coherent version of the category in recent years has been a regional-American idiom: producers named on menus, preservation techniques foregrounded, meat sourced whole and broken down in-house. This is the tradition Salt's Cure occupies. Curing, smoking, and whole-animal utilization connect it not to the Pacific Rim influences that define much of Los Angeles's food identity but to an older American vernacular rooted in necessity and resourcefulness. That approach reads as a Southern or Appalachian inheritance — the kind of food culture where nothing from the animal goes unused and salt does the work that refrigeration once couldn't.

In California, that tradition acquires a specific character. The state's agricultural depth means the sourcing side of whole-animal cooking is exceptionally well-supported: ranchers in the Central Valley and coast ranges producing beef, pork, and lamb at a scale and quality that make the in-house butchery model viable in a way it isn't everywhere. Salt's Cure's positioning in Hollywood, a neighborhood that trends toward faster-casual and delivery-oriented formats, makes its deliberate, technique-first approach more conspicuous, and arguably more durable. The same commitment to house curing that looked countercultural in 2012 now reads as a stable identity, the kind that builds the repeat clientele an OAD casual ranking requires.

Hollywood Neighborhood Context

Highland Avenue runs through the mid-section of Hollywood, between the denser tourist infrastructure to the south and the residential hills to the north. The dining register along that stretch leans practical rather than destination-driven. Salt's Cure at 1155 Highland sits at the edge of that pattern, close enough to the Hollywood grid to draw opportunistic diners but far enough from the Sunset Strip circuit to sustain a local regulars base. Nearby, Norah and Pace represent different expressions of neighborhood dining in the same corridor — Italian-leaning and event-oriented respectively , while the more format-driven rooms in the broader city, like 71above or Nightshade, occupy a completely different audience tier. Salt's Cure is not competing with those rooms. Its competition is the neighborhood itself: the pressure on any casual sit-down format to justify itself against the abundance of faster, cheaper options that Hollywood supports.

The fact that it has done so for over a decade, and earned ongoing professional recognition while doing it, says something about the discipline of its format rather than any marketing success.

Where It Sits in the New American Conversation

New American as a category has fractured into recognizable sub-traditions at this point. At the high end, tasting-menu formats like The French Laundry, Alinea, and Lazy Bear have defined what ambition looks like in the category. At the approachable end, places like Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg integrate farm-to-table rigor into a hospitality-forward format. Classic East Coast rooms like The Inn at Little Washington and Bayona hold a different kind of New American lineage, drawing on French foundations. Salt's Cure fits none of these patterns directly. Its closest peer set is the generation of American butcher-restaurants and charcuterie-focused casual rooms that emerged in the early 2010s alongside a broader national interest in preservation and provenance. Within that cohort, its California geography and continued operation place it among the more durable examples.

For reference points outside New American entirely, the curing and preservation ethos has more in common with the regional traditions behind Emeril's in New Orleans or the meat-forward classicism of a room like Le Bernardin in its commitment to technique over concept, even if the cuisines point in different directions.

Planning a Visit

Salt's Cure runs Wednesday and Thursday from 9am to 8pm, extending to 9pm on Friday and Saturday. Sunday service ends at 3pm, making it a logical brunch destination for the neighbourhood. The restaurant is closed Monday and Tuesday. Those hours reflect a deliberate approach to staffing and kitchen rhythm that is common among small-format restaurants with in-house curing programs: the prep time required for preservation-based cooking doesn't support a seven-day schedule without diluting quality or exhausting a small team. The address at 1155 Highland Ave places it in a driving-and-parking-dependent part of Hollywood; street parking along Highland and adjacent side streets is the practical approach. For travelers building a broader Los Angeles itinerary, our full Los Angeles restaurants guide, our Los Angeles hotels guide, our Los Angeles bars guide, our Los Angeles wineries guide, and our Los Angeles experiences guide cover the broader picture. Salt's Cure fits well into a neighborhood-focused day in Hollywood rather than a destination-dining evening, which is consistent with its format and pricing tier. Chef Chris Phelps and Zack Walters have maintained the restaurant's identity across its run, and the OAD consistency from 2023 to 2024 suggests the kitchen hasn't drifted from what earned it recognition in the first place. At a R+D Kitchen-adjacent price tier for the neighborhood, it represents solid-value casual dining with a technical foundation that most rooms in that register don't carry.

What Regulars Order at Salt's Cure

Salt's Cure built its reputation on house-cured and smoked products, so the items that reflect that technique most directly are the ones the restaurant's following returns for. The cured meats and charcuterie formats that the kitchen produces in-house are the signature of the format, and regulars tend to anchor their orders around whatever preservation-forward preparations are on the current menu. Weekend brunch draws its own crowd, with the Sunday-only service ending at 3pm functioning as a natural close to the week for the restaurant's core local base. Because the menu rotates with sourcing availability, the consistent thread is technique and format rather than specific dish names, but anything that puts the house curing program at the center of the plate reflects what the kitchen does at its most disciplined.