The Tasting Kitchen Is Back on Abbot Kinney, Three Years After the Fire

The olive tree survived. So did the handwritten menus.

The Tasting Kitchen reopened at 1633 Abbot Kinney Boulevard on July 16, three years after a March 2023 fire closed it. Casey Lane, who opened the restaurant in 2009 at 25 years old having just moved down from Portland, is back running the kitchen.

The original run mattered. Lane's handwritten, market-driven menus, rewritten close to nightly, earned praise from Jonathan Gold and four consecutive James Beard Rising Star Chef semifinalist nods. The dining room, with a mature olive tree growing through the middle of it, became one of the fixed points on a boulevard still figuring out what it wanted to be.

What changed

The kitchen now runs on charcoal and live fire, the clearest departure from the original. Longtime dishes carry over, including the mackerel and the pastas, alongside new plates built around the hearth. Guests can order a la carte or take Lane's tasting menu, a dual format that honors the original concept while giving people a way in that does not require the full progression.

Matt Winter of M Winter Design handled the reworked room, using hand-troweled plaster and antique reclaimed marble. The result reads a little less bohemian than the 2009 version and a little more midcentury. The olive tree stayed.

The bar is a genuine upgrade. Blake Antrobus leads the program, most recently from Monsieur Dior by Dominique Crenn, and before that Bicyclette and Manzke under Shawn Lickliter, where the team earned a 2022 Michelin Guide California Exceptional Cocktails Award. His list follows the same seasonal logic as the kitchen.

What Lane has been doing

The three years were not idle. Lane has been culinary program lead at Ghisallo and Jyan Isaac Bread and still oversees both. He built the menu at West Hollywood's Viale dei Romani in the La Peer Hotel before it closed in 2020, worked on menus for Downtown's Hotel Figueroa, and partnered with Palisociety on Marco Polo at the Silver Lake Pool and Inn and Simonette in Culver City.

He has been candid that the reopening feels different, describing the 2026 version as arriving with more calm and a less hungry pace. Speaking to Forbes about the boulevard's evolution, he characterized the early years as a stretch where art met crime, followed by the hype and landlords pricing the block for corporate guarantees, and said he now sees bungalow shops returning.

A curated Master Selector music series is in development, with KCRW's J.Rocc and Detroit's Moodymann on the wish list, and a fine-dining-style lunch on the Chez Panisse model is planned. Lane's framing: not every lunch in Los Angeles has to be a power lunch.

Visiting

The Tasting Kitchen is at 1633 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice, CA 90291.

• Hours: dinner Wednesday through Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m., with daily service and extended evening hours planned.

• Format: a la carte or tasting menu. Walk-ins are welcomed at the bar.

• Parking: metered street parking along Abbot Kinney and the residential side streets, which fill early on weekend evenings.

• Menus and reservations: thetastingkitchen.com.

It reopens into a busier street than the one it left. Badmaash opened its Venice dining room on Abbot Kinney in March, covered in Badmaash on Abbot Kinney, and San Damian is a few blocks down, covered in San Damian.

Follow along with more LA restaurant news, or see what else has opened in our guide to new restaurants in Los Angeles.