Restaurant Review: Gjelina Imports the Fantasy of L.A.

Is Gjelina, with its three locations, a chain now? It’s certainly more than just a restaurant. Lett left the Gjelina Group in 2019, selling his stake back to the founder, Fran Camaj (whose mother is the restaurant’s namesake). The company now operates a hotel, a takeaway, a home-goods store, a flower shop, and a foundation dedicated to vocational training in hospitality, plus Gjusta, a prepared-foods shop, which Camaj told The New Yorker he’s planning to bring to New York, too.

Though specific items on Gjelina’s menu have changed over the years since Lett’s departure, the kitchens, now under the stewardship of the executive chef Juan Hernandez, still hew to Lett’s philosophies and formulas. The dishes no longer feel as revolutionary as they did a decade and a half ago—pretty much everything that the restaurant serves could come straight from Lett’s “Gjelina” cookbook, from 2015, a terrific volume full of intimidatingly cross-referenced recipes and sub-recipes. But knocking off points for Gjelina’s continued dedication to Brussels sprouts and pestos is a little bit like dismissing “Hamlet” for being full of clichés.

The kitchen at Gjelina New York, naturally, is open, situated behind a dining bar, and is visually punctuated by the orange flames of a wood-burning oven. The food is just as striking, and just as assertive, as it is in California, with saturated flavors deployed in a calculated balance. A lush lamb tartare is spiced with North African baharat paste as resonant and lingering as a foghorn. A bouquet of long-stemmed broccolini is charred and frizzy around the edges and dressed in a vinaigrette just slightly softened by the tangy sweetness of black garlic. A twirl of saffron-infused spaghetti is tossed in a sauce of confited tomatoes and bottarga that burns with a red-chile heat. You order the roasted fennel because you love fennel; you close your eyes in rapture because of the onion agrodolce on top, which turns out to be what fennel has always needed, along with a sprinkle of togarashi, and a few perfect supremes of orange, for good measure.

One recent night, I counted fifty-two items on the dinner menu, not including desserts. The servers were not especially helpful at navigating the plenitude. “What sounds good to you?” seems to be their go-to phrase, and fair enough: when a restaurant has been doing its thing this well, for this long, there really is no wrong way to go. “Should we get the fingerling sweet potatoes, or the pinto potato?” my friend inquired on one visit, considering some of the spud options (four, including a pizza topped with thin rounds of potato, with taleggio and garlic). We went with the fingerlings—a row of blistered wedges with an edge of smoke and caramel, served in a pool of spicy yogurt under a shower of finely slivered scallions. What sounded good was indeed good; one of the promises of Gjelina is that what sounds good always will be.

What is different from the original, noticeably and significantly, is, in part, the physical space. L.A. sprawls; New York soars. This Gjelina is narrower, more vertical, a stack of boxy parlors with a scattering of street-facing windows and no fresh air to speak of. Sunny café vibes in a front room—pale wood, minimalist shapes—give way to moodier spaces inside: a large upstairs dining room, with the heavy wooden bar running along one wall; a quieter, upholstered dining area beyond that. At dinnertime, the restaurant is busy, but not slammed; the crowd seems to be largely made up of people with beautiful hair and compellingly hideous shoes. Compared with the L.A. Gjelina, the New York outpost, perhaps inevitably, has little sense of place.