Bi-coastal breaking points
I, too, want to talk to you about Sam’s Place and Bridges
“Alright, here’s what you’re going to do. Don’t think about it. Just take that piece of bread and run it through the butter like the camera isn’t even here.”
An influencer is coaching his two influencer-adjacent, hand-model friends through their first bites at Sam’s Place, a new spot in LA’s Highland Park — a neighborhood with one great bar (Gold Line) and now one great restaurant that is also basically just a bar. He has a hand on his phone and another on a $100 LED light. I catch eye rolls from hovering parties holding beers, walking that balance between “I’m chill and having a fun time” to “if they don’t relinquish these seats soon I’m going home.” Then our olives arrive and I turn away from the crowd, back to a table snagged through somewhat nefarious methods.
The closest thing Sam’s Place has to a website or social media presence is a profile on
, which is by design.“We both hate it,” owners Scotty Cantino and Ben Jones told
, with Cantino adding, “I’d rather be tasting wine or polishing a glass than have to update social media or reply to DMs.”It looks like Instagram has come to Sam’s Place, which is fine. All signs point to Cantino and Jones building something good enough to sustain an inevitable move out of the underground.
A friend and I arrive around 7 on a Saturday night, finding a packed bar, full booths, beautiful wood paneling and a quiet blood bath outside hoping for seats. You order at the bar, get a number, and wonder if you’re about to eat standing up. A first-time customer hounds Cantino for a job while she waits for her wine. The top 75% of the Sam’s Place menu features drinks, with a collection of small plates in the bottom left corner. Olives, almonds, wings, herb salad, saucisson with bread and better, sweet potatoes, a steak. That’s about it. Everything is quite good, with few surprises or twists. They pull cassettes from behind the bar to fight the Spotify algorithm. The place maintains the charm of an hidden gem half as busy as it is now even as it stretches to its true capacity.
For months, trying to decide where to eat out in LA, I’d been imagining Sam’s Place even before word-of-mouth informed me it existed. It continuously struck me as odd that no new, approachable and well-executed dinner spots seemed to have opened besides Stir Crazy since I left a couple years ago. While New York embraces bustling hotel restaurants, exclusive clubs cosplaying as dining destinations and a return to its tried and true classics, I love how Sam’s Place and Stir Crazy embody my favorite thing about LA: ease. You can have great food, rather casually, all over the city in strip malls and parking lots. You end up having most of your favorite meals at home, cooked by friends using the best ingredients around. We don’t do formal all that well, and we’re in a period of mostly being done trying.
Despite the new hype and demand, I hope Sam’s Place can hold onto this opening month magic. What they’re doing is working. A spot to be a regular, treated like an adult, with reliable service and enjoyable clientele, food that delivers yet feels no need to show off, and a couple influencers in the corners who do no harm and probably won’t return.
The team at Sam’s Place told Emily Wilson their journey to opening was inspired by a dive bar in New Orleans that nailed a method for always serving ice-cold beer, which is endearing. Bridges, in New York’s Chinatown, has different references points. London wine bars. Estela, where chef Sam Lawrence used to work. Parisian bistronomie. You’ve seen a menu like this before in this part of town, but not done quite like this.
The Billy Cotton-designed space avoids having any bad tables, though the corner banquets are the real star seats. During a late dinner in Bridges’ opening week, the room is packed with friends bouncing around tables and saying hi, gossiping about what to order. The food starts arriving and the conversation swings between between surprise, elation and relief. A clean sardines on toast with anchovies and peppers moves into a wildly good uni and shrimp custard. The balance between the volume of the room and the music is just right. A simple dish of squash, greens and cheese strikingly punches above its weight.
And then something special happens. There’s the city’s best new dish, a comte tarte with chanterelles. There’s perfectly cooked crab and béarnaise. There’s dry-aged duck, delicious and one-upped by whipped potatoes and XO. And there’s a vin jaune gelate topped with passionfruit you’re compelled not to share.
After the meal, we’re debriefing. Most of us are blown away, plotting a return res or an event in the PDR. One friend sitting a table over texts the next morning that it was pretty good but not too exciting or different than what’s out there already. Another said King was more dialed in and Demo was more interesting. And that’s fun. I like a spot that’s a little divisive.
Service is over when we get up to leave. The kitchen is checking on prep and orders for the next day with earned confidence from a killer first week. The front of house staff is beaming and proud. That night, a few upcoming tables were still available, but by now they’re all gone. The word is out. Bridges clogged up the Resy red paint before even appearing on Google Maps.
We know what happens next. Two or three stars in the Times (I’d bet on three, they’re just getting started), a line to snag the walk-in booths at 5:30, a flooded tagged page on Instagram, DMs dying to get in, and a hope that the team just keeps consistently delivering.
I’m optimistic both Sam’s Place and Bridges figure out how to bend without breaking to being the hot spot of the moment. They look built to last, and they’re reaffirming faith that there’s a way to do this — a way to open a restaurant with a distinct point of view and reasonable ambitions that still just wants to make people happy.