M. Georgina is a 4500-square-foot shrine to culinary
ingenuity and not an inch of space is wasted. Whole beasts
her career trajectory now, the road to LA was paved slowly.
smoke and sizzle on hot coals over here. Dry goods stand
Very slowly. “Los Angeles was never part of the plan,” she
at attention on rows of open shelves over there. There
says. “I had no thoughts of leaving San Francisco. At all.”
are stations for prepping the housemade ricotta cheese,
behind ROW DTLA had been courting Melissa from afar,
the menu, plus uncommonly delicious bread and butter
checking in every so often in an effort to convince her
at the ready and an open-air pick-up window called The
that LA—and their complex—was the place for her next
Slip for lunch on the go. Everything about this restaurant,
restaurant. In their minds, she was integral to the project
right down to its slick glass-and-metal construction, exists
and they wanted her as an anchor.
for one reason: to bring chef-owner Melissa Perello’s brand
of elevated yet accessible market-driven food to delicious
“That’s when I started thinking, this might be
worth considering,” Melissa says. “Then I started getting
life in the biggest and best possible way.
Situated prominently within ROW DTLA, a sprawling
interested and it all snowballed from there. The food
mixed-use development in Los Angeles’ burgeoning Arts
scene in LA has changed so dramatically over the past few
District, M. Georgina feels like a secret discovery—at once
years, and I was struck by how exciting it all felt. I wasn’t
unique within the landscape of LA’s evolving food scene
expecting it, but I also couldn’t deny it. It just felt right.”
and also completely at home among the new tastemaker-
To understand the influences behind Melissa’s
culinary vision, it’s crucial to go back in time. Before she
led restaurants propelling the city’s palate forward. Like
became the darling of the food world for reinvigorating
its location, M. Georgina manages a delicate balancing
San Francisco’s fabled Charles Nob Hill restaurant at
act; it is historic yet experimental, old-school with a new
the tender age of twenty-four, before she became one of
vision, foundational in technique yet fluid in expression,
Food & Wine magazine’s Best New Chefs at twenty-seven,
serious and unsentimental but with a whiff of whimsy.
But other forces were at work behind the scenes.
For the better part of the past eight years, the developers
yogurt and other from-scratch ingredients that populate
But while the move feels like the natural next step in
It’s a bigger, bolder, glitzier twist on the kind of high-
before the accolades and the Michelin star she earned at
quality, unpretentious flavor that has become Melissa’s
Fifth Floor restaurant, before she opened two restaurants
signature over the past decade, and propelled both of her
of her own and earned two additional Michelin stars for
San Francisco restaurants, Frances and Octavia, from
those, too, and long before this LA venture ever presented
dining spots to destinations.
itself, Melissa Perello was a little girl toggling between two
seemingly disparate destinations that heavily shaped the kind of chef she would become: New Jersey and Texas.
“When I was younger, we lived in Hackensack, New
Jersey, where my father’s family was from,” she says, “so
in the summers, my parents would ship us off to Texas,
"THE FOOD SCENE IN LA HAS
where my mother’s family was from, for six to eight weeks.
We’d be in the middle of nowhere, in northern Texas, the
CHANGED SO DRAMATICALLY
panhandle, with nothing to do.” To stave off boredom,
OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, AND I
Melissa watched cooking shows on PBS. Soon, she was
spellbound by the dishes she saw chefs like Nathalie
WAS STRUCK BY HOW EXCITING IT
Dupree, Jacques Pépin and Julia Child conjuring on
ALL FELT. I WASN’T EXPECTING IT,
the screen. “I’d go home to New Jersey with this whole
repertoire of things to cook,” she says. “I remember being
BUT I ALSO COULDN’T DENY IT.
about seven or eight years old telling my mom that I
IT JUST FELT RIGHT."
just had to cook this leg of lamb dish I had seen and she was like, ‘Alright.’ So we went and got two legs of lamb
and bound them and stuffed them with thyme and dijon
mustard and then roasted them on the grill just like I had
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