Ori Menashe - Bestia: Italian Recipes Created in the Heart of L.A. [A Cookbook]

Text copyright 2018 by Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis
Photographs copyright 2018 by Nicole Franzen

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Menashe, Ori, author. | Gergis, Genevieve, author. | Franzen, Nicole, photographer.

Title: Bestia : italian recipes created in the Heart of L.A. / by Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis, with Lesley Suter ; photographs by Nicole Franzen.

Description: California, New York : Ten Speed Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018014042

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, Italian. | Bestia (Restaurant) | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX723 .M4585 2018 | DDC 641.5945dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014042

ISBN9780399580901

Ebook ISBN9780399580918

Prop styling by Joni Noe

v5.3.2_r1

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CONTENTS

PANTRY

COCKTAILS

CHARCUTERIE

SALADS

STARTERS & SIDES

BREAD & PIZZA

PASTA

MAIN DISHES

DESSERTS

OUR STORY

Genevieve: Bestia is a restaurant that never should have worked.

To start, we were two self-taught unknowns. Ori had cooked in many great restaurants around Los Angeles, but hes not the type to take credit or be showythats just not his styleand as a result, few people outside of the restaurant industry knew who he was. I had never worked in a professional kitchen in my life, so I brought nothing to the table at all.

Then theres the location. We chose to open an ambitiously sized restaurant on a dead-end street on the edge of downtown Los Angeles amid nothing but empty warehouses and a seedy strip club. One Yelp reviewer called it the corner of Crack and Murder.

Ori: There were needles and condoms and cans of overflowing garbage in the street. It was horrible. But for some reason, the first time I walked through the alley toward the giant, corrugated-steel building, I was blind to all of it. I literally just didnt see it.

Genevieve: Its the newborn-baby syndrome. When you first lay eyes on your newborn child, you dont notice that its covered in goop and its head is shaped like a cone. No, in that moment, theyre literally the most beautiful thing youve ever seen.

Ori: Thats how it was for me with Saffron, our daughter, and thats how it was with Bestia. I walked through the door, and even though it was all under construction and still broken up into three different apartments, I saw the potential in all of the metal, the exposed ceiling, the bones. It was beautiful and ugly all at the same timejust cool. And then I walked out into the courtyard with fig trees and cactus and the sound of fountains and stillness. I got back in my car, called Genevieve, and said, I found it.

Genevieve: Are you sure? I asked him. Ori is a workaholic, and I knew how antsy he was to just find a place and get back into the kitchen. But then he said, Theres a courtyard. He knows me, Im a sucker for stuff like thatanything that breaks the mold of a one-dimensional box. So I said, OK, let me see it.

Ori: I drove home, picked her up, and took her back to the space. She immediately loved it too. This was our restaurant.

Genevieve: We were so confident about the location, but for no reason at all. The logical thing to do would have been to consider things like how many people will walk by, or what other businesses are around it. But no. None of this affected our conviction that this hidden industrial ruin on a dead-end street was the perfect spot for Bestia. Like everything else we do, we went entirely with our hearts.

Ori: Even more than the location, I was confident about the food. The menu would be Italian, but different from what Id cooked beforemore amplified, less traditional, and authentically mine. I knew wed have handmade pastas and pizzas, but with an added focus on meat. I wanted to serve off-cuts like pan-seared chicken gizzards with beets and grilled beef heart, while also bringing in whole animals for house-cured salumi and steaks grilled over a wood fire.

Genevieve: The investors who tried Oris food loved it, too. But even then, many of them pulled out when they saw the space. Its funny, we still didnt get the hint that our location could be an issue. The investors who stuck around were mostly friends who were either not in it for the money, or whod scraped together whatever little money they had just because they wanted to help us fulfill our dream.

Ori: We basically had to build the restaurant out of nothing. But Genevieve had a friend who became our restaurant designer and gave us a great deal. Our contractor gave us a great deal. Our landlord gave us a great deal. Almost everything you see inside Bestia today was either built by friends or found at a swap meet. In the end, we put the entire restaurant together for less than $1 million.

Genevieve: It was all falling into place. But then two weeks before we opened, Oris mom came to visit from Israel.

Ori: She saw the building and said, Why did you do this?! Theres nobody here? Why arent you opening in an area where theres foot traffic?! I told her to chill out and took her to nearby Urth Caff to show her the crowds. But something about what she said flipped a switch in my head. Suddenly I saw it allthe neighborhood, the trash, everything. I hadnt even realized before that there was a strip cluband not even a classy onejust down the street. I panicked. I left one night after a long day of curing meats and called Genevieve. I told her we had made a big mistake.

Genevieve: He said, Genevieve, I walked around. Im seeing used condoms and needles all over the ground. Its disgusting. What did we do? I thought it was just preopening anxiety. Again, like that moment right before you have a babyyoure like, Were not ready! I told him to calm down, but he continued to freak out. Finally I said, Well, its too late now. Were opening in two weeks. Lets just do this.

Ori: I made her promise, If this doesnt work, were moving to Israel. You agree?

Genevieve: I said yes, but I was lying.

Ori: Because if this doesnt work, I said, its our last chance. The only place we could build up something like this again is Israel. We arent going to be able to do this one more time because nobodys going to trust us.

Genevieve: Especially since we picked this crazy location, theyre all going to think were insane. Which we sort of were. But finally, we decided okay, lets just see how it turns out. We planned to open the day after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally a dead day. Ori said, Its greatwell have maybe forty or fifty people tops, itll be fine. I was nervous. This was my first real day as a professional pastry chef, and I didnt want a huge crowd.

But then the time came to open the doors, and I see a line of thirty people already waiting outside. How did this happen? Thered been barely any press. We were unknowns. The neighborhood was downright dangerous. The restaurant was really hard to find. But still, our customers found us. This is what I mean when I say that this restaurant shouldnt have worked. Against all odds, we ended up serving a hundred twenty people that opening night, and there has continued to be a line outside of Bestia at opening time every night for the past five years. Were eternally grateful for it.