Santa Monica Dining Scene November 11, 2021
By Dolores Quintana and Sam Catanzaro
Montana Avenue Location for McCall’s Meat & Fish Co.
High-end Los Feliz butcher McCall’s Meat and Fish Co. has new owners and will be opening a new location in Santa Monica in 2022. As reported by What Now Los Angeles, the company’s new owners are David and Michelle Sarraf but Olin Schneider will keep serving the company as head butcher. The new location will be opening at 1426 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.
P.F. Changs Leaves Santa Monica
The P.F. Changs in Santa Monica, located on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and 4th Street, appears to be closed for good. The building that housed the restaurant, which closed down at the beginning of the pandemic, now has a for lease sign on the window. A listing for the 6,495 square foot space at 326 Wilshire Boulevard has an asking rate of $5.75 per square monthly, roughly $37,46 a month.
Breadblock Expanding
Breadblok, the French gluten-free bakery from Santa Monica will be expanding to a number of new locations. The first is in the Silverlake area, near Pine and Crane, on Griffith Park Boulevard as reported by Eater Los Angeles. Chloé and Celine Charlier, the sisters who own and operate the bakery, will also be expanding on the Westside when they open two new locations in Venice and Beverly Hills in 2022. Their Instagram page, credits their grandparents for the whole concept of Breadblok, by stressing the importance of living an organic and holistic lifestyle.
New Head Chef for Umami Burger
Chef Alvin Cailan will be the new head chef and face of Umami Burger, the gourmet burger restaurant chain. This collaboration was put together by C3 (Creating Culinary Communities), a global food and beverage tech platform that was founded by Sam Nazarian. Cailan is innovative Filipino-American and well regarded chef who founded the celebrated Eggslut, as a food truck that became a Grand Central Market mainstay, the Unit 120 pop-up, which was a test kitchen and incubator for new talent and new potential restaurant concepts that gave a start to perennially popular Howlin Ray’s restaurant among others. He also founded Amboy Quality Meats and Burgers, a burger spot that “always has a line out the door” in Chinatown and is the star host of First We Feast and Complex Network’s Burger Show for three years. Cailin will be developing a new menu with the culinary talent at C3 for Umami Burger using all of the knowledge he’s acquired about burgers from all over the United States during his travels hosting the show.
Chef Cailan said, “As a son of the Los Angeles cultural mosaic, I’m excited to take a fan favorite, Umami Burger, and accentuate the fifth flavor by incorporating flavors from Filipino influences to classic American styles, offering a fresh new take the whole world can appreciate.”
