A Legendary Arts District Space Is Reborn as a French Japanese Bistro From the Ototo Team

During the peak of the pandemic, Charles Namba and Courtney Kaplan spent their days daydreaming about a third restaurant while hiking on Los Angeles’s trails. The partners in business and life opened the izakaya Tsubaki in Echo Park in 2017 and debuted the drinking den Ototo next door two years later. Even though it was unclear if either of the restaurants was going to survive the lockdowns, the duo continued to brainstorm new possibilities. “It felt like a total fantasy,” Kaplan says.

Namba and Kaplan initially entertained the idea of a chicken katsu sandwich shop before considering something more French. Eventually, they landed on the idea of a French Japanese bistro drawing on Namba’s French cooking background and Kaplan’s sake and wine expertise. After four years of planning, Camélia opened its doors in the Arts District on July 6.

Namba and Kaplan’s desire to open a French restaurant predates Camélia’s opening by some 14 years. In 2010 when Kaplan and Namba moved to Los Angeles from New York, they intended to open a French restaurant but pivoted to an izakaya after seeing the Echo Park space. In their years of traveling through Japan, the duo often dined at French restaurants led by Japanese chefs and witnessed the natural symbiosis between the two cuisines. In approaching Camélia, they set out to imagine what a French restaurant in Japan would look like through the lens of Los Angeles. Shying away from the word “fusion,” Kaplan instead describes the meeting of the two cuisines as “finding ways to harmonize.”

“If you go to Tokyo and eat in a French restaurant, they’re using local products, they’re using flavors that are familiar,” Kaplan says. “The menu reads French and it looks French on the plate but when you eat it, there’s something Japanese about it.”

For the menu, Namba integrates Japanese ingredients into traditional French dishes and sauces, like substituting dashi for chicken stock and koji in place of cream. Plush black sesame Parker House rolls are on hand to start the meal and can be paired with house-cured ikura. Main courses include braised beef cheeks finished with a red wine wasabi sauce and crispy burdock root, and an abalone and mussel pot pie in a golden brown puff pastry.

Namba, along with chef de cuisine Nestor Silva, also riff on dishes like the croque-madame to include ham katsu with Gruyere, and a koji-roasted chicken served with seaweed cream sauce. The menu includes French bistro classics like a dry-aged burger with French fries and a New York steak. Oysters, Dungeness crab, uni toast, sashimi, and more are available from the raw bar. Pastry chef Estevan Silva, who is the chef de cuisine’s twin brother and worked at restaurants like Quince, Cotogna, and Verjus, assembled dessert options like kokuto caramel pudding, chocolate gateau, and pistachio tarte.

Drawing on Kaplan’s experience working in sake bars in Japan and as a sommelier in France, both wine and sake share the spotlight at Camélia. The beverage list is divided into sections like “Coups de Coeur” spotlighting Kaplan’s current favorites and “All Mighty” which lists crowd pleasers. The wine menu is all French, while the sake menu explores Japan’s different styles and regions. There is currently only cold sake on the menu, but Kaplan may experiment with warm sake in cooler months.

For Kaplan, the approach to pairing sake with food diverges from the process of pairing wine. “I think some of these dishes, it’s easier on paper to see how wine will make sense because they read so French,” Kaplan says. While a wine pairing can sometimes highlight contrasting flavors, sake should work in unison with the flavors of the dish. “Sake should be like the last ingredient in the dish, as opposed to kind of standing out,” Kaplan says.

On the cocktail side, bar lead Kevin Nguyen uses French and Japanese spirits to craft drinks like a daiquiri with rum and Calpico and milk punch with shochu. The Decibel Martini made with vodka, shochu, French vermouth, and umeshu takes inspiration from Kaplan’s time working at New York’s sake bar Decibel.

Camélia’s home in the Arts District formerly housed the French bistro Church & State and the Brazilian restaurant Caboco. Namba and Kaplan wanted to warm up the industrial bones of the building to feel like something that landed in Paris from Japan’s Shōwa era. The pair worked with Cheri Messerli and David Rager of design firm Weekends to rework the space. Using a Japanese kissaten (coffee shop) as inspiration, Messerli and Rager outfitted the room in dark red oak and intimate booths. Tall curved windows straight out of the 1950s look out onto a small enclosed patio, while scalloped pendant lights hang overhead.

The opening menu is just the beginning for Camélia. Kaplan plans on developing a cheese program for the restaurant, which she will pair with sake. Nguyen is already working on more ways to highlight the often misunderstood Japanese spirit shochu, and how it pairs with food. But for now, Kaplan and Namba are just excited to have the doors open. “I think there’s a lot of possibilities with this concept,” Kaplan says. “We can’t do too much too soon.”

Camélia, located at 1850 Industrial Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021, is open Thursday and Monday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Reservations are available on OpenTable.