About Rustic Canyon

As the flagship within the beloved Rustic Canyon Family restaurant group, we’re a welcoming dining destination that embraces a slow food approach and celebrates the world-class ingredients found at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. We’re the type of familiar place where you pop in multiple nights a week for a casual dinner, post up at the bar for a solo meal and an expertly-crafted cocktail, or open bottles of celebratory wines over a huge spread for a special occasion.

Before opening in December 2006, Founder Josh Loeb’s dream was to create a neighborhood restaurant that was cozy, but had a deep commitment to craft and the incredible bounty of ingredients that come from Southern California. Josh began by hosting monthly dinners at his family’s beautiful home nestled in Rustic Canyon—a small, forested community carved into the Santa Monica Mountains. Friends and family would gather around a long, candlelit table to share a meal created with thought and passion, discover interesting wines, tell stories and forge new connections. Our restaurant became an extension of this.

Over the years, we’ve garnered critical acclaim, and so many talented people have lent their varied perspectives and wild creativity to the hyper-seasonal menu, inventive cocktail program and expansive wine list. At its heart, Rustic Canyon is simply a neighborhood restaurant that makes you feel at home and where the food is not only delicious and nourishing, but can often surprise you. Our motto is “Simple Ain’t Easy,” which means we believe in taking all the small, and often time-consuming or unnoticed, extra steps to make something really special. It may look simple on the plate or in the glass, but a lot of technique went into bringing that dish or cocktail to life.

Under James Beard-nominated Chef/Owner Jeremy Fox (also behind our sister spot Birdie G’s and author of the celebrated cookbook, On Vegetables), dishes shift with California’s numerous micro-seasons and can change almost daily. His vision for simplicity shines through in the eclectic, yet comforting menu filled with an array of beautiful vegetables, local seafood, housemade terrines and charcuterie, and California’s finest meats and poultry. The whole team honors the people who bring us those ingredients by creatively showcasing and cross-utilizing every element, drawing upon a vast larder, and making nearly everything in-house, right down to the sea salt and cultured butter.

Rustic Canyon Family Wine Director and Esters Co-Owner Kathryn Coker designed the 300+ wine list, which earned us placement in Wine Enthusiast’s “Best Wine Restaurants” for five consecutive years. It showcases small producers whose stories we know and love, and who are focused on soil health and chemical-free practices in the vineyard—from rising stars like Quinta da Carolina’s young Luis Pedro out of Portugal’s Douro Valley to Jolie-Laide’s Scott & Jenny Schultz who crush whole clusters by foot out of Fulton, California to Hope Well’s Mimi Castell, a second-generation winemaker and leader in the regenerative agriculture movement out of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Despite the bar’s very small footprint, longtime Bar Manager Justin Dicken crafts a truly astonishing array of bitters, tinctures, orgeats, liqueurs and more for his classic and seasonal cocktails—all of which feature small-batch spirits and ingredients he picks up weekly at the nearby farmers’ market. Seasonal cocktails can be as fleeting as the food, showcasing peak-season snap peas, canary melons, green almonds, opal basil, cherimoya and more. Scraps from the kitchen go into infusions, fermented honeys and secondary fermentations, whey is transformed into syrups, calpico and milk punch, while miso and candied ingredients from the larder find their way into the bar and vice versa.