“This is not a restaurant,” says Daniele Uditi, addressing a crowd of 32 diners in a spacious warehouse in West Adams on a recent Sunday evening. “It might look like it, but it’s not.”
Uditi wants to set the record straight, as soon as you sit down for a meal at Le Le Dinner Club. The warehouse is outfitted with tables facing a kitchen that looks like the set of a daytime talk show. It’s meant to be a stand-in for Uditi’s home. Steam billows from big silver pots on the stove and the fire from three Gozney ovens warms the room.
Daniele Uditi addresses the diners at Le Le Dinner Club, a new supper club that takes place in a warehouse in West Adams.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
“When you go to a restaurant, you never meet the chef, never understand the story behind the food,” he says. “I want to be close to you and explain dish by dish and, hopefully, make you very full.”
In a city full of chefs making Italian food, Uditi is a rarity. He cooks like a grandma, with his most important culinary training having taken place at his family’s restaurant in Naples and his aunt’s bakery in Caserta. At Le Le, he’s shedding and shunning the notions of a Los Angeles Italian restaurant, where Italian is often a monolith of red sauce, pizza and pasta.
Uditi introduced Angelenos to his unique style of Neapolitan pizza at Pizzana. He’s to credit for the cacio e pepe wave that swept the nation, with restaurants everywhere copying and riffing on his cacio e pepe pizza. His small Brentwood pizzeria is now a verifiable chain, with locations throughout Los Angeles and Texas.
At Le Le, Uditi is cooking food that reflects the regionality of his family home in Campania, and he’s doing it in a setting that’s the antithesis of a chain restaurant. What started as a recurring dinner party at his home in Simi Valley is now a two- to four-times-a-month supper club with 6,000 people on the waitlist. Dinner is $250 per person and includes wine pairings.
Sommelier Ferdinando Mucerino pours wine pairings during the Le Le Dinner Club.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
“I love pizza, but I wanted to expand the menu to truly Neapolitan dishes,” he says. “I wanted to tell a story of where I come from, which is the Campania region, which is not really highlighted in L.A. There is a lot of Tuscany, a lot of Northern Italian, but nobody really has the southern home-cooked feeling.”
In sommelier Ferdinando Mucerino, Uditi found a fellow Neapolitan with a desire to share the riches of the region and a business partner for his new venture. The two guide diners through a 2 ½-hour party with wine pairings, designed to feel more like a meal at a friend’s house than L.A.’s next great restaurant.
“Here, you can do whatever you want,” Mucerino says, demonstrably nonchalant with a glass of red wine in hand. “Come up and talk to us. Come to Daniele and ask about the recipes, come to me and have some more pours. Really enjoy yourself, make yourself at home, because you are home.”
At my table is the friend I invited, and on the other side, a recent graduate of UCLA, who heard about the dinner through someone they follow on Instagram.
“In my family restaurant, you come and sit wherever there is space,” Uditi says. “I wanted to re-create that feeling where people who don’t know each other put the phone away and spend some time talking to one another.”
Daniele Uditi prepares the first bread course at his new Le Le Dinner Club.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
Le Le begins with three courses of bread. The first is the pomodoro, a thick, fluffy pan-pizza smeared with sugo di pomodoro, a rich red sauce with a deep tomato flavor that tastes like it’s been reducing for hours. Each slice gets a dollop of milky buffalo mozzarella and a generous drizzle of olive oil. It’s the bread Uditi used to sell by the kilo at the counter of his aunt’s bakery.
Next is a pillowy focaccia coated in a whipped prosciutto lardo made with the often-discarded fat trimmings. The meat butter melts into the warm bread under spoonfuls of sweet fig jam and shavings of Conciato Romano, widely referred to as the oldest variety of cheese in the world. The cheese is aged with wine and herbs, giving the sheep’s milk cheese its unique, fierce aroma. Like Parmesan’s older, more pungent cousin.
The last focaccia is an homage to the sandwiches Uditi used to help his uncle sell under a bridge in Naples as a kid.
Diners are invited into the kitchen to take video and photos and also help prepare one of the courses.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
“It was my Sunday gig,” he says. “We dipped the bread in fried lard leftover drippings, then smattered it with rapini and pecorino, wrapped it in foil and sold it like a burrito.”
Uditi cooks Neapolitan rapini with Calabrian chiles, garlic and pecorino to create a mess of creamy, bitter greens he spoons over the hot focaccia.
Mucerino’s wine pairings are just as hyper-regional and the pours are generous. I was remiss to waste the remnants of my glass of Cantine di Marzo Greco di Tufo, a dry, citrusy white wine from Campania that was served alongside a salad of endive, sugar snap peas and tonnato meant to mimic Caesar dressing. Unless you’re quick with your sips, leftover wine in your glass is dumped to make room for the next pairing, with each piece of focaccia and individual item on the menu receiving its own wine.
The pasta portion of the meal begins with Uditi inviting diners to join him in the kitchen to break mezzanelli.
“In Italy, they say Italians don’t break pasta, or when an Italian breaks pasta, an Italian goes to heaven or gets mad,” says Uditi. “So guess what?”
Daniele Uditi prepares the lardiata, a dish made with mezzanelli pasta in a tomato sauce fortified with lardo.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
He takes a footlong piece of pasta and breaks it into four pieces.
“We are committing sins tonight!”
With phones trained on the kitchen, guests put on pairs of black gloves and film themselves breaking the long tubes of pasta for the next course, a lardiata Uditi’s family used to make for Sunday dinners. Lardo di colonnata gives the tomato sauce a meaty backbone and a velvety texture that clings to each broken piece of noodle.
“In this space, you appreciate Neapolitan cuisine with no compromises” Uditi says. “The goal is to make people understand my culture.”
Le Le is named for the nickname his mother and younger brother gave him as a child.
Uditi’s crowning glory is pasta e fagioli, a universally popular Italian dish that’s part of the canon of cucina povera. It’s a lumpy mass of broken fusilli, linguini, spaghetti, mafalda and ziti pasta, fused together with Peruano beans cooked until the starches leech and create a paste-like sauce. It’s a dish Uditi made once a week at his family’s Naples restaurant. For Le Le, the pasta e fagioli is served tableside from a colossal terracotta pot that is wheeled through the dining room. Each person receives a healthy portion with a drizzle of agile sofrito, or what Uditi likes to call Italian chili crisp.
The texture switches from chewy to soft, creamy to crisp in every spoonful. It’s a dish that delivers a warming sensation that envelops your entire body.
While guests visit the kitchen frequently throughout the evening, there’s a mad dash to capture the sizzle of rib-eye steaks emerging from the ovens. Uditi dresses the steaks in a demi-glace made from all the meat juice and trimmings and a little bit of Aglianico wine. It’s an unabashed moment of pure carnal bliss unmatched by anything I’ve experienced at an actual steakhouse in the last year.
Bowls of pasta e fagioli are served tableside and finished with a garlic chili crisp.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
Mucerino pairs the steak with his most prized wine of the evening, a bottle of Taurasi wrapped in a cloudy white webbing of marine life and debris.
“This bottle was aged under the water in the Adriatic Sea for nine years,” he says. “The water speeds the aging process, the natural darkness, natural cold temperatures and the small vibration of the water changes the molecular structure of the wine.”
The Taurasi is big and earthy enough for the steak, with enough acidity to help cut through the richness of the meat. Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I tasted a salinity in the wine that I like to imagine came from the sea.
Rib-eye steak with a rich demi-glace served at the new Le Le Dinner Club.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
For dessert, Uditi invites Ishnoelle Richardson into the kitchen. Richardson is the baker behind Baking With Ish, a small pastry counter at the Blossom Market food hall in San Gabriel. He’s known for his pastries infused with Filipino flavors.
Richardson’s pistachio dessert is like a luxurious cake and a nut tart in a single, petite round pastry. The crust is fashioned from 80% Sonora wheat from the Tehachapi Grain Project and 20% almond flour. It’s on the thicker side, at least half an inch, to form a sturdy base for the cake inside. The spongecake is soaked in Limoncello and surrounded by a white chocolate ganache with Italian pistachio paste with almonds, giving the cake a slight amaretto flavor. A dollop of whipped ricotta helps catch any stray bits of nut or crumble.
By the time dessert arrives, my capacity for another bite is waning, but the tart disappears in a matter of minutes.
Uditi makes his way around the dining room, checking in with each table and pausing to take photos. He sips from a glass of wine and sneaks a bite of pistachio tart.
Ishnoelle Richardon of Baking With Ish serves a pistachio tart to finish the meal.
(Red Gaskell / For The Times)
“I don’t want barriers, it’s about conviviality and making memories,” he says.
Dates for upcoming dinners are announced every two weeks, and Uditi plans to turn Le Le into a club of sorts, where people can sign up to be members. He also has his sights on opening a focacceria. Until then, your best bet at a reservation is to sign up for the waitlist.
