Are à la carte menus allowed here? Never posted one before and haven’t seen many.
Looks like Kali ditched their tasting menu and converted into a classic Hollywood steakhouse in mid-2025 (someone correct me if wrong). We were looking for a place to have a nice dinner in the area after picking up a car key and settled on Kali.
Overall it was a fine experience without, unfortunately, any real highlights or lowlights. Most things looked better than it tasted.
My favorites were the Parker House Rolls—slightly sweet, a little chewy, and mega pillowy—and the shrimp cocktail. I can’t remember the last time I had shrimp cocktail that wasn’t Costco’s so the perfectly cooked, flavorful jumbo shrimp was refreshing lol. I don’t know what was on top (sea grass?) but I liked it cause it tasted mildly of the ocean.
Mac: creamy without much cheese flavor
Pea tendrils: dunno what I expected, it was stir fried
Kali steakhouse fries: kind of insane and not what we expected because it was literally fried quarters of a giant russet potato
Potato A La Loaded: good, soft (not fluffy) on the inside and crispy on the outside and I imagine the skin should be eaten. Definitely not good if you expect it to be a cloudy soft twice baked potato like this other guy in the restaurant who complained it was overcooked and “inedible”.
Pork chop: didn’t look like 16oz at all, and wasn’t a big fan because both flavor and texture tasted cured (personal preference)
Ribeye: 16oz, was fine
Meringue gelato: basically whipped cream gelato with cured egg yolk shaved on top. The parts with egg was delicious but the egg to gelato ratio is so off. Pictures make it look like a small quenelle of gelato when it’s the size of a navel orange.
My husband loved his martini. Grasshopper unfortunately came with a hair, probably just floated in on top of the foam.
FYI, they add a 5% “Kitchen Appreciation” charge to each bill. On the menu in like 4pt font, it says it goes directly to the restaurant and you can have it removed which I didn’t see. Supposedly it’s used to provide fair pay and benefits to their full-time team. People say to just raise prices on the menu but given their $95 16oz ribeye and $85 12oz NY (no dry-aging or any special sourcing/treatment written on the menu), not sure how much higher they can reasonably go.
by chashaoballs
8 Comments
very helpful – was planning on going soon but won’t after reading this. Out of curiosity – was that supposed to be a medium-rare ribeye?
Looks like food I can cook at home. Not fine dining imo
I’m really surprised at the Kali rebrand/rebuild after they opened Koast (which now seems to be closed?). The shift to a steakhouse while less than a mile from Gwen and a few blocks from Chi Spacca is bizarre.
Looks like Koast closed, which is a shame because it was great, so maybe Kali will go back to the menu that won them a star? But given those business decisions it may just be that either management is incompetent or the customer base just isn’t there.
wtf happened to this place? They used to have a reasonable tasting menu and wine pairing, which made it a solid value proposition.
This was the first michelin starred place I ever went to a few years back, and we didn’t like it but this was pre-steakhouse rebrand. Had cavier there and was underwhelmed. Looks better now so might want to try it but I’ve since tried other LA Michelin places and they were much better.
Oof! I went almost a a year ago to the date. First Michelin star in LA. I couldn’t believe how average everything was. A good restaurant but nothing gave me 1 star vibes at all.
Can’t get over how the MnC looks so much like Velveeta’s boxed version. Both the shell type and the cheese sauce hue take me back to my childhood. 😋
Lmao you can see the pube on the martini from outer space