Tesse

Los Angeles is an industry town. Everywhere you look, you’re reminded that this is Hollywood - from the agency bros who take too long to order at your Starbucks every morning, to the filming that regularly shuts down your street right when you leave for work. And then there are the industry restaurants.

These are the restaurants people in entertainment go to because everyone else in entertainment eats there too. They know they’ll see their boss and their boss’s boss and their nemesis, all while doing a deal that will make them look very important. Tesse, a French-ish spot in Sunset Plaza, is absolutely an industry restaurant. So, no matter what we say, people in the industry will come here. But honestly, they really shouldn’t.

The room at Tesse is objectively beautiful, and also objectively soulless. There’s a moodily-lit bar, booths that you can only sit in if you make more than $200K a year, and dark wood on almost every surface. If Laura Dern’s Big Little Lies character had a ski chalet, it would probably look like this. Your boss will like it, and will probably ask for the designer’s number on his way out. He is re-doing the Aspen house after all.

If you stumble in here as a non-industry civilian, Tesse can feel pretty overwhelming, mostly because everyone here knows everyone else. There’s a lot of intra-table interaction, but we suppose when you’re taking a meeting with your archrival’s star client, you want to make sure everyone in town will see it. The good news is that Tesse is a well-run restaurant, so even if you’re a normal person with a normal job, none of the staff will look you up and down and decide you’re not the worth the time investment. They’re nice to everyone, which is more than you can say for Nobu.

But where Tesse really falls down is the food. The menu is extremely long, with 36 dishes, 23 cheese and charcuterie options, and eight desserts. A restaurant can get away with a dissertation-length list of dishes when most of those dishes are good, but this isn’t the case at Tesse. A handful are solid - the beef tartare, whipped potato-topped blue crab, the desserts - but most are boring, and some are just bad. We’ve been actively discouraged from ordering a dish at Tesse - why they wouldn’t just remove it from the menu remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that no one eating at Tesse really cares whether the food is good or the atmosphere is fun. That’s what makes this the ultimate industry restaurant. And just like you’ve learned to move your car at night to avoid Fresh Off The Boat filming on your street in the morning, you should probably find a different place to eat. Even if you do need an industry restaurant, you can do much better than Tesse.