Marcus Jernmark Rethinks Fine Dining at Lielle in Los Angeles, Without the Theatrics
As the executive chef of Stockholm’s three-Michelin-starred Frantzén, which was ranked No. 6 in the 2021 World 50 Best Restaurants list, Marcus Jernmark cooked at the highest tier of fine dining.
But at Lielle, the Los Angeles restaurant he’s debuting on Thursday, February 12, at the former Bicyclette space on West Pico Boulevard, he’s thinking about satiation and sensibleness more than spectacle and showmanship.
“You can go to Lielle to be full,” Jernmark tells Observer. “You don’t go to most fine-dining restaurants to get full. You go there for the experience. I want to kind of bridge that gap.”
Lielle will no doubt be a high-end dining destination, but Jernmark wants to take things down a notch after spending years dining around Los Angeles and seeing what guests here enjoy.
“The price point is important,” says Jernmark, who plans to charge $150 for generous four-course meals instead of having the 42-seat Lielle be one of those tasting-menu restaurants that charges twice that for a progression of daintier bites. “It’s an important tool for us to set expectations for the guests. I think that it’s intriguing to be a part of redefining that potential of a new or maybe not-so-widely utilized tier of fine dining, where you take sort of a social dining format and bring a lot of quality and intentions behind that.”
Every Lielle meal will start with house-baked 36-hour Rouge de Bordeaux levain bread with house-cultured butter and items that might include vendace roe (a nod to Jernmark’s background in Nordic cooking) with beer-poached Dungeness crab.
“The bread is amazing, but it’s been such a trip to learn how to bake it,” Jernmark says. “Bread is complicated. The simplest things are the ones that are really hard. But if you do it really well, what people are going to take away from the experience is, ‘Oh, that bread and butter.’”
Baking in-house also pays dividends in the form of misos that Lielle is making with leftover bread.
“We’re doing soups with it,” Jernmark says. “We’re mixing it with walnuts and doing walnut miso. We’re smearing it onto our squab. We just find so many different outlets for one product, and it’s been really rewarding.”
At Lielle, Jernmark and chef de cuisine Matthew Bowden (who previously cooked at fine-dining powerhouses Providence and Manresa) will showcase dishes like abalone “BBQ” with seaweed rice, Brussels sprouts and fermented hen of the woods sauce. Aged squab is served with yuzu pepper, sprouted walnut and bitter greens. There’s spaghetti all’assassina with spiny lobster, preserved tomato and sea urchin. The focus here is what Jernmark likes to call California bistronomy.
Jernmark and his wife/creative partner, Andrea, put this restaurant together after scouring California for the best ingredients. Andrea, who hand-sewed Lielle’s napkins and worked closely with her husband and design studio Lovers Unite to reimagine the subterranean space that was previously home to Walter and Margarita Manzke’s Bicyclette, has joined her husband on drives up the Central Coast. There have been frequent visits to Buellton’s Motley Crew Ranch and Marketplace, where Lielle is procuring proteins like mature beef.
“They focus on 100 percent regenerative and biodynamic practices, and they’re working with a cluster of producers around them.” Jernmark says. “We go up there two or three times a month and actually buy all the food that we eat at home from there. But we’re also working on a sausage with them.”
That sausage will likely be used for bangers and mash at Marée, a California-Parisian wine bar above Lielle that Jernmark plans to debut later this year.
In 2023, I happened to run into Jernmark while walking on the Bowery in Manhattan. I was on my way to Torrisi, and he was heading to Estela. We talked about our dining itineraries. He was doing a very specific kind of R&D. His hit list also included Torrisi, along with Claud and The Four Horsemen.
Mentally, he was over 15-course menus. And as these things turn out, Torrisi has since earned a Michelin star while The Four Horsemen and Penny (the upstairs seafood bar from the Claud team) made it into the inaugural North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
As Jernmark gets ready to open Lielle, he’s thinking about his favorite restaurants in the world, like Paris spots Maison Sota, Septime, Le Châteaubriand and Clown Bar in its heyday. There’s a commonality here, clearly. Jernmark wants Lielle to feel like a restaurant, not like a friend’s living room or a palace or a spaceship. He wants to serve world-class food without excessive frills.
He also wants to shy away from performative formality. If it makes more sense for a sauce to be plated inside the kitchen, he’ll avoid a tableside presentation. Instead of specific wine pairings, there will be a carefully curated by-the-glass selection that’s highly influenced by the time Jernmark has spent with California sommelier/winemaker Rajat Parr.
Jernmark wants his dining room to be a bit dark, but knows that it’s important to properly see your dining companion and the food you’re eating at the restaurant’s custom cherry wood tables and wine-toned leather banquettes.
Seating is “comfortable, but it’s not over the top,” Jernmark says. “Tables are not very spacious, but they’re intentionally set up in a way where you have all the space that you need. You’re very comfortable, but it’s not excessive. You’re sitting relatively close for fine dining to not dilute the human factor of what a busy restaurant should be.”
The human factor is driving the creation of Lielle, which is named after Jernmark’s daughter, in many ways. Jernmark is working with small suppliers like Monterey Abalone Company and Petaluma’s Andante Dairy. It’s about building a like-minded network of independent purveyors and collaborators. Parr introduced Jernmark to Andante’s Soyoung Scanlan, and Jernmark is now working with her on cheese projects and an aged saison.
There’s clearly a seriousness to the way Jernmark thinks about food. But the point he’s making at Lielle is that seriousness doesn’t have to mean ceremony.
“At some point, you need to relax a little bit,” Jernmark says. “I promise you there’s going to be so little show that some people will request more show. But this is a restaurant for people who are well-traveled and have seen a lot of smoke and mirrors. And they’re over it. We don’t need that in our lives anymore. We want to bring it back to basics in that sense.”
Lielle is about forging a different path and letting go. Jernmark wants Bowden to be “in a free role” in the kitchen. Jernmark is there to support the kitchen, but he feels no need to be presiding over it. On many nights, you’ll likely find him walking through the dining room, offering service that’s warm and welcoming but not over-the-top.
“If everything goes really well, I’m probably going to be in a relatively nice maître d’ situation,” he says. “I will be in the kitchen as well, but I need to look out for the entire operation.”
Lielle, located at 9576 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90035, will be open for dinner seven nights a week, with seatings from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.