Why Capo matters.
Capo is a refined Italian restaurant where Santa Monica's coastal edge meets Bruce Marder's half-century of Los Angeles restaurant work, fireplace cooking and a cellar assembled across decades of sustained collecting.
Set along Ocean Avenue near Pico Boulevard and just steps from Santa Monica State Beach, the restaurant occupies the coastal transition between the beachfront, the Civic Center blocks extending northward and the lower-density streets leading south toward Ocean Park. A freestanding red-gabled building encloses a compact dining room of high timber beams, white tablecloths and candlelight, giving the property the proportions of a private coastal residence. A wood-burning fireplace occupies one corner, placing the principal cooking fire within view as the room gathers closely around it. Art, brickwork and warm wood surfaces deepen the residential character as evening light disappears beyond the coast outside. The result is an intimate dining room whose architecture and visible fire compress fine dining into a small building beside the Pacific.
What defines Capo.
Capo is best known for chef-owner Bruce Marder opening an ambitious Italian restaurant near the Santa Monica waterfront in 1998 after more than two decades spent shaping influential Westside dining rooms. Marder entered the restaurant business in 1972 and went on to open or consult on thirteen restaurants, including West Beach Café, Rebecca's and Broadway Deli. West Beach Café connected contemporary California cooking with art in Venice during the 1970s and 1980s, then Marder sold the restaurant as his ambitions moved toward a smaller fine-dining project. Capo emerged through a partnership with Broadway Deli collaborator Marvin Zeidler and Wally's Wine Shop owner Steve Wallace, although permitting delayed the project for almost three years. The restaurant finally opened in June 1998 with Marder personally cooking an Italian menu that included risotto with zucchini blossoms, baby chicken diavolo and venison with wild mushrooms. Executive chef Rene Morales later joined Marder in leading the kitchen, preserving handmade pasta, seafood and fireplace-grilled meat as central components of the restaurant. Wine developed into an equally consequential part of Capo under wine director Justin Prairie, whose tenure saw inventory grow from $700,000 to $1.5 million by 2015 as Marder repeatedly reinvested restaurant profits into bottles. Zeidler and Wallace contributed selections from their own collections, and Marder's relationships with producers in France and Italy strengthened the cellar further. Wine Spectator elevated Capo to its Grand Award in 2015 after eleven years at the publication's preceding award level, and the restaurant states that it has retained the Grand Award for eleven consecutive years through 2025. More than 2,500 selections now span major wine-producing regions, giving the small dining room a cellar whose scale substantially exceeds its physical footprint. Capo continues under Marder with dinner service Tuesday through Saturday, more than twenty-eight years after its opening.
Fireplace cooking gives the savory kitchen its central transformation, exposing meat to live heat that browns the exterior as thickness protects moisture deeper within each cut. Prime New York steak develops a broad seared surface whose rendered fat carries smoke from the burning wood into the crust. Rib eye increases intramuscular fat, giving the fire more fat to melt as the exterior darkens and the center rises toward serving temperature. Filet mignon changes that balance through leaner, exceptionally tender muscle, placing greater emphasis on precise heat exposure to preserve softness beneath its browned exterior. Veal chop introduces bone and greater thickness, extending the thermal path from surface to center and producing a substantial gradient between charred edges and tender interior. Rack of lamb responds through its exterior fat cap, which renders under heat and protects the meat as smoke adheres to the browned surface. Branzino brings the fireplace into seafood, where skin shields delicate flesh and becomes crisp as moisture escapes from the exterior. Handmade pasta supplies a softer counterpoint elsewhere in the meal, using sauces and starch to bridge the concentrated flavors of grilled meat and fish. Wine completes that structure through a cellar deep enough to match differences in fat, smoke, texture and sauce across successive courses. Capo organizes its cooking around the fireplace's ability to transform proteins at different rates, using cut, fat content, thickness and controlled heat to create distinct expressions from the same live-fire source.
How Capo fits.
Capo works as the dinner anchor for a southern Santa Monica route connecting a nineteenth-century residence, a surviving resort cottage and Frank Gehry's conversion of an industrial property into an architectural complex.
Begin at California Heritage Museum, housed in the Roy Jones House built in 1894 for the son of Santa Monica co-founder Senator John Percival Jones. Architect Sumner P. Hunt designed the residence during a transitional period between Queen Anne ornament and the more restrained Colonial and Georgian Revival forms gaining prominence near the end of the century. The Jones family first occupied the Ocean Avenue house before later conversion into a rooming house. Threatened by commercial development, the structure was moved intact to Main Street in 1977, received municipal historic designation in 1979 and became the museum's home. Continue to Shotgun House, built in 1897 during Ocean Park's early development as a seaside resort. Its three rooms form a single narrow line beneath a gabled roof, with board-and-batten construction and diamond-pattern shingles preserving a modest housing type used locally for vacation cottages. The house remained residential until 1996, escaped demolition in 2002 and underwent three relocations before reaching its permanent 2nd Street site in 2014. Rehabilitation converted it into the Santa Monica Conservancy's Preservation Resource Center, which opened in 2016 and earned LEED Gold certification alongside several preservation awards. Conclude at Edgemar, where Frank Gehry transformed a former dairy property into an arts and commercial complex along Main Street. Existing industrial structures became components within a new architectural composition, joining reused buildings with Gehry's interventions as Main Street shifted away from its earlier manufacturing and service functions. The project became part of a concentrated architectural corridor that also preserves the Roy Jones House, Ocean Park Library and early twentieth-century commercial buildings. The progression moves from Hunt's nineteenth-century coastal residence through a rescued working-class resort cottage and culminates at Gehry's reuse of industrial fabric during Main Street's late twentieth-century reinvention.
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