Why Dante Beverly Hills matters.
Dante Beverly Hills is a panoramic aperitivo restaurant where Golden Triangle's luxury dining culture meets Greenwich Village heritage, Italian drinking traditions and a California rooftop interpretation shaped by Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson.
Set atop The Maybourne Beverly Hills near North Cañon Drive and Beverly Cañon Gardens, the restaurant occupies the hotel's ninth floor between Wilshire Boulevard, Rodeo Drive and the foothills north of Sunset Boulevard, with sightlines extending across Hollywood toward the San Gabriel Mountains. The rooftop divides into an enclosed dining room and broad open-air terrace, allowing the restaurant to shift continuously between interior tables and the Los Angeles skyline. Nathalie Hudson developed a pale Californian palette around rounded blue banquettes, marble tables, mint-green terrace furniture and greenery, translating Dante's European character into the elevated setting. Local artist Abel Macias painted the ceiling fresco with Southern California flora and fauna, and a white Steinway piano supports live afternoon music inside the dining room. The result is a rooftop restaurant whose altitude, artwork, live music and expansive geography give Dante's century-old New York lineage a distinctly Southern Californian architectural setting.
What defines Dante Beverly Hills.
Dante Beverly Hills is best known for carrying the Greenwich Village institution revived by Australians Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson into its first West Coast outpost after their stewardship turned a century-old Italian café into one of the world's most decorated cocktail bars. Caffè Dante began in Greenwich Village in 1915 and spent generations as a gathering place associated with the neighborhood's Italian immigrant community, artists, writers and musicians. Pride and Hudson assumed control on the café's centenary in 2015, retaining its historical character and rebuilding the drinks program around Italian aperitivo culture. Naren Young joined the revival as creative director, developing a cocktail program whose attention to Negronis, spritzes and aperitivo classics helped propel Dante to number nine on The World's 50 Best Bars in 2018. Dante reached number one on the organization's 2019 list and simultaneously received its Best Bar in North America distinction; the following year it placed second globally and retained the North American honor. The Garibaldi became one of the operation's signatures through an unusually simple construction of Campari and orange juice aerated into a fluffy texture, demonstrating the team's preference for technical refinement of familiar Italian drinks. The Maybourne Beverly Hills initially approached Pride and Hudson about a temporary collaboration, and discussions developed into a permanent ninth-floor restaurant that became Dante's first operation beyond New York City. Hudson oversaw the Beverly Hills design herself, drawing its colors from the changing light, hills and mountain views surrounding the rooftop. The project opened in 2023 as a California extension of a hospitality lineage spanning more than a century, connecting the original immigrant coffeehouse with the internationally recognized aperitivo program created under Pride and Hudson.
The Garibaldi remains the clearest bridge between the New York bar and Beverly Hills, pairing bitter Campari with aerated orange juice whose soft texture changes the weight of a two-ingredient drink. Martini Hour develops another branch of the drinks program through the Dante Martini, which combines Ford's gin, Ketel One vodka, Noilly Prat, Dolin Blanc, Nardini Cedro and olive and lemon bitters. The Dirty Martini layers Reyka vodka with dry vermouth, St-Germain, olive oil and olive bitters, placing salinity and fat directly into the cocktail's structure. Spritzes move toward lighter Mediterranean combinations: the Sbagliato Sicilia uses Dolin Blanc, Luxardo Bitter Bianco, Dante limoncello, lemon bitters and Prosecco, and the Mediterranean Tonic joins Gin Mare with manzanilla, olive bitters, salt and citrus tonic. A wood-fired oven gives the food its strongest counterpoint, blistering pizza beneath combinations such as spicy soppressata, mozzarella, pomodoro and hot honey or mortadella, stracciatella, pistachio and rosemary. Seafood extends the Mediterranean cooking through yellowfin tuna with blood orange, mustard greens, pimentón oil and lemon-caper vinaigrette, alongside fregola cooked with calamari, mussels, clams, shrimp, saffron and fish fumet. Dante Beverly Hills binds these preparations through aperitivo logic, moving from bitter, citrus-driven drinks into charred bread, cured meat, seafood, cheese and pasta across an extended rooftop meal.
How Dante Beverly Hills fits.
Dante Beverly Hills works as the evening anchor for an outing connecting Frank Lloyd Wright's late-career commercial architecture, Beverly Hills' conversion of a Depression-era post office into a performing-arts institution and Wolfgang Puck's enduring role in California restaurant culture.
Begin at Anderton Court Shops, commissioned by Nina Anderton from Frank Lloyd Wright in 1952 and completed as the architect's only Southern California retail project. Wright organized six boutiques across three levels around a central light well, with angular cantilevered ramps carrying pedestrians upward through a diamond-grid composition that made circulation the building's principal architectural event. An inverted-V frontage widened the upper portions of the structure behind Rodeo Drive, and a penthouse apartment with an upper studio occupied the third level. The building became one of Wright's final Los Angeles commissions and entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. Continue to Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, where the former Beverly Hills Post Office supplies the historical core of a 70,000-square-foot cultural complex. Ralph C. Flewelling developed the 1934 Italian Renaissance Revival post office with Allison & Allison, and Charles Kassler painted eight interior fresco murals depicting Depression-era labor. Beverly Hills acquired the building in 1999, and architect Zoltan E. Pali subsequently joined the restored structure to the new 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater after the Annenberg Foundation committed a $25 million founding gift. Conclude at Spago, whose history reaches to Wolfgang Puck's original 1982 restaurant above the Sunset Strip and the California cooking that made him an internationally recognized chef. Puck moved Spago to North Cañon Drive in 1997, collaborating with architect Stephen Jones and designer Barbara Lazaroff on a Beverly Hills dining room finished with etched glass, South African slate and purpleheart wood. The restaurant became the long-running flagship of Puck's organization and a platform for cooking that combined California produce with techniques and flavors drawn from his Austrian upbringing and French training. The progression moves from Wright's geometric retail experiment through a federal post office remade for theater and culminates at Puck's Beverly Hills flagship, joining architecture, performance and California dining before Dante Beverly Hills extends the evening upward into aperitivo and live music.
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