Why Funke matters.
Funke is a sumptuous Italian restaurant where Beverly Hills' polished dining culture meets Evan Funke's preservation of regional handmade pasta, Dan Brunn's theatrical transformation of a 1930s Art Deco building and a flagship conceived as the culmination of the chef's decades studying Italian technique.
Set along South Santa Monica Boulevard near North Canon Drive and just east of Crescent Drive, the restaurant occupies Beverly Hills' commercial center between the Civic Center, Rodeo Drive and the retail and dining blocks extending south toward Wilshire Boulevard. A soaring entrance opens beside a marble-clad amaro bar and a glass-enclosed pasta laboratory rising through two levels of the building. The principal dining room expands beneath a wood-beamed ceiling and hundreds of suspended Murano-glass lights, with leather, suede, marble and Loro Piana wall treatments carrying the detailing across its tables and booths. Upstairs rooms lead toward a landscaped rooftop where a pink-quartz bar sits beneath the open sky and surrounding Beverly Hills skyline. The result is a three-level restaurant whose visible pasta workshop, expansive dining room and rooftop bar turn the physical craft of Italian cooking into the organizing principle of the entire building.
What defines Funke.
Funke is best known for concentrating Evan Funke's long apprenticeship to regional Italian pasta traditions inside the first restaurant to carry his surname. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Pacific Palisades, Funke studied at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena before spending six years at Wolfgang Puck's Spago, where he advanced to sous chef. His commitment to pasta deepened in Bologna under Alessandra Spisni at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese, whose instruction in sfoglia helped direct the handmade work that later defined his cooking. Bucato preceded Felix Trattoria, which opened in Venice in 2017 with a pasta laboratorio placed visibly inside the restaurant; Mother Wolf followed in Hollywood with a concentrated exploration of Roman cooking. Funke's 2019 book American Sfoglino codified techniques associated with Emilia-Romagna and received the 2020 IACP Award for Best Cookbook in the Chefs and Restaurants category, with its photography receiving a James Beard Foundation Award that year. Real-estate executive Kurt Rappaport purchased Funke's eventual Beverly Hills building for $40 million in 2018 and partnered directly with the chef on the restaurant after an earlier Beverly Hills project involving Funke never materialized. Dan Brunn led the architectural work and Clint Nicholas contributed to the interiors during a development process spanning several years. Funke opened May 5, 2023 across 10,000 square feet and three stories, turning the chef's accumulated study of Italy into an eponymous flagship built expressly around pasta makers working in public view.
Agnolotti from San Giovanni Bianco folds Taleggio fonduta into meticulously shaped pasta before sugo di arrosto and Parmigiano Reggiano supply concentrated roasted-meat depth and aged-cheese salinity. Pasta shapes across the restaurant carry their geographic origin alongside the woman who taught Funke the form, embedding individual practitioners into a menu assembled through his fieldwork across Italy. Busiate, associated with Trapani in Sicily, takes its corkscrew shape through dough wound around a slender rod, demonstrating the regional handwork that gives the flagship a broader southern Italian emphasis than his earlier restaurants. Sfincione draws from Palermo's thick Sicilian pizza tradition through a substantial, airy crumb beneath tomato, onion, anchovy and cheese, extending the restaurant's regional inquiry beyond pasta. Focaccia sfogliata develops another dough technique through laminated layers whose butter produces a flaky structure uncommon to standard focaccia. The glass-walled laboratorio makes those distinctions observable as pasta makers roll, cut, fold and shape dough throughout service, placing the human technique behind the finished dishes directly inside the dining room.
How Funke fits.
Funke works as the anchor for a Beverly Hills outing connecting a Depression-era federal building converted into a performing-arts center, Frank Lloyd Wright's final Los Angeles commission and a fountain whose sculpture reaches back to the indigenous history embedded within the city's name.
Begin at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, where the former Beverly Hills Main Post Office survives within a contemporary cultural complex. Ralph C. Flewelling designed the Italian Renaissance Revival building with Allison & Allison as consulting architects, and the post office opened in 1934 after honorary mayor Will Rogers helped secure federal funding. Charles Kassler painted eight fresco murals across its double-height marble lobby, depicting both postal history and Depression-era modern life. The post office served Beverly Hills for more than six decades before the city reacquired it in 1999. Its conversion preserved the historic structure and connected it by tunnel to a modern annex containing a 500-seat theater. Continue to Anderton Court Shops, Frank Lloyd Wright's only completed retail building in Southern California and his final Los Angeles-area commission. Completed in 1952 on Rodeo Drive, the three-story composition arranges six boutiques around a central light well. Cantilevered angular ramps climb through the building, staggering shops by half-levels and turning vertical circulation into the principal architectural event. Wright shaped the façade as an inverted V and extended its chevron geometry through tapering piers, soffits, fascia and the central spire. The building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 and later underwent restoration for Givenchy's Beverly Hills flagship. Conclude at Electric Fountain, installed at Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards in 1931 through support from the Beverly Hills Women's Club and the family of silent-film actor Harold Lloyd. Architect Ralph Carlin Flewelling designed the fountain, and sculptor Robert Merrell Gage created its central figure and bas-relief. The kneeling Tongva figure atop the column performs a rain prayer, connecting the artwork with indigenous settlements established around water descending from Benedict, Coldwater and Franklin canyons. A major restoration completed in 2016 revived the waterworks, sculpture and colored nighttime illumination. The progression moves from federal investment converted into performing arts through Frank Lloyd Wright compressing retail into sculptural architecture and culminates in civic art linking Beverly Hills' twentieth-century development to the water and indigenous settlement that preceded it.
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