Why Laurel Hardware matters.
Laurel Hardware is a magnetic New American restaurant where West Hollywood's Santa Monica Boulevard corridor meets an adaptive reuse of a neighborhood hardware shop, Dean McKillen and Phil Howard's hospitality partnership and a secluded olive-tree garden behind its preserved storefront.
Set along Santa Monica Boulevard near North Laurel Avenue and just steps from Plummer Park, the restaurant occupies West Hollywood's central commercial spine between Fairfax Avenue to the east, Crescent Heights Boulevard to the west and residential blocks extending south toward Melrose Avenue. The retained hardware-store facade gives way to a 3,500-square-foot interior designed by Sam Marshall, moving from a bright front room into darker communal dining and bar areas. Elevated booths, wood floors and lounge furniture lead toward broad rear windows, where the building opens onto a courtyard planted with mature olive trees. That garden removes diners from the traffic and storefront activity immediately beyond the narrow boulevard frontage, creating a second spatial character deep inside the property. The result is a restaurant whose preserved commercial shell and unexpectedly expansive rear garden turn an ordinary West Hollywood storefront into a sequence of increasingly secluded dining rooms.
What defines Laurel Hardware.
Laurel Hardware is best known for Dean McKillen and Phil Howard converting a hardware store that had occupied its Santa Monica Boulevard site since 1946 into a restaurant that opened in July 2012 while retaining the former business's name and exterior sign. The partners, both Dublin natives, spent more than a year developing the property before launching what became their first major West Hollywood hospitality project. Chef Mario Alberto led the opening kitchen after working at Gjelina, Lazy Ox and Freddy Smalls, bringing experience in produce-driven Los Angeles cooking into a menu originally billed as New American with local Angeleno flavors. Cole Apodaca developed the opening drinks program, pairing seasonal infusions with a bar positioned behind the brighter front dining room. The restaurant retained enough of the former shop's exterior character that people continued entering in search of hardware years after the conversion. McKillen and Howard expanded their partnership with Ysabel on Fairfax Avenue in 2015, then carried the Laurel name into additional ventures, including Laurel Grill and the 17,000-square-foot Laurel Supply market that opened farther west on Santa Monica Boulevard in May 2026. The original restaurant has continued operating through that expansion, preserving the 2012 conversion as the foundation of a hospitality group whose West Hollywood footprint now reaches across several concepts. Active service runs seven days a week, and the restaurant still frames its kitchen around produce, dairy, oils and other products purchased from local, sustainable and organic suppliers.
Seasonal produce supplies the kitchen's organizing principle, allowing roasting, grilling, frying and raw preparation to alter texture before acidity, dairy and herbs establish contrast around it. Brussels sprouts gain concentrated sweetness and browned edges under heat, then lemon and chile sharpen the caramelized leaves as pecorino contributes salinity and fat. Blistered shishitos push the same high-heat treatment into thinner vegetable flesh, where char develops rapidly around a softer interior. Pizza transfers that concentration onto dough, using oven heat to firm the base and brown its exposed perimeter before cheese, vegetables and meat settle into the crust. The burger shifts browning toward beef, where direct heat builds a savory exterior capable of supporting cheese, sauce and the softer bun around it. Local sourcing lets those preparations change with agricultural seasonality, keeping vegetables and herbs connected to periods when their flavor requires less intervention. Cocktail infusions follow a parallel approach behind the bar, drawing seasonal fruit, herbs and other aromatics into spirits before citrus, sweetness or bitterness completes the drink. Small-production wines produced under sustainable, biodynamic and organic principles extend that agricultural emphasis into beverage service. Shared plates distribute these contrasts across the table, allowing charred vegetables, richer proteins, pizza and drinks to alternate through a meal instead of arriving as a rigid sequence. Laurel Hardware builds its cooking around the transformation of seasonal ingredients under focused heat, then uses acid, herbs, dairy and drinks to sharpen the roasted and browned flavors created in the kitchen.
How Laurel Hardware fits.
Laurel Hardware works as the dinner anchor for a West Hollywood route connecting an experiment in modern domestic architecture, a restored film-industry gathering place and the vast design complex that changed the physical scale of the city.
Begin at Schindler House, completed in 1922 as Rudolph M. Schindler's dramatic Kings Road residence for himself, Pauline Schindler, Clyde Chace and Marian Chace. Concrete slab-tilt construction, shared kitchens, sleeping baskets and interconnected studio rooms challenged conventional domestic planning, and sliding openings carried those rooms directly into enclosed gardens. Pauline and Rudolph separated in 1927, yet both eventually occupied different portions of the property until his death in 1953. Friends of the Schindler House acquired it in 1980, and cooperation with Vienna's MAK established the MAK Center for Art and Architecture there in 1994. Continue to Formosa Cafe, where a 1904 Pacific Electric trolley became part of a restaurant associated with the neighboring film studios and generations of entertainment figures. Jimmy Bernstein operated the business as the studio district grew around it, and Lem Quon entered the partnership in 1945 before taking full ownership in 1976. The restaurant closed in 2016, then 1933 Group undertook a $2.4 million restoration that preserved the trolley, red booths and surviving memorabilia before reopening the property in 2019. West Hollywood designated the Formosa a local cultural resource that same year. Conclude at Pacific Design Center, where Cesar Pelli and Gruen Associates radically increased the architectural scale of the surrounding district with the 750,000-square-foot Blue Building in 1975. Norma Merrick Sklarek served as production manager on the first phase, whose opaque blue glass and immense horizontal mass quickly earned the building its Blue Whale nickname. Pelli extended the composition with the 450,000-square-foot Green Building in 1988, and the 400,000-square-foot Red Building completed his multidecade conception in 2012. The fourteen-acre campus brought showrooms, offices and arts programming into three enormous colored forms built across almost four decades. The progression moves from Schindler's intimate reinvention of domestic space through a restored film-industry gathering place and culminates at Pelli's immense architectural complex built to concentrate West Hollywood's design trade.
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