Why The Georgian Room matters.
The Georgian Room is a clandestine Italian steakhouse and piano bar where Downtown Santa Monica's oceanfront heritage meets subterranean supper-club architecture, live music and a restored dining room deliberately separated from the brightness of Ocean Avenue above.
Set beneath Ocean Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard and just north of Broadway, the restaurant occupies the lower level of The Georgian within Santa Monica's bluff-top hotel corridor overlooking the Pacific. Fettle arranged racing-green leather booths along deep red walls and wood paneling, retaining the room's historic L-shaped seating configuration beneath a low ceiling that heightens its enclosed character. A rose-marble bar wraps around a 1918 Steinway & Sons piano, placing musicians at the physical center of the drinking room. Framed artwork, table lamps and tightly spaced banquettes maintain low sightlines across the sixty-five-seat interior as the small performance platform draws attention toward the piano. The result is an unusually intimate subterranean dining room whose architecture concentrates dinner, cocktails and live performance within a setting almost completely concealed from the coastal boulevard overhead.
What defines The Georgian Room.
The Georgian Room is best known for reviving a subterranean drinking and dining tradition connected to The Georgian's earliest decades as one of Santa Monica's principal gathering places for Hollywood figures. Hotelier Rosamond Borde commissioned architect M. Eugene Durfee to create The Georgian during the Depression, and the hotel opened in 1933 with a basement speakeasy operating during the final year of Prohibition. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard and Charlie Chaplin belonged to the celebrity clientele associated with the property, and the secluded downstairs operation accumulated stories linking it with Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone, although the Santa Monica Conservancy presents those mob associations as reputed history. The basement continued through later hospitality incarnations, including the Georgian Room name during the 1940s and the Red Griffin during the following decade, before the downstairs restaurant eventually disappeared from regular public life. The wider property remained connected to political and entertainment circles after Prohibition; Rose Kennedy spent summers there during the 1960s entertaining actors, politicians and journalists. Santa Monica designated The Georgian a historic property in 1995, protecting the building decades after its original celebrity period had faded. BLVD Hospitality founder Jon Blanchard spent thirteen years pursuing the property before his company and ESI Ventures acquired it in 2020, then closed the hotel for extensive work in October 2022. The Georgian reopened in April 2023, and the downstairs restaurant returned several months later after an absence measured in decades. Chef David Almany, whose career included years working under Nancy Silverton, led the Italian cooking at the revived restaurant; bar manager Jerom Morris developed the cocktail program and wine director Kristin Olszewski assembled its Italian-focused cellar. Reservation-only entry, restricted photography and late-night jazz restored the basement as a discreet destination with its own operating character inside the larger hotel.
Blue prawns alla plancha begin the current savory sequence with Calabrian chile, capers, lemon, garlic and butter, using heat and salinity to sharpen the shellfish before richer courses arrive. Burrata and mortadella bruschetta moves into a distinctly Italian register through grilled ciabatta and pistachio salsa verde, balancing the cheese's softness and the mortadella's fat with toasted bread and herbaceous nuttiness. Malfadine limone builds pasta around butter, Parmigiano Reggiano, zucchini, basil and pine nuts, letting lemon cut through the emulsified sauce as the ruffled noodle retains it along the edges. Bucatini all'amatriciana develops a darker pasta profile through guanciale, chile flake and Pecorino Romano, with rendered pork fat coating the hollow strands before the aged sheep's-milk cheese reinforces their salinity. Dry-aged New York steak frites shifts the meal into chophouse territory through concentrated beef and peppercorn sauce, and the twenty-two-ounce bone-in ribeye carries that emphasis further with horseradish cream and salsa verde available to interrupt the richness. Fried chicken and Osetra caviar supplies the kitchen's most extravagant collision, placing crisp poultry beneath crème fraîche, chives, red onion and half an ounce of roe so heat, crunch, cultured cream and cold brininess register in rapid succession. The cooking builds a coherent bridge between Italian-American supper-club food and steakhouse abundance through chile, cured pork, aged cheese, dry-aged beef and caviar, giving the downstairs room a culinary structure as concentrated as its evening format.
How The Georgian Room fits.
The Georgian Room works as the anchor for a Santa Monica outing connecting a Victorian optical attraction created to draw people toward the young seaside city, a Spanish Colonial Revival theater endowed for local youth and a historical collection born from Santa Monica's centennial.
Begin at Camera Obscura Art Lab, whose central optical device reaches back to Mayor Robert F. Jones's effort to turn nineteenth-century image technology into a seaside attraction. Jones operated the camera on the beach by 1898, charging ten cents for a live projected view of the surrounding coast before temporarily moving it to Westlake Park. The apparatus returned to Santa Monica in 1899, entered the North Beach Bathhouse complex and became municipal property in 1910, when the city moved it onto the bluff to attract people toward Linda Vista Park. Its rotating mirror and view project the surrounding landscape onto a circular surface inside a darkened chamber. The device moved into Weldon J. Fulton's purpose-built midcentury structure in 1955, where Santa Monica has subsequently connected the historic optical apparatus with public arts programming. Continue to Miles Memorial Playhouse, created through former city councilman J. Euclid Miles's $25,000 bequest in memory of his daughter Mary. Architect John Byers designed the 1929 building in Spanish Colonial Revival form, combining white stucco, a red-tile roof and wrought-iron detailing within what became Reed Park. Byers had built a substantial career designing Southern California residences, yet the playhouse translated his command of Spanish-derived architecture into a civic performance building dedicated to Santa Monica's young people. The surrounding ground carries recreational history predating the theater: the park hosted California's first polo game during the 1880s and Southern California's first golf game in 1897. Severe damage during the 1994 Northridge earthquake led to restoration, returning the building to public performance use. Conclude at Santa Monica History Museum, whose origins followed the city's centennial celebration in 1975. Ann Funk chaired the Historical Activities Committee that assembled a local-history exhibition at the Civic Auditorium, and the response led to the founding meeting of the Santa Monica Historical Society at the public library on October 8 of that year. Former mayor Clo Hoover, Santa Monica's first woman mayor, became the organization's first president. Descendants of early land grantees and pioneer families supplied photographs, memorabilia and artifacts during the collection's formative decade, creating an archive that grew beyond the organization's original expectations. A public museum followed in 1988, and its photographic holdings subsequently expanded through collections connected to Muscle Beach, the Santa Monica Outlook, the fire department and early local families. The progression moves from an optical novelty built to attract seaside crowds through a philanthropically endowed theater dedicated to civic recreation and culminates in an institution created to preserve the city's own historical memory.
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