Why Ysabel matters.
Ysabel is an elegant courtyard restaurant where West Hollywood's nocturnal character meets midcentury-inflected architecture, open-air dining and the second hospitality venture from Laurel Hardware partners Dean McKillen and Phil Howard.
Set along North Fairfax Avenue near Romaine Street and just steps from Laurel Hardware, the restaurant occupies West Hollywood's eastern reaches between the commercial intensity of Santa Monica Boulevard, the residential blocks around Kings Road and the design corridor extending south toward Melrose Avenue, where low-rise buildings conceal unusually deep interior parcels. A passage from Fairfax opens into a large courtyard organized around mature trees, paved terraces and multiple levels, allowing the restaurant to unfold well beyond its restrained street frontage. Marble stairs, leather seating and two bars divide the property into distinct dining and drinking zones without severing the open-air room at its center. Fireplace seating and an elevated terrace create quieter pockets around the principal courtyard as evening light shifts toward strings of bulbs suspended through the trees. The result is a West Hollywood restaurant whose concealed approach and expansive courtyard transform an ordinary Fairfax frontage into a layered setting built around dinner, cocktails and late-night social life.
What defines Ysabel.
Ysabel is best known for expanding Dean McKillen and Phil Howard's West Hollywood restaurant partnership beyond Laurel Hardware when the pair opened the Fairfax Avenue restaurant in the former Lola's property in 2015. The Dublin-born partners had purchased Laurel Hardware from its original owner several years earlier, retaining the former hardware store's name and signage as they converted it into a restaurant. Executive chef Mario Alberto initially led Ysabel's kitchen, connecting the new project directly with the culinary operation at Laurel Hardware. Alison Trent assumed control of the kitchen in 2016 after working at Thomas Keller's Bouchon and The French Laundry and Michael Cimarusti's Providence. Her tenure brought preparations including hamachi crudo, ricotta-truffle capeletti, Australian lamb chops and sundried tomato brioche, with house-made pasta occupying a substantial place in the repertoire. More than a decade after opening, Ysabel remains active on Fairfax with dinner service seven nights a week, preserving the restaurant as the long-running counterpart to the partners' original West Hollywood venture.
Di Stefano burrata arrives with prosciutto, stone fruit, almond pesto, arugula, tomato, balsamic and basil oil, using creamy cheese and cured meat as the base for fruit, nuts, acidity and herbs. Branzino takes a sharper direction through poblano-avocado cream, blistered peppers, quinoa, cilantro, radish and lime, and miso salmon combines black forbidden rice with carrots, scallions, sprouting broccoli and green Thai curry. Chicken schnitzel joins Mary's chicken breast with warm radicchio, dates, shallots, balsamic, celeriac and parsley, placing crisp breading against bitter leaves and concentrated sweetness. Australian lamb chops use za'atar carrots and confit whole garlic, and the steak program extends through flat iron, New York strip, filet mignon, ribeye and a dry-aged 40-ounce tomahawk. The cocktail repertoire follows the kitchen's cross-cultural range: The Cactus combines mezcal with pineapple, cucumber, ginger and avocado, Reesh 2.0 joins tequila with Nixta corn liqueur, Ancho Reyes Verde and Green Chartreuse, and Second Wind connects vodka with hard espresso, cold brew and chocolate bitters. Churro ice cream sandwiches, date-and-fig bread pudding with spiced rum sauce and orange olive-oil cake carry those contrasts into dessert through fried dough, dried fruit, spice, citrus and coconut.
How Ysabel fits.
Ysabel works as the anchor for an outing connecting an experimental house that altered Southern California architecture with the surviving public ground of West Hollywood's pre-incorporation history and César Pelli's three-building monument to the region's design industry.
Begin at Schindler House, completed in 1922 by Austrian-born architect R.M. Schindler as a cooperative home and workplace for Schindler and Pauline Schindler alongside Clyde and Marian Chace. Concrete, redwood, glass and canvas formed what Schindler conceived as an enclosed campsite, with four adults occupying private studios connected through shared living areas and outdoor courts. Schindler used a slab-tilt construction process and dissolved conventional boundaries between rooms and gardens, beginning the Southern California body of work through which he developed his concept of “Space architecture.” Pauline Schindler later helped establish Friends of the Schindler House in 1976, the property was acquired for preservation in 1980 and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture began operating there in 1994. Continue to Plummer Park, established in 1937 and carrying layers of community history from decades before West Hollywood incorporated as a city in 1984. Great Hall, Long Hall and Fiesta Hall survive as historic community buildings within the grounds, spaces through which generations of local organizations developed social and cultural life. Santa Monica Boulevard along the park's southern edge belonged to U.S. Route 66, placing the grounds beside the historic highway that carried westbound travelers into Los Angeles before the route was decommissioned. Conclude at Pacific Design Center, where César Pelli transformed a 14-acre property into an expansive center for the design trade through three buildings completed across nearly four decades. The 750,000-square-foot Blue Building opened in 1975, the 450,000-square-foot Green Building followed in 1988 and the 400,000-square-foot Red Building completed Pelli's original three-part conception in 2012. The combined campus reaches 1.6 million square feet and concentrates dozens of showrooms representing thousands of manufacturers across furniture, textiles, lighting, surfaces and interior products. The progression moves from a dramatic domestic experiment that helped redirect Southern California modernism through a public ground carrying nearly ninety years of community history and culminates inside an architectural complex built at the immense scale of Los Angeles's international design trade.
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