Why Zeidler's Cafe matters.
Zeidler's Café is a cultured museum café where the Sepulveda Pass's architectural character meets Jewish culinary traditions, Mediterranean flavors and the hospitality legacy of Los Angeles restaurateurs Judy and Marvin Zeidler.
Set within the Skirball Cultural Center near Mulholland Drive and just steps from the institution's Taper Courtyard, the café occupies Moshe Safdie's hillside campus at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, where Sepulveda Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway pass through the narrow geographic connection between the Los Angeles Basin and San Fernando Valley. Safdie organized the surrounding complex through clustered buildings, courtyards, arcades and landscaped ravines that follow the steep terrain. Pink Tadoussac granite, recessed glazing and vaulted stainless-steel roofs carry that architectural language around the dining setting. Indoor tables open toward a sunlit courtyard, placing lunch within the same sequence of enclosed and outdoor spaces that defines the larger campus. The result is a museum restaurant whose courtyard dining, mountain setting and Safdie-designed surroundings bind the meal directly to one of Los Angeles' major Jewish cultural institutions.
What defines Zeidler's Cafe.
Zeidler's Café is best known for carrying the names and culinary legacy of Judy and Marvin Zeidler, Los Angeles restaurateurs whose work connected Jewish cooking, Italian food and several consequential Southern California restaurants. Judy began cooking professionally after moving to a Topanga Canyon ranch in 1963, when a nearby restaurant began purchasing her homemade apple strudel for daily service. She subsequently published nine cookbooks, including The Gourmet Jewish Cook, spent more than two decades as a food consultant for the Los Angeles Times and hosted Judy's Kitchen on the Jewish Television Network. Marvin joined Michel Richard and Bruce Marder as an investor in Santa Monica's Broadway Deli, and the Zeidlers later became associated with restaurants including Citrus, Capo and Cora's. Their connection with the Skirball ran deeper than restaurant naming, with Judy and Marvin participating among the institution's founding supporters and helping create the café. Judy contributed recipes, and the couple's decades of travel through Italy supplied another culinary current within a body of work already grounded in Jewish food. The café continues that inheritance under chef Sean Sheridan, with the Skirball explicitly framing its current menu around Jewish culture, Mediterranean flavors and contemporary Los Angeles cooking.
The menu develops that premise by moving recognizable Jewish and Mediterranean preparations through contemporary California ingredients and compositions. A spinach-and-cheese boureka retains the puff-pastry structure associated with Sephardic and Israeli baking, and bagel and lox joins cured salmon with cream cheese, capers, tomato and red onion. Chicken shawarma salad places roasted sliced thighs over romaine, tomato, cucumber and onion with tahini and grilled naan, shifting a spit-roasted reference into a composed lunch plate. Avocado toast carries sumac and za'atar over sourdough with heirloom tomatoes, bringing Levantine seasoning into a Los Angeles café staple. Israeli street corn salad combines corn, cucumber, grape tomatoes, red onion and feta with lime dressing, moving another familiar regional ingredient set through a California salad format. Kosher dill pickle fries push the Jewish deli reference in a different direction through fried pickles and everything-bagel dip. The chopped salad completes the pattern with romaine, vegetables, avocado, burrata and honey-lemon herb dressing, showing how the kitchen repeatedly crosses Jewish food references, Mediterranean ingredients and contemporary Los Angeles lunch cooking without confining the menu to a single culinary tradition.
How Zeidler's Cafe fits.
Zeidler's Café works as the anchor for an outing connecting expansive modern architecture with an internationally significant art collection and an interactive interpretation of one of the Hebrew Bible's foundational stories.
Begin at Getty Center, where architect Richard Meier's hilltop complex opened in December 1997 after more than a decade of planning and construction. The 110-acre site rises above the Sepulveda Pass on the opposite architectural pole from Safdie's lower hillside campus, with pale travertine cladding, rectilinear pavilions and broad terraces commanding views across the Los Angeles Basin. J. Paul Getty's collecting enterprise ultimately produced an institution encompassing European paintings, drawings, sculpture, decorative arts, illuminated manuscripts and photography, with the Brentwood campus joining museum galleries to conservation, research and educational programs. Continue to Skirball Museum, whose institutional history began within Hebrew Union College before founder Uri D. Herscher developed the independent cultural center that opened in April 1996. Jack H. Skirball encouraged the project, Herscher selected the 15-acre Sepulveda Pass site and Moshe Safdie designed all four phases of a campus that eventually reached 170,000 square feet. Its ongoing Visions and Values: Jewish Life from Antiquity to America connects Jewish history with the American immigrant experience, carrying the institution's central historical collection through the same campus occupied by the café. Conclude at Noah's Ark, the Skirball installation opened in June 2007 after five years of development inspired partly by more than 120 folk-art arks in the museum collection. The 8,000-square-foot wooden environment contains hundreds of handcrafted animals assembled from repurposed objects, with vegetable steamers forming an elephant's trunk, shoehorns becoming deer ears and keyboards entering zebra bodies. Mechanical devices generate thunder, rain, wind and other effects as the biblical flood story becomes an interactive exploration of collective action and second chances. A major 2026 renewal expanded the installation after an attraction that had grown to more than 50,000 visitors and students annually. The progression moves from a hilltop modernist arts campus through the Skirball's Jewish-American historical collection and culminates inside an elaborate physical interpretation of a flood story shared across cultures.
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