Pasta|Bar Brings an Intimate, Pasta-Centric Tasting Menu to Encino

Hidden on the second floor of a shopping megaplex anchored by a California Pizza Kitchen and a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Pasta|Bar is exactly the kind of place you'd walk right past if you didn't know to look up. That's part of the charm.

Chef Phillip Frankland Lee's Michelin-starred concept brings head chef DJ Nelson to the curved counter of Encino Place, where 12 seats face an open kitchen and dinner means a dozen courses built around handmade, often single-bite pastas. The format is a tasting menu, but the energy, as Eater LA put it, is "zero pomp and circumstance."

The evening begins before anyone sits down. Arriving diners are taken into a moody bar and served savory canapés alongside an elaborate cocktail constructed using a Japanese cold drip tower. Only then does the main dining room open up, revealing that curved counter where the night's dozen courses unfold in front of you. Nelson and his cooks work in full view, and if you're seated along that counter, the kitchen is close enough to feel like a conversation.

The pasta itself is the point. Portions run small and precise, single bites in many cases, with homemade bread brought out to pull every last trace of sauce from the bowl. Seasonal garnishes and flourishes come from the restaurant's own garden, grown less than a mile away, so what hits the plate reflects whatever is happening just around the corner from Encino Place.

The crowd skews toward elder millennials, and the playlist confirms it. Nelson works the kitchen to a 90s-heavy rotation that includes Keith Sweat, Mary J. Blige, and Jennifer Lopez, and he sings along. The effect is that a formal tasting-menu structure loosens into something closer to a dinner party, with 12 strangers seated side by side, guard collectively dropped by the time the third course lands. The full playlist is available on Spotify for anyone who wants to extend the evening past dessert.

Finding Pasta|Bar requires a small act of commitment. Take the escalators up from the ground floor of Encino Place and look for two gold plaques at the top: one reads "Sushi / Pasta Bar," the other instructs you to ring the doorbell. Ring it.