In the bleakest days of early 2021, when Courtney Kaplan and Charles Namba started believing that the pandemic would force the closure of Tsubaki, their modern izakaya in Echo Park, the couple would distract themselves with some hopeful fantasizing: If this place did close and they could eventually open another restaurant, what would they want to create?
The idea stuck for a bistro with an enveloping atmosphere, serving French dishes inflected with Japanese flavors. It had been the original plan for Tsubaki, before they swung toward Namba’s repertoire of raw, steamed, fried and grilled dishes matched equally by Kaplan’s extraordinary sake program — a direction that better fit the restaurant’s tiny quarters.
Four years later, Tsubaki and its next-door sake bar, Ototo, are thankfully still with us, two community touchstones where I take visitors to show off L.A. greatness.
Critic Bill Addison returns to Vespertine, an out-there tasting-menu restaurant that could be equally exhilarating and maddening. Now reopened after four years, is it worth the splurge?
Meanwhile, five miles away, Kaplan and Namba have lately been immersed in finally bringing their long-incubating bistro to life. They introduced Camélia in the Arts District in July, in the century-old building, once a National Biscuit Co. factory, that housed Church & State for over a decade. The scope of the space, much larger than either of their Echo Park businesses, gives Namba and Kaplan the room to broaden their ambitions, to flex their individual expertise while entwining their talents — and two cuisines — more intricately than they’ve attempted before.
An endeavor this complex tends to take a few months to crystallize. As 2025 begins, Camélia is right where it needs to be: The restaurant finds fresh meaning in the bistro genre — an exuberant evening out framed around food, driven by honed technique — that’s also a sophisticated exploration of identity.
Camélia’s aioli garni with market vegetables highlights produce of the season, dressed with carrot vinaigrette.
(Rebecca Peloquin / For The Times)
It’s heartening, after the space lay dormant for a couple of years, to see crowds once again gathering on the Industrial Street patio, a block from the busy 7th Street corner where Yess resides.
Camélia’s interior redo erases memories of former tenants. Frosted pendant globe fixtures, wicker chairs, lots of knotty wood paneling to soften the wide pipes running overhead, red leather booths and pale green banquettes create an overt Midcentury Modern vibe. Beyond the smoky caramel lighting that enrobes diners at night, there’s little in sight that evokes the clichés of a “bistro,” a term that’s been stretched to infinite interpretations anyway.
So what is the working definition at Camélia? Plush, purple-yam blinis crowned with feathery Dungeness crab and the pop of gently saline ikura. Clams steamed in a donabe in a broth enriched with lobster butter. A croque-madame constructed using soft, stretchy shokupan. Beef cheeks braised in red wine and nipped, unmistakably, with freshly grated wasabi root. To drink: an aperitif of anise-scented pastis, or a Suntory highball? A half-bottle of Beaujolais with a couple of years’ age on it? Seasonal sakes timed for release in the fall? A splash of each?
This precise grafting of French and Japanese cultures is the sum of its owners’ lives, professional and personal. Namba grew up in Los Angeles. His first kitchen job was at a Beverly Hills pizzeria. He didn’t start taking cooking seriously, though, until he moved to New York and secured a gig at En Japanese Brasserie, a restaurant covering spectrum sushi, noodles and salads. There he met Kaplan, who had studied Japanese at Columbia University in New York and lived in Tokyo as a student. His career next stop: David and Karen Waltuck’s lauded French temple Chanterelle in Tribeca. Hers: Decibel, one of the country’s defining sake bars.
When they relocated to Los Angeles, Namba landed at Bouchon in Beverly Hills and Kaplan worked as a sommelier at Bestia before they opened Tsubaki in 2017. In a recent interview, Kaplan mentioned that the Japanese-French synthesis, already so organic to their experiences, would cohere further during their travels. She mentioned a neighborhood bistro near the house of Namba’s parents in Kobe, Japan, that they frequent — and also both French restaurants in Tokyo and centers of Parisian bistronomie where they’ve had clever dishes that could collapse the 6,000-mile distance between the two cities.
Stateside, the merger of Japanese and French cuisines often can seem forced, or gimmicky, or ridiculous. Kaplan and Namba come to the challenge seasoned and ready, and it shows.
Few beverage pros in the country have Kaplan’s fluency, and her gift for storytelling, on two subjects as vast as wine and sake. Angelenos who’ve interacted with her before at Tsubaki or Ototo know her disarming charm: She can sidle up to a table almost shyly and self-effacingly. But once she has coaxed out your predilections, maybe by asking what flavors you like in other beverages, you’re soon sipping something explicit — something herbal, or funky, or effervescent — that could rewire your understanding of sake.
Camélia affords Kaplan the chance to recenter her wine knowledge. Her list condenses a tour of France into classic styles and up-and-coming producers; it’s the kind of document that urges conversation with Kaplan or one of her gracious, engaged staffers. That said, the first page always includes some of her current, often seasonal wine and sake obsessions, offered in full and half bottles, with language (“Did someone say red wine in sake form?”) that draws you into her worldview.
Something about small restaurants occupies a particular place in a cityscape, especially in sprawling Los Angeles. Stir Crazy on Melrose feels like a respite from the world.
Whatever your drinking interests, come with a thirst to quench. “Dryuary” observers might lean into bar lead Kevin Nguyen’s nonalcoholic cocktails, including a faux-Negroni riff taut with pomegranate and bitter orange.
As for the cooking: Namba and his team are hand-stitching two cuisines like master tailors.
Every dish feels considered in its own context. In many cases Namba takes a French staple and swaps one critical element for another. Ginger replaces peppercorns for cut-through spice in brandy sauce over ruddy New York strip. The stretchy, pillowy qualities of milk bread lighten the Gruyère and Mornay sauce that blanket the croque-monsieur (though it’s still calorically bombastic enough to share even among four people). Dijon mustard commonly flavors buttery pan sauces that accompany roast chicken. Namba instead tempers seaweed in cream; its oceanic umami achieves the same desired effect to both highlight and offset the bird’s simplicity.
Sometimes he slides in an element adding hidden depths — say, miso butter in a sweet potato gratin scented with thyme. Or he relies on his own imaginings, as with a poetic plate of scallops and oyster mushrooms glossed with dashi-lime cream and finished with a frothy puree of chestnuts and dates. The flavors ping bright, earthy, sweet and nutty.
Other dishes are what they are, with little blurring of lines. A Japanese technique called warayaki, in which meats or fish are cooked over burning hay to perfume them with fire, yields a beautiful starter of sliced bonito paired with myoga, spritzed with sudachi and finished with hazelnut-miso dressing. A thick, American-style burger made with dry-aged beef, served with a cone full of crisp fries, is purely an excellent handful of a burger.
There are certainly works in progress. Because the salads at Tsubaki always have astounding layers of flavor, I expect more out of Camélia’s assemblage of seasonal-changing greens with fruits and nuts and cheese, which have yet to conjure much emotion. Parker House rolls nutty with black sesame tend to come out dry, an unfortunate way to kick off dinner. I keep trying to fall in love with the $70 duck frites that feeds two. It’s draped with appropriate, smart-sounding things like coriander-yuzu shichimi and béarnaise, and it always hits a little flat. I know Namba and his team can adjust its frequency levels for more treble and rumble.
If you rushed to Camélia in, say, August while the restaurant was still settling in, I’ll now push across the table to you one of Namba’s latest creations, to demonstrate his swift evolution: koshihikari rice cooked in the style of risotto with dashi, then intensified with a wild compound butter that includes uni, pulverized katsuobushi, lobster coral, soy sauce and, for a little Gallic kick, espelette. The dish arrives overlaid with lemony grilled Monterey Bay squid, minty from chopped shiso. Imagine the famous riz au lait of l’Ami Jean rendered as chawanmushi from a parallel universe.
Does a dish identified as “risotto” color too far outside the bistro lines? When a chef touches on the sublime, labels mean nothing. We know that in Los Angeles. Even better, Kaplan is waiting with a soulmate junmai daiginjo by the glass, creamy and flinty-bright, to match Namba’s efforts texture for texture.
Camélia
1850 Industrial St., Los Angeles, cameliadtla.com
Prices: Snacks and raw bar $12-$28, smaller plates $14-$28, larger plates $27-$80, desserts $8-$16.
Details: 5-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 5-10:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Full bar. Valet (and difficult street) parking.
Recommended dishes: Blini with Dungeness crab and ikura; croque-madame; koshihikari risotto with grilled squid; sage-stuffed loup de mer; koji-roasted chicken in seaweed cream sauce; dry-aged burger; and pastry chef Estevan Silva’s purin (custard) with caramel, figs and rum.
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