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Jon & Vinny's
By 2015, chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo already had a strong Los Angeles reputation to trade on, built through their earlier restaurant Animal — so when they opened a second, more casual concept on Fairfax Avenue that same year, expectations were already high. Jon & Vinny's answered with a red-sauce Italian-American menu built around pizza, pasta, and an all-day format that runs from breakfast straight through dinner. The pizza program sits on a thin, well-charred crust, with the Popeye — a white pie loaded with spinach, garlic, and a fried egg cracked on top — becoming one of the restaurant's most-ordered and most-photographed items. The broader menu's willingness to serve pizza alongside a full breakfast menu and hearty pasta dishes reflects Shook and Dotolo's larger approach: comfort-forward Italian-American food executed with real chef-level technique rather than a straightforward red-sauce nostalgia act. The restaurant quickly became one of the Fairfax corridor's most reliably busy spots, drawing both destination diners chasing Shook and Dotolo's reputation from Animal and neighborhood regulars treating it as a straightforward daily option — a dual identity that's not easy for a single restaurant to hold. Since the Fairfax original, Jon & Vinny's has expanded to additional Los Angeles locations, extending the same all-day, pizza-and-pasta format to more of the city while keeping the chef-driven technique that distinguished it from typical casual Italian-American restaurants when it first opened. Order the Popeye at 10am for breakfast or 10pm for dinner — the kitchen treats neither request as unusual.
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Pizzana
Pizzana opened in Brentwood in 2017, built around Neapolitan-style pizza from chef Daniele Uditi, an Italian-trained pizzaiolo who developed his own dough formula — a longer fermentation process aimed at a lighter, more digestible crust than a traditional Neapolitan pie while still keeping the format's soft, char-blistered center and puffed cornicione edge. Uditi's pizzas lean into seasonal, market-driven toppings rather than a fixed traditional lineup, and the restaurant's burrata and other starters have built as much of a following as the pizzas themselves — a full Italian menu built around, rather than just alongside, the pizza program. That combination of technical dough work and a genuinely considered broader menu set Pizzana apart from more pizza-only Neapolitan spots when it opened. The restaurant's Brentwood opening drew real attention within Los Angeles's food press for bringing a more rigorously technical approach to Neapolitan-style pizza to the Westside specifically, a part of the city that hadn't previously had a destination-level Neapolitan pizzeria of its own. Since opening, Pizzana has expanded to additional Los Angeles-area locations, growth that's let more of the city access Uditi's specific dough technique without diluting the standard set at the original Brentwood restaurant. Most pizzerias mention their dough in passing; Uditi built an entire restaurant group around getting that one variable exactly right.
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