Zach Pollack Goes Casual With New Cosa Buona Concept Coming to Echo Park

Silver Lake’s Alimento restaurant has been immensely popular since first opening just over two years ago, with chef/owner Zach Pollack putting out some of the city’s finest Italian food inside a brightly lit space along Silver Lake Boulevard. Now the chef is branching out with yet another concept, this time a loose Italian-American idea that comes complete with pizza, antipastos, and more.

While not hewing strictly to the red sauce Italian genre of Sunday gravy suppers, the new restaurant — called Cosa Buona — will indeed be focused on the sort of casual, rich flavors found in East Coast delis and other longstanding Italian-American restaurants nationwide. There will be a particular lean on pizzas (as opposed to pasta) with the new restaurant, as Pollack has been looking to perfect something akin to a smaller wood-fired pie that isn’t bound in the traditions and ingredients of true Neapolitan heritage. You can also expect hearty options like chicken parmesan sandwiches and the like.

The name Cosa Buona is actually a bit of a tip-off to the location as well, with Pollack taking over the former Pizza Buona space in Echo Park. The corner address at Sunset and Alvarado is an icon for the area, with the original owners running Pizza Buona for nearly 60 years, even through a series of dangerous car crashes through their front door over the years.

With Cosa Buona, Pollack hopes to strongly nod to the restaurant that came before, while moving the space in a new direction. Beyond physically moving the front door away from the dangerous corner and onto Alvarado, the plan is to add in a bar, that wood-fired pizza oven, one run of booths, and a few other fine details that should keep the place feeling lively and casual. There will still be take out and delivery as well, something that helped prop up the original Pizza Buona for years.

Ultimately it’ll be a while before the restaurant comes online, with a mid to late fall landing expected. But if you can’t wait to try a sample of what will be on offer from Cosa Buona, Pollack is actually running a sort of mini-version of the menu as part of dineLA, which launches next week. The full menu for dineLA can be found below.

Cosa Buona dineLA

Cosa Buona
2100 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA