Chad Colby’s Antico Will Be a Rustic Italian Farmhouse on Beverly Boulevard

Chef Chad Colby’s upcoming Antico restaurant project is starting to take shape, with plans for a late summer opening on Beverly Boulevard near Larchmont. The project has specifically been in the works with Colby for well over a year now, but the genesis of what to expect on the menu, and in the place itself, reaches back to much of Colby’s earliest cooking years.

Colby first debuted a pared-down version of what Antico will look like via an outdoor two-day pop-up run next to Hayden in Culver City, but now he’s spoken to Eater’s restaurant editor Hillary Dixler Canavan about just what the bones of his new restaurant will look like. According to him, Antico will encompass “Italian farmhouse-style cooking,” utilizing his collection of outdated pasta tools and antique cookware. That means everything from beans in clay pots to touches of charcuterie.

Covering the whole of Italy also means offering hand-rolled couscous, a time-intensive process Colby says he learned from a Tunisian woman in Trapani, a Sicilian port city close to Africa. There will also be a vegetable plate that comes with almost any meal, a sort of mandatory rustic side dish finished in a hearth alongside the meat and everything else.

As for the space and the format, Colby says his new restaurant will only seat about 45 at a time. It’s going to carry a loose prix fixe format where diners can scale up or down depending on their needs: Something south of $40 for a three-course dinner with pasta as the entree, or around $55 for four courses, and on up. Think of Antico as a reaction against the fully communal, small shared-plates restaurant world currently flourishing around Los Angeles, but with Felix’s attention to detail and a softer price point.

There’s no word yet on an official opening for the project, and Colby himself declines to name the actual address just yet, but expect something around late summer in the greater Larchmont area, along Beverly Boulevard.

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