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LA’s Most Celebrated Filipino Restaurant Shines Bright Once More

After a year of uncertainty, Chinatown’s Lasita gets a new outlook and a sunny new space

An overhead shot of bowls of Filipino food, including chicken and noodles.
Food from Lasita
Jakob Layman
Farley Elliott is the Senior Editor at Eater LA and the author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks. He covers restaurants in every form, from breaking news to the culture, people, and history that surrounds LA's dining landscape.

It’s been a wobbly ride for the Lasita team in the last year. The Far East Plaza Filipino restaurant, formerly known as Lasa, closed and re-concepted during the winter surge portion of the ongoing global pandemic, returning to life weeks later with its new name and more easygoing takeaway menu. The outlook — casual Filipino food done with California ingredients and lots of heart — remained the same even as brothers Chase and Chad Valencia decided to amicably split, leaving Chase to run the Lasita show with former Lasa chef de cuisine (and Eater Young Guns winner) Nico de Leon. And yet, through it all, the Lasita team is intent on keeping things very, very sunny.

Here comes the newest iteration of Lasita, a colorful dinnertime hideaway meant to evoke the serenity of a Philippine sunset. Preen, Inc., one of LA’s premier hospitality architecture firms (Tesse, Howlin’ Rays, Socalo, Odys + Penelope), managed to flip the space to include pared-down wooden booths and banquettes along with an oversized central table that can double as a family-style feasting station or a place for wine pours and stand-up gatherings among friends. There’s a casual rail along the window for elbow-to-elbow indoor dining like the old days, and lots of color and artistry in the artwork and hanging paper fixtures.

A light orange room for a new restaurant, with a view into the kitchen.
Inside the new Lasita

Much of the Lasita menu, with its focus on rotisserie-style chicken and pork lechon, remains in place, along with the colorful pours of natural wine, of course. There’s also pancit, roast pork sandwiches, smaller bar snacks, and bites of calamansi cream pie for dessert, each ideal for a warm summer evening in changing Chinatown, a neighborhood that has undergone its own generation of upheaval and uncertainty in the face of development and gentrification.

For those eager to return to what may (still) be Los Angeles’s best Filipino restaurant, Chase Valencia, Nico de Leon, and the Lasita team will be on-site starting tomorrow evening, keeping hours from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, with Sunday hours from noon to 4 p.m.

Orange walls and hanging paper sculptures inside of a new restaurant dining room.
The dining room
An outdoor patio seating area in front of a light teal and orange restaurant facade.
Outdoor seating, too

LASA

727 North Broadway, , CA 90012 (213) 443-6163 Visit Website