Dante Beverly Hills Is the Rooftop Cocktail Destination of Summer 2023

Beloved New York City institution Dante will open on the top floor of the Maybourne Beverly Hills on July 4, offering lunch and dinner, sweeping views of the city and Hollywood Hills, its signature aperitivo-style cocktails, and a fresh Italian-meets-Mediterranean menu. The original Caffe Dante has been a cocktail staple in Greenwich Village for more than a century, while a second location with a full food menu opened in the West Village in 2020. Dante Beverly Hills joins a spate of recent upscale Italian-leaning openings in the 90210 zip code, including Evan Funke’s Funke and the newly revived La Dolce Vita.

While the team behind Dante has run pop-ups in cities like Aspen and Madrid, Dante Beverly Hills marks the restaurant’s first official, standalone foray outside of New York City.

“We were always drawn to LA because it feels much more like home than New York does,” says owner Linden Pride, who took over Dante in 2015 with his wife Nathalie Hudson. “We spent 13, 14 years in New York City, and it was a crash course in hospitality. Coming to LA always felt like a North Star for produce and the outdoor lifestyle, but we hadn’t figured out how to do it until we partnered with the Maybourne Beverly Hills.”

Dante Beverly Hills is situated on the ninth floor of the hotel. An indoor dining room outfitted with plush blue rounded booths, white marble tables, a white Steinway, and a ceiling fresco inspired by Southern California’s flora and fauna by local artist Abel Macias opens up onto a balcony outfitted with cozy couches in the restaurant’s signature shade of mint green. Hudson oversaw the restaurant’s design, which also features a striking bar and pool-adjacent seating flanked by a wood-fired oven and lush greenery.

Considering Dante is known as a cocktail destination, the drink list is extensive. “We always try to create every drink that someone would order and make the best possible version of it,” Pride says. “That’s why our menu is so broad, although about 90 percent are signature drinks.”

Those signature drinks include the Garibaldi, a combination of Campari and “fluffy” orange juice, and there are Negronis, spritzes, and martinis aplenty. For this location though, Pride also put more of an emphasis on spirits like mezcal and tequila as a nod to California cocktail culture, offering only-in-LA drinks like a celery paloma, fluffy margarita, and tequila martini. The restaurant also plans to offer a daily $10 martini hour from 3 to 5 p.m. daily.

The food, meanwhile, relies on market-fresh ingredients, seafood, and bright, coastal Italian flavors. That translates to blistered wood-fired pizzas topped with tomato, mozzarella, thinly-sliced soppresata, and a kiss of hot honey, or squash blossoms, zucchini, stracciatella, and pesto Genovese. There’s also crudo garnished with caper leaves, Calabrian chili, citrus, and olive oil; burrata with semi-dried tomatoes, basil, and sourdough; fregola with calamari, mussels, clams, shrimp, parsley, saffron, and fish fumet; and house-made gemelli pasta with basil-pine nut pesto. Desserts include boozy affogatos and the like.

“The menu is a different iteration to what we’ve done at the first two Dantes but has the same DNA,” Pride says. “Here, it’s things we like to eat when we pretend we’re on the Italian coast. With this vista, as the sun washes through the mountains, you could be anywhere. It’s a great place to come by, eat some coastal Italian food, and have a couple of spritzes.”

Dante Beverly Hills at 225 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210 will serve food from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and the bar will stay open until midnight.