Dave Beran Shoots for the Moon With His New Fine Dining Restaurant in Santa Monica

On a chilly Monday evening in mid-November, chef Dave Beran moves lightly around the dimly lit space that will become Seline, his new restaurant tucked behind a brick-lined retail complex along Main Street in Santa Monica. Beran comes to a resting point at midnight after hours of organizational tasks that include extensive cleaning and labeling. He sits on a milk crate wearing a worn-out sweatshirt and shorts despite the cool weather while his French bulldog roams the grounds as a gentle sentry. Though Beran has built his career cooking in fancy restaurants, he does not give off a bourgeois vibe outside of the kitchen.

“Originally, we thought we could make it look and feel like a high-end luxury home, but we realized that’s what so many people already have in LA. It didn’t feel genuine to me,” says Beran. “I didn’t grow up in a chateau, so I started looking at it from a personal perspective.”

Open on Tuesday, December 3, Seline may be Beran’s next career-defining restaurant after spending more than a decade working in Chicago, most notably at three-Michelin-star Alinea and as the executive chef of Next. He eventually made a name for himself in Los Angeles with Dialogue, a 700-square-foot tasting menu restaurant that opened in 2017 and earned him and his team a Michelin star. In 2019, he opened Pasjoli, his first a la carte restaurant, which serves polished French bistro classics. Beran closed Dialogue in 2020; at the time, he said he intended to reopen it in a new location with a fully realized vision. While Dialogue made a strong first impression and Pasjoli has earned its status as a Santa Monica mainstay, Beran considers Seline his magnum opus. The name comes from the Latin word for moon or heaven and is inspired by his daughter’s name, Harvest Moon.

“When we opened Dialogue, I saw it as my opportunity to move away from everything I had done at Alinea and find my own voice,” says Beran. He used the restaurant’s smaller scale to learn what Angelenos wanted from a fine dining experience. Later, he refined his approach to service at Pasjoli before arriving to where he is now — on the precipice of opening Seline. Instead of having multiple one-bite plates, Beran wants to present fewer courses with more drawn-out elements. “I wanted to craft more of a story as opposed to snapshots, honing the menu on a handful of ingredients and then revisiting them over and over again,” he says.

Inspired by a meal he had at Blue Hill at Stone Barns years ago, Beran turns ingredients like squash or pine into multiple components that create a narrative arc. He starts the opening menu with a pine-flavored matsutake mushroom tea and later serves a chawamushi infused with matsutake. Instead of an overly instructional meal, servers present courses for diners to discover for themselves. The earthy chawanmushi is served alongside trout and its roe on separate plates, leading diners to navigate how to make their own perfect first and subsequent tastes. “I wanted to play off comfort and instinct,” says Beran. The experience also features subtle Easter eggs to Beran’s youth, like the Petoskey stones commonly found on Lake Michigan beaches as chopstick rests.

A meal at Seline might consist of 15 to 18 separate dishes that are presented in nine or 10 courses and will change with the seasons. December’s opening menu features squash, black cod, squab, chestnut, sorrel, and hazelnut in various expressions. A $225 wine pairing from wine director Matthew Brodbine features more forward-thinking producers, while a $125 non-alcoholic pairing employs various beverages both curated and prepared in-house.

Seline’s Rugo/Raff-designed dining room mirrors the casual kitchen nook where families tend to eat their meals rather than a formal dining room where the “nice plateware” is displayed in glass cases. The entire space is visible through the glass doors and windows like a fish tank. Inside, the dining room is as dim as a crescent moon night, punctuated with paintings by controversial Los Angeles artist David Choe. Puffy chairs lined with blue velvet and a speckled carpet add to the moody atmosphere, a stark contrast to the more daytime hues of the recently opened Somni (which, coincidentally, had the same contractors). Eventually, Seline’s current 38-seat dining capacity will expand into a lush patio, fulfilling the restaurant’s promised “secret garden” ambience.

Save for two pillars, nothing separates the dining room from the kitchen, laid out with long counters and a gleaming stainless steel cooking station. “We wanted the space and the energy to be like the family huddling around the card table, the sliding door where the dogs run in and out,” Beran says. “I didn’t want the formality of a proper dining room. I wanted people to feel the comfort and energy of the kitchen.”

As a longtime Alinea employee and now an employer himself, Beran has tried to reimagine the labor model. Profits were shared with Dialogue employees, while at Pasjoli, gratuity was reflected in prices before the restaurant switched to service fees that were distributed to all hourly workers. At Seline, tips will be pooled and distributed to hourly front- and back-of-house staff.

Though many restaurants around Los Angeles have struggled in a year when sales were almost universally down, likely due to the slower activity in the film and television industry, the city has seen the return of fine dining in recent months. Somni opened last week, returning after a four-year hiatus, and Vespertine regained its two Michelin stars in August 2024. Beran has put all his ambition into Seline, knowing that it fulfills years of anticipation. “This restaurant has pushed me out of my comfort zone more than anything I’ve done before. It’s my one shot, win or lose,” he says.

Seline is located at 3110 Main Street, Suite 132, Santa Monica, CA, 90401, and serves two seatings per night beginning at 5:30 p.m., from Tuesday to Saturday. Dinner costs $295 per person before taxes, fees, and beverages. Reservations are available on OpenTable.