In our Dining Reports, we share a firsthand perspective of a recent restaurant visit, covering everything from the vibe to must-get dishes. See more in the Eater app.
It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the new Arts District bar and restaurant Lynx. The website remains vague with only the all-caps description: “A PRODUCT BAR. AND PIZZA.” The restaurant’s social media presence is equally mysterious: a few captionless photos on Instagram and a YouTube channel, for some reason, that has no videos.
It’s the new project from chef Josh Skenes — best known for San Francisco’s Saison and Angler, and for the short-lived, Icarian restaurants Leopardo and Happies Hand Made in Los Angeles — and only serves a tight, abstract pizza menu. Maybe it’s really more a bar with absurdly good cocktails from beverage director Brandyn Tepper. But it’s also a full-service, sit-down restaurant, one in which you can’t really meander or mingle, and the playlist has been designed to work both for Lynx and fast-casual Tatsu Ramen, with which it shares a building, bathroom, and makeshift dividing wall that occasionally emits the ghost sounds of slurping. It is, to say the least, unique.
I suspect this ambiguity is intentional, partially as cover for a bar and restaurant that is still working to define itself. The inscrutability also serves to thrust Lynx into the realm of modern art. The pizzas feel avant-garde and push the extremes of crust at both ends. Most arrive with an absurdly open-structure cornicione that’s basically all alveoli, inflated like an inner tube with a blistery exterior. Toppings get piled in the center of the puffy halo of crust, often spilling out as you pull slices apart in a way that feels both haphazard and lavish. Flavor combinations require more contemplation than pizzeria standards, leaning hard into salty, spicy, and umami — cured meats, roe, and ferments abound.
On some days, you can get the World’s Thinnest Pizza, which arrives cracker-flat like a funhouse mirror distortion of the other pies, jagged and crisp and served with similarly thin — though still ample — toppings such as embered anchovy filets, diced chiles, and smushed capers.
Tepper’s cocktails innovate in ways that surprise and challenge the drinker, from layers of smoke and sugar awakened in a barbecued banana peel to an anise whisper in a clarified cacao pseudo–milk punch. In some ways, it may be easiest to approach Lynx as a quiet bar where you can also get odd pizzas — the subtle neon red “BAR” signage outside proclaims as much. Despite its litany of idiosyncrasies, I think Lynx feels worthy of longevity, something Skenes, amid all his accomplishments, hasn’t quite achieved in Los Angeles yet.
Start with a sparkling amaro kola, a light-bodied drink pairing bright citrus with the gentle astringency of amaro. The interplay of sour, sweet, and bitter makes an ideal aperitif.The Filetti pizza is deceptively simple: a clump of marinated raw tomatoes and an abundance of fresh basil showered atop melted mozzarella that hides a fermented chile paste. It’s a jumble in a pleasing way and almost gives the impression of a spicy Caprese salad, except for that ring of crust blown out to wild proportions like a Mort Drucker caricature of Neapolitan pizza — engorged and airy with sourdough tang and plenty of good olive oil.The Banana Stand cocktail outperforms its understated description: “Barbecue banana peel stirred with banana rum,” the menu says, which does not capture the depth of flavor in the short drink. The cocktail is strong and boozy with an up-front kick of caramelly banana pie; a hit of bitter smoke layers underneath. It tastes of vacation and sunscreen and beach bonfires after dark, all sweetness and char.The World’s Thinnest Pizza is a fun juxtaposition to the other pies. The crust protrudes dramatically over the edge of the serving tray, jagged and flat, with lanky filets of smoky anchovy laid out in lines like a lonely road. It’s salty, savory, crispy, and pleasantly spicy.The Chocolate Rainwater is a clarified combination of cacao shell rum and a wedge of orange that offers notes of anise and cacao but none of the creamy sweetness you might imagine.
Skenes has been on something of an odyssey in the Los Angeles restaurant scene since the opening of Angler Los Angeles in 2019. There have been fits and starts, pivots and swaps, renovations that turned into closures and abrupt concept changes — in fact, Lynx is in the space that briefly housed Skenes’s fun chicken tender shop Happies Hand Made, and the paper that arrives under the pizzas at Lynx appears left over from that restaurant, branded with Happies all-over print “Hand Made” wordmark. That is to say, it’s fair to wonder how long Lynx will be around, and in what form.
Recent discourse on Food Talk Central cites long waits as Skenes performs quality control live on the line. I can corroborate to some extent: I saw the chef take a single bite of a lot of slices and then immediately dump the rest in, presumably, the trash, but it didn’t seem to drastically affect our wait time. It’s still early days for Lynx: it’s an evolving project and dough can be a finicky canvas. Still, this might be an indicator that Lynx is unlikely to remain the same for long, or even from visit to visit.
Some people will find Lynx frustrating — the pizzas are unpredictable, the atmosphere is kind of weird, and the whole thing feels extremely conceptual. But I found both the pizzas and drinks revelatory and thought-provoking in a way I really enjoyed. It feels like a runway-show version of pizza, putting forward exaggerated, often impractical concepts that will eventually filter to the mainstream in more accessible formats. (See: Miranda Priestly on cerulean.) Get there now, so that when everyone’s crust is puffy as hell or 2-D flat you can say you tried it at Lynx first.
Interior. Digital Style House
Cocktail in progress. Digital Style House