One of Los Angeles’s most popular underground dinners has finally landed a home after years in limbo. Chainsaw, which took off as a dinner pop-up/party in Karla Subero Pittol’s Echo Park garage, is opening a cafe in the Melrose Hill neighborhood on November 13th. Expect the pies and ice cream Chainsaw is famous for, as well as arepas, pabellón criollo, and golden empanadas. “This place is hard to describe,” says Subero Pittol. “I keep calling it a micro cafe, but sometimes I call it a bakery, sometimes I call it a restaurant. I think everything I do is a little bit of everything that I do.”
That “everything” goes all the way back to college, when Subero Pittol would host dinner parties called Chateau Whatever in her apartment. “I started cooking and feeding like 70 hungover kids every weekend,” she says. “It’s how I paid my rent through college.” After graduating, she moved to Paris where she cooked at a small cafe, and frequently found her own recipes on the specials board, including a strawberry and basil creme brulee, which was a huge hit with regulars.
While the experience gave Subero Pittol more confidence in her cooking, the money did not prove enough to live on. She moved home to Los Angeles and began working at Animal in 2013, where she met the late chef Jonathan Whitener, Animal’s chef de cuisine at the time, who would become her mentor. When Whitener opened Here’s Looking At You in Koreatown, Subero Pittol joined as pastry chef. Her once-a-week bar pies quickly became a hit (the Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold even singled it out in his review of the restaurant).
Karla Subero Pittol. Oscar Mendoza
If she was flying high, an era of disillusionment was right around the corner. “I wanted out of the kitchen so badly that I took on a job as a professional dog walker,” Subero Pittol says. She left Here’s Looking At You in late 2017 and worked odd jobs, then started a floral design firm. But all the while, cooking was still in the back of her mind. It wasn’t that restaurant life no longer appealed to her so much as she had concerns around the grueling, male-dominated work culture. Then, one afternoon in 2018, floating around the pool of the Hotel Figueroa, friend and artist Sara Marlowe Hall told her, “‘Babe, just start your own thing,’” recalls Subero Pittol. “Which, sure, but how? I had no money,” she says. “And that’s when the wheels just started turning and I had an idea for a bar restaurant I always wanted to open.”
At first, Subero Pittol didn’t feel secure enough in her savory cooking to go it alone. So she brought on friend Max Sheffler, a former sous chef at Providence, to run the kitchen, fixed up the garage at her Echo Park house with Marlowe Hall leading the design, and started hosting small dinners under the name Chainsaw (a nod to a dog she met in New Orleans who had an outsized impact on her).
The first iteration of Chainsaw featured Sheffler’s more composed plates — beef in a smoky vinaigrette, buckwheat salad, squid on a bed of pickles — alongside Subero Pittol’s desserts (passionfruit lime pie, sour orange pie, fernet mint chip ice cream). Diners would purchase carnival tickets upon arriving, and as trays of food moved around the garage and outdoor seats, they could exchange their tickets for anything that caught their fancy. Still hungry? Want seconds? All guests needed to do was just purchase more tickets.
“While we chased funding, we just kept doing the garage events in hopes of building a brand, building a name for ourselves, and getting attention on the project,” says Subero Pittol. That attention (including in this publication) grew rapidly. Soon, the garage was operating less as an underground pop-up and more like a hot new restaurant that just happened to be at someone’s home. The success gave Subero Pittol and Sheffler some breathing room to run Chainsaw in the garage until they found a permanent location they liked and signed a lease.
Empanada and matcha. Oscar Mendoza
Icebox pie. Oscar Mendoza
Arepas. Oscar Mendoza
On March 1, 2020, Subero Pittol and Sheffler did just that: The pair signed a lease and reached escrow for the former Trencher space in Echo Park. But the onset of the pandemic shutdowns in Los Angeles barely two weeks after halted the plans. “The owners reached out right after March 15th happened and were, like, if you guys want out, we totally understand, this is an unprecedented thing that happened,” Subero Pittol recalls. Though momentum for a big opening of her dream project had been derailed, she wasn’t alone — the entire industry shut down. Subero Pittol had to again find a model that would allow her business to survive.
Chainsaw pivoted to selling pies during the height of the social-distancing era. At the same time, Sheffler and Subero Pittol parted ways amicably on the project. When Subero Pittol resurrected Chainsaw in 2022, things had evolved in Los Angeles — and in her professional life — considerably. She was the chef now, and her staff soon became all women: a revelation for her. “That’s when the wheel started to turn—what if I start hiring women chefs?,” she says. “In wanting to do that, I realized I can’t hire them and expect them to work under the boys while I’m just sitting back and designing a cocktail menu and making pie. I need to do the food. And that was the rebirth of my savory cooking career.”
Over the next few years, Chainsaw continued to grow, with garage dinner events selling out frequently. Eventually, a new lease opportunity presented itself: this time, with real estate developer Zach Lasry in Melrose Hill. Lasry had been quickly transforming the intersection of Melrose and Western into a food and culture destination by bringing in art galleries like David Zwirner and Southern Guild, upscale retail like Kiko Kostadinov and Interior Greens, and buzzy restaurants like Bar Etoile and Cafe Telegrama. In late 2023, Anna Sonenshein of Little Fish first connected Subero Pittol with Lasry, who wanted to help find a permanent home for Chainsaw. Lasry offered support with rent and improvements to the space. “The only reason why I felt confident that I was able to do it by myself was because of how generous the rent offering was,” says Subero Pittol.
Now, after years of restarts, Chainsaw is ready to open its doors. But if dinners at the garage sat 50-plus people, the new storefront is designed to be a pick-up window with only a few stools on the sidewalk and a seat or two inside the shop. The space itself — just like the garage — was imagined in collaboration with Sara Marlowe Hall (who owns Merchant Modern). Rich wood doors and cabinets welcome diners in, creating a warm storefront that feels well-worn and lived in. Cured meats and pots hang behind the counter like a classic deli. Marlowe Hall and Subero Pittol spent hours painting one of the walls in the front to look like layers that flecked and peeled over a few decades.
Sous chef Natalia Iorlano (formerly of Hatchet Hall) will help dish out savory foods that draw from Subero Pittol’s Venezuelan heritage: arepas will be a staple on the menu, while empanadas and pabellón criollo will be featured regularly, as well, along with Sri Lankan-inspired dishes like black pork curry and a chicken curry. “My partner is Sri Lankan, and when we go visit his family in Australia, all I do is cook food with his family,” says Subero Pittol. “I want people to realize that our range is vast and diverse. We’ll always have a consistent menu of the things we’re known for, but I will always be trying new things, too.”
As for the desserts menu, Subero Pittol’s signature passionfruit lime pie will be available, along with her marquesa de chocolate pie, and baked double-crust fruit pie with the fruits rotating seasonally. Ice creams and other pies will make appearances, too, as will a Jammy Strawberry Matcha (a tricolored dessert cup of ice cream, matcha, and strawberry topping). A coffee program run by Stephanie Quevedo (formerly of Kumquat) will use Post Era beans.
If it sounds like Chainsaw is packing a lot into a small space, it is. But it’s the result of years of pivots and refinements and understanding what works and what doesn’t. “We want to be malleable forever,” Subero Pittol says. “All I want to do is feed people really good food and make them happy.”
Interior of Chainsaw. Oscar Mendoza
Seating. Oscar Mendoza
Plates and bowls stacked at Chainsaw. Oscar Mendoza