LA Dining: Cafe Pinot

Looking for some downtown dining? Looking for a place for the pre-show dinner or the post-matinee dinner? Give Cafe Pinot a try.

Cafe Pinot is part of the Patina Group of restaurants.

Food:
Terrific food. I had the Caesar salad for appetizer. For entree, I had the lamb loin. My other dining companions had the duck and the veal. I got to sample a bit of the meats from the other two meals and they were excellent as well. Portion sizes are appropriate and well presented. Obviously, you aren't going to Cafe Pinot to stuff yourself! For dessert, the three of us split the creme brulee and the chocolate decadence. Yummmmm...

Service:
Service from the staff was friendly and generally good. However, we were there with the post-matinee opera crowd AND as the pre-musical crowd was arriving there so things got pretty busy and some customers were unhappy.

Atmosphere:
Nice indoor and outdoor seating. We had outdoor with the heat lamp which works pretty well. The outside has a view of the towering buildings of downtown which was quite spectacular especially at night.

Price:
Dinner for three with tax and tip came out around $150. A real bonus of Cafe Pinot is *no* corkage fee! We found this out from the posts over at Chowhound.com.

Check out the Citysearch review of Cafe Pinot where it won a "highly recommended" rating.

Location:
Cafe Pinot
700 W 5th St
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Phone: (213) 239-6500

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I used to love Pinot. It was our favorite place for special occassions back in the late nineties up until about three years ago.

But the last three times we went, it seems that reservations meant nothing to them, we would be kept waiting for up to 30 minutes. The service slipped, the food was not nearly as good as it used to be and we had the crappiest bottle of wine and they made it sound like we were being picky because it had a moldy cork. Even our old favorites, like the chocolate croissant bread pudding ended up being a disappointment.

I'd like to give them another try. I love dining outside in nice weather there.

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