SELINE: Santa Monica’s New Michelin-Worthy Tasting Menu
On Main Street in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the beach, chef Dave Beran is running the most ambitious tasting menu on the Westside. SELINE opened in 2025, joined the Michelin Guide the same year, and has been nearly impossible to book since. The menu runs 15 to 18 courses. The cooking is rooted in Southern California's ingredients and seasons. Nothing about it feels predictable.
Beran has serious credentials — he ran the kitchen at Next in Chicago before moving to LA to open Dialogue, which also earned Michelin recognition before closing during the pandemic. SELINE is his return, leaner and more focused, with a room and a kitchen built around exactly the kind of cooking he wants to do.
"SELINE is the kind of restaurant that reminds you what it feels like to eat something you've never eaten before. That experience is increasingly rare and worth every effort to secure a table."
The Cooking
The menu changes constantly — this is not a place with signature dishes. Beran sources from the Santa Monica Farmers Market directly (you'll often see the same farms you recognize from the Wednesday market appear in the courses) and builds the menu around what's exceptional that week. Southern California has extraordinary produce year-round, and the kitchen uses it without apology or irony: the flavors are clean, the techniques are controlled, and there is nothing on the menu that is there for its own sake.
The 15–18 course format means you eat for roughly three hours. Portions are calibrated — you will finish full but not uncomfortable. Wine pairings are available and well-matched; the list skews toward California, France, and natural producers.
The Room
SELINE is a small restaurant. The dining room seats a limited number of covers per service, which is part of what makes the experience coherent — the kitchen-to-table ratio allows for the kind of attention to detail that larger tasting-menu operations lose. The space is calm without being cold: warm lighting, good acoustics, the kind of room that recedes and lets the food be the event.
What It Costs
Tasting menus at this level of cooking in Los Angeles run $200–$350 per person before wine. SELINE is priced accordingly. It is an occasion restaurant — the kind of place you go when you want the evening to be the event, not just the prelude to one. For what you get, the value is strong relative to comparable restaurants in other cities.
The Neighborhood
Main Street in Ocean Park is worth walking before or after dinner. The stretch between Pier Ave and Rose Ave has a mix of independent restaurants, wine bars, and coffee shops that are well above average for a beach-adjacent commercial strip. Getting there early for a drink at one of the wine bars nearby before your reservation at SELINE makes the evening feel properly considered.
