Lasita

The food is really great! We particularly enjoyed the fish.

Hands down one of my favorite restaurants in LA. The service is warm and attentive, the vibe is impeccable inside and out and the food is absolutely phenomenal. My faves are always the salads, pancit, and that sauce on that branzino… unreal! Always get dessert!! Lasita is a gem and we’re lucky to have them in this city!

We were really excited to try Lasita after hearing so many great things, but unfortunately it didn’t live up to our expectations. The biggest issue was the value. Nearly every dish felt dramatically undersized for the price. We started with the $6 chips, which literally came with six chips about a dollar per chip. They were essentially veggie chips with a light seasoning. They tasted fine, but there just wasn’t enough there to justify the price. Even the dining experience felt a little awkward. The water glasses were tiny, served without ice, and constantly needed refilling. The plates themselves were also very small, making everything feel even more portioned than it already was. For the mains, we ordered the chicken inasal, kabocha squash, and lechon. The chicken was juicy and cooked well, but it didn’t taste like chicken inasal. We were expecting the bold, heavily marinated, smoky, charred Filipino flavors that make the dish special, but instead it tasted more like regular rotisserie chicken. It wasn’t bad it just lacked the Filipino character. The kabocha squash was tasty, but there were only a handful of thin slices in a coconut-based sauce. At around $18, it was hard to overlook how tiny the portion was. The lechon came with only four pieces of pork for $28. It was decent, but the accompanying sauce wasn’t our favorite. We asked for vinegar instead, which actually complemented the pork much better. We were also surprised that there didn’t seem to be any familiarity with Mang Tomas, a sauce many people associate with lechon. For dessert, we had the leche flan. The flavor was excellent, but it was served at room temperature, which felt unusual. Once again, the portion was very small, especially for the $15 price tag. In the end, our meal came to about $140 after tip, and we left feeling underwhelmed. None of the food was bad in fact, much of it was enjoyable but the portions were tiny, the flavors didn’t stand out, and several dishes lacked the bold Filipino identity we were hoping for. We wanted to love Lasita, but for the price, it just didn’t deliver the experience we expected.

Stopped by during the AMEX x Resy Summer Seat event and had a great time. Food is phenomenal, as a Filipino I enjoyed their twist with the dishes. The Kalabasa is a favorite of mine, and they managed to elevate it. I would recommend them to anyone that would love to try Filipino food or want to try different versions of the dishes we all know and love.

One of the most delicious meals I've had in LA, marred by some of the most atrociously apathetic service I've ever had. My partners and I showed up early for our reservation, and getting seated was still quick: A short stroll around the shopping center that Lasita is in and they seated the three of us right as we made it back to the front door. From there, it took about 5 minutes for us to get a bottle of water, and the experience started off strong with a great recommendation for a bottle of wine (their natural wines are excellent, and absolutely a highlight of the meal). We already knew what we wanted to order, so we tagged our food order on when the waiter brought our wine. From there, it took about 20 minutes until our first dish came out. First was the Kinilaw, and it was fantastic. The fish was fresh, the plantain chips were picture perfect, and we'd inhaled the whole plate inside of five minutes. After another 10 minutes, our second starter came out, the Adobo Tataki. This too was delicious; the fishy, citrusy sauce a perfect compliment to the marbled beef and the tiny slivers of perfectly-fried garlic. Once again, it took us less than 5 minutes to demolish the plate. Then we waited an entire hour for the rest of our food, which was: two more starters, sides of rice, and two of the mains. The pancit was delicious, albeit fairly miserly with the portion size. A noodle dish should be one of the easy ways for restaurants like this to bulk out a diner's order without ruining their food cost, especially when it's so vegetable-heavy. I don't know that I'd order it again. The mushroom sisig is, as other reviews have mentioned, a standout, especially if ordered with an egg or the lechon add-on. It was a textural joy, with some mushrooms extra crispy from the hot plate while the soft and chewy texture of the rest of the mushrooms and the egg mixed with the intense heat of the tiny chiles cooked into the dish. The pork belly lechon and steak pares were, as expected, the real stars. The pork belly was perfectly cooked. Skin so crispy it could drown out conversation when you take a bite, attached to meat so soft you could almost spread it, and with two excellent dipping sauces: one, a garlic sauce reminiscent of a Mediterranean toum, the other a strong, thin soy-forward sauce. Both helped cut through the fattiness of the belly. The steak pares was perfectly cooked, almost melt-in-the-mouth tender, and dressed with a delicious, sticky-sweet-salty sauce and crispy noodle bits. A pretty perfect little dish. If I had a complaint about it, it's simply that I could find it elsewhere with more going on. If we hadn't ordered rice (a must, here, as the garlic rice and chicken fat rice were both spectacular), we would have all been missing it from the steak dish. And finally, the service. As mentioned, it took us a full hour between dishes. But more than that: In two hours of sitting, eating, and drinking, our waiter only checked on us *once*. Not only did we have to get up to flag down a waiter simply to ask if our table had been forgotten, but when it came time for the check, one of us had to get up *again* to ask for the check. We had to flag down our waiter to get a single refill of our water, and we were never once offered another refill, nor were we upsold on more wine or anything else. There was no apology made (when we asked after our meal, we were told that the kitchen was short-staffed, and so I blame the back of house not at all), and on multiple occasions I watched our waiter standing, chatting with another waiter, looking out at the dining room and steadfastly not serving us. And look, I've been in the food industry for nearly 20 years. I get it. Sometimes you have a bad day. Maybe they weren't prepared for a busy Tuesday. Maybe front of house was also understaffed. But after the first two dishes had come and gone for an hour with no explanation or even table touches, the three of us were debating simply leaving and going elsewhere. Maybe we will eat at Lasita again... but only if we can get the food to go.

This place is a hidden gem 💎, great food, great service.