Search restaurants near me on Melrose east of Highland and Kali will come up with a decade of accumulated praise attached to it, almost all of which is now describing something that is no longer served. In July 2025 the restaurant at 5722 Melrose Avenue eliminated its tasting menu — the format it had been recognised for — and reopened with an à la carte mid-century steakhouse menu. The address, the chef and the garden are the same. The meal is not.
When a restaurant changes format, every review written before the change becomes a description of a different place. Ask Karpo what the current menu actually looks like where you are eating tonight, and what else along this stretch of Melrose is worth knowing about.
What Kali was, and why the reputation was earned
Kali is run by Kevin Meehan and Drew Langley, who have worked together for most of their careers — Meehan in the kitchen, Langley on wine. It spent roughly ten years as a garden-to-table restaurant with a tasting menu, drawing on produce grown for the restaurant, and it collected Michelin recognition for that work.
The garden was not decorative. A kitchen that grows a meaningful share of its own vegetables builds its menu backwards from what is ready rather than forwards from what it wants, which is why the tasting format made sense: a set menu is the easiest way to serve produce whose availability you cannot fully control.
Ten years is a long run for that format in Los Angeles, and the restaurants that have kept it going are mostly at price points considerably higher than Kali's. That context matters for understanding the change — this was not a failure of a concept, it was a decision about what a room of this size on this street should be doing in 2025.
The mid-century steakhouse is a specific idea
A mid-century steakhouse menu is not simply a steakhouse. The phrase points at a particular American dining register — the era of the composed cocktail, the shrimp cocktail, the wedge, the chop, the side ordered separately — with the ordering structure and the theatre that went with it.
Going à la carte changes the economics for the diner substantially. A tasting menu is a single price and a single decision, and you either want it or you do not. An à la carte steakhouse can be a two-course weeknight dinner or a four-hour production, and the same room now accommodates both. That flexibility is almost certainly the point of the change.
It also changes what the wine programme is for. A tasting menu is usually paired; a steakhouse list is chosen from. With Langley running it, the list is the part of the old restaurant that carries over most directly, and asking for guidance rather than ordering by grape is worth doing here.
What the garden is doing now
The interesting open question about the new Kali is what happens to the produce. A steakhouse menu is not an obvious home for a garden-to-table practice — the format is built around protein, and the vegetables are traditionally an afterthought sold in dishes designed to be shared.
Which is precisely where this version of the restaurant has room to be better than the genre it has joined. The sides are the place to look on the current menu, and ordering more of them than a steakhouse would normally suggest is the way to eat here that takes advantage of what this kitchen has always been good at. A table that orders two steaks and one side has missed the whole point.
If in doubt, ask what came out of the garden this week. It is a question this kitchen is set up to answer, which is not true of most rooms serving a chop.
There is a broader pattern worth naming here, because Kali is not alone in it. A number of American restaurants that built their names on the tasting menu have moved back towards à la carte in the last few years, and the reasons are consistent: the format is expensive to staff, it excludes anyone who wants a short dinner, and it commits a kitchen to a single price point in a city where people eat out at several. Reading Kali's change as a retreat misses what it is — a working restaurant choosing to be usable more often.
The address and the hour
Melrose east of Highland is a working, unpolished stretch of Hollywood rather than the shopping strip further west. Kali has never had a frontage that announces itself, and the reimagined identity has not changed that. It remains easy to drive past.
Because the format is new, this is a period where checking before you go is worth the thirty seconds it costs — service days and times for a restaurant that has recently changed its whole model are exactly the details that stale listings get wrong. The telephone is 323.871.4160 and is the fastest way to settle it.
Practical notes
Kali is at 5722 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, run by Kevin Meehan and Drew Langley, on 323.871.4160. As of July 2025 it no longer serves a tasting menu; the current format is à la carte, described as a mid-century steakhouse. Treat any review or listing written before mid-2025 as describing a different restaurant. Order more vegetable sides than the format suggests — the garden is the part of this kitchen with the longest track record — and use the wine list rather than ordering around it. Because the model changed recently, confirm the current service days by telephone rather than trusting an aggregator.
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Ask Karpo first
Restaurants change format more often than the internet updates, and a glowing write-up can be describing a menu that was retired a year ago. Ask Karpo what a place near you is actually serving right now, whether the hours have moved, and what else is worth considering on the same street.
