Beverly Hills is not where anybody goes looking for a bargain, and the assumption is broadly correct. But expensive neighbourhoods produce a specific and reliable anomaly: restaurants with high fixed costs and serious kitchens sometimes run one menu, quietly, at a price that makes no sense relative to everything around it. It is usually not advertised. It is almost never the thing on the front of the menu. And it is frequently the best value dinner within several miles.
The cheapest interesting dinners in this city are often hiding inside expensive restaurants, on a menu nobody mentions. Tell Karpo your budget and where you are, and get the set menus near you that come in under it — not the ones that only start there.
On South Beverly Drive there is a four-course tasting menu for sixty-four dollars, in a restaurant whose whole proposition is beef.
What sixty-four dollars buys
The Picanha Dinner at Matū runs four courses. A twenty-four-hour bone broth to start, which is a genuinely unusual opening for a steak restaurant and tells you where the kitchen's head is. Steak tartare with a Japanese accent. Picanha skewers served with tahini and zhoug — a combination that is more Levantine than Brazilian and works far better than the description suggests. And a shared ribeye.
Put that against the local market. Sixty-four dollars in Beverly Hills is what a single steak costs in most of the rooms within a five-minute walk, before anything else arrives at the table. Getting four courses including a shared ribeye for that figure is not a small discount, it is a different category of transaction, and it is the sort of thing that exists because a restaurant wants people in on a Tuesday rather than because it has run the numbers wrong.
The beef is the actual argument
Matū serves one hundred per cent grass-fed wagyu from New Zealand, and the sourcing is the restaurant's founding idea rather than a line on the menu. Grass-fed wagyu is an unusual proposition — wagyu genetics are normally paired with grain finishing to produce the heavy marbling the name is associated with, and the grass-fed version is leaner, more mineral, and tastes considerably more of the animal and less of fat.
Whether you prefer it is a genuine question of taste rather than a matter of quality. If what you want from a steak is the melting, almost sweet richness of a highly marbled grain-finished cut, this will read as restrained. If you find that style overwhelming after four bites — and a great many people quietly do — this is the version you have been looking for. The restaurant makes a related case around health, sustainability and animal welfare, which is the reason the sourcing is where it is rather than somewhere closer. New Zealand cattle are pasture-raised year round in a way that is difficult to replicate at scale in California, and the restaurant has built its supply chain around that rather than around proximity.
Picanha, briefly
Picanha is the cut from the top of the rump with the fat cap left on — the centrepiece of Brazilian churrasco, comparatively little used in American steakhouses, and one of the best value cuts on any animal. It is beefy, has enough fat to stay forgiving, and is at its best cooked hard and fast on a skewer, which is exactly what happens here. Ordering it in a restaurant that mostly sells ribeye and filet is a good decision on its own terms before the price is considered. The skewer format matters too. A whole steak arrives once and is then a project; skewers arrive as several separate pieces with a high ratio of charred surface to interior, which is the part of any grilled beef that carries the most flavour. It is also considerably easier to share, which is the whole register this menu is pitched in — the ribeye at the end is explicitly a shared course rather than a plate each, and the meal is built around a table rather than around individuals.
- Four courses for $64: 24-hour bone broth, steak tartare, picanha skewers, shared ribeye
- 100% grass-fed New Zealand wagyu — leaner and more mineral than grain-finished
- Open Sunday to Friday 5.30pm to 10pm, and Saturday from 5pm
- 239 South Beverly Drive, with a second location in Brentwood
Timing it
The restaurant runs 5.30pm to 10pm Sunday through Friday and opens an hour earlier on Saturday. A four-course menu needs about two hours, so a nine o'clock booking is not the one to take. The early end of the evening is also, in Beverly Hills, the easier end for parking — the structures around Beverly Drive are considerably less painful at half past five than at eight, and several of them offer a free first hour or two, which is worth checking before paying for valet.
The other reason to come early is the neighbourhood. The blocks south of Wilshire around Beverly Drive are quiet, walkable and pleasant in the evening in a way that most of Los Angeles is not, and having somewhere to walk for twenty minutes after a beef-heavy dinner is more useful than it sounds. It is also one of the few parts of Los Angeles where that walk is genuinely pleasant after dark rather than merely possible.
Practical notes
Matū, 239 South Beverly Drive, Suite 100, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, with a second location in Brentwood. The Picanha Dinner is a four-course tasting menu at sixty-four dollars per person, comprising a twenty-four-hour bone broth, steak tartare with a Japanese accent, picanha skewers with tahini and zhoug, and a shared ribeye. The restaurant serves one hundred per cent grass-fed wagyu from New Zealand, leaner than grain-finished wagyu. Open 5.30pm to 10pm Sunday to Friday and from 5pm on Saturday, with a full bar. Book the earlier end of the evening for easier parking and to allow two hours for the menu.
Tags: #LosAngeles #BeverlyHills #TastingMenu #Steakhouse #Wagyu #GrassFed #LAEats #HiddenGems #Picanha #ValueDining #DateNight #LARestaurants #ThingsToDoLA #NewZealandBeef
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