By 
I didn’t want to end 2024 without going to one of the most anticipated restaurant openings this year: Leopardo.
At first, I thought Leopardo was one of the many new fancy restaurants that populate LA’s fine dining scene. This was until I read the backstory of three-star Michelin chef and co-owner, Joshua Skenes.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Joshua Skenes grew up hunting with spears, fishing and cooking over campfires. In 2016, he opened Saison in San Francisco with his business partner, Mark Bright.
As a former fisherman, connection to nature is at the forefront of Joshua’s cooking. When he worked at Saison, he cooked as if he was living in the backwoods by using a hearth. This cooking method coupled with his creative culinary skills earned Saison three Michelin stars, which is the highest rating in the Michelin Guide, and the most important achievement any chef could dream of! At the time, Saison became the first restaurant in California to receive two Michelin stars.
Influenced by his formative years of hunting and fishing, Joshua always wanted to transcend the eating experience beyond a fancy dinner. How could he connect guests to the wilderness?
In 2021, he announced Skenes Ranch, an invitation-only experience located in Washington state, where guests would stay at a hunting and fishing lodge with master classes.
“Skenes Ranch is a working ranch and farm, a “restaurant,” a lab, a school, a forum for innovators and collaborators improving how we grow and raise food, and hopefully a model that reminds us to look at food as vitality, as nature intended, and to try and shrink our circle of consumption. It is a place that constantly reminds you to breathe deeply and live life to its fullest.” – Website
In 2019, Joshua moved to Los Angeles to open Angler in the Beverly Center, which followed the same rustic aesthetic as Saison; serving fresh wild-caught food cooked in a 32-foot-long open hearth.
That same year, Joshua started offering an $800-per-person tasting menu from his home in Hollywood Hills. Soon after, he stepped away to work on the development of Skenes Ranch.
After a four-year stint at the Beverly Center, Angler closed permanently last year. However, this wasn’t the last we’d see of Joshua Skenes in LA! In the summer of 2023, he secured the space of the former La Brea Bakery. Fast-forward to a year later, Joshua opened Leopardo — a place where sourcing the best quality ingredients prevails above anything else.
“We want to use incredible local products that nobody uses, like the ocean tilefish. It’s so delicious and craveable — we just treat it really well with good buttery olive oil, lemon, salt, seasoning.” Joshua Skenes for EaterLA.
Space
Instead of revamping the space, Joshua preserved the brick walls and parquet flooring from the former business, which made it look more homey and cozy. The brick walls are decorated with a hodgepodge of artworks, photos of Ferraris, celebrities (some of them are autographed) and vintage posters. If it’s your first time at Leopardo and you don’t know anything about Joshua Skenes, the pictures on the walls might lead you to believe that this place only offers your typical Italian fare.
The bar area features a long, marble countertop with brass pendant fixtures, where guests can have a peek behind the curtain of the inner workings of the restaurant. From hearing conversations between the sous chefs to seeing the prepping process of the food, the counter is the best spot!
On the back end of the restaurant, there’s a lush patio for those who want to enjoy an al-fresco dining experience.
What I ordered:
Cali-prese 2010 salad
Dare I say that this is the best honey vinaigrette I’ve ever tasted? One of the sous chefs said: “We use honey from the Farmer’s Market and then we mix it with two kinds of vinegars. One is a white balsamic, the other is apple cider vinegar. Then we add Shiro Dashi, which is essentially like a fortified soup base.”
If you think you’ve had good tomatoes, wait until you try these 18-hour early grey tomatoes, which are skinned and served with a glob of stracciatella cheese on top. They’re intensely sweet and juicy with tangy hints. Think of eating a fruit-flavored candy in its natural, raw form.
The mouthfeel of this dish was unparalleled: the creamy cheese, the soft yet highly concentrated rich flavor from the tomatoes, the nuanced honey vinaigrette sauce and the subtle herbal notes from the mint leaves. This tantalizing combination was a delight for my tastebuds, which is why you can’t go to Leopardo without ordering this.
According to Resy.com, Joshua and his team spent months canning jars of early girl tomatoes, hence the insanely rich flavor.
Wild-boar meatballs
Instead of serving the classic beef meatballs that you can find at most Italian restaurants in LA, Joshua offers wild boar meatballs. I assume his hunting trips incentivized him to offer this type of meat. For those who don’t know, wild hogs are hunted in the south of the US.
As opposed to beef and pork, boar meat is 85% lean and 15% fat, making it an excellent source of protein. I personally don’t like pork meat, but I enjoyed this meat. I also appreciated that the meat taste wasn’t too overpowering due to its high lean content.
The meatballs are bathed in a rich tomato sauce with toasted bread crumbs and topped with finely grated Parmesan cheese. There were specks of black pepper inside the tender meatballs, which added an extra kick without being too overwhelming.
I wanted to make sure I had enough room for the pizza and dessert, so I ate one meatball and a half. They tasted incredible the following day!
Hello Satan pizza
The Hello Satan pizza is spicy galore, peppered with a generous amount of fermented chilies and chili flakes.
Once I learned about the high spicy level on this pizza while I was placing my order, I was ready to move on and order another pizza. However, my server kindly excused himself for a second to ask Chef Joshua if it was possible to put the spices on the side. So, thank you!
If you order pizza at any restaurant, you expect it to arrive in a timely manner. Even though I was the first person to dine in, the Hello Satan pizza took about 40 minutes to make! At Leopardo, every pizza is handled individually. Many of their pizzas have jalapenos or other delicate ingredients, so they have to carefully watch each of them to ensure they’re being properly cooked.
Once the Hello Satan pizza was ready, Joshua and the sous chefs carefully pulled it out of the oven with the pellets and dissected it on the stainless steel table, under the bright pendant lights. They looked like a legion of doctors performing surgery. Then, Chef Joshua carefully placed the pizza on a round serving tray. He lifted it and turned it around, poring over the massive crust.
He made his way over to me and placed it on the counter. “Here’s the Hello Satan pizza”, he said with a smile. Here’s what it looked like!
Pizza purists may not be a fan of the massive puffy crust, which Joshua Sekenes said was an homage to Tokyo-style pizza.
First of all, the cheese was spectacular; creamy and slightly sharp, providing a savory layer that complemented the rich tomato sauce, while cutting through the peppery kick from the salumi, and enhancing the herbal notes from the basil. The pizza was topped off with an irresistible drizzle of wildflower honey, creating a beautiful symphony of sweet and savory flavors.
I sprinkled some of the fermented chilies and chili flakes. My server was right, the fermented chilies definitely elevated the pizza to new heights and enhanced the base of the ingredients I’ve just talked about. The flakes added a nice grainy texture to the overall pizza. All in all, I was able to handle the spiciness pretty well, but in small doses.
The texture of the pizza crust was perfection: airy, crisp, and bubbly. It was so flavorful, and it showcased the impeccable fermentation process of the dough. Don’t overlook it!
At the end of the interview, you’ll read the great lengths Chef Joshua Skenes goes through to source the best ingredients for the restaurant. Think of the Hello Satan as pizza on steroids. I want to make it very clear that this is not your run-of-the-mill pizza. The flavor was off the charts – in EVERY bite. Truly, it was one of the best pizzas I’ve had in a long time. I’m so thankful to Chef Joshua for modifying my order!
From what I read, some people who have tried it thought the spice level was too much. I think too much spiciness on this pizza detracts from the fresh and stellar ingredients. But I guess you could order one of the non-spicy pizzas… With this being said, Joshua Skenes said in his interview with Resy.com that the pizzas were still in development and that he and his team were working on different styles.
My server said: “Each pizza has its own time frame. It’s all about the ingredients. We watch each of them to make sure all the pizza is consistent with the crunch and taste. We use the TLC: tender, love and care.”
In the Forbes’ Magazine article, “Why Three-Star Michelin Chefs Are Racing To This Los Angeles Pizza Joint”, author David Hochman said: “Let’s talk about the incredible pizza. I will go out on a limb and say the Hello Satan pizza with wild honey, chili, salumi, and herbs, is the best pizza I’ve ever had. What’s your secret?”
Joshua Skenes replied:
“The dough is a big part of it. We tested every high-quality flour we could find and settled on nine different grains from the West Coast. Our starter is two years old and the dough is naturally leavened, wild yeasted, and fermented for about three days, with a focus on lactic acid for a subtle, natural sweetness. Plus, we use tomatoes from my favorite Bay Area farm and fermented chilies for that kick.”
Frozen soft serve
You can’t go to Leopardo and not order their most popular dessert! The piled-high soft serve is accompanied by honey (rum honeycomb), and butter Biscoff cookies, which are sprinkled with a dash of sea salt.
Note: I think either Joshua or the sous chefs were very generous with the portion of the soft serve that day. If you look at other photos, they usually don’t pile the soft serve that high. I wish there was a way I could have taken the rest to go!! 😭🍦
As I poured the rum honeycomb onto the soft serve, it was so satisfying to watch the droplet of honey running down the glorious soft serve swirls. Make sure you drizzle a generous amount! Tasting the fluffy texture of the soft serve coupled with the delicately sweet honeycomb is already an experience unto itself.
The soft serve has a pleasantly rich milky flavor, with a smooth and creamy consistency. Then you add the flavorful crunch of the butter Biscoff cookies, which have a very distinctive blend of warm flavors (brown sugar,cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg), and boom, a dose of nostalgia seeps in. You’re taken back to your childhood, when you used to dunk cookies into milk.
If Chef Joshua opened a stand offering this soft serve, I woud be there in a heartbeat. When I looked it up, I wasn’t surprised to see that a few online publications have already gotten wind of this elevated cookies and milk delight, and have ranked it on the top lists of the best soft serves in the city.
Joshua Skenes for EaterLA: “It’s so fucking good. It makes me happy as soon as I see it. It’s a pure milk and cream flavor, and so silken in texture. It’s just really great pastured milk and cream”
Overall thoughts
My total for these four dishes was $116 (without tip). Expensive? Yes, but it’s not too far off from other upscale restaurants in LA that probably don’t go above and beyond like Joshua Skenes to offer ingredients of the utmost quality. The menu has pizzas and other items that lean towards Italian, but you can also find raw dishes, like deer tartare, Crudo, and oysters – an homage to Joshua’s hunting background.
The tomatoes were $25. For the exceptional quality, I was surprised by the relatively low price. I’ve had plenty of $25-$30 entrees at high-end restaurants in LA, but they didn’t make a lasting impression in the way Leopardo’s Cali-prese salad did.
The depth of the sauces and the textural components on each dish were very unique and worth another visit.
In his interview with Forbes Magazine, Joshua said that the challenge of keeping Leopardo was the hard work that goes into sourcing the best quality ingredients while keeping them at an affordable price.
Leopardo is a restaurant that I’d gladly return to. Given the casual style of the restaurant, many people find it hard to justify the high prices. Since they serve pizzas, is it an Italian restaurant? Not exactly. So, is it a fine dining establishment? Not really. It’s hard to pigeonhole Leopardo into one dining category.
Joshua Skenes has a bevy of recognitions, and using the words “Michelin-starred chef” to promote Leopardo would be a great way for people to understand the high prices. However, EaterLA said, “He wants to diminish himself as much as possible. He even wanted to list himself and his Leopardo partner on the site as “anonymous pizza lovers.”
From tasting some of the best produce in California to having each dish overseen by a veteran Michelin-starred chef, Leopardo is one of the best culinary experiences you can find in Los Angeles right now. I can’t rave about it enough! Not to mention how generous the portions were. You will not leave hungry!
I don’t drink, but from the photos I’ve seen, they also put a lot of thought and care into their cocktail offerings. The menu at Leopardo is ever-changing based on the season and produce availability. Overall, there’s a lot of hard work and wherewithal at play to keep a restaurant like this. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts!
Joshua Skenes for Forbes Magazine:
“At the same time, you get your haters who don’t understand. Some reviewer wrote something with an eye roll that complained about the $160 waffle with caviar dish [crispy red flint waffles with Bordier butter and maple syrup, topped by Ossetra caviar aged for six months with country bacon salt]. To the critic, it was an expensive waffle, but they didn’t pay attention to the fact that we’re serving the absolute best caviar that you can buy in the US, or that there’s a ton of that excellent caviar on the dish. Food costs for products like these can be high but we make sure the taste experience is worth it.”
Leopardo: Website and Instagram
Book your reservation on Resy here.
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 5:30 PM to 9:30 PM. Closed on Sundays and Mondays.
What do you think?