The first time I walked into RVR (pronounced “river”) last fall, I felt the usual rush of excitement that accompanies visiting a well-regarded chef’s newest culinary concept. In many cases, a proven name’s follow-up effort more than delivers—the cadence of the menu familiar yet novel enough to inspire newfound delight. Highs are all but guaranteed, lows are few and far between.
This has not been the case at Travis Lett’s new-but-old seasonal “izakaya” on Abbot Kinney, which just celebrated its first year in business on October 1 and has garnered recognition from the New York Times. Every time I’ve visited RVR in the last year—now four times over—something or the other has gone terribly awry. Here, within the same cramped space that held Lett’s all-but-identical Japanese concept, MTN (pronounced “mountain”), Gjelina’s founding chef applies the same breezy-yet-upscale, distinctly Californian approach to Japanese cooking as he once did for Italian cuisine back in 2008. Unfortunately, Lett hasn’t been nearly as successful this time around.
Pork gyoza arrives cloaked in a delicate skirt, but the dumplings themselves completely disintegrated on more than one occasion. Coursing between dishes lag with no apparent explanation; the harsh cacophony of the dining room, at least at peak hours, all but ensures you have to yell out your order. A “jammy” strawberry shochu highball tastes, instead, of childhood cough syrup. The homemade ramen bowls lack dimensionality, with limp, overcooked noodles and salty, one-note broths. As usual, Lett’s seasonal vegetable dishes shine, edging out the overpriced hand rolls and hit-or-miss preparations of izakaya standards in my unofficial power ranking of the lengthy, ever-changing menu.
Compare this to a meal I enjoyed last summer at nearby Gjelina, which Lett officially left in 2020. (RVR is his first restaurant independent of Gjelina Group, which also runs nearby Gjusta and Gjusta Grocer as well as expansions in New York and Las Vegas.) Seventeen years in, the Abbot Kinney all-day staple hums along on autopilot, swapping in many of the same seasonal dishes that the founding chef introduced decades ago. The service is brisk, the pizza crust crisp, the ricotta pancakes as good as ever. It might not be the most interesting meal in Los Angeles anymore, but Gjelina first-timers and regulars alike don’t necessarily care about novelty or ingenuity. They care about consistency.
I would claim the problem at RVR is the size of the menu (it currently offers over three dozen items during brunch), but Gjelina has a similarly dizzying line-up and no such issues. Perhaps Lett is so hyper-focused on sourcing and seasonality that it comes at the expense of consistency and precision. Nevertheless, the chef’s continued presence in the kitchen ensures a certain level of exciting dynamism to the menu, and I can’t deny the power of an immaculately roasted Japanese sweet potato paired with dashi tomato sauce and lime aioli. For locals, RVR is a great but pricey option for a few bites and a drink, as well as a boon for vegetarians or the vegetable-obsessed.
Order the right assortment of dishes or come on the right day, and it’s possible you’ve never experienced the same claustrophobic, frustrating side of RVR I’ve come across in the last year. Maybe, as well, I’ve also never come with the “right” number of people. I’ve only been here in a party of two, which means I’ve never sat in the comfortable booths that line the wall, my meals confined to the rickety stools by the window—or, oddly enough, the same exact table for two. I finally had the chance to experience weekend brunch on my final visit. Upon check-in, I was once again led to the same exact table for two. Instead, I asked for a table on the beautifully appointed, relatively new rooftop, which offers far quieter, better ambience and a standalone bar, albeit all at the expense of attentive service.
I visited MTN once during its three-year run from 2017 to 2020, but I can't say I remember much about it. At this point, the experience is lost to memory, though a depressing, greasy bowl of Manila clam ramen—which the server claimed tasted like a brothy version of linguini al vongole—served as a rude awakening as to why I never returned to MTN. Though billed as a “California izakaya,” several of RVR’s dishes that overlap with a conventional izakaya but are largely unremarkable or in need of significant improvement.
At all costs, avoid the ramen section, where the watery vegetable miso will make you miss the far better vegetarian options at Tonchin, Jinya or even, dare I say it, Tatsu. I also like the vegetarian option at nearby Venice Ramen in Marina del Rey better. I’ve tried five different bowls of ramen at RVR over time, and the noodles have always been overcooked to the point they lack any discernible bite. Over the summer, Lett offered a chicken paitan topped with lemon—a California-style substitute for sudachi, a mild Japanese citrus often used to garnish cold soba. Unfortunately, the bitter pith of the lemon slices had leached into the broth, rendering the dish extremely unpalatable.
On that same visit, I enjoyed a perfectly fried rendition of chicken karaage; grilled squid with Jimmy Nardello peppers; the aforementioned Japanese sweet potatoes; and charred okra topped with ginger, garlic, sour plum, shiso leaves and a housemade sesame furikake. Then the ramen arrived. Everything was going so well, until it wasn’t—just like every other meal I’ve had at RVR.
Between the spotty service and the inconsistent cooking, I always leave RVR a little deflated. During my first meal last October, seven days after RVR’s debut, my party’s two bowls of ramen took a solid half-hour to arrive with little to no explanation. I would chalk it up to opening issues, but the same thing happened a year later with a Wagyu curry and pork gyoza I ordered during brunch, my server explaining it away as “We thought you weren’t finished eating.” A simple check-in would have sufficed. Later, a manager comped a drink for the inconvenience, but I was still late to my next appointment.
The newer weekend brunch menu offers plenty of daytime highlights, including a choice platter of airy mochi beignets dusted with crushed pistachios and orange zest; Japanese-style crustless sandwiches filled with pork tonkatsu, tamago and crispy, locally sourced rock cod; and maple-glazed pork belly chashu. A black sesame pancake topped with blackberry-apple preserves and cultured butter was fine, but not particularly memorable. I also tried the brunch-only Wagyu beef curry, which came studded with sungold tomatoes—the end result was cloying, the jammy produce overpowering the curry roux on which Japanese curry is based. I might be a frequent visitor to the farmers’ market and a native Californian, Angeleno, and even Westsider at that, but there are limits to what seasonality can accomplish in matters of taste.
As long as you build a meal around the vegetable section and avoid the ramen and dumplings, you can have a decent upscale meal at RVR. The hand rolls and charcoal-grilled items are expensive, but delicious in a straightforward way. Lett and his team know how to use binchotan, churning out chicken thigh, lamb shoulder, beef tongue and other juicy, perfectly cooked pieces of protein. Still, I would rather send you to longtime Nanbankan in West L.A. or Culver City’s newly opened Gokigen Tori for kushiyaki if you’re looking for an option closer to the Westside, and local mini-chain Yunomi (Arts District, Culver City, Toluca Lake) for reasonably priced, high-quality temaki.
In the process of researching and writing this review, I decided to pay a visit to Hakata Izakaya Hero, which I awarded a measly three stars when I first reviewed it in 2022 (I’d now give it four); made the hourlong drive out to Arcadia for Izakaya Tonchinkan, a standout suburban option with the same ownership as nearby Sushi Kisen; paid a handful of visits to Virgil Village’s Budonoki, which isn’t even my favorite but is still a better representation of the genre than RVR; and even dropped in to Santa Monica’s Shirube—an offshoot of a famous izakaya group in Tokyo—for seared mackerel and sashimi moriawase. I revisited reservation-only Kinjiro in Little Tokyo, which is as fantastic as ever, and Echo Park’s Tsubaki, where chef Charles Namba actually does justice to the term “California izakaya.”
Every single one of these other izakayas, upon measured reappraisal, is doing a far better job at serving reasonably priced, delicious Japanese drinking food than RVR. The price point and need to carefully build the “right” order keep me from recommending it as a citywide dining destination. Would I stop by again if I was in the area and craving some vegetable dishes? Absolutely, but I wouldn’t come if it was out of the way.
At the same time, I can see why the place has become a hit among neighborhood locals. For the average, now fairly affluent Venice resident, a $16 wild caught fish handroll, a $16 plate of mediocre gyoza and a $15 Toki whiskey highball at the bar might be a fine-as-wine way to spend $60 after tax and tip—and if I had that kind of tech money to burn and zero curiosity about or interest in trekking to the South Bay (home to one of the country’s largest Japanese American communities), maybe I’d feel the same.
RVR earned three stars—“good”—from us. To find out more about Time Out’s curation methods and ethics policies, head to our global “How we review” page.