Marcus Jernmark Opens Lielle, New Fine Restaurant in LA

As executive chef of the three-Michelin-starred Frantzén in Stockholm, ranked 6th in the list of the world’s 50 best restaurants in 2021, Marcus Jernmark has cooked at the highest level of the restaurant.

But at Lielle, the Los Angeles restaurant he’ll open on Thursday, February 12, in the former Bicyclette space on West Pico Boulevard, he’s thinking about sustenance and sense over glitz and glamour.

“You can go to Lielle to get your fill,” Jernmark tells the Observer. “You don’t go to many restaurants to get your fill. You go there to get information. I want to close that gap.”

There’s no doubt that Lielle will be an upscale restaurant, but Jernmark wants to take things down a notch after spending years dining in Los Angeles and seeing what guests enjoy here.

“Price is important,” said Jernmark, who plans to charge $150 for most four-course meals instead of the 42-seat Lielle being one of those tasting-menu restaurants that charge double that for a succession of delicious bites. “It’s an important tool for us to set the expectations of the guests. I think it’s amazing to be part of redefining that power of a new or potentially more used category of fine dining, where you take a kind of public dining format and bring quality and multiple purposes behind it.”

Every meal at Lielle will start with 36-hour house-baked Rouge de Bordeaux levain bread with house-churned butter and toppings may include vendace roe (a nod to Jernmark’s background in Nordic cooking) with beer-battered Dungeness crab.

“Bread is amazing, but it’s been such a journey learning to bake,” Jernmark said. “Bread is complicated, the simple things are the really hard things, but if you do it right, the thing people will take away from this experience is, ‘Oh, that bread and butter.’

Baking at home also pays dividends in the form of misos that Lielle makes from leftover bread.

“We make soups with it,” Jernmark said. “We mix it with walnuts and make walnut miso. We rub it on our squab. We just got a lot of different stores for one product, and it’s really paid off.”

At Lielle, Jernmark and chef de cuisine Matthew Bowden (who previously cooked at the excellent restaurants Providence and Manresa) will showcase dishes such as abalone “BBQ” with seaweed rice, Brussels sprouts and fermented hen of the woods sauce. Aged squab is served with yuzu pepper, sprouted walnuts and spicy herbs. There is spaghetti all’assassina with spiny lobster, preserved tomato and sea urchin. The focus here is what Jernmark likes to call California bistronomy.

Jernmark and his creative wife/partner, Andrea, put this restaurant together after scouring California for the best ingredients. Andrea, who sewed Lielle’s diapers by hand and worked closely with her husband and design studio Lovers Unite to reimagine the underground space that was formerly home to Walter and Margarita Manzke’s Bicyclette, joined her husband on drives up the Central Coast. There were frequent visits to Buellton’s Motley Crew Ranch and Marketplace, where Lielle found protein like prime beef.

“They focus on 100% renewable and biodynamic practices, and work with a collection of producers around them.” Jernmark said. “We go up there two or three times a month and buy all the food we eat at home from there, but we also prepare the sausage with them.”

That sausage will likely be used for bangers and mash at Marée, the California-Parisian winery above Lielle that Jernmark plans to roll out later this year.

In 2023, I ran into Jernmark while walking the Bowery in Manhattan. I was on my way to Torrisi, and he was on his way to Estela. We talked about our dining trip. He was doing some kind of R&D. His hit list includes Torrisi, and Claud and the Four Horsemen.

Mentally, he was over 15 course menus. And as these things happen, Torrisi has since earned a Michelin star when The Four Horsemen and Penny (a top seafood restaurant from Claud’s group) entered the first list of the 50 best restaurants in North America.

As Jernmark prepares to open Lielle, he is thinking of his favorite restaurants in the world, such as Paris’s Maison Sota, Septime, Le Châteaubriand and Clown Bar in their heyday. There are similarities here, clearly. Jernmark wants Lielle to feel like a restaurant, not like a friend’s living room or a palace or a spaceship. You want to serve world-class food without over-frying.

You also want to avoid doing it in a systematic way. If it makes sense for the sauce to be served inside the kitchen, you’ll avoid a tableside presentation. Instead of exclusive wine pairings, there will be carefully selected selections by the glass heavily influenced by the time Jernmark spent with California sommelier/winemaker Rajat Parr.

Jernmark wants his dining room to be a little darker, but he knows it’s important to see who you’re dining with and the food you’re eating at the custom cherry wood tables and wine-trimmed leather banquettes.

The seating is “comfortable, but not over the top,” says Jernmark. “The tables aren’t too open, but they’re deliberately arranged so that you have all the space you need. You’re very comfortable, but not overcrowded. You’re sitting close to good food so you don’t detract from what should be a busy restaurant.”

The human element drives the creation of Lielle, named after Jernmark’s daughter, in many ways. Jernmark works with smaller suppliers such as the Monterey Abalone Company and Petaluma’s Andante Dairy. It’s about building a like-minded network of independent suppliers and partners. Parr introduced Jernmark to Andante’s Soyoung Scanlan, and Jernmark now works with her on cheese and aged saison projects.

It is clear that the seriousness of the way Jernmark thinks about food. But the point he makes to Lielle is that sincerity doesn’t have to mean ceremony.

“At some point, you need to take a break,” Jernmark said. “I promise you there will be so little show that some people will ask for more show. But this is a restaurant for people who travel a lot and see a lot of smoke and mirrors. And they’re done. We don’t need that in our lives anymore. We want to get it back to basics that way.”

Lielle is all about making a different approach and letting it go. Jernmark wants Bowden to be in a “free role” in the kitchen. Jernmark is there to support the kitchen, but he doesn’t feel the need to be in charge. On most nights, you’ll likely find him walking the dining room, offering service that’s warm and welcoming but not over the top.

“If all goes well, I will probably be in the best position of maître d’,” he says. “I will also be in the kitchen, but I have to look after all the work.”

Lielle, located at 9576 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90035, will be open for dinner seven nights a week, with seatings from 5pm to 8:30pm.