15 Best Group Dinner Restaurants in Los Angeles

First, a correction worth making loud: this isn't an Alhambra Chinese spot — Girl & the Goat lives at 555-3 Mateo Street in the Arts District, Stephanie Izard's West Coast follow-up to her Chicago original. Izard, the first woman to win Top Chef and an Iron Chef titleholder, cooks globally restless small plates here, and the kitchen leans hard into California produce. The room is all soaring ceilings, linen tones and greenery, with a central bar and two patios that keep it humming from lunch into dinner — genuinely built for a sprawling group order. Plant-forward folks, you're spoiled: the wood-fired broccoli under shrimp crunch and blue cheese labneh and the chickpea fritters with goat yogurt, tamarind and herb chutney are the table I'd build first. The sautéed green beans with fish sauce vinaigrette and cashews have lived on the menu forever for a reason. Carnivores, the goat curry with masa chips earns its name. And come back for Sunday brunch and the potato crepe, a cheeky banh xeo riff. It's $$$, Michelin-recommended for 2025, and worth the downtown trek.

Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis built something in the Arts District that the Los Angeles dining conversation has not been able to stop referencing since it opened — a soaring, high-ceilinged room that photographers and date-planners return to almost as reliably as the people who come specifically for the food. The space has a quality that is genuinely rare in a city that tends to trade atmosphere against substance: the scale flatters rather than overwhelms, and the warm light reportedly holds through the evening in a way that makes the room feel considered rather than styled. For a night that needs to feel significant without announcing itself, Bavel is consistently cited as the room in Los Angeles that does that best.

The kitchen centers on a contemporary Middle Eastern framework, and the reputation that has accumulated around it is specific: the hummus is widely reported to be made fresh and served warm, a distinction that diners and critics have noted repeatedly as genuinely different in character from the refrigerated versions the city otherwise defaults to. The menu is built around mezze logic — dishes that are meant to compose an evening rather than anchor one — and Menashe's approach to wood-fired bread is described as the right entry point, a through-line that connects the opening of the meal to whatever follows. The cocktail program is noted for drawing from the same pantry of herbs and spices as the kitchen, giving the evening a coherence that bars and restaurants rarely manage when they operate as separate concerns.

The Arts District location means the surrounding blocks reward arriving early or lingering after. Reserve for weekend evenings; the bar is reportedly accessible for walk-ins on weeknights.