Eyal Shani's Malka Brings Kosher Fire Cooking to Beverly Hills Hotel

Chef Eyal Shani has opened Malka, his first full-service restaurant on the West Coast, inside the SIXTY Beverly Hills hotel at 9360 Wilshire Boulevard, bringing his live-fire, instinct-driven cooking style to a kosher dining room steps from Rodeo Drive. Shani reportedly spent 72 hours building the restaurant's opening menu from scratch, describing the tight window as a gift rather than a constraint.

“The limitation of these 72 hours is a beautiful opportunity for me not to calculate anything, just to do it for my deepest intuition,” Shani said, according to Modern Luxury. The restaurant occupies a space at the 4-star boutique hotel that previously housed Ella Restaurant & Bar, per PartySlate. Malka opened in partnership with Giancarlo Pagani of Pagani Projects, the same collaborator behind Shani's recent Southern California expansion strategy.

Beverly Hills marks Malka's fifth global outpost, following its 2018 debut in Tel Aviv and subsequent openings on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 2023, in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood in September 2024, and in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to YeahThatsKosher. Shani, who is also the chef behind the fast-casual pita chain Miznon, operates more than 40 restaurants worldwide through his Good People Group. His Greenwich Village restaurant SHMONÉ earned a Michelin star in 2023 and has retained that status through 2025.

A Menu Built on Feel, Not Formula

Malka's design leans natural, open, and youthful, the work of Turjeman Yaakov of Jacob Turgeman Design, who has collaborated with Shani on other concepts including HaSalon. The restaurant is described as a fresh Mediterranean concept with a seasonally driven menu built around olive oil and fresh vegetables, organized under a kosher framework. Shani said he is working with the vitality and spirit of California ingredients for the Beverly Hills location.

The Beverly Hills menu may include mashed-potato-stuffed schnitzel and Shani's signature Very Israeli Hummus, alongside a flattened eggplant dish exclusive to this location. U.S. Malka locations are built around specialized live-fire kitchen setups, including custom wood-burning grills, hibachi stations, rotisserie skewers, and smoking cabinets, with dishes organized into sections like Knife Works and Fire Works, the same account notes. Shani spent more than a year and a half developing the tomato sauce for his Tel Aviv pizza concept, and he describes the tomato itself as a creature that balances acidity and sugars. “The tomato is magic,” he said.

Cocktails and a Philosophy of Hiring

Among the drinks on offer is The Iris, a cocktail built from Haku vodka, white peach mint purée, and fresh lemon. Shani has said he wants Malka's energy to extend beyond the restaurant and into diners' everyday lives, and that philosophy extends to how he builds his kitchen staff. He has said he prefers up-and-coming cooks over the most seasoned experts, seeking out people who can operate outside conventional methods and lines.

“I need passionate people who can live out of the box, out of the method, out of the lines,” Shani said, per the same account. He has said he wants his staff to understand how to watch and feel what ingredients want to be, rather than follow rigid technique. Shani and his team describe charging the food itself with passion as central to the restaurant's identity.

Keeping Shabbat in a Beverly Hills Hotel

Malka Beverly Hills takes dinner reservations Sunday through Thursday from 5:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. and stays closed Fridays and Saturdays in observance of Shabbat, a schedule maintained across all of Malka's global locations, according to Resy. That weekly closure sits somewhat apart from the rhythms of a bustling hotel property, and how Malka balances its spontaneous, live-fire menu style with strict kosher certification inside that setting remains an open question as the restaurant settles into its routine.

The opening caps a deliberate buildup in the region. Shani's fast-casual Miznon expanded its Southern California footprint in late 2025 with new locations on West Third Street and at Culver City's Platform, a rollout Modern Luxury has described as priming the L.A. market ahead of a full-service venue. Shani has also been expanding elsewhere on the national stage; Hoodline previously reported on his Naked Tomato opening at Moxy South Beach in May, and he is separately developing a 4,000-square-foot restaurant concept at Brooklyn's Williamsburg Wharf waterfront development alongside a new Breads Bakery storefront.

A New Kind of Kosher Dining for L.A.

Malka's arrival lands within a broader wave of late-summer restaurant debuts across Los Angeles, including Alphabet Bar & Grill in Pacific Palisades and Lucky's steakhouse downtown, as noted by the Observer. But Malka's positioning is distinct from L.A.'s existing kosher dining landscape. Beverly Hills borders the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, long recognized as a hub for Southern California's Orthodox Jewish community, home to roughly 30 kosher establishments along a single stretch of Pico Boulevard, according to PBS SoCal. Those offerings have historically leaned toward casual delis, pizzerias, and neighborhood butcher shops rather than Michelin-adjacent fine dining. Shani, who visited Malka and toured Los Angeles markets just over a week before the opening, is betting that a boutique hotel setting near Rodeo Drive can hold both his improvisational cooking style and the discipline of kosher law under one roof.