Bad Roman Beverly Hills opened on May 26 in the former Palm Steakhouse space, and it belongs on your short list if maximalist Italian American dining is your format. Quality Branded Hospitality, the group behind Don Angie, San Sabino, Limusina, and Quality Italian, has brought the New York original's full playbook to Beverly Hills: garlic babka, Osetra caviar gnocchi, flaming Vesuvius bowls, and a room designed to feel like a wealthy socialite grandmother's vacation home. Skip it if you want quiet, restrained Italian. Book it if you want the opposite.
Bad Roman Beverly Hills Opens in the Former Palm Steakhouse Space
The address has history. The Palm Steakhouse ran on power lunches and expense accounts for decades before closing, and the space carries that legacy of Beverly Hills dining gravity. GRT Architects designed the Beverly Hills interiors, threading in motifs from the New York location: palm-printed booths, 1980s-style glass block walls, ceiling light fixtures designed to resemble a cluster of cells, and greyhound statues that bring the same slightly surreal energy they do in the Columbus Circle original. The result is a room that signals immediately: this is not a serious Italian restaurant. It is something more specific and more fun.
Bad Roman New York debuted in 2022 in the same Columbus Circle building as three-Michelin-starred Per Se, a deliberate contrast that defined the concept from day one. Michael Stillman, president and founder of Quality Branded Hospitality and son of T.G.I.
Friday's and Smith & Wollensky founder Alan Stillman, built the New York location around the idea of coloring outside the lines of classic Italian cooking. Garlic bread became rippled babka. Pepperoni cups arrived on a plate with ranch and no pizza in sight. Orange striped seating replaced red leather booths.
The Beverly Hills outpost carries all of that forward into a city that already knows how to receive it.
What's on the Menu: Garlic Babka, Caviar Gnocchi, and Flaming Vesuvius Bowls
Chef partner Craig Koketsu, formerly of Lespinasse, leads the kitchen at Bad Roman Beverly Hills. The menu imports the New York signatures while adding enough West Coast-facing options to feel considered rather than copy-pasted. The roasted garlic babka is the entry point, order it.
The seafood tower arrives with Maine lobster, oysters, tuna crudo, and caviar, which puts it in the same spending category as the towers at Nobu Malibu and Catch LA, though Bad Roman's version leans Italian American rather than pan-Asian.
Pastas are made daily at the restaurant. The current lineup includes kale mafaldine with sun-dried tomatoes, agnolotti bistecca, and Osetra caviar gnocchi, the dish to order if you're trying to understand what Bad Roman is actually doing.
Larger mains run to Faroe Island salmon, roasted branzino, and chicken al limone. Because every restaurant in this zip code now needs a steak program, two are available: a filet and a Snake River Farms wagyu strip.
Dessert includes blood orange sorbet with whipped zabaglione, a tiramisu ice cream cake, and a caramelized chocolate tart with olive oil gelato. The Vesuvius Bowl, rum, orgeat, and lime, lit on fire tableside, closes the meal the way the room demands: with spectacle. It is the kind of finish that reads as gimmicky in the wrong context and exactly right in this one.
The beverage program matches the food's register. Cocktails include a Martini Pepperoncini with pepperoncini brine and lemon zest, a Spritzy Spritz with prosecco, grapefruit, and Cocchi Americano, and a lineup of Italian Carpool shots, the house take on a boilermaker. Non-alcoholic options include an espresso shakerato, a Habanero Slush, and a Falso Spritz made with St. Agrestis Amaro Falso. The wine list pulls from Italy, France, California, and Oregon, which gives it enough range to work across the menu without pretending to be a serious cellar program.
Why Quality Branded Hospitality's West Coast Expansion Matters
Bad Roman Beverly Hills is part of a broader pattern. According to Eater LA, the opening joins Sushi Nakazawa, Alba, Cipriani, and Marea as New York restaurants that have made the move west in recent months. The trade has gone both ways, Erewhon's Tonic Bar, Goop, and Canyon Coffee have all opened in New York, but the restaurant flow is running east to west at a pace that suggests something structural rather than opportunistic.
The former Palm Steakhouse address adds a layer of context that the New York location never had. The Palm was a Beverly Hills institution, the kind of room where deals got done and regulars got their caricatures hung on the wall. Replacing it with a restaurant that features greyhound statues and flaming rum bowls is either a provocation or a natural evolution, depending on how you read the current Beverly Hills dining moment. Either way, it is a more interesting choice than converting the space into another steakhouse.
What Los Angeles Diners Can Expect from Bad Roman
If you know the New York location, the Beverly Hills outpost will feel immediately familiar in format and slightly different in atmosphere. The Columbus Circle original sits in a building that also houses Per Se, which creates a specific kind of energy, the sense that you are choosing irreverence deliberately, in full view of three Michelin stars.
The Beverly Hills location does not have that exact counterpoint, but it has the former Palm's address and a neighborhood that carries its own weight. The room will likely skew toward the same mix of celebratory groups, industry dinners, and first-timers who came for the babka and stayed for the Vesuvius Bowl.
For practical purposes: Bad Roman Beverly Hills is not a tasting-menu restaurant and does not require that kind of commitment. It is a large-format, share-everything room where the pasta and the seafood tower are the core of the meal and the cocktails are designed to be ordered in rounds. Groups of four to six will get the most out of the format. Solo diners and couples can work the menu, but the sharing structure rewards larger tables. Reservations opened with the May 26 launch, and the New York location built a following quickly after its 2022 debut, so expect the Beverly Hills room to fill up as word spreads through the summer.
The comparison that matters most for LA diners is not to other Italian American restaurants but to the broader category of high-energy, high-spend dining rooms that Beverly Hills already supports. Bad Roman Beverly Hills is closer in spirit to Catch LA or Nobu Malibu than to Osteria Mozza, it is built for the table that wants a show alongside the food. If that is your format, book it now before the summer wait list sets in.
