Inside Somerville: Issa Rae’s Love Letter To South Central LA

The room is dim in the good kind of way — moody, low-lit, built for long conversations rather than seeing and being seen from across the room. Dining booths are deep and plush, upholstered in a rich blue that leans more nostalgic than trendy, like the space was pulled from another decade and set down carefully in this one. A stage sits front and center, no small detail tucked into a corner, and whoever’s playing that night is doing it in full view — close enough to a jazz club with a kitchen attached that it stops feeling like a restaurant with music playing in the background. And somewhere at the bar, there’s a decent chance the person nursing a cocktail two seats down is someone you’d recognize from a screen — no fuss made about it, just one more sign of exactly who this room was built to hold.

It’s a lot of room to take in before you’ve even ordered water, and it’s worth sitting in for a second, because none of it is an accident. This is Somerville, the restaurant Issa Rae opened in View Park-Windsor Hills — the reason a good number of people book a table here before they book anything else on their LA itinerary.

The Story Behind The Name

Somerville didn’t arrive as a celebrity side project dropped into a neighborhood for the photo op. Rae built it with GVO Hospitality partners Ajay Relan and Yonnie Hagos, and the throughline in how they talk about the restaurant is investment, not indulgence — a bet placed on South Central’s own history rather than a workaround of it. The name itself nods to South Los Angeles’s Hotel Somerville, one of the only hotels that welcomed Black travelers in the city during the era of segregation. That lineage shows up less as a wall plaque than as an operating principle: this is a room built to hold the neighborhood, not just to be photographed inside it.

The original Hotel Somerville — later renamed the Dunbar Hotel — was built by Dr. John Somerville, the first African American to graduate from the University of Southern California. Hotel Somerville stood as one of the few places in Los Angeles where Black travelers could book a room without question. Naming a restaurant after it isn’t a passing homage; it’s a direct line drawn between what Somerville was to Black Angelenos then and what this space is reclaiming now.

That history also helps explain why Somerville became one of the hardest reservations to land in Los Angeles when it first opened. Getting a table in the first year or two meant refreshing a booking site at odd hours or knowing somebody who knew somebody. It’s loosened up some since then — walk-ins have better odds now, and the reservation window isn’t the blood sport it once was — but Somerville is still popular enough, and still small enough, that booking a few days out is the difference between a smooth night and a long wait at the bar.

The kitchen describes its cooking as progressive American with a Southern sensibility, and that description holds up plate by plate — familiar dishes, cooked with enough care that they never read as a gimmick.

We started with the Parker House rolls and the fried chicken and caviar sliders, which sound like a stunt on paper and taste like restraint on the plate. The rolls are soft enough to bring back memories of your favorite Sunday dinner, and the sliders balance salt and brine well enough that neither element is showing off at the other’s expense.

For the mains, the braised short ribs and the Scottish salmon are the two dishes worth building the meal around. The short ribs fall apart at the first cut, no real effort required from the fork. The salmon is cooked with a precision that many kitchens skip past when they’ve got flashier ingredients to lean on. Both are dishes you’d order again without needing convincing.

Then there’s the collard green lasagna, which is less a dish to fall in love with than a dish to have an opinion about, and that’s precisely the point. It layers a Southern staple into an Italian form, and depending on who’s at the table, it lands as either the most interesting thing on the menu or the one dish that didn’t need reinventing. Order it anyway — it’s the dish you’ll end up debating on the ride home, whether or not you’d order it again.

The Drinks And The Experience

Cocktails close the night out with the same logic as the food: familiar structures, reworked with care. The Reverb is the easier entry: bright and low-lift for someone easing into the list. The Stroll asks more of you and rewards it, built for palates that want something with more spine. And when the Viarae Prosecco shows up — Rae’s own label, poured without ceremony — it reads less like a marketing tie-in and more like another quiet signal that everything on this menu, down to what’s in the glass, was chosen intentionally rather than by default.

The restaurant is one piece of something larger Rae and her partners are building around it — a stretch of View Park-Windsor Hills reimagined as a place people travel to on purpose rather than pass through. Somerville isn’t the whole story of that vision, but it’s the clearest expression of it. It’s proof that South Central doesn’t need outside investment to tell its own story well; it needs the people who already know it to be handed the room and the resources to do it right. Go for the short ribs. Stay for what the room has to say about who gets to shape a city’s narrative. It’s worth a reservation, and worth returning for a second one.