Providence and Somni Just Became Los Angeles’s First Michelin 3-Star Restaurants

For one restaurant, it took a little over six months, and for another, this was a night two decades in the making.

A pair of Los Angeles dining destinations just became the city’s first Michelin three-star restaurants ever, with Aitor Zabala’s Somni earning the honors less than a year after opening and Michael Cimarusti’s Providence reaching fine dining’s pinnacle as it approaches its 20th anniversary.

The California Michelin Guide was revealed on Wednesday night in Sacramento, with the tire company that moonlights as a gastronome bible handing out stars to restaurants up and down the Golden State. Five restaurants earned their first star (Lilo, Mori Nozomi, Restaurant Ki, Silvers Omakase, and Sun Moon Studio), two restaurants graduated to two stars (Enclos and Kiln), and, of course, Somni and Providence took home the top honors.

The seafood-focused Providence has been a stalwart of L.A. fine dining since it opened in 2005, with chef Cimarusti becoming one of the deans of the city’s restaurant scene, serving California ingredients and line-caught seafood with a strong background in French technique. His restaurant has been a proving ground for talented chefs and a beacon of sustainability in fine dining (hence Michelin bestowing the restaurant with a Green Star as well).

In contrast, Somni opened late in 2024, reaching three stars with astounding speed, with Zabala looking at his adopted SoCal home through the lens of Spanish modernist cooking. However, the contemporary tasting-menu spot is hardly an overnight success. The first iteration of Somni opened in 2018 inside the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, a restaurant hidden inside of José Andrés’s Bazaar, but closed in 2020 as a pandemic casualty. Zabala split from Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup, but retained the restaurant’s name, which means “dream" in Catalan, and went about rebuilding his restaurant in a new location. Zabala’s cooking at the new Somni, as it was at the old, is inventive and playful while still being laser-focused on deliciousness and never tipping over into abstraction.

The pair now joins the 157 restaurants worldwide (16 in the United States and eight in California) that hold three stars, or as Michelin defines it, restaurants “worth a special journey."

The night wasn’t great news for everyone, as five restaurants fell out of the stars in the 2025 guide. Osito and Aphotic in San Francisco and Sushi Ginza Onodera in West Hollywood each closed in the past year, so their exclusion was academic. But it appears Hana Re in Costa Mesa and Chez TJ in Mountain View both lost the stars they’d held in 2024.

And in one last little curious item from the night, Somni’s ascension to three stars was spoiled when Michelin’s YouTube channel inadvertently posted a video too early of Zabala and his staff learning about their three stars from Gwendal Poullennec, the guide’s international director. That clip circulated on Reddit before the one-star restaurants had even been revealed at the ceremony. But the lack of surprise certainly doesn’t dampen the celebration of the Somni team.

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