How to book Funke

Funke is chef Evan Funke's pasta restaurant in Beverly Hills, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It opened in May 2023, after three years of work with real estate investor Kurt Rappaport, a co-owner, plus architect Dan Brunn and designer Clint Nicholas^2,4. It follows his earlier Los Angeles restaurants Felix and Mother Wolf, and a few of their dishes moved over to the new menu^4,5.

The restaurant fills a restored three-story Art Deco building from the 1930s^2,5. On the ground floor, booths in red leather sit under high ceilings. A mezzanine holds a quieter second dining room with its own bar, and the roof is Bar Funke, a rooftop bar open to walk-ins only^3,4,5. At the center is a glass-walled pasta lab about 20 feet tall, where diners can watch the pasta being made^2,3.

The menu is à la carte. About a dozen pastas are offered, half rolled by hand and half extruded through bronze dies, and the menu lists the hand-rolled shapes by region and by the maker who perfected them^4,5. Antipasti such as zucchini blossoms and Sicilian sfincione come first, and pastry chef Shannon Swindle's desserts lean Sicilian^4,5. The restaurant says its aim is to seek out "rare, obscure pasta shapes" from less traveled parts of Italy¹.

The Michelin Guide lists Funke as a recommended restaurant³. Critics also note the high prices and the showy crowd: The Infatuation found parts of the first floor "tacky", and Time Out called the scene "glitzy-borderline-gaudy"^6,7.