What to Order at Companion, Venice’s Cozy New Neighborhood Cafe
Cafe by day, and Cal-Italian trattoria by night, Companion is the chilled-out Venice neighborhood restaurant you’ll want to visit on repeat. The vibe is red sauce meets listening room: custom-built shelves lining the walls are adorned with flowers, travel relics, books, and an impressive collection of vintage vinyl. The tight menu is stacked with seasonal interpretations of Italian comfort food classics like chicken Milanese and rigatoni Bolognese, and most importantly, pizza (you’ll be tipped off by the very prominent open kitchen/pizza oven).
Owners Nick and Dakota Monica own and operate nearby Gnarwhal Coffee Co., a craft coffee shop/roaster on Santa Monica’s Main Street, so they’re experts when it comes to daytime fare, namely pastries from Cafe Tropical in Silver Lake and coffee made with regeneratively farmed beans. But when it came time to tackle a nighttime menu, they sought a chef who could interpret their seasonal Cal-Italian vision, and just as importantly, make proper use of the massive Woodstone pizza oven, left behind from the previous tenant.
Introduced via a mutual friend, the Monicas tapped chef Jack Goode (previously of Quarter Sheets) to run the show once their plans to open Companion firmed up in early 2024. Goode worked in New York kitchens like The Smile, Babs, and Old Rose before returning to his native L.A. in early 2021. We sat down with Goode to pore over the five most essential dishes to try when you visit.
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The Big Salad
“It’s so hard to make a green salad interesting. When a dish is usually boring, it pushes me harder to make something I’m genuinely excited to eat, which is what we’ve done here. For winter we’ve been leaning into chicories and getting away from our very fruity tomato-based panzanella.
The Big Salad is our way to get a very massive chicory salad on the table. It’s made with herbs like chives, dill, a couple different types of basil including opal, Thai, classic, and lemon basil when we can get it as well. For lettuce, it’s got a mix of little gem, castelfranco, and frisée. All of our greens are from The Garden Of and Kenter Canyon Farms. We break the leaves apart and keep them pretty whole.
The vinaigrette is very tart and acidic, made with Banyuls wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, and a little rice vinegar to ease it up a bit. We dress the salad with lots of lemon juice, olive oil, and then our vinaigrette. Our salad is a bit of a palate cleanser for our richer foods like the pizza. The way that I really like this menu to work is before you’re through with your salad, the pizza and pasta hit the table.”
Rigatoni Bolognese
“We have this great wine list from Nick, so with the Bolognese, we get to play with some really nice wines. We do a 50/50 mix of red and wine in the sauce — usually you just see one or the other. There’s no tomato sauce added at all, and the meat is the real star. We use all Peads & Barnetts beef (a.k.a. Pork and Flowers). They’re a very sustainable and very humane farmer. They feed their pigs in an amazing way by letting them graze on acorns like prosciutto pigs do.
They also have a really cool project of taking in retired dairy cows and finishing them on their feed for a year. It makes the meat almost taste dry-aged. We get their ground beef for the Bolognese, which has a deep, rich flavor that’s really unique. We use a 50/50 beef and pork blend. We use beef tallow to start the cooking, along with the vegetables, rosemary sprigs, and some Parmesan rinds. We let that slow cook for about three hours. The thing about this sauce is that a lot of [the magic] happens in the pan once we toss it with the pasta. The meat goes in with a lot of pasta water and parmesan and butter. We make all our pasta fresh in house several times a week.”
Steak au Poivre
“We’re getting a really amazing Wagyu for this dish called Mitchell Grass from Australia courtesy of Westholme. A 16-ounce piece is what we shoot for. Occasionally we get a skinnier one. So we price it MP. For the sauce we make a really rich, classic au poivre with lots of black pepper, Cognac, reduced veal stock, and cream. I don’t like the peppercorns in the poivre so we strain those out. This is our take on a very classic dish, but the steak is served totally uncut with a nice sharp steak knife, alongside our fries. We cook it on a really hot flattop where we render the fat cap first and cook the meat in its own fat. I’ve served steaks in many different ways, but I feel very fortunate to be able to serve this one whole like we do.”
Any of the pizzas
“It wasn’t the plan to do pizza initially. But when Nick and Dakota saw the space and the oven, they figured it would be a waste not to use it. This kind of oven (Woodstone) replicates a wood-fired one even though it’s designed for high volume. Our dough would bake off very close to a Neapolitan pizza if it was cooked in an 800℉ oven. But we dial our oven back to around 600℉ so we get a much lower, slower bake.
This is a Quarter Sheets technique that I applied here. It almost sets the crust so it gets a little more crispy and less floppy. We have a commissary that produces our dough for us. It’s a very standard pizza dough recipe, with some different flours in there. For the sauce we use Alta Cucina or Bianca DiNapoli tomatoes mixed with fresh basil, garlic, and chile flakes. The sauce is raw until it goes onto the pizza. We like Grande for cheese, we’ve started using their diced mozzarella. It’s a low-hydration mozzarella so it melts out great.
I also really love our clam pizza — you can find them here and there in L.A. but it’s not widespread. This kind of pie is native to New Haven, New Jersey. We steam the clams in white wine along with basil, garlic, and chili flakes. They go with a cream sauce and thinly sliced lemons, with a little more garlic. For our sausage pie, we use Peads and Barnetts spicy Italian sausage and top it with a bright arugula salad. It’s so good.”
Bonus: Sfoglia Specials
“We do this on weekends only — it’s a pasta special where we serve all hand-made noodles, no machines. We’re lucky to have a very talented pasta maker on staff, Jordan Clark, who studied in Italy with a master pasta maker. We’re doing egg noodles, which were originally developed for royalty. We change up the dish every week or so. Sometimes we’ll repeat if we’re really into it.
Recently we did an agnolotti del plin, stuffed with ricotta and mushroom and topped with a cream sauce. We’ve gotten to play with all kinds of fun stuff. Pasta is so near and dear to my heart, so I’m happy to keep experimenting with it.”
