There are places you go to eat, and then there are places you go to dissolve. Marelle is the second kind. It sits at 1740 Ocean Avenue like a secret the Pacific Ocean whispered into the ear of Santa Monica and swore it would never tell. You’ll walk past it once, maybe twice, because the entrance is tucked inside the Sandbourne hotel, a terracotta-and-linen fever dream designed by an Icelandic architect who clearly decided that buildings should breathe. You step through the lobby, past a ceramic installation that looks like it was spun by sea-sprites, and suddenly the room opens sideways into a dining space that makes you exhale in a way you didn’t realize you’d been holding back since 2019.
This is Marelle. Star of the Sea. And I’m going to tell you right now: no camera can hold it. No review can corner it. No amount of words — not mine, not anyone’s — can truly nail a butterfly this ethereal to the page. But I’ll try, because you deserve to know where the dream lives.
The first thing that hits you isn’t the food. It’s the light. Marelle was designed by Gulla Jónsdóttir, the same sorceress who made the Sandbourne feel like a Mexican-Mediterranean temple, and she understood something crucial: in Southern California, architecture should be an extension of the sunset. The walls are woven fibers and soft linens, the palette is pulled straight from the sand and sea outside, and the ceiling is hung with handmade ceramic pendant lamps from Oaxaca that look like giant seed pods about to hatch some kind of benevolent deity. The floor-to-ceiling windows are thrown completely open to a patio that overlooks the hotel pool, and beyond that, a distant sliver of the Pacific that shimmers like crushed glass. You’re inside, but you’re also outside. You’re in a restaurant, but you’re also in a sanctuary. There’s a DJ at sunset spinning tracks that feel like they were made specifically for this exact angle of golden hour. You haven’t even looked at the menu and already your shoulders are somewhere down around your ankles.
This is the part where I tell you about the cocktails, because at Marelle the cocktails aren’t drinks — they’re opening ceremonies. Beverage director Amanda Fewster has created a menu that functions as a love letter to the California coast, and the star of the show is the seashell cocktail. They literally serve it in a real seashell. You lift this pearlescent, palm-sized ocean artifact to your lips and sip something bright and briny and faintly sweet, and for a moment you are no longer a person with a job and a calendar; you are a mermaid on a gap year. Then there’s the La Vie en Rose, a bubbling pink confection of tequila, guava, lime, and Aperol that arrives in rose-colored glasses so pretty you’ll take six photos before your first sip. The Thai Tiki tastes like a Bangkok beach vacation accidentally collided with a Santa Monica pier sunset — pineapple rum, banana liqueur, Thai tea, a dusting of nutmeg. These are not cocktails. These are altered states achieved through legal means.
Now the food. And this is where I need you to pay attention, because Chef Raphael Lunetta is doing something that shouldn’t be possible: he’s making California cuisine feel dangerous again. Lunetta is a Santa Monica native who cooked in Paris, opened the legendary JiRaffe in 1997, won Food & Wine Best New Chef, and then seemed to vanish into the role of local elder statesman. At Marelle, he’s resurrected. The menu is officially “approachable coastal California,” but what that really means is: ingredients so fresh they’re still vibrating, combined in ways that make your eyebrows do things your eyebrows don’t normally do.
The jumbo lump crab cake arrives at brunch like a golden discus of pure sweet crustacean, held together by nothing but willpower and a whisper of binder, crowned with a green goddess aioli that makes you want to order a second one immediately and eat it in the car. The lemon ricotta pancakes are somehow both fluffy and substantial, studded with Jidori chicken and roasted peppers in a savory-sweet tango that rewires your understanding of what a pancake can be. At dinner, the hamachi crudo comes draped across the plate like a silk scarf, drizzled with a jalapeño kefir lime ponzu that hits every receptor on your tongue in sequence — first cold, then citrus, then a slow-building warmth that never quite becomes heat. The charred Spanish octopus is a revelation: a single leg, impossibly tender, lacquered in a chorizo velouté so rich and smoky you’ll drag your finger through the plate smear when no one’s looking. And the 24-ounce ribeye for two arrives with confit plum tomatoes and onion rings and a white-wine herb reduction that could make a vegetarian weep with conflicted longing.
But the dish. The dish that will haunt me until I die is the lemon mushroom rigatoni. It sounds simple. It is not simple. The mushrooms are roasted with lemon until they caramelize at the edges, the rigatoni is al dente in that exact way that makes pasta feel like a living thing, and the sauce is a buttery, citrusy, umami-packed emulsion that clings to every ridged tube like it’s afraid of being separated. I watched a man at the next table take his first bite, put his fork down, and stare at the ceiling for eleven seconds. That is not hyperbole. I counted. This pasta breaks people.
And yet — and yet — the food, the drinks, the design, they’re all just instruments in a larger orchestra. What Marelle actually sells is atmosphere, the rarest commodity in a city where every restaurant claims to have it. The atmosphere here is specific. It’s Tulum-meets-Santorini, as the design press keeps saying, but that phrase doesn’t capture the California-ness of it. It’s Tulum-meets-Santorini if both those places were in a David Hockney painting. It’s a place where you can show up for a casual Tuesday breakfast and somehow find yourself still there at sunset, having drifted through brunch and lunch in a haze of sea air and rosé. The indoor-outdoor flow is so seamless that you genuinely forget whether you’re sitting inside or outside — the lines dissolve, which is exactly the point. Marelle is designed to blur the boundary between you and the ocean, between you and the sky, between you and whatever version of yourself you become when no one’s watching.
The crowd is a study in California abundance. You’ll see a table of women in cream linens doing a bridal shower that looks like a perfume ad. Next to them, a couple who clearly left their kids with a grandparent and are staring at each other like they just met. A solo diner at the bar, drinking a stirred Oaxacan Bianco, writing in a leather notebook and looking like she knows secrets about the universe. A producer type in a vintage band tee, talking quietly with someone who might be a studio executive or might be a shaman. The servers move through this ecosystem like they’ve been trained by a hospitality whisperer — present but never hovering, warm but never performative. The bartender, Andrew, is apparently a legend who remembers your name after one visit. That’s the kind of detail you don’t engineer. You either have it or you don’t.
And the ocean. Always, underneath everything, the ocean. You can smell it. You can hear it when the music dips. You can see it winking at you through the palm fronds and the hanging clay lamps. Marelle means “Star of the Sea,” and the name isn’t just branding — it’s a promise. This restaurant knows it belongs to the Pacific. Every dish tastes like it was hauled ashore by someone with salt in their hair. Every cocktail feels like it was mixed with seawater instead of tap. There’s a reason the place is open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily: the ocean doesn’t close, so why should its temple?
The prices hover between $50 and $100 per person, which in Los Angeles fine dining terms is practically charity. You can spend more if you go deep into the wine list, or less if you just graze the brunch menu and sip a single seashell cocktail. But here’s the thing: the value proposition at Marelle has nothing to do with the bill. It has to do with the sensation, about ninety minutes in, that you have somehow been transported to a different timeline — one where the pandemic didn’t happen, where your email inbox doesn’t exist, where the concept of “networking” has been replaced by the concept of “being.” You look around and everyone is experiencing the same thing. No one is on their phone. No one is talking about the industry. People are laughing, leaning in, touching wrists. Marelle is a restaurant that functions as a soft reset for the soul.
Is it perfect? Nothing this beautiful is ever perfect, because perfection is a sterile concept and Marelle is anything but sterile. The parking situation is valet only, $10 with validation — fine, but worth knowing. On weekends the brunch crowd can get loud, and the DJ occasionally pushes the volume into “I love this song but I also want to hear my date” territory. The popular items sometimes run out by late afternoon, which is either a sign of freshness or poor planning depending on your disposition. I choose to believe it’s proof that nothing at Marelle sits around waiting to be ordered. It’s all alive.
What I’m trying to tell you is this: Marelle Santa Monica is too dreamy for words because it operates at a frequency that language can’t quite capture. It’s not just a restaurant — it’s a mood, a sanctuary, a brief and shimmering reprieve from the grind. It’s the place you take someone you’re falling in love with. It’s the place you go alone when you need to remember that the world is still capable of beauty. It’s the place you book when you want to be reminded that California, for all its flaws, can still produce spaces that feel like waking up inside a poem.
Go for the seashell cocktail. Stay for the rigatoni. Leave in a state of grace. And try, just try, not to become one of those people who comes once and immediately starts planning the next visit. I failed at that. You will too. Some dreams don’t let you go.
SLAY LIFESTYLE CONCIERGE NOTES
Here’s the key information for Marelle Santa Monica:
Location
* Address: 1740 Ocean Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90401
* It’s located at the Sandbourne Santa Monica hotel, just steps from the beach on Ocean Avenue.10
Contact
* Phone: (310) 899-6122
* Email: reservations@marelle.com (for reservations and private events)
* Website: www.marelle.com
* Instagram: @marellesantamonica
Hours
* Breakfast (Mon–Fri): 7:00 AM – 11:00 AM
* Lunch (Mon–Fri): 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
* Dinner: 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM
* Brunch (Sat–Sun): 7:00 AM – 3:00 PM
* Open daily overall from ~7 AM – 11 PM.12
Reservations
* Book via OpenTable: Marelle on OpenTable
* Or call (310) 899-6122.23
Menus
* Full menus (Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner) are available on their site: View Menus
* The restaurant offers Californian coastal cuisine with seafood, salads, steaks, pastas, and more. Menus rotate seasonally.
Valet parking is available ($5 for the first 4 hours with validation). Enjoy your visit! 🌊
This is Marelle. Star of the Sea. And I’m going to tell you right now: no camera can hold it. No review can corner it. No amount of words — not mine, not anyone’s — can truly nail a butterfly this ethereal to the page. But I’ll try, because you deserve to know where the dream lives
The first thing that hits you isn’t the food. It’s the light. Marelle was designed by Gulla Jónsdóttir, the same sorceress who made the Sandbourne feel like a Mexican-Mediterranean temple, and she understood something crucial: in Southern California, architecture should be an extension of the sunset.
The walls are woven fibers and soft linens, the palette is pulled straight from the sand and sea outside, and the ceiling is hung with handmade ceramic pendant lamps from Oaxaca that look like giant seed pods about to hatch some kind of benevolent deity
The floor-to-ceiling windows are thrown completely open to a patio that overlooks the hotel pool, and beyond that, a distant sliver of the Pacific that shimmers like crushed glass
You’re inside, but you’re also outside. You’re in a restaurant, but you’re also in a sanctuary
There’s a DJ at sunset spinning tracks that feel like they were made specifically for this exact angle of golden hour. You haven’t even looked at the menu and already your shoulders are somewhere down around your ankles.
