Business & Tech

Which Beverly Hills Restaurant is a Hit With Gustavo Dudamel?

The L.A. Philharmonic conductor enjoys Coupa Café, where you don't have to be a celebrity to afford the happy hour menu.

Where can star crazy Angelenos spot Gustavo Dudamel, the dynamic conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, feasting on the cuisine of his motherland?

Given that Venezuelan restaurants in Los Angeles are few and far between, a good bet is Coupa Café, located near Crate & Barrel on N. Canon Drive.

Voted by Beverly Hills Patch readers as the best café in the city to get a latte, Coupa Café tied in 2012 with the famous Bouchon Bistro down the street as the local place that serves the best French fries. What’s more, Coupa Café was also Readers’ Choice for Beverly Hills’ Best Beef Burger.

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But it’s gluten-free Venezuelan cuisine that Coupa Café specializes in. Whether it’s the restaurant’s signature tequeños (fried Venezuelan white cheese sticks wrapped in flour dough), beef empanadas or pabellón (Venezuela’s national dish, made from shredded beef, black beans, rice, fried plantains, arepitas, nata and queso blanco), the food at Coupa is as distinct as the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s national youth orchestra, where Dudamel has served as artistic director for the past 13 years.

So what’s Dudamel’s favorite dish at Coupa Café? “He loves perico,” says Jennifer Harrison, the restaurant’s catering director. Not to be confused with Pecorino Romano (a hard, salty Italian cheese) or, indeed, with the Perricone Diet associated with weight loss, perico is a simple but sumptuous breakfast specialty consisting of scrambled eggs, sautéed tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers and griddled-cooked corn cakes with multiple filings. (Try it next week on Easter Sunday at Coupa Café’s $30 all-you-can-eat brunch. See attached menu for details.)

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Coupa Café is co-owned by Camelia Coupal, who is also the restaurant’s chef. The family-owned eatery has a branch in Caracas and as many as four cafés on the Stanford University, with a fifth one set to open soon at the campus’ golf course club house. (“The Farm,” as Stanford is referred to by its students because its huge sprawl, happens to be Coupal’s alma mater.)

“Coupa,” pronounced koo-pa, is meant to be a play on words on “cuppa.” (The Coupals came up with the café’s name by dropping the “L” at the end of their family name, according to Harrison.) The “coffee-intensive” restaurant, as L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold once aptly wrote, serves its own line of fair trade-imported 100-percent Arabica shade-grown, sun-dried coffee grown on Venezuelan plantations owned by the Coupal family.

Framed photographs of the family’s plantations line an entire wall of the restaurant. Currently in its sixth year, the restaurant has 30 tables that seat about 80 people. (For events, some 200 people can fit into the space, including on the patio.)

Although decidedly upscale, given its Canon Drive location, Coupa Café has a relatively affordable 4 p.m.-7 p.m. happy hour menu that, on balance, is arguably a bargain. Tequeños, for example, cost just $5, which is also the price of a plate of mini cachapas (griddled corn cakes topped with handmade white Venezuelan cheese and served with Venezuelan-style sour cream). A robust collection of wines ranging from pinot grigio to pinot noir cost $6 each ($3 less than the non-happy hour price).

Not included in the happy hour is the gurapita, a traditional Venezuelan drink made from vodka-like Japanese soju, passion fruit juice and sugar. Similar to a refreshing island drink, it was part of Coupa Café’s catering menu for visiting Venezuelan filmmakers recently. The occasion: Last month's Academy Awards.

Coupa Café, 419 N. Canon Dr. (310) 385-0420


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