On South Hewitt Street in the Arts District, behind brick and vines and under a vertical neon sign that says BAR, is one of the more exacting kitchens in Los Angeles. It makes pizza.
Lynx shares the building with Tatsu Ramen next door. The two are joined by a speaker system, one playlist and a bathroom, which is about the only casual arrangement in the place.
Josh Skenes made his name at Saison in San Francisco, which began as a pop-up in 2009 and went on to three Michelin stars. Lynx, in the building that was Happies Hand Made, is a smaller idea held to the same standard.
He opened Lynx in March 2026 with Brandyn Tepper, his bar director at Saison and later corporate beverage director at Angler, who runs the drinks. After a long, quiet soft opening and only two months of service, it earned a Bib Gourmand, one of six in Los Angeles that year. That is an award for the cooking, not the cocktails, and it arrived before most of the city knew the place was there.
“The seriousness of a three-star kitchen, applied to pizza and a good drink.”
The pizza, and the oven
Skenes says the pizza is built backwards, from the bite. The target is a thin exterior that shatters like an eggshell, an open, airy, tender interior and big, jagged, inflated edges. The oven is a conveyor-belt model of the kind found at Domino's, which he counts among the best ovens there are, a detail that says more about his method than any menu description. The list is short: a Napoletana with whole anchovy fillets, two kinds of olive, capers and basil; a raw mushroom pie under Vacche Rosse Parmesan, with lemon to squeeze over; the Lucifer, with crispy guanciale and roasted tomatoes; and the Cheezus, a cheese board's worth of toppings finished with habanero honey.
The drinks
Tepper builds each cocktail around a single ingredient and chases its purest version, with a centrifuge and a rotary evaporator in full view of the room. The Sudachi daiquiri uses only the peel of the Japanese citrus, shaken straight into the rum, and no lime at all. The Paloma went through roughly 30 versions to get the carbonation right. The Shanghai Pistachio, bourbon and pistachio with milky oolong and honey, began as four words from Skenes. Every glass arrives frosted with liquid nitrogen.
The room
The room is small: exposed wood beams, oversized globe pendants, deep crimson slatted walls, banquettes. The soundtrack is eighties hits, Peter Gabriel and Toto among them. It runs evenings only, on a compressed schedule. Reservations are released weekly, on Monday mornings, and the bar stays open after the kitchen closes.
