The Georgian Room

Some hotel restaurants provide a fun scene. Others have good food. The Georgian Room, an Italian steakhouse in the basement of The Georgian Hotel, checks both of those boxes. Hidden just off of Santa Monica’s packed Ocean Avenue strip, it’s the kind of place where you have to buzz a mysterious doorbell and put a privacy sticker over your phone camera before you’re seated. That’s probably why the old Hollywood dining room here is so exciting—it feels like a portal to a dark, ’30s-era dinner parlor where bankers take their secret girlfriends for a rendezvous. The menu is full of solid Italian food, with dishes like hazelnut-crusted lamb rack, and oxtail ragu. But we always go for the buttery New York strip steak. Start with one of the house martinis, and don’t leave until you hear the jazz singer crooning slowed renditions of Brittney Spears songs next to a vintage Steinway.