Review: Yes, the fried fish sandwich is famous. But dive deeper into this Melrose Hill seafood menu

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.

The fantastic, Filet-o-Fish-transcending fried fish sandwich that chefs Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle introduced during the pandemic was one of those creations that Los Angeles didn’t know it needed. Not until it was among us — first as a cult-status pop-up trophy item, next as an instant 2020s-era mainstay served from a takeout window in Echo Park, now as the gateway lure to the couple’s 6-month-old restaurant, Little Fish Melrose Hill.

While the carryout Little Fish location in Echo Park transitions over the next few months to a more permanent space a block away, the only time and place to currently crunch into the sandwich is during lunch service at the new restaurant.

The piercing freshness of the encased Pacific striped bass or Channel Island rockfish (whichever the day’s catch brings), its finely laced batter rustling against the teeth, the calibrated pickles and mayo and the winking slice of American cheese: Nothing has changed. If you’d only previously pulled this masterwork slightly squished from a to-go box, enjoying it on a proper plate fully showcases its statuesque construction.

Then, keep delving. Sonenshein and Vahle’s Little Fish projects have always been about more than the breakout signature perched on a domed potato bun, but this is the place — fitting seamlessly into a cluster of restaurants that includes Kuya Lord, Bar Etoile, Telegrama Cafe and Chainsaw — where their greater ambitions have come into focus.

Little Fish Melrose Hill is decidedly a seafood restaurant, but its owners evade the template that calls for shellfish towers and clam chowder and fried calamari.

The chefs married in April. It isn’t a stretch to see the ever-evolving, ideas-packed menu as a dialogue between two people in love who work together.

Little Fish wine director Kae Whalen with chef-owners Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein in the dining rooom of the Melrose Hill restaurant, left. A display of dry-aged fish, right, is visible from the dining room. (Shelby Moore/For The Times)

Dishes meander through and between cuisines. Rather than rooting themselves in any one tradition, Sonenshein and Vahle achieve cohesion through their style — a conscious, effective unity of their culinary gifts.

Their tiny “beach sandwich,” designed as a kickoff snack, builds in the same satisfactions as its fish counterpart. Shelled mussels are cured in shiro shoyu to impart a light salty-sweetness. They’re scattered over airy slices of ciabatta slicked with mayo.

Balance of acid is a given element of cooking, but Sonenshein and Vahle use acidic jolts with particular success as little “aha” moments. Here they zap the other ingredients with pickled guindilla peppers from Spain’s Basque region, called piparras, to give the palate a jolt that rolls through and quickly dissipates.

For whimsy: a final layer of Kettle potato chips. Crackle, brine, creamy, twang. Fun.

A similar formula brings the wow to a small dish of tuna-stuffed olives, blasting lemon and textured with oil-crisped bread crumbs. What could have been a throwaway nibble instead becomes a thought-through, gripping preface that sets up what’s to come.

These openers cry out for a glass of, say, something minerally from the Loire Valley, which brings me to the restaurant’s next-level advantage: Kae Whalen, one of L.A.’s great wine minds and hospitality freethinkers.

Whalen first opened my mind in 2019 at Kismet with her approach to wines that fall under the divisive category of “natural.” It’s been a constant joy over the years to find her performing sommelier duties at Anajak Thai or Baby Bistro or now-closed Bar Chelou in Pasadena. She’s general manager and beverage director at Little Fish. Even when she isn’t in the dining room her touch is omnipresent in the staff, a sparky crew that surely was, each of them, the rare high-school combination of cool kid and theater kid.

Whalen has grown professionally alongside L.A.’s tastes. She’ll tuck strands of her straight brown hair behind one ear to lean in for a focused conversation about what to drink. Tell her that you hate natural wine, and she’ll bring you a bottle of something that falls into classic Burgundian territory. Only later, when you love it, will she describe with a sphinx-like smile how it’s produced with low-intervention practices.

Poached steelhead trout with melon rind, sungold tomatoes and cilantro at Little Fish.

If you’re open to a buzzy, juicy glass of chilled Merlot from Sonoma that no character from “Sideways” would recognize, she pours that too.

Her presence helps define the smart way Little Fish positions itself along the borderlines of casual and fancy, quirky and elegant. The room plays its part, too, situated on a prime corner where L.A.’s singular light shifts, gilds and dims as lunchtime segues to dinner hours.

Decor is subtle, beautifully so. Note the wetlands-colored palette of tiles, all soft greens and pinkish browns, along the wall behind the oak bar. They frame two built-in chambers for dry-aging fish. I see the tapered forms hanging shadowed behind their doors and they inspire me to order crudo, among the most overplayed dishes of the early millennium.

The payoff: plates like halibut, velvety-firm, shiny with olive oil and crowned with diced green strawberries, salted and fermented in the manner of umeboshi, with matching dots of fresh wasabi.

Chilled summer melon is sprinkled with shrimp shell tajin.

Crudos change often, and they’re reliably, similarly imagined with seasonings that are electric and outside the box.

Warmer weather has brought lighter inspirations like a mound of Dungeness crab, arranged with ribbons of summer squash and dressed in vinegary tosazu gelee (again, the just-right acidity), or a simple plate of pale Brilliant melon wedges sprinkled with tajin that incorporates ground shrimp shells. Sometimes the oceanic aspects are nearly implied: Summery “corn dumplings” orbit the shape and give of agnolotti, and they’re served simply in koji-infused butter with translucent snips of wakame for toothy contrast.

Should the seafood-averse find their way through the door, look to an excellent roast chicken in ham jus, accompanied by a welcome splotch of mustard. An order of black pepper-dusted fries alongside is ideal, though amid Sonenshein and Vahle’s general exuberance of flavors, the horseradish in the aioli that comes with them might be a case of overkill.

Even in the restaurant’s early months, when the chefs were fine-tuning their collaboration and honing the sharp, defined creativity their cooking now consistently achieves, the desserts showed brilliance. A lovely-enough dinner in February ended with a bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream — a grown-up version of the mint-chocolate chip ice cream of our childhoods — drizzled with a Cabernet reduction and a handful of blackberries. Suddenly, the whole night felt exhilarated. I’m glad it’s become a staple.

The half chicken with ham jus and mustard.

Lately the couple has been making a Camembert cheesecake, dotted with cherries they pickled last year — essentially an exquisitely savory-sweet, reconceptualized cheese course.

Early on, Whalen had encouraged a fruit plate, paired with California cheeses, that never quite took off with customers. Citrus and dates apparently couldn’t compete with bay leaf-stracciatella ice cream. Right now, though, ripe, honey-tart peaches with soft goat cheese would be awfully good with the last sips of a Chenin Blanc.

A revival of “Kae’s fruit plate” during peak stone fruit season would be the rare worthy glance backward here. Propelled by a crew dedicated to making tiny details matter, Little Fish runs on pure forward momentum. It just gets better and better.

Bay leaf straciatella ice cream with blackberries.