Suzanne Goin & Caroline Styne and the Lucques Group

The Lucques Group is the rare LA restaurant tree built on a true two-person partnership: Suzanne Goin as the chef, Caroline Styne as the wine director and business partner — a model that became as influential as the food. Goin trained at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, at Olives in Boston, and at Alain Passard’s Arpège in Paris, then was executive chef at Campanile in 1997 under Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel — which roots this tree in the Silverton/Spago lineage ^[1][2]. In 1998 she and Styne (who had run the floor at Jones in Hollywood) opened Lucques on Melrose, a small, ingredient-driven California-Mediterranean room that became a critics’ fixture and ran for more than two decades before closing permanently in the COVID era ^[1][2][3].

Then came the move that reshaped how Los Angeles eats: A.O.C. in 2002, which paired a serious wine list with a menu of small plates — and effectively introduced the small-plates-and-wine-bar format to LA as a real restaurant rather than a bar snack ^[1][4]. A.O.C. is still open (West Hollywood and a Brentwood location). The group grew further with Tavern in Brentwood (2009), The Larder (a catering and quick-serve arm, 2014), the long-running Hollywood Bowl food-and-wine concession, and Caldo Verde (the restaurant inside the Proper Hotel Downtown), plus partnership ventures including The Hungry Cat seafood restaurants with Goin’s husband, chef David Lentz ^[1][4]. Goin has won multiple James Beard Awards — Best Chef: California (2006), the cookbook award for Sunday Suppers at Lucques (2006), and Outstanding Chef (2016) — and Styne won the James Beard Outstanding Restaurateur award (2018); the pairing, not either alone, is the unit ^[2][3][4].

Direct ventures

• Lucques (West Hollywood, 1998 — closed) — the foundational restaurant; California-Mediterranean ^[1][2].
• A.O.C. (2002, West Hollywood; later Brentwood) — the wine-bar-restaurant that pioneered the small-plates format in LA ^[1][4].
• Tavern (Brentwood, 2009 — closed) — a brighter, all-day room with a marketplace ^[1].
• The Larder (2014–) — catering and grab-and-go ^[1].
• Hollywood Bowl — the food-and-wine concession, run for more than a decade ^[4].
• Caldo Verde (Downtown LA, at the Proper Hotel) — Iberian-leaning ^[1].
• The Hungry Cat — seafood/raw-bar restaurants (Hollywood, Santa Barbara), partnership with David Lentz ^[1].
• (Cal Mare, a joint venture with the Mozza group, has closed.)

Alumni / mentees

Lucques and A.O.C. were major LA training kitchens, and a steady stream of line cooks and sous chefs passed through on their way to running or opening their own rooms — the famous “Sunday Suppers at Lucques” series functioned as an informal salon and cross-pollination event for the city’s chefs ^[1][2]. Specific named-alumnus restaurants are under-documented in the press relative to the kitchen’s reputation, so treat this section as partial; the cleanest documented link is the partnership outward to David Lentz and The Hungry Cat. (A later pass should chase down which independent LA chefs cite Lucques/A.O.C. as their training ground.)

What the tree means

The through-line is California-Mediterranean cooking — Provence and Catalonia and the produce of Southern California, plated without fuss — but the deeper inheritance is structural. Goin and Styne proved two things to LA: that a wine list curated as carefully as the menu, with small plates built to match it, is a restaurant format and not just a bar concept (A.O.C.’s real legacy, visible in a generation of LA wine bars since); and that a chef-and-restaurateur partnership split cleanly down kitchen and floor — Goin’s food, Styne’s wine and business — can sustain a multi-restaurant group for a quarter-century. And because Goin came up through Campanile, this whole tree is a living branch of the Silverton/Peel lineage. The Lucques Group is where California-Mediterranean dining and the modern LA wine bar were, in effect, co-invented.