Market high

Beethoven Market (Mar Vista)

RESTAURANTS • First Person

With quiet, tree-lined streets and its central-ish Westside location, Mar Vista is a great place to live, but it hasn’t exactly been a neighborhood known for splashy restaurant debuts. Jeremy Adler is changing that with Beethoven Market, which opened Saturday at the intersection of Beethoven and Palms.

Adler, also a co-owner of Cobi’s in Santa Monica, has created what might be the ideal neighborhood restaurant (in an ideal neighborhood setting). The big, airy space — which used to be an actual market — has a huge, inviting central bar and a compact, greenery-lined patio. Cozy booths and banquettes line the walls.

In the kitchen, Felix alum Michael Leonard is turning out Cal-Italian standards like house-made pastas sauced in carbonara or amatriciana. There’s a dead-simple tuna carpaccio with capers and olive oil, prawns bathed in salsa verde, a chicory Caesar with “what my mother thinks is too much dressing” (it’s not), and a handful of wood-fired pizzas, including an excellent red-sauced sausage and pepper pie.

Everything about the place feels easy-breezy, from the affordable wines by the glass to cocktails like a Vesper with olive oil-infused vodka. Speaking of affordable, those pastas are priced in the teens, as with the $14 cacio e pepe; at nearby Felix, the tonnarelli version is $26.

It’s clear that Adler wants Beethoven Market to be a place people come to repeatedly, maybe even multiple times a week. Given its distance from my place — a 10-minute walk — I’ll likely do just that. –Karen Palmer

→ Beethoven Market (Mar Vista) • 12904 Palms Blvd • Sun-Mon & Wed 5-9p; Thu-Sat 5-10p • Reserve.