LA Times
By S. Irene Virbila
October 28, 2013
Bernhard Mairinger will cook the last dinner at BierBeisl as we know it Saturday, Nov. 9. Then the young Austrian-born chef-owner is closing the 2-year-old modern Austrian restaurant on Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, and taking a break before opening in a larger space next year.
“I’ve been working for two years pretty much 24/7,” says the chef, who will turn 29 in November. He’s off to Europe and Asia to attend festivals and do some research in Austria for the new BierBeisl, which is to open on the Westside sometime in 2014.
He’s already negotiating for a space, but it’s one that’s never been a restaurant before. And we know how long it can take just for permits to make their way through the system.
Mairinger is excited. He’s already hired a baker and a pastry chef from Austria for the new place. He’ll be adding at least one more cook, too. “We’ll have a real brigade,” he says, clearly exhausted after cooking virtually every dish himself every day at Bierbeisl.
“The new restaurant will seat 100 to 125. We’ll have a bigger bar, a more detailed wine list, definitely more beer, a few of them exclusive, and then, of course, more schnapps,” he says.
He also plans on a cafe and bakery reminiscent of those in Vienna, open all day seven days a week and serving traditional Viennese pastries and desserts. That means fluffy bites of kaiserschmarrn, apple strudel, warm plum dumplings -- and, of course, Viennese-style coffee.
The restaurant menu will continue to be a modern twist on Austrian cuisine, but Mairinger will be able to offer a larger selection of dishes in the new space. Not to worry, we’ll still be able to get those juicy sausages, classic weinerschnitzel, house-cured char and white fish fillet or his venison loin with braised red cabbage.
But he’ll no longer be cooking practically by himself in a kitchen the size of a closet. At 6-feet-7, that was no mean feat.