Dinner at Studio City's Alto Runs $150. The Bar Costs Less.

The Argentine-Uruguayan grill on Ventura Boulevard also runs a bar menu of choripan and milanesa for people skipping the asado.

A typical seated dinner at Alto, the Argentine-Uruguayan wood-fired restaurant at 12969 Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, runs $150 or more. That figure comes from Eater LA's dining report, filed September 10, 2026 by correspondent Matthew Kang. Kang parks a cheaper route near the bottom of his piece: the bar.

A hundred and fifty dollars is a plan, not a dinner. It's the Saturday you book three weeks out, the anniversary you tell people about, the night that competes with a car payment in most Valley households. The bar is the version you could do on a Tuesday. Kang points there to a chimichurri-filled choripan, and to a beef milanesa under mozzarella and white onions. He calls the get-in price "very reasonable."

Here's where I'd reorder that report. The bar is the news. Alto comes from chef Esteban Klenzi and Juana Castellanos. A restaurant most of the neighborhood can afford once a year is a destination. A restaurant with a counter you can repeat is a fixture. The counter got two sentences.

Argentine cooking isn't a discovery here, and Kang says so himself. He names Carlitos Gardel's steakhouse plates and H&H's Brazilian barbecue as markers South American food has already set in Los Angeles. Both comparisons do one job: the wood fire alone buys Alto nothing. The risk in the room is that refinement sands the folklore flat, until you're eating a very nice steakhouse that happens to serve empanadas. The answer in the Eater LA report is a kombu-cured pork chop. Seaweed and mild pork hit the grill together, so the umami has somewhere to go. Kang rates it above the dry-aged short rib asado and calls it the night's stunner. When the pork chop beats the asado at an asado restaurant, the Uruguayan half of the menu is doing real work.

The rave has a crack in it, and he leaves it in. On the burnt avocado salad, Kang writes that the char is better to look at than to taste. The frisée and arugula under it are the stronger half of the plate, he says. A few lines later he calls the charcoal-singed piquillo peppers "the greatest side dish in Los Angeles." That's one critic's superlative, dated September 10, 2026. It's also exactly the line a table orders on.

The fair objection to a bar-first recommendation is that it reviews a restaurant by avoiding it. Alto is built as a progression: four house breads, then blackened empanadas and sweetbreads, then asado. Two sandwiches at the counter skip the argument the kitchen is making. I'll concede half of that. A $150 dinner you do once a year isn't a kitchen you know. A seat you can repeat is how a neighborhood learns one.

The phone is 747-202-1661. If you're headed for the bar rather than the dining room, ask what the choripan and the milanesa run before you sit down.

Source: la.eater.com, retrieved September 12, 2026.