Kali Swapped Tasting Menus for $99 Rib-Eyes. It Kept Its Michelin Star.

Chef Kevin Meehan expected to lose the star when he turned his Melrose Avenue tasting-menu room into a midcentury steakhouse.

A rib-eye at Kali, the Melrose Avenue restaurant that kept its Michelin star after turning itself into a steakhouse, costs $99. The New York strip is $85. Sauce on the side — chimichurri, bearnaise or the house version of A1 — runs $5 apiece, per a dining report published September 2, 2026 by Eater LA's Matthew Kang, who ate there.

A couple splitting one of each cut, sauce on both, is $199 into the evening before a martini, a side, tax or tip. That's what the star costs at the top of this menu.

The room at 5722 Melrose Ave. spent close to a decade serving chef Kevin Meehan's produce-forward California tasting menu. In July 2025 he rebuilt it as a midcentury steakhouse with Musso & Frank as the template: a long martini list, martinis that arrive with a side car, wood-grilled chops, and a bar that throws every Dodger game up on the wall, Eater reported. Meehan figured the change would cost him his Michelin star.

It didn't.

Here's what's on the record from that visit:

• Rib-eye, $99
• New York strip, $85
• Mushroom risotto, $35
• Sauce on the side, $5

The interesting number is the $35. That's the mushroom risotto, which Kang describes as a rice remake of a dish from the old tasting menu, the one Meehan used to build with black garlic and barley. It arrives zig-zagged with herb oil and fried basil, and it's the only thing here priced under $60.

So that's the order. Sit at the bar, get the risotto, and you've eaten the part of this kitchen the inspectors were grading in the first place, for a third of the steak.

Where the bill jumps is the step from that plate to any piece of beef. The risotto is $35 and the cheaper steak is $85, which makes the move to the grill a $50 decision at minimum. The gap between the two steaks is smaller than people assume: $14 buys the rib-eye over the strip. Both come pre-sliced, both dry-aged at least a few weeks, both served with a grilled lemon, a roasted head of garlic and Meehan's black garlic sauce, according to the review. The sauces are the cheap upgrade in the building.

Kang's takeaway calls Kali "the most refined steakhouse experience in Los Angeles," and looking at those numbers, I'd say the star is cheaper to reach here than the rib-eye price suggests. A $99 steak is a $99 steak whether or not Michelin has heard of the cook. The $35 plate that survived the format change is the actual souvenir of the tasting-menu years.

Who it's for: anyone who wanted a Musso & Frank table and couldn't get one, and anyone who'd rather watch the Dodgers somewhere with a working martini program. Kali is at 5722 Melrose Ave., (323) 871-4160.

Source: la.eater.com, retrieved September 8, 2026.