Ardor’s bass sashimi

Inside Chef Patricia Lalu’s Ardor: California Produce, Filipino Standards

By Eric Barton | Nov. 22, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

When Patricia Lalu talks about a slammed night at Ardor, she does not start with drama. She starts with systems. “Being organized and the five P’s: proper preparation prevents poor performance,” she tells me, like it is carved over the kitchen door. Working on the line, that translates to urgency without panic, calm in the weeds, and an obsessive insistence that even something as simple as frying tortilla chips deserves a full measure of attention. “Don’t be mediocre,” a chef once told her early on. She turned it into a life rule.

That is how you end up with a kid from the Phillipines running the kitchen at a Sunset Strip hotspot. Ardor is the signature restaurant at the Edition hotel in West Hollywood, and there, you’ll find Lalu sending out crudos, lamb chops, and vegetable dishes built around California produce. As chef de cuisine, her job is equal parts pressure cooker and showcase: a luxury hotel that has to keep travelers, locals, and critics all equally fed and impressed.

Patricia Lalu

The standard she holds her team to started at her family’s table. Lalu grew up in Pampanga, the province Filipinos like to call the country’s food capital. Dinner was a full-family sport for six, everyone in their designated seat, everyone negotiating for the best bite. One dish still takes her right back: pinaupong manok, or “seated chicken,” steamed whole on rock salt, wrapped in banana leaf, weighted down with a rock to keep the pot airtight. As the youngest, she never had to fight for the prized pieces; they just appeared on her plate, already picked for her. “All of us now have very high standards when it comes to food,” she says, and those standards quietly became her internal calibration for every dish she sends out.

If there was a push toward professional cooking, it came less from a mentor and more from her own stubbornness. “I’m the type of person that if I want something, I will go get it and work for it,” she says. Culinary school at Scottsdale Community College became the test case. She performed well there, and suddenly this idea of a life in kitchens shifted from vague dream to actual path. Around that time she also found a north star in Anthony Bourdain, trying to emulate “Anthony’s way of traveling and exploring other countries’ cultures through the prism of immersing myself in their cuisine.”

Sweet potato curry

Her parents were less enthused. In the classic Asian immigrant script, expectations ran high, particularly from her father. “He wanted me to choose a different career because he didn’t want his youngest to be doing physical labor and arduous tasks associated with leading a kitchen,” she says. Kitchens are all physical labor and arduous tasks. What changed his mind was not an argument but time. Years of them watching her show up at resorts and hotels, grinding through long services, still talking about flavor and ingredients like she had just discovered them, turned reluctance into pride. “Over the years, my parents have seen firsthand the passion and dedication I have poured into my career, and my parents are now my biggest champions.”

Tandoor carrots

Milkbread

Arizona became her proving ground. At major properties like The Westin Kierland, the mandate was brutal in its simplicity: put out a lot of food very quickly while also keeping the quality high. That meant a mountain of repetition—banquets, lines, stations—that honed speed, discipline, and a certain visual precision. She is almost as particular about appearance as she is about seasoning. “Always having a clean uniform and composed demeanor – how you look is how you represent yourself. If one looks orderly and precise, one has to match it with their actions as well,” she says. The outside had to match the inside, or it felt wrong.

Skirt steak with mole salt

The habits stuck. On a busy night now, what keeps Ardor humming is not some heroic last-minute save but the boring, relentless work of prep and standards. The five P’s. Lists that actually get followed. A culture where “whatever you do, whatever it is, always give your best even though it’s a simple task from picking herbs to frying tortilla chips.” The less you have to fix once the tickets start spitting out, the more the team can fall into a flow that makes a packed room feel almost manageable.

When she moved from Arizona to Los Angeles, the first thing she noticed was the produce. “How lucky L.A. is, California in general, to have such perfect weather to enable growing a huge variety of ingredients and the best produce for cuisine available,” she says. At Ardor, that abundance shows up in a vegetable-forward menu that still has plenty for the carnivores: seasonal crudos, Colorado lamb chops, shrimp glossed in garlic butter, tandoor carrots and blistered squash that arrive at the table looking like centerpieces.

Asparagus with truffle aioli

For Lalu, the point is not to show off technique for its own sake. The dish she talks about most proudly is the crudo because it lets her play with “fresh seasonal ingredients and have fun with making different ceviche, aguachile, vinaigrettes,” while keeping the “star fish of that dish” front and center. What makes it sing, she insists, is restraint. “Just using the best ingredients available and showcasing that without doing too much makes a huge difference.”

Maitake mushrooms with couscous

Lalu

Looking ahead, she is not chasing some grand reinvention. She talks instead about continuing to build her version of California cuisine, one that reflects the city’s mashup of cultures and gives her room to fold in flavors and techniques she picks up as she travels. “I simply want to keep serving great food, while adding new flavors and techniques I learn from traveling across the world,” she says. It is a very Patricia Lalu kind of ambition: precise, grounded, never satisfied, and always circling back to that early piece of advice she still repeats to herself and her cooks when the night gets loud: don’t be mediocre.