Inside Charbel Hayek’s Ladyhawk, West Hollywood’s Breakout Mediterranean Star

By Eric Barton | Nov. 10, 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.

Service will be peaking when Charbel Hayek will say the line that doubles as a creed: “Don’t fight the chaos, flow with it.” Tickets might be piling up, pans hissing, the grill station blasting heat to the rest of the line, and Hayek keeps tempo like a bandleader.

“Cooking should feel like music, not stress,” he says. “You lead with heart, and everything falls into place.” The words match the plates at his restaurants: precise, unfussy, and alive with the kind of heat that adds definition, not weight.

That calm is what has led Hayek to acclaim for his restaurants, Ladyhawk in West Hollywood and Laya in Hollywood. That chill sense of purpose also has a source, way back to his family table in Lebanon, where food was a social glue for everything he knew about how to live.

“Food was everything, it brought people together,” Hayek says. “Every meal had a story behind it, from the land to the hands that made it.” Fresh produce, homemade bread, big flavors—the raw materials were close, and so was the meaning. His mother drew him into the kitchen; the spark arrived when he realized cooking could be a language. “Food was my way to express creativity and emotion, how I connect with people and share a piece of who I am.”

Charbel Hayek

After high school, Hayek left Beirut for culinary training in France at École Ferrières—the “French School of Excellence” you’ll see listed on a lot of the best chef bios. The lessons there focused on refinement, and that fit Hayek’s instinct to edit rather than embellish. After, he moved to L.A. with his family and spent nearly three years under Josiah Citrin at the two-Michelin-star Mélisse, a kitchen where seconds matter and every dice of an onion needs to look like the last one. There he learned the metronome: seasoning like a point of view, char that knows when to stop, olive oil doing more work than butter ever can.

He returned to Lebanon and, at 24, won Top Chef Middle East & North Africa in 2021, then cooked on the 2023 World All-Stars season. For a time he cooked as a private chef in Florida, sharpening his voice for intimate audiences, before coming back to Los Angeles with a plan that read like a thesis.

Ladyhawk opened inside West Hollywood’s Kimpton La Peer in late 2023, the polished argument for his approach: elegant plates, market produce, Lebanese spirit expressed in restraint. Laya followed in Hollywood in July 2024, the looser sibling with the same soul: more spontaneous, smoke a touch louder, still built on the idea that the ingredient leads and the plate listens. “They’re like two sides of me,” he says. “One romantic, one spontaneous; but both tell the same story, just in their own way.”

This year, his map keeps expanding. The common thread across his restaurants is the way plates feel lighter than they look. He told me that some dishes want to “speak softly,” others need the “punch” of za’atar or sumac, and the trick is knowing which voice the moment requires. The goal is simple: guests should leave with a sense that Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean cooking is not a stereotype but a living thing—“full of emotion, memory, and life.”

Back on the line, the creed returns as muscle memory. Flow with it. Keep time. Let the food do the talking. Ladyhawk and Laya are the chorus; the story is a kid from Beirut who learned to edit, learned to lead, and learned that the right kind of cooking feels like home.