Sleek Wood-Fired Steakhouse Headed to LA’s Booming Tech Corridor

It’s busy times in Playa Vista, with yet another new restaurant heading towards the tech-heavy hotbed — and this one has a few very notable names behind it. The new restaurant, lovingly called Bull & Butterfly, comes to the neighborhood by way of Alan and Heidi Jackson, who made their bones on the busy Lemonade restaurants, and features open-kitchen cooking from chef Ben Ford.

The new Bull & Butterfly will follow a modern California steakhouse format, meaning plenty of chops and wine but also lots of grilled vegetables. Ford will be mostly leaning into historic California and Baja cooking techniques, leaning on lots of charcoal, ember cooking, and spit roasting for his humanely-raised ribs and roasts to carne asada. Similarly, many of the wines will come from the Valle de Guadalupe in Mexico, with cocktails inspired from all over greater Southern California.

As for the restaurant itself, the Jacksons have pulled the broad dining area together with an open kitchen and horseshoe bar, adding on patio seating and honing in on the oh-so-trendy gold, pink, and emerald green hues found at places like Bavel and Nightshade. They’ve got plenty of experience with restaurant build-outs, having opened more than two dozen Lemonade locations, as well as restaurants like the Farm of Beverly Hills over the years. It’s at the latter spot where the Jacksons first met chef Ben Ford, who himself would go on to open multiple locations of his onetime Culver City restaurant Ford’s Filling Station.

Bull & Butterfly is slated to land at the Runway development in Playa Vista sometime this fall, keeping dinner hours to start. Meanwhile, the neighborhood continues to lean into the fast casual restaurant model for all the workers nearby, including at new places like Tex-Mex spot HomeState.

Bull & Butterfly. 12746 Jefferson Boulevard, Playa Vista, CA.