Jackson Kalb was 13 years old the first time he walked into a real kitchen. Not his family’s kitchen — his parents, by his own admission, were not good home cooks. The kitchen he walked into was Mélisse in Santa Monica, a two-Michelin-star French restaurant, and he was there because a guest at one of his backyard catering gigs happened to know the chef. That chef was Josiah Citrin. He let the kid in.
From there, Kalb trained at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas, Grant Achatz’s Alinea in Chicago, and Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe in New York, all before he was old enough to rent a car without a surcharge. He went to Cornell’s hotel school, spent two years eating his way through Italy, came back to California, and started cooking the food he actually wanted to cook. Italian. Southern Italian specifically — the pastas of Sardinia and Calabria and the coastal south, built with handmade dough and sauces that take all day.
In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, he opened Ospi on Venice Beach. It shouldn’t have worked. It worked immediately. Four California locations later, he’s bringing it to Dallas, and 1621 Oak Lawn Avenue in the Design District opens May 1. First location outside of California. The old Meddlesome Moth space, completely reimagined.
The name is short for ospitante — Italian for host. That word is the whole philosophy. Kalb describes it as his version of a casual lunch trattoria, a familial dinner restaurant, and a recovery brunch spot on the weekends, all in the same room. The food backs that up.
The spicy rigatoni alla vodka is what Dallas will talk about first. It’s the dish that put Ospi on the map in Venice, the one every server recommends and every first-timer orders, and it earns all of it — rigatoni cooked exactly right, pulled through a vodka sauce that has a real kick and a richness that doesn’t quit. Then there’s the malloreddus, a hand-rolled Sardinian pasta with a beef cheek ragu scented with thyme and finished with grana padano cheese, which is the dish serious eaters go back for specifically. The ceci e tria — fried pasta with chickpeas and lemon — sounds simple and turns out to be a quiet masterpiece.
The pizza is Roman-style tonda, cracker-thin, so light Kalb jokes it’s practically low-carb. The Hapa is the one to order: pepperoni, slow-roasted pineapple, pickled jalapeños. It sounds like a bad idea. It’s a great pizza. The vodka pizza with stracciatella is what you get if you want the sauce on a different canvas. The butter chicken ordered parm-style — drowned in that same vodka sauce with pecorino Romano — is the kind of dish that changes how you feel about chicken.
The kale salad has a following in California that borders on irrational, which usually means it’s very good.
Kalb runs all of this through his hospitality group, Memento Mori, which also operates Jame Enoteca and several Jemma locations in LA. At Ospi, he and his wife Melissa Saka are often on the floor themselves — pouring water, talking to guests, making first-timers feel like regulars. That part travels too.
The Design District has been stacking up serious restaurants at a pace that’s hard to keep up with. Ospi fits in without blending in. It’s California-relaxed, Italy-rooted, and built around the kind of food you want to eat more than once a week. Dallas could use a place like that.
Ospi opens May 1 at 1621 Oak Lawn Avenue in the Design District. Reservations at ospi.com.
