Opus occupies huge, awkward quarters fitted into the Wiltern building 17 years ago for Mario Tamayo’s Atlas, a supper club with pan-Latin food that probably wasn’t much better than what your aunties served at bridge parties in the 1950s but helped to jump-start the idea of the velvet-rope lounge that has dominated the Los Angeles restaurant scene ever since. Its first incarnation as Opus was as a high-end steak house with organic inclinations overseen by Sara Levine, who has since gone on to the Pasadena wine bar Vertical. Levine’s cooking was sure, but her restaurant never quite worked — the intimacy of her food seemed lost in the gargantuan space, a handsome, masculine dining room with soaring ceilings, leather tabletops, a glassed-in demi-patio for smokers, more tons of rusted metal than you’d find at a Richard Serra exhibition, and flat screens in the bar that show both the ball game and old Murnau movies without the sound. The crowds, half Korean and half not, swelled only when there were big concerts at the theater next door, and even then less for her cuisine than for the universal emollients of... More >>>