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Karla Subero Pittol is a Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles–raised chef who runs a pop-up restaurant outside of her garage in Echo Park on the east side of LA. The space is decorated with wood tables, woven light fixtures, and colorful enamel bowls—plus, it’s equipped with a fully stocked bar. Inside, she hosts dinner parties, oftentimes collaborating with other local chefs. And her talents aren’t strictly main course—Pittol used to work as a pastry chef in restaurants making her a masterful pie maker and an ice-cream savant with flavors ranging from Shirley Temple sorbet to apricot-and-cheese Danish sherbert. All of this is accomplished under the moniker Chainsaw, an experiential and thoughtfully tasteful food project.
I visited Pittol at the garage to chat about how she styles the space, curates a vibe, and what she likes to wear when she hosts.
EW: How did you go about designing the garage?
Karla Subero Pittol: I had a lot of help from my friend Sara Hall. She's an interior designer and a fine artist. She was the one that helped me decide to do Chainsaw in the first place. She had known that I had a pop-up in college out of my one-bedroom apartment that I ran for two years to pay my way through school. I knew I wanted to open a restaurant, but I had no money, and I had just moved into this house with this garage—so, she was like, “Why don’t we turn the garage into a mock-up of your restaurant?” And that’s exactly what we did.
It started out with us pulling furniture from both of our homes. I had no idea who was actually going to come, but it went so well that we started doing monthly [dinners] and selling out 90 reservations in five minutes. People just wanted to see what was going on in this well-dressed garage in Echo Park with good food and drinks.
Sara had a lot of ideas for how to make it really practical, while also tying together both our personal styles. Lots of pops of color, but also really sturdy materials. A lot of wood, a lot of enamels. Enamel bowls are sort of the signature look of Chainsaw because they’re indestructible (if you drop it on the ground, it's not gonna break) but they also look gorgeous with food. The bentwood chairs give it a very French-bistro, European feel. My time in Paris inspired a lot of the bones for the project: simple neighborhood cafes that turn into bars in the evening where people can sit, eat small plates, and linger.
EW: It has a distinct vibe and personality, but at the same time, it feels adaptable—like you could serve any style of cuisine here.
KSP: Totally! The bones are very bare. It definitely has a personality, but I think it's minimal enough that if you put anything on a serving plate in this space, it goes.
EW: Do you ever change up your tablescapes?
KSP: I do two different things out of the space: pop-up events and private dinners. At the private dinners, it’s just one set tablescape that utilizes all the elements in a more cohesive way. So always vintage Japanese teak trays and empty cans of canned goods to hold forks and napkins. We use 40 oz beer bottles to hold water. I scrubbed all of the labels off—it took ages,—but now I have a full collectsion of them. We’ll use the smaller colorful enamels for candles, which at night gives off this psycho glow. It’s so beautiful.
At the public pop-ups, the format is really different. It’s very adjacent to dim sum and definitely inspired by the service at State Bird Provisions in San Francisco. I’ll have the full menu [hung on the wall] with various dishes at various prices. But no one actually gets to order any of the food. They just look at the menu, internalize it, and then whoever's cooking on that day will just cook items from the menu in batches of four to 10. And then we take all our vintage Dansk trays, run it out to people, and say “Hey, I've got 10 of this beef arepa, they’re two tickets apiece.”’ I want people here engaging with each other and engaging with the food. All the tables that we set up are communal because I want people to sit next to strangers and just talk to people they wouldn't normally talk to.
EW: When you’re having a party, what do you like to wear?
KSP: It's hard to wear the things that I wear in my daily life at an event or if I'm cooking. I have a taste for the finer things in life and I don’t want to mess them up while I'm in the kitchen. Recently, I'm finding out that I'm actually not as messy as I thought I was. And so I'll push my limits a little bit, but my Chainsaw uniform definitely started as a pair of Ben Davis trousers or Dickies and a Girlfriend Collective sports bra and Nike Cortezes. Now I dress how I want to dress because I have a lot more help. Before I figured out how to delegate and how to ask for help, I was doing everything myself: running around, taking out the trash, all of the grunt work. Now that I have a bigger team, I can dress a little nicer so I’ll try to spruce it up with a dress here and there.
EW: Do you wear the same jewelry every day?
KSP: I always wear some sort of chunky choker. I also mix up a lot of gold and silver.
EW: Do you tend to wear colors that match the space?
KSP: I match the space, completely. There’s a lot of Yves Klein Blue, aquamarine, and cobalt, plus lots of reds, lots of bright yellows. So if I'm going to do a pop of color, it'll be within that primary color vibe. Otherwise, I wear a lot of black—but that's just because, if I was gonna spill something on myself, it's the easiest thing to cover up.
