Giorgio Baldi’s Provides Italian Delights to the Canyon for 36 Years
Proprietor Elena Baldi at Giorgio’s restaurant. Photo: Levi Langen
By Laurel Busby
News & Information Editor
When her family opened Giorgio Baldi’s restaurant in 1990, Elena Baldi had recently graduated from high school and was about to enroll in UC-Santa Cruz.
Four years later, Baldi returned home with a degree in art history and started working in the family business, which unexpectedly became her life’s work.
“I surprisingly loved it,” Baldi said. “I just loved working there. I enjoyed dealing with people. That’s the number one thing I do. It’s my niche.”
Her parents were the chefs. Both had learned to cook in Italy, where her father, Giorgio, specialized in seafood dishes that he had learned from his mother in Forte del Marmi on the country’s western coast, while her mother, Roberta, who grew up near Milan, focused on varied dishes, such as raviolis, soups, and a popular butterscotch pudding.
Their son, Edoardo, eventually branched out to open his own restaurants, E. Baldi in Beverly Hills and a steakhouse in the Waldorf Astoria, but their daughter preferred to work alongside her parents in the Canyon. While interacting with customers was her favorite endeavor, she also enjoyed the creativity of cooking, which kept her connected to the artistic interests that she had explored in college.
“The dishes are art themselves,” she said. “It’s always fun to be involved in the process of making a new dish.”
Some dishes have remained popular over the years, such as the dover sole in lemon sauce and their biggest seller, the agnolotti, which is a mini ravioli filled with sweet corn in a truffle sauce. Her mother’s sauces and ravioli fillings in general tend to be favorites, although some simpler dishes like the minestrone soup also have many fans.
“Some people have been coming for 30 years, and they eat the same exact thing every time,” Baldi said. “I like the fact that they love a dish so much.”
Original owner Giorgio Baldi
The restaurant has gone through changes and struggles over the years, such as the challenges of COVID, but the most traumatic one was the loss of her father due to a heart attack in 2011. He had originally moved from Italy in 1984 to help a friend open a Beverly Hills restaurant. His family joined him the following year when his daughter was 14 years old, and, after six months in Hollywood, the Baldis settled in Pacific Palisades.
After Giorgio’s restaurant opened on 114 W. Channel Rd., her father spent much of his time heading the kitchen, where he was the main chef, although he also enjoyed connecting with customers on the floor.
“My dad was a very charismatic person, a very sociable person,” Elena said. “He didn’t speak a word of English until he died, but everyone loved him. Somehow, he spoke to people.” After his death, “it was hard. He was the restaurant…. You wouldn’t think about the restaurant without him in it.”
Over time, Baldi and her mother learned to live with the loss, and they kept the restaurant going. When the COVID pandemic hit, they adjusted Giorgio’s by adding outdoor seating, which oddly enough had been something that her father had desired. Unfortunately, the Palisades Fire damaged those tables and chairs, which then had to be removed and have yet to be returned in part due to insurance challenges.
Baldi’s house, which is near Chautauqua north of Sunset, luckily was one of two on her street that survived the fire, although it was uninhabitable for a year, and her mother’s house in Malibu also made it through the tragedy. However, their restaurant has not yet come back to its former state. Due to reduced business, only half the staff were able to return after two months of closure, and, because of the lost outdoor seating, the restaurant was diminished to about half its size.
“I wish I could have kept everybody on the staff, but I couldn’t do it,” said Baldi, who noted that the loss of so many residents of the Palisades, at least temporarily, to other locales has been a difficult change. “It’s sad. All these families are spread around. We miss a lot of people, because they’re not living here anymore.”
Yet, the Canyon community has been firmly supportive of Giorgio’s since they reopened last year, just as they were during COVID, when people made numerous to-go orders that kept the business afloat.
“We have the most amazing neighbors,” Baldi said. After the fire, “when we opened the restaurant for the first time, the regulars rushed in, which is so touching to me. I appreciate it so much. We have these families that have been coming since day one…. I hear from people who are rebuilding or moving back in a little bit. People are looking forward to coming back…. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
(Giorgio’s is open Tuesdays-Sundays from 5-10 p.m. For more information, phone (310) 573-1660 or visit giorgiobaldi.com.)
