Love & Salt Owner Dishes on Manhattan Beach Roots
It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon in Manhattan Beach. Locals and visitors alike crowd the sidewalks along Manhattan Beach Blvd. with ice coffees in hand and sandals on feet.
Inside Love & Salt, one of South Bay’s vibrant restaurants, owner Sylvie Gabriele sits at the bar in the midst of a bustling brunch service. The scent of scrambled eggs, maple-glazed bacon and the eatery’s house-made buttermilk English muffins floods the rustic and open interior. The restaurant is nearly full at 1:30 p.m. with chatty customers, whose voices and clanging silverware echo off the high ceilings.
“Love and salt are the two ingredients to make great food,” said the restaurant’s owner, Sylvie Gabriele. “But the deeper meaning is that it takes a lot of love and salt to have a great life.”
Born in the South of France and reared in Manhattan Beach, Sylvie Gabriele is the current owner of local restaurant Love & Salt | Photo by Betsy Carter
Before it was Love & Salt, it was Café Pierre. Gabriele’s father, Guy, opened the contemporary French bistro in 1977. Guy, who is 100 percent Italian, was born in Tunisia, but his family fled to Italy when France lost Tunisia as a French colony in 1956. They settled in the south of France, where they opened a butcher shop and where Guy met Gabriele’s mother, Susan, who was a native Angelino and University of Southern California student. They got married and moved to Manhattan Beach when Sylvie was a toddler.
“Manhattan Beach encapsulates California living,” says Gabriele. “It’s gorgeous. The beaches are gorgeous. The homes are beautiful. I just think the size of it and the topography of it… It makes it an ideal place to live.”
Gabriele began working at Café Pierre as a teenager in the 1980s, first as a hostess and then as a waitress. She put herself through college and graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and women’s studies. She went on to work as a counselor in a family crisis center, but soon recognized she could make a difference through dining.
“I think that experience is what made me realize I didn’t want to work in the field of psychology because I found that there was so many people who didn’t really want help,” says Gabriele. “And not that people shouldn’t devote themselves to that. But I realized I could help others and have an impact on others in a different way.”
She received her Master’s degree in Business Management from Loyola Marymount University at the age of 28 and went into business with her father.
“It’s been fantastic,” says Gabriele. “It’s the best partner you can have because you think the same and you have the same values and a similar philosophy of life.”
Saying goodbye to Café Pierre was surprisingly easy for Gabriele and her father, despite its long running presence both in the South Bay community and their family. It was time for a change and a shift in mentality. They desired the same friendly and inclusive environment, but with a concept of sharing and family style dining. Love & Salt was born.
“It was a coming of age in a way,” said Gabriele. “It wasn’t really a difficult thing. It was really like shedding the old and growing into the new.”
The father-daughter duo intends to open two more restaurants. The first will be a Middle Eastern fast-casual restaurant, and the other will be a different variation of Love & Salt. Both eateries will be located in Los Angeles proper.
“We were and still are passionate about that conscious, non-GMO approach,” said Gabriele. “Our forthcoming concept will be grounded in that, while serving cross-cultural cuisine that pays homage to our restaurant family’s different heritages.”
