Deep red and luxuriantly marbled, meat is central to the experience of Gwen, a new restaurant in Hollywood, California. As patrons enter the grand, high-ceilinged dining room, they pass through the venue’s small butcher shop, its retail vitrine brimming with aged Wagyu beef, plump fowl, savory sausages, and terrines of grouse or fois gras. Here, just over the restaurant’s threshold, an inset of seemingly timeworn marble mosaic—that could easily pass as being original to this ornate 1920s building—punctuates the polished yet age-scarred concrete floor, spelling out “Gwen” with a lyrical flourish. Deceptively recent, this inlay (honoring the owners’ grandmother, who was raised on a farm) simultaneously evokes old-time Hollywood glamour and the utilitarian floor tiles of a vintage butcher shop. And that play between the elegant and the raw runs through Gwen—underscored by aromas from a great copper- clad hearth. If this soaring rectangular dining room is a temple to meat, then the altar at the end of its “nave” is the wood-burning grill.