With Trois Mec, Ludo Lefebvre Has a Place to Call His Own Axel Koester for The New York Times At Trois Mec in Los Angeles, Ludo Lefebvre cooks and joins waiters in delivering dishes. LOS ANGELES - Ludo Lefebvre was always the chef without a restaurant, though it did not seem to have hurt him any. For six years, he commandeered empty spaces across Los Angeles as stages for the pop-up restaurants he called LudoBites, quick runs that lasted a few weeks or months. He built a base of intensely loyal fans who stormed the reservation line at the first whisper of the next LudoBites incarnation. But at age 42, Mr. Lefebvre, a father of 2-year-old twins who lives in suburban Sherman Oaks, is settling down in a restaurant he won't have to pack up in three months, renting an old pizza parlor off Melrose Avenue. It is part of a striking collaboration with Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Animal, a nose-to-tail restaurant buzzing every night with, for the most part, hipster food enthusiasts. Trois Mec, with its name intentionally misspelled, is being closely watched as a sign of changing restaurant tastes in this ever-churning food city. It was Mr. Lefebvre, a classically trained French chef with wrist-to-elbow tattoos that include the names of his young son and daughter, who pioneered the notion that a chef (a contestant on "Iron Chef" and "Top Chef Masters," no less) did not need a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Mr. Shook and Mr. Dotolo, meanwhile, have been the champions of unpretentious if ambitious small-plate dining. This new restaurant embodies the argument of these three chefs (the Trois Mec, or three guys) that eating sensibilities are changing, that a brightening economy and the maturing of their clients has prompted a desire for more cultivated dining, or "refined dining," as Mr. Lefebvre put it. Not white tablecloth, but certainly less casual. "Sometimes I think it's gotten too casual," Mr. Lefebvre said. We need to bring a little more refinement back into the restaurant industry. I want good service. I want good hospitality. But in a casual way. Like you're in a kitchen. "I think fine dining rooms are coming back," he said. People want to have a good experience when they go to restaurants now. Not a froufrou like a three-star Michelin restaurant. But people want an experience. Trois Mec is easing back to a formality in cooking and presentation that is more Burgundy than Berkeley. "This is something new for us," Mr. Shook said. The service. The reservations. The food. The tasting menu only. There are no small dishes. There are no choices; rather, a set five-course menu cooked by Mr. Lefebvre. And a reservation alone is not enough: diners are required to pay in advance the $97 cost of the meal, which includes tax and tip but not wine. The other night, the restaurant staff seemed to outnumber the diners, a suggestion of the caliber of service promised. "Everyone in here is a professional food person," said Krissy Lefebvre, Mr. Lefebvre's wife and muse. We don't have any actors, we don't have any part-time people. The wine list is offbeat French (no California pinots here), and most of the bottles are priced considerably north of $100. Mr. Lefebvre has given up cooking in a T-shirt, bringing back the traditional white chef's jacket. "I'm French, I'm French," he said. I forgot where I was from. This does not mean he's a modern-day André Soltner. Trois Mec has 24 seats, 8 of them at a counter. "You can hear the dish machine while you are here for dinner," Mr. Dotolo said. The restaurant is tucked away at the back of a glum blot of a strip mall that it shares with Yum Yum Donuts and Tasty Thai. The sign over its frosted windows is a holdover from the last tenant, Raffallo's Pizza, in all its yellow-and-red garish glory. That night, patrons waited for their table on the sidewalk, across the street from a gas station, enduring the bleating of a car alarm at the restaurant's front door. Inside, there was quiet, intimate elegance. Diners and cooks shared the same small, mostly candlelit space, with white marble floors and a wall of mirrors assuring that everyone could observe the kitchen (where Mr. Lefebvre scolds his sous-chefs on some nights, in his best television-chef manner).