Christian Navarro Opens Christian's Wine Bar & Restaurant on Sunset

Christian Navarro has spent more than three decades building the kind of reputation that only a few figures in Los Angeles food and wine ever reach. He is not simply a wine buyer, and not simply a restaurateur. He is the operator who helped take Wally's from neighborhood institution to modern wine-and-dining powerhouse, then carried that same high-end hospitality logic into Oak View Group's venue world. Now he is back on Sunset with Christian's, a restaurant and wine bar that feels less like a side project and more like a statement of authorship.

Navarro's story starts well before this opening. CSQ says he was born in Mexico City, raised in Palm Springs, and moved to Los Angeles at 19, where an entry-level wine-shop job changed the course of his life. Steve Wallace saw something in him early, and that relationship became the foundation for one of the most recognizable wine businesses in Southern California. By the time Navarro emerged as Wally's public face, his client list already stretched deep into Hollywood, finance, politics, and the arts. The Los Angeles Times said Wally's regulars had included Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Eli Broad, and Bill Clinton.

When Steve Wallace stepped away in 2013, Navarro joined Maurice and Paul Marciano in buying the business and pushing it into a new form. Market Watch later wrote that Navarro had turned Wally's into a hybrid operation where restaurant, wine retail, cheese counter, gifting, and online sales all worked together. That shift mattered. It moved Wally's out of the old liquor-store lane and into a more complete hospitality business, one built around atmosphere, product access, and trust. It also made Navarro more than a merchant. It made him a format-builder.

His reach kept growing. Oak View Group announced in 2023 that Navarro would help shape premium food and wine offerings across arenas, stadiums, and festivals worldwide. In 2024, that partnership produced mastercard midnight by navarro's in Manhattan, a wine bar, dining room, lounge, and performance venue near Penn Station and Hudson Yards. The food there was framed as French-California, seasonal, and wine-driven, which now reads like an important bridge between the Wally's years and Christian's.

Christian's brings that whole backstory back to Southern California, but in a more personal key. The restaurant's official site lists the address as 9000 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, inside the long-recognizable HBO building corridor on the Strip. The operator describes the room as a place for exceptional wine and seasonal food, and the June opening materials say the kitchen is led by Chef Alan Martinez, a longtime collaborator from Navarro's Wally's orbit. In other words, this is not a concept built from scratch by strangers. It is a return by a founder figure working with people who already know his instincts.

The attached menu pages make the ambition easy to read. Christian's is offering Kaviari caviar service, cheese and charcuterie, crudo, house-made pastas, fondue, a wagyu burger, branzino, wood-roasted chicken, and large-format steaks. That is a smart mix. It gives wine drinkers enough bite-sized luxury to treat the room as a bar, while giving dinner guests enough depth to settle in for a full meal. The result looks like French-leaning California cooking with a steakhouse backbone, which is exactly the kind of menu that suits Sunset right now.

There is also something shrewd about the timing. After years of building brands for Wally's and then using Oak View's platform to test his ideas in New York and venue hospitality, Navarro now has a room that carries his own name. For longtime Los Angeles diners, that is the real story. Christian's is not just another opening. It is Christian Navarro, after years of shaping other banners, finally putting his signature over the door on Sunset.