Redirected: Restaurant Reviews By Patric Kuh

Alma

By Patric Kuh — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Photographs by Andrea Bricco

The evening sun shines through the sackcloth screen on Alma’s window. An early Chez Panisse poster hangs behind cracked glass, while across the room stands a bookcase with tomes from Mugaritz and Noma, two restaurants—one in the Spanish Basque country, the other in Copenhagen—that are among the lodestars of this downtown kitchen. I’m not certain the “hay-roasted potato” derives directly from Noma’s René Redzepi, the Danish chef who finds inspiration in tidal pools and hedges, but the message is clear: Alma is uncompromising. Sure, the room sort of recalls a ’90s coffeehouse with its spare layout of loosely arranged tables, but that only heightens your focus on those German Butterball potatoes, which acquire golden hues and an incredible nuttiness when roasted for eight hours under a layer of organic oat grasses.

The chef, 27-year-old Ari Taymor, hasn’t yet reached the stage where he can shake the influence of the culinary world’s big names. Nothing wrong with that. His cooking might have some derivative elements, like the ash meringue on the sunchoke split (helpful hint: a dessert) that comes from the playbook of Mugaritz’s Andoni Aduriz, the Spanish chef for whom the residue of fire is a staple. But Alma also burns with a refreshing passion. Situated on a stretch of Broadway that is only beginning to be hit by ripples from the downtown revival, it lies across the street from the gothic United Artists Theatre building that’s slated to become a trendy Ace Hotel next year. The narrow white-walled room—dominated by the open kitchen on one side and a lengthy bench seat on the other—was once home to a kabob spot. Now it’s a transitional restaurant in a transitional part of downtown. A Saved by the Bell lobby card decorates the bathroom, and the menu is printed on a single sheet of college-ruled notebook paper. Ring them up and you go to Google Voice; your receipt is texted from Squareup. Techy efficiency and civic idealism (they’re planning to give internships to inner-city kids) combine in a low-budget boho restaurant that is pleasantly different from downtown’s larger, shinier operations.

Originally from Palo Alto—his aunt is the Tony-winning director Julie Taymor—Taymor has a degree in international affairs from D.C.’s George Washington University. He got into cooking only seven years ago when a life-altering meal at Chez Panisse led to an accelerated schooling highlighted by stints at Lucques; Armand Arnal’s Provençal culinary think tank, La Chassagnette (located in a nature preserve and open only six months a year); and the San Francisco pasta shrine Flour + Water. Following a brief gig at Saluté in Venice, he launched a string of pop-ups around L.A. before landing on Broadway. Walk in and you might find Taymor in the kitchen, kneading miso-buckwheat rolls as beverage director Chris Yamashiro—he was tending the Maggie’s Farm market stand when he met Taymor—tops off a glass of one of his powerful house-brewed ginger ales (Alma has no liquor license yet) and general manager Ashleigh Parsons (a Harvard grad, natch) waits on customers. Or waits for them. The quirky atmosphere leaves you feeling as if you’ve happened upon an art house performance piece being played out for the few who are wise enough to venture in. Seeing Alice Waters smiling on the seafoam green banquette one night only added to the effect.

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With a menu that includes epazote, whey, malt, and sea rocket Taymor picks in Malibu coves, the cooking at Alma can be a challenge to categorize. At times it seems like the sort of thing Euell Gibbons, author of the 1962 foraging classic, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, would have come up with if he’d had access to a nitrous oxide charger. Gastro Expressionism? Whole Earth Romanticism? Haute Ashcan? Whatever you call it, Taymor is an undeniable talent at an early point in his career. Intent at the stove (he doesn’t serve pastas because to him they demand single-minded devotion), he still hasn’t quite gotten over the pop-up notion that every plate must be a showstopper. Though he corrals lesser-known plants (like chickweed) with all manner of gels and whipped essences, it’s when he uses more familiar points of departure that he is at his finest.

For instance, the house-cultured butter—its flavors deep and clean—that comes with the small basket of bread shares a tangy hint of fermentation with those miso-inflected buckwheat rolls. Likewise Taymor reimagines the standard hors d’oeuvre tower of potato, cream, and caviar as a free-form appetizer, anchoring smoked cipollini crème fraîche and sustainably harvested hackleback eggs with fried fingerlings. The squishy, crunchy texture of the potato, the campfire note of the smoke, and the briny trill of the roe combine in a spectacular way. I wouldn’t heap the same praise on the beer gel that’s dabbed under corn and bacon beignets (when beer becomes that pronounced, you kind of want it in a glass), but thankfully there isn’t enough to counter the main element, a salt made from burned rinds of lime and Meyer lemon that’s sprinkled onto the beignets as they are lifted from bubbling oil. Stunning.

If Taymor’s style of cooking has a throughline, it’s the way he layers distinct ingredients, superimposing them in a progression that incrementally ratchets up the taste. Granted, things can get molecular here, but the effects tend to work. A bed of red bell pepper puree thickened with xanthan gum serves as a base camp from which the applewood-smoked whitefish, watermelon juice spiked with fish sauce, and chamomile granité begin their nervy ascent. A tier of pureed lovage—bright green, as if pulled from a mountain stream—brings a crucial acidity to the hay-roasted potatoes, which rest in a pool of N₂0-lightened Humboldt Fog. That herbal pop provides the creation with an internal structure; without it the preparation would just be a raclette with airs. Fried quinoa delivers a little heft when sown over a salad of raw squash ribbons and crumbled feta. The marigold petals Taymor also works in can’t do that. For a hot appetizer Yamashiro pours an intense sunchoke cream from a mason jar onto charred chicory and a soft-cooked egg. Neither a soup nor a velouté, it’s as sophisticated a country-inspired dish as I’ve ever had.

Given the exploratory nature of Alma, there are moments when Taymor inevitably overreaches. Steaming corn soup does away with the nasturtium ice cream before you can take a slurpy bite; pimped with a gleaming quenelle of soy and squid ink sorbet, a cayenne-laced beef tartare loses its force. The restaurant’s pop-up origins might have something to do with this. The menu changes so frequently (during the several times I’ve been, not once did Taymor offer the same lineup), the kitchen must find it difficult to tinker and refine. Pop-ups can also insulate a chef: When a dish doesn’t fly, customers might chalk it up to the fleeting nature of the place. So why complain to the kitchen? Maybe that’s why Yamashiro quietly retreated after he asked about my seaweed-crusted beef and I admitted the meat was tough. It must have been an off night because the sweetbreads with celery root were raw pink at the center, an unneeded reminder that they are the thymus gland of a veal calf. Sweetbreads are meant to be blanched and then, at pickup, roasted or sautéed. From Paris to Buenos Aires (where they are part of any good asado), these vittles are cooked through.

Taymor and his crew are too skilled to let the quality fluctuate like that. After all, this is a kitchen that can roast salmon so attentively over cedar planks that the fish retains the bright color and texture of sashimi; a puree of burned eggplant that’s been boosted with sherry vinegar gets the dish to Umamiville real fast. The slowly braised Boulder Valley beef is a preparation that displays a mastery of several styles of cooking, from cutting edge to haute. The chopped oyster and tarragon persillade lends a crystalline sharpness to the meat, while a helping of brown butter hollandaise envelops it in a gorgeous richness. Similarly Taymor’s version of chicken wings—an appetizer that playfully evokes bar fare—requires the wings to be confited, then seared in duck fat. But it’s the curlicues of brined apple and celery strips that provide definition. Chicken wings, deep fried or not, are fatty; the astringency of celery counters that. Finally it becomes clear why the two are served together. I just never expected to have such a revelation in an eight-table restaurant next to a hostess dance club.

Alma captures elusive shades of flavor without obscuring any of the ingredients, and it is exciting to see that sensibility extended to desserts. A smoked date foam lends an almost haunting touch to a parfaitlike tumbler of black sesame panna cotta with Mast Brothers chocolate sorbet and crisped puffed rice. The sweetness of a Turkish fig—plump on the plate, with walnut granola—is tamed by a bitter, dark wildflower honey. For the sunchoke split Taymor cooks the root down in caramel, presenting it on a primer coat of a blowtorched marshmallow flavored with Nocino, a walnut liqueur. The ash meringue shards he places on the arrangement create a sylvan dialogue with the birch ice cream at the dessert’s core. I tasted and retasted this ice cream, trying to find words to describe what the birch bark imparts, but nothing came to mind until I turned to good old Euell Gibbons. “It tastes more like pure spring water than anything else,” he writes, “but it has a faint sweetness and a bare hint of wintergreen.” I didn’t pick up on the wintergreen, but I don’t doubt that’s it.

Alma
952 S. Broadway, Downtown, 213-444-0984

Best dishes: Fried fingerlings with crème fraîche and caviar, chicken wings with cucumber ketchup, California
king salmon with burned eggplant, braised beef with oyster persillade, black sesame panna cotta, hazelnut tres leches cake, sunchoke split with birch ice cream

Drinks: BYOB (wine and beer license pending), excellent if slightly too intense house-crafted soft drinks

Atmosphere: Create it yourself

Noise level: Quiet

Kid friendly? The space is, but the food requires more adventurous young eaters

Price range: $4 (spiced Marcona almonds) to $24 (beef with oyster persillade)

Hours: Tue.-Sat., 6 p.m.-10:30 p.m.

Parking: Street or nearby lots

Reservations: Recommended on weekends

Credit cards: All major

Mercado

By Patric Kuh — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:03:00 GMT

Photograph by Andrea Bricco

At Mercado the pozole is finished with cilantro and diced red onion, arriving in an off-white Heath Ceramics bowl. Unadorned in a domestic sort of way yet with an artistic matte glaze, the vessel is a perfect example of midcentury design. Does it add anything to the traditional pork stew? Not a lick. The rich pork broth of guajillo chiles and hominy would be as satisfying on a Styrofoam plate at a swap meet. But this is a restaurant on 4th Street in Santa Monica, within pepita-spitting distance of the Pacific. ¶ Mercado isn’t simply repackaging a cuisine we tend to associate with humble mom-and-pop storefronts; it’s trying to reshape the way we think about Mexican food. We’re pretty site-specific when discussing Mexican food, exchanging tips about places with names like Tacos El Pecas and gladly driving massive lengths of freeway to experience some incontestably authentic rendering. Mercado makes you reconsider what “authentic” means. The interior is a modernist mash-up of tiles, mirrors, and long communal tables hewn from wood that could pass for oil-stained planks from the pier. Scrawled on the mirror above the dark banquettes are mentions of farmers’ market vegetables and hyperdetailed facts about the añejo of the week. This isn’t an eatery that gives patronizing design cues about what’s in the kitchen or one that aims to gentrify the offerings for folks reluctant to venture past their usual off-ramp. Sure, it may appear more democratic to suck down some jiggly cabeza tacos at the stand by the car wash on Pico, but few restaurants prove as seamlessly that zip code and trappings ultimately have little to do with the power of what is presented on the plate.

Jesse Gomez and Jose Acevedo launched Mercado earlier this year after working together at Taleo Grill, a forward-thinking (and now defunct) Mexican restaurant near an Irvine business park. Before that, Acevedo plied the stoves for the Hillstone and Wolfgang Puck restaurant groups, while Gomez was a manager at Houston’s and Katana, part of the Sushi Roku family of restaurants. OK, that’s a lot of corporate names, but Gomez, the 38-year-old grandson of Gustavo and Irene Montes, a couple from the state of Querétaro who started El Arco Iris in Highland Park in 1964, grew up doing his homework—literally—at those tables. He went on to earn a degree in psychology from Princeton, and after a flirtation with law school, Gomez found himself drawn back into the restaurant world, gaining the chops he’d need when he took over the arches and booths of El Arco Iris in 2005.

Located on York Boulevard, in a neighborhood where bougainvillea grows over splayed back fences and city streets wind onto the Arroyo Seco Parkway, El Arco Iris needed only an upgrade in the bar and a little Diego Rivera on the walls to keep pace with an evolving Highland Park. The art changed; Irene’s chilaquiles, in a torrid chile verde sauce, stayed the same. In 2009, Gomez opened Yxta (named after lawyer-novelist Yxta Maya Murray) in the produce district near Central Avenue. A trendy, industrially spare space where the small-batch mescal flows, it was a step closer to Mercado in terms of its vision and lack of visual cues. You don’t need a bunch of serapes on the wall to know that the arrachera—a strip of charred skirt steak that comes with a cheese enchilada—has been done right.

With Mercado, Gomez has thrown his grappling hook deep into the Westside, doubling down on Yxta’s hip aesthetic (both places were designed by New York-based Poonam Khanna) while banking on a less direct approach. Heritage, after all, hadn’t worked for the previous tenant, La Serenata de Garibaldi, whose beach-adjacent outpost never felt as rooted as the original near 1st and Boyle.

At Gomez’s other restaurants, free chips and salsa-bearing molcajetes are practical touches; here, where they might be considered ironic, they aren’t served. Instead of what’s expected, Mercado weaves a constant dialogue between the comforts of comida casera—patient home-style cooking that revolves around the steaming pot—and the energy of comida callejera, or street food, with its emphasis on efficiently delivered maximum effect. Acevedo will cook nopales slowly—cutting the cactus paddles into strips before sautéing them with garlic, a smidge of chile negro, and tomatillo—then turn them off at just the right moment so they remain brothy rather than become slimy: the embodiment of casera cooking. Pivoting, he’ll do the opposite with the elote callejero, unleashing chile piquín, cotija cheese, and lime on roasted corn kernels for a refined (as in heightened but not denatured) version of the charred cobs cooked at sidewalk grills.

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A native of Guanajuato, Acevedo is not one to be creative for creativity’s sake. He prepares his shrimp enchiladas with yellow mole straight up; there’s no improving on that texture when a tortilla is starting to get nice and juicy beneath a terrific sauce. At other times he adds only a subtle twist, like when he reconfigures Baja-style fish tacos by squeezing an aioli of chile de árbol under the battered flesh rather than supplying heat with the heap of fried chiles you might see at Tacos Baja Ensenada on Whittier Boulevard. Likewise, in place of the usual shredded carnitas, his are made from a large chunk of slow-cooked pork with vinegar-tinged cauliflower florets. What the carnitas lose in crispness they gain in natural moisture—far more satisfying than relying on lard to keep the meat from drying out. Frankly I’d love to see more along the lines of that cauliflower; despite the restaurant’s name and proximity to the farmers’ market, Acevedo always comes back to broccolini. A dull side, it’s a lackluster example of produce-driven cooking except when he Mexifies the roasted stalks by tossing them under alambres de arrachera, or ginger-glazed skirt steak skewers.

There may be no greater truism in dining than the notion that the kind of corpo-rate operations Acevedo and Gomez trained in are the enemy of authenticity. If you’re grand enough to have mission statements posted in the back rooms, hiring protocols, and HR departments, you couldn’t possibly cook up a good menudo. Acevedo can do legit Mexican (his tortilla with melted Oaxaca cheese and spit-roasted carne al pastor is one fine mula), but Mercado is often at its best precisely when it isn’t paying lip service to “the way it is really done.” Tuesday’s soup special is a stellar cream of lobster, for which Acevedo deglazes, then reduces, a blend of mirepoix and shells—a classic approach—before hitting it with a delicate layer of very nonclassical heat. It works. The way he forms his ceviche in a cup piled on a slice of grilled pineapple is a tad HoJo-ish, but cutting the fruit releases juices into the mixture of serrano chile, red pepper, and marinated whitefish, rendering the ceviche the ideal consistency for scooping onto a saltine. A ceviche that makes itself—it’s practically molecular.

I thought I’d dislike the scallops coated with crushed pumpkin seeds and arranged over oven-browned mashed potatoes; often that sort of crust prevents scallops from getting a good sear. Hooey! The guy pulled it off. The nutty flavor of the toasted seeds—a staple of afternoon strolls in the colonial cities of central Mexico—formed a compact with a ring of chipotle-peppercorn sauce. Sometimes it’s the unexpected scale of a cut that surprises. Acevedo serves the Shelton Farms turkey leg whole. Braised and moist, it glistens with a mole negro sauce every bit as complex as the one at El Sazon Oaxaqueño in Palms. That the portion is too big for one person doesn’t matter. I saw a group of friends make short work of it at the bar, wrapping hunks of the tender meat in handmade tortillas as the heavily tatted fellow mixing the drinks waved a sparking orange peel over a concoction.

Speaking of the bar, at least a handful of varietals from the burgeoning Mexican wine scene could stand to be represented among the 74 tequilas listed, but unlike many places, Mercado offers a serious exchange between the cocktail program and the food. I love the way the hibiscus-tinged Jamaica margarita plays off the jicama wrapper of a shrimp taco draped in pickled white cabbage slaw. The allusions unspool—aguas frescas kept cool in glass barrel jars, aproned ladies selling chile-spiked spears of cucumber, jicama, and papaya—but nothing is forced. Just as Thomas Keller might nod to Fernand Point with the butter-enhanced jus of a roasted chicken, Acevedo needs only a squirt of lime to conjure the parasol-bedecked pushcart.

Not all diners may get the specific references, but everyone gets the drift. A certain fluency is the natural outcome of living in a city filled with birrierías, tortillerías, and ice-shaving paleteros. When Mercado departs from the tried and true, it isn’t to bastardize; it’s to explore. The haul of shrimp on the tostadas served at places like Ostioneria Colima on Alvarado may have been the briny model for the sashimi strips stretched across Acevedo’s version. The sponge cake of the tres leches could have come from a pastelería where you help yourself with tongs and a plastic mesh basket. Only there it wouldn’t be freshly baked and oozing with condensed and evaporated milk. Another dessert, the flan, is rich enough to be a crème brûlée. Does it need the side of rompope, a celebratory eggnog? No, it’s essentially custard served with custard. But it’s a festive touch. For more than a few customers streaming in from the packed parking lots outside, it’s sentimental, too, bringing back memories of gatherings at Grandma’s house, where flowers grew out of Bustelo coffee cans and where you never got up from the table until you were way past full.

Mercado
1416 4th Street, Santa Monica, 310-526-7121

Best Dishes: Nopalitos, elote callejero, pozole (Sundays only), jicama taco with shrimp, alambres de arrachera, dos gringas (spit-roasted pastor), pastel de tres leches
Drinks: Extensive tequila and draft beer selection; smart cocktails but no Mexican wines
Atmosphere: Animated
Noise Level: Can get uncomfortably loud
Kid Friendly? Yes
Price Range: $7 (chicken tortilla soup) to $25 (carne asada plate)
Hours: Mon.-Wed., 5-10; Thu.-Fri., 5-midnight; Sat., 4-midnight; Sun., 4-10
Parking: Nearby lots
Reservations: Recommended
Credit Cards: All major

Bierbeisl

By Patric Kuh — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 16:46:00 GMT

Photograph by Andrea Bricco

You’ll find BierBeisl down the block from Sprinkles cupcakes in Beverly Hills. Fitted into oxblood bricks, the carved wood door looks properly ancestral, just what an Angeleno might expect of an Austrian restaurant, but the poured concrete, wood tables, and spare off-white walls in the tight space are in line with the modernist traditions a native of the landlocked nation might expect. At one table a foursome of diners is downing a bottle of Gemischte Satz, a carefree white wine that—varietal shmarietal—is made by fermenting different grapes together. A few tables away someone digs into plump sausages and sauerkraut as a wispy kaiserschmarrn dessert arrives nearby.

Lederhosen? Leaden steins? BierBeisl doesn’t go there. Deer antlers above the trio of schnapps bottles mounted on the main wall may well be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the baronial hunting lodge—or, for that matter, to every frat boy’s favorite, Jägermeister. The Alpine heights and quaint Austrian towns scrolling by on the digital picture frame atop a barrel near the entrance are the closest you’re going to get to evocations of Julie Andrews singing about crisp apple strudels and schnitzel with noodles. Except, of course, for the food itself. Twenty-seven-year-old Bernhard Mairinger is a disciplined, forward-thinking chef who isn’t out to reinvent Austrian food with Cal-Med flights of fancy. Whether it’s the grammel schmalz (a type of rendered pork fat) he serves sprinkled with bits of pork crackling in shot glass-size tubs, the Styrian pumpkin seed oil he uses to unite the flavors of a roast pork carpaccio with pretzel dumplings, the array of handcrafted fruit vinegars he splashes around, or the artisanal fruit schnapps that might cap a meal, Mairinger’s cooking is honest without being sentimental.

BierBeisl’s arrival creates an Austrian triangle that extends from countryman Norbert Wabnig’s Beverly Hills Cheese Store (which supplies BierBeisl with a nutty, hard bergkäse) to Spago a few blocks away. In fact, not far from BierBeisl, on Rodeo Drive, Mama Weiss offered a Hungarian-slanted rendition of Austrian stuffed cabbage and paprika chicken in the 1930s and ’40s. Decades later Arnold Schwarzenegger tried for a slapdash Austrian hybrid at Venice’s Schatzi on Main, where quesadillas would precede either a plate of cappellini chinois or zürcher geschnetzeltes, a veal stew. What’s telling is that Wolfgang Puck, a son of Carinthia (the southern Austrian province bordering Slovenia), thought it best to give us California cuisine rather than anything from his homeland. When he was manning the burners at Ma Maison, the city was already busy writing its own culinary story, one that revolved around olive trees and sunshine. Fortunately, before Schatzi went dark in 2009, Wurstküche began slinging sausages downtown, setting off a wavelet of Teutonic beer-and-brat joints that are the natural antecedents to Mairin-ger’s more ambitious venture.

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Perhaps a bigger budget would have allowed for something grander than a shopfront on an unprepossessing stretch of Little Santa Monica Boulevard, yet the drive-by aspect (keep an eye out for the shingle over the door) is fitting, beisls being the neighborhood stalwarts of Vienna where you might pop in for a plate of goulash or a cold brew. The lack of airs works. A compact bar looks onto a pair of plump white taps dispensing Salzburg’s Steigl beer; at the adjacent counter customers are practically face to face with the chef, ever unshaved as he concentrates on the stove.

Beisl or no beisl, the obsessive attention to detail in Mairinger’s cooking isn’t like anything you’re going to find in a Viennese basement. He worked as chef de cuisine at Patina under Tony Esnault, and he surveys his native cooking from the same vantage point that a generation of highly trained French chefs contemplated their own from when they reinvented the bistro a decade ago. It’s authentic, all right—a farmhouse aesthetic heightened by a rippling echo of Hapsburg grandeur and unerring technique. A golden veal bouillon, clear from patient simmering, is filled with herb-flecked pancake noodles. A mound of whitefish tartare adds tang to the refreshing chilled cucumber-yogurt soup. For the hot parsnip soup, Mai-ringer spoons on deep green parsley puree to accentuate the hominess of the root vegetable with its herbal intensity.

He is especially good in that way, elevating dishes with impeccable timing and a knack for minimalism. His salads showcase Austrian vinegars as much as they do the sprightly greens he mixes with chervil and micro thyme. In one, the freshly cut Granny Smith he juliennes cranks up the wattage of the Grüner Veltliner vinegar; in another, Mairinger contrasts a plummier, more cidery Gala apple with an aged pear balsamic from distiller and vinegar maker Alois Gölles. He hones the flavors in an appetizer of white asparagus and sweetbreads by calling on the acidity of a Meyer lemon peel confit. The cold cabanossi beef and pork sausage is laid out on a rectangular plate almost like sashimi, with florets of house-pickled cauliflower, dabs of a smooth tarragon mustard, and slices of sunflower seed-bedecked country bread drawing out every down-home note. It’s an uncomplicated dish with surprising complexity.

The sense of pride in representing a culture that has little traction in these parts extends to the drinks. Keg lines are cleaned assiduously to ensure a foamy head on the Austrian, German, and Czech beers Mairinger has selected. The wine list is practically an education in winemaking in the latitudes just below those where grain alcohol begins to dominate. Along with versions of the ubiquitous Grüner, you’ll find wines that, arranged by region and estate, lead to the gorgeously expansive berry stirrings of a Bründlmayer red made with the St. Laurent grape in the granitic northeast. Joyful, quaffable, layered, it embodies the spirit of Mitteleuropa the way a great pinot noir can pierce the mists of Burgundy.

Nowhere is Mairinger’s impulse to enlighten more evident than with the sausages, which he sources from Continental Sausage in Glendale. Part of his artistry lies in allowing a brat to be simply a brat and yet so much more. Pan seared (careful—sear too much and the casing will burst) and accompanied by sauerkraut, which he doctors with apple and juniper berries, the bratwursts are like no others in L.A. The wieners here are served as a pair alongside a roll and slathered with tarragon mustard. They’re delicate paragons with everyday attitude. These are wieners that still say “Yo!” Probably the most refined dish on the sausage menu is the weisswurst—plump white veal numbers that are poached in milk and draped in nutmeg-sprinkled ribbons of white onions. Their austere subtlety offers a sharp counterpoint to the peppery debreziner, the most spiced and Hungarian of all the sausages, which he loads onto a mustard-shmeared pretzel epi with raw cross-cut shallots and a dusting of curry. I’ve heard angels humming “The Radetzky March” when I’ve bitten into this.

That dialogue between the delicate and the hearty is something Mairinger carries throughout the menu. It’s a tough balancing act. Go a little too far in either direction, and you lose what makes this cooking so compelling. The freshly grated horseradish arranged on the house-cured arctic char appetizer might take its cue from the freshly grated wasabi that every ambitious sushi spot dispenses, but it lacks the rip-snort effect needed to electrify the mild fish. A less poetic but more assertive spoonful of processed horseradish would do a better job of dressing up the flavor. The duo of pork swerves too far the other way. Piled into a bowl, the combination of braised cheek, crisp belly, crushed potatoes, roasted kale, shimeji mushrooms, and braised shallots is supposed to represent a rustic ideal, but one element obscures another in the rush to make the point.

Then again, the schnitzel and potato salad are an almost perfect pairing. The warm, mustardy fingerlings, with their hint of chestnut flavor, act as a bracing foil to the golden breading of the pounded meat—turkey, pork, and veal are options. When Mairinger adds basil puree to the fingerlings that accompany the whitefish, the garnish illuminates the fragile purity of the fillet. You know this cooking, and yet you don’t. You’ve had some rendering of spaetzle in three of your last five gastropub meals. But as crafted by Mairinger—who rolls egg dough on a board before cutting it with a spatula into boiling water and searing the ringlets in a pan with clarified butter and a spear of rosemary—these dumplings command the dish, even if they’re the garnish of the mushroom-strewn, umlaut-adorned beef medallions “Jäger Art.”

Perhaps it’s the long winters, but Austrians have a thing for prolonging the summer flavors of fruits either by transforming them into compotes or distilling them into schnapps. As he does with the wines and beers, Mairinger allows us to appreciate how fine these after-dinner drinks can be by stocking gems from two celebrated producers, Hans Reisetbauer and Alois Gölles. Neither the schnapps nor the eau de vie is chilled, the way the French tend to serve it, and a shot—poured into a tulip-shaped liqueur glass instead of a snifter—suddenly seems like something that could be enjoyed every other day. All linger and expand on the palate, as if an entire landscape has been compressed in a copper still: Gölles’s aged apple schnapps transports you to orchards in the Alpine foothills; Reisetbauer’s rowanberry eau de vie captures the craggy peaks in its clean burn.

Fruits are employed as building blocks in desserts as well. In the hands of pastry chef Lissette Rodriguez, a strudel is artfully stretched dough that can barely contain a payload of thinly cut apples or the season’s first cherries. The kaiserschmarrn, a souffléd batter glistening with sugar, is a simple pleasure that’s energized by plum jam. The clever use of preserved fruit is even more pronounced in the Sacher torte, a legendary cake first served at Vienna’s Hotel Sacher and whose name alone can prompt the first bars of “The Blue Danube.” Instead of a touristy cliché, BierBeisl’s version is a lively exchange between airy biscuit and dark chocolate, candied orange and loosely whipped cream. It’s the cooked-down apricots, however, that set it all off. The last time I went for lunch, the hostess offered me a slice. “You normally come for dinner,” she said. I felt a twinge of guilt that, unaware I was a critic, she figured I was becoming a regular. But as I lifted a forkful of the torte, I found myself thinking maybe I will.

Water Grill

By Patric Kuh — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Photographs by Andrea Bricco

King’s Seafood Company has perfected a theatrical version of the seafaring dining hall. Located in Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada, its dozen King’s Fish House restaurants let you sit under lazily spinning fans in a room hung with taxidermied trophy fish and placards bearing fisherman jokes as if you’re in some camera-ready backwater or on a pier or a bend in the bayou—lots of settings that aren’t, to name one, the Commons at Calabasas. In this world, all is kettle-to-skillet abundance. The chowder has a lovely thickness for the Vermont soda crackers to recline on, the specials are invariably crusted with nuts, and the oyster shooters go down easy.

King’s Seafood aimed for a different effect when it opened Water Grill downtown in 1989. This was the flagship, an elegant destination on the ground floor of the beaux arts Pacific Center, where the sommelier could pull the cork on a bottle of Corton and talented chefs—Providence’s Michael Cimarusti and M.B. Post’s David LeFevre both cooked here—were encouraged to blaze out beyond the house style, obsessively using tweezers to add microgreens to sashimi. But the restaurant was showing its age. The wide stone columns that once appeared so stately began to give the space a cavernlike feel, while the modernist murals, heavy linens, and peach palette signaled a notion of bygone luxury.

An update was in order. In its $1.5 million effort King’s Seafood has drawn a giant vacuum over the casual culinary spots that dominate the scene. It’s added zeitgeisty touches like rag napkins, subway tiles, and repurposed bottles that serve as decanters. A barkeep in a candy-striped shirt and black waistcoat (the de rigueur bar cloth in his jeans back pocket) mixes cocktails and fills pitchers of beer for the business types who eat lobster rolls at the bar. Yes, pitchers of beer at Water Grill. Lest things seem too publike, there’s plenty of well-stuffed leather seating, while the profusion of fishing poles arranged on the dark mural looks more art installation than maritime kitsch.

To bring the cooking along with the interior, the company has hired Damon Gordon, an energetic Brit who sports a mop of hair above a high fade. Trained in England at the Roux brothers’ esteemed Waterside Inn before spending a decade at various Ian Schra-ger hotels, he’s got classical chops but a contemporary outlook. You see that dichotomy in dishes like the Dover sole, which Gordon bathes in a frothy lemon-honed butter sauce that’s just been tipped from the pan, and in the rustic Virginia black bass that he adorns with sprigs of thyme, a mod approach that places the ingredient front and center. Liberated, integrated—I’m not sure what the right word is, but the new formula works. I loved the old Water Grill, but the venue suffered from a structural tension, its refined elements butting up against the reality that a lot of customers weren’t there for the room; they were there to suck down a dozen Skookums at the brass rail.

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Gordon cooks with a quiet authority. For his chowder he renders bacon and then mixes in onions, thinly sliced fingerlings, and a clam stock before adding whole clams in their shells. Lighter than the other versions I’ve had here, it somehow conveys the dish’s long history, back to when it was a simple fisherman’s stew. Strands of colored seaweed give phenomenal depth to the miso soup. Even his fish tacos—a risky gambit for an Ips-wich native working in America’s taco capital—are good, the clean flavor of the cod contrasting with julienned jicama and red cabbage as a salsa of blistered tomatoes and Fresno chiles drips from the corn tortillas. Gordon brings the same subtlety to the fish-and-chips, the hunk of cod fried in a beer batter. The sauce in a big platter of Manila clams gets reduced enough to allow you to use the shells to scoop up tiles of leek greens and bacon. I ordered it with a ten-ounce pour of Devotion Belgian Pale Ale (brewed in San Diego County’s San Marcos), and it was magical, the hoppiness of the beer teasing out every nuance of the sauce.

The oysters at Water Grill are still the best in the city. When you think about it, the hyperspecific way we talk about the provenance of food these days has been part of the conversation about bivalves from the beginning. There’s a meatiness to the Rincón de Ballenas from Baja that can be tamed with a bit of horseradish. Intensify the crystallinity of the Hama Hama from Puget Sound with diced shallot. Nothing more than a knifepoint of cocktail sauce is needed to unleash the minerality of the Stingray from Chesapeake Bay. The oysters are available individually for less than three bucks a pop, too, which means you can compare salinity, clarity, and a host of halftones for less than $10.

Just don’t come here expecting a bargain. Despite the more laid-back touches, a meal adds up fast. After all, Water Grill remains an ingredient-driven restaurant that has the means to provision its kitchen with some of the world’s best fish. But that m.o. is not enough to keep a few of the dishes afloat. In fact, the skate wing that arrived at my table smelled so badly of ammonia that I had to send it back. The five shrimp that form the centerpiece of the $28 shrimp Louie salad are pristine specimens, but the rest of the dish—two leaves of butter lettuce, an avocado spear, and a cold rasher—doesn’t live up to the cost. In contrast, the shrimp and crab Louie at King’s Fish House is loaded with olives, carrots, and cucumbers yet goes for half the price. And Water Grill’s lobster roll clocks in at $32, which kind of misses the point. Slinging a fine ingredient into a bun is supposed to be a delicious and democratizing takedown, not an opportunity to charge more.

This is a case where keeping the restaurant from going too casual would actually help: A little all-around pampering allows you to forget the prices. On certain evenings the bartender puts out cutlery and a pewter bucket for shells; with the arrival of salted sourdough rolls, I’ve felt as if I’ve been spoiled by the kind of direct, no-frills service perfected in the American bar and grill. On other nights, though, the rolls never materialize, and the food comes before the cutlery. If this were Red Lobster, I’d be fine with it, but I’m less fine with it at a place where I have to pay a $3 supplement for the escabeche sauce to go with my $40 loup de mer.

But what a loup de mer it is. In fact, one of my favorite things at the new Water Grill is the whole fish—the catch of the day prepared as simply as possible. Butterflied and wood roasted, the fish is an austere beauty needing only a squeeze of lemon, which has itself been browned in the oven, to accentuate the purity of the flesh. (OK, the side of raisin-flecked Napa cabbage slaw helps.) On a different night I tried it with the esca-beche, which Gordon envisions as a sweet finishing broth (rather than the traditional vinegar-laced preparation), mining it with Picholine olives and threads of saffron to send the fish in a Sardinian direction. Gorgeous.

That’s the sort of creativity I look forward to seeing more of. It’s apparent when he highlights the flavor of the Norwegian ocean trout, a fish one shade more assertive than arctic char, by using a sherry vinegar note in an asparagus puree. With sautéed Alaskan wild halibut he wilts fava bean leaves in a court bouillon that’s faint with white wine and peppercorns, a heady broth that seems to nod to pho. It’s a reminder that verities—in this case, how fresh herbs can bring almost anything to life—cut across national lines.

The desserts underscore a similar point: At first glance they’re steak house staples, and on second glance they are, too. Free of irony or allusion, they might feature a twist or two but are unabashed about their everyday roots. The ribbon of lime granité that runs through a quenelle of sweet milk sorbet accompanying a key lime pie is as creative as things get. Still, the pie does what it should, delivering a bracing kick, and while the multilayered chocolate cake is standard fare, anybody who likes chocolate cake would have a tough time moping over it.

Before Cimarusti left the kitchen in 2006, pastry chef Wonyee Tom would fry apple beignets to order and crown them with pecan ice cream. It’s tempting to be wistful over the Water Grill of that era, but I’m glad to see the restaurant get back on course. One night the person serving my table was a waitress I recognized from a decade of dining at Water Grill. Somebody was panning their iPhone across the glistening sea urchins, cherrystones, and crab claws that are splayed by the trio of oyster shuckers who occupy the prow of the bar. There was a game on the TV for the business travelers who were out on the town. In the background, flames would occasionally rise up from a stove in the kitchen. The room was hopping. At the end of the meal my waitress pressed an index finger to the tabletop’s exposed wood surface. “I miss my crumber,” she said, but I don’t think she meant it at all.

Water Grill
544 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, 213-891-0900**

Best Dishes: Raw bar, chowder, steamed clams, fish-and-chips, ocean trout with asparagus chutney, key lime pie
Drinks: Excellent carafe selection, plentiful craft beers, full bar
Atmosphere: Cheery
Noise Level: Moderate
Kid Friendliness: Come one, come all
Price Range: $2.25 (single Bahia Falsa oyster) to $145 (“The King” iced shellfish platter)
Hours: Mon.-Thu., 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.-11 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.-10 p.m.
Parking: Valet, $8
Reservations: Recommended
Credit Cards: All major

Cooks County

By Patric Kuh — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:17:00 GMT

Photograph by Andrea Bricco

Walking into Cooks County for the first time, you’ll feel like you’re on familiar turf: The busboy wears a striped butcher’s apron, the blackboard lists wines that are drinking well, and the concrete floor appears functional rather than fashionable, while the logo on the menu—weathered, slightly splotchy—looks as if it were applied by a worn rubber stamp. Perhaps it’s all part of a trend that puts authenticity before pretension, but here they take it further than most. You want produce-centric food? Hell, Cooks County names 41 farmers at the bottom of its menu. The bar stools, made from old metal tractor seats, push the agrarian theme home.

A partnership between restaurateur couple Claudio and Adria Blotta and chef couple Daniel Mattern and Roxana Jullapat, Cooks County is both market driven and market tested. In an age when farmers have hashtags and followers, getting aggie is hardly cutting edge, but the place is inspiring: Working with great raw materials is a big responsibility, one that this restaurant takes quite seriously. Few ventures are as wholesome and almost quaintly well intended—“Cardoons are part of the thistle family,” a waitress lets me know one night when I order a fried batch—and fewer still are so focused on expressing their culinary sensibility through the bounty of the fields.

Mattern and Jullapat have been knocking around L.A. kitchens for more than a decade. Their shared stints at Campanile, Lucques, and A.O.C. (in addition to a solo one for Jullapat at the original Bastide) preceded a move to Ammo, where Mattern headed the kitchen and Jullapat made the pastries. Claudio and Adria Blotta met at Campanile, where he was a manager turned partner and she was a waitress. For their first restaurant together, the Blottas launched the somewhat confusing (and now shuttered) La Terza—a 3rd Street hotel dining room where Gino Angelini oversaw the food, Jason Travi was the chef, and Nancy Silverton kind of did desserts. Barbrix, their Silver Lake hangout, has fared far better, bringing in a nightly crowd that knows its primitivo from its blaufränkisch. To create Cooks County, the four nabbed the space on Beverly Boulevard that briefly held Bistro LQ and for many years the beloved Mimosa. At lunch, when the broad windows filter the sun, the room’s austere decor—exposed rafters, air ducts, and lightbulbs, with plain white walls—has the atmosphere of an atelier.

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We’re so accustomed to hearing chefs and publicists use phrases like “only the freshest seasonal ingredients” that it’s easy to tune out the subject. (What, you don’t scour the bins where the wilted, bruised stuff is stacked?) But strange as it may sound, constructing a menu around the most flavorful fruits and vegetables demands the utmost commitment from a chef. It takes a lot of effort just to get those elements to the kitchen and a whole lot of skill to know how to harness the produce without mucking it up. Mattern brilliantly assumes that charge. With the celery root salad, he’s a gifted matchmaker, using a mustard dressing to unite the earthiness of the root vegetable slaw and the vibrancy of skin-on Pink Lady slices. It’s as if the recipe were lifted from an Elizabeth David paean to France and given a farmers’ market twist. Equally wonderful are those fried cardoons, which arrive in cocoons of a gossamer Parmesan-laced batter and with a ramekin of aioli. Combining the robust and the ethereal, they are graced with a hint of fried sage.

If there is a theoretical undercurrent to Mattern’s wide-ranging technique, it is to provide what each ingredient requires and nothing more. You can sense the range in something as subtle as steamed clams in a broth thick with white beans and blanched garlic; the crosshatched grilled bread bobbing on the side is ideal for sopping up the hearty sauce. More classico are thick ribbons of hand-cut tagliatelle smothered in a short rib ragù and draped with dandelion greens. Nosing closer to the Middle East, Mattern gives a Levantine shading to a braised chicken leg, accenting it with roasted cauliflower and lashings of cumin, citrus zest, and ground green olives. At other times his style is deeply American. Grill-scored, butterflied Idaho trout sits on a mound of pureed celery root, a dish so reminiscent of the uncluttered manly cooking found in a WASP fishing camp, it would make Ralph Lauren weep.

Mattern’s pork loin practically purrs on a helping of wide-bore polenta integrale and is finished with a slice of Duroc bacon, with its notes of brown sugar and applewood smoke. You need only taste the dish to understand that he is more than capable of casting an eye over heritage breeds in search of flavor. Yet time and time again, it is what’s pickled rather than what’s plucked that seems to reflect the soulful core of his cooking. He turns the usual equation—meat + vegetables—on its head and can make the protein seem like the garnish.

As good as the grilled yellowtail is in a buttermilk bun, it’s the strands of spicy cabbage and the accompanying house-pickled cauliflower florets that elevate the lunchtime sandwich. In a salad of simple lettuces, he adds a few discs of radish, a few squirts of lemon to accent the delicate butter leaf lettuce without overwhelming it. With the minimalist appetizer of shaved fennel, he lets the sliced Schaner Farms blood oranges bring out the contrast with a tangy pop. The grilled Delta asparagus compresses it all into one pitch-perfect composition. The diameter of a quarter, the sweet spears are thick enough that they can be cooked over fire without mushing up; scoops of creamy ricotta serve as a backdrop for the mix of Trufflebert Farm hazelnuts, garlic, lemon zest, and hazelnut oil pounded with a mortar and pestle. The dish—with its tonal control of the elements—is exquisite. Here the modern vegetable-oriented style has been shaken free of its folksiness, and we are left in an affecting place where talent has done justice to its source of inspiration.

Still, Cooks County has its lapses. Factoring the cost of complimentary bread into the prices would be an improvement on primly charging $3 for some slices. And I’ve had a waitress ask how I’d like my confit duck leg cooked—a moot point for a vittle that’s spent several hours simmering in fat. But most surprising is how the kitchen goes into a tailspin as the orders rain down—a fairly basic failing for such an experienced crew. The celery root puree loses its romance when instead of a ladled helping, it is a splat delivered by a frantic cook. I’ve had pea shoots dripping with butter—when slammed, the kitchen shovels spoonfuls of them into the pans—under a piece of roasted salmon bearing a shaky dribble of aioli that could pass for a Pollock parody.

What never seems to waver are Jullapat’s offerings. The way she extends the rigor of the house style through baking is one of Cooks County’s delights. With the same curiosity Mattern has, she explores grains other than wheat, using chickpea flour to make a vegetarian pancake with spicy carrot salad, toasted almonds, and cumin yogurt that’s a magnificent dish to share. Jullapat transforms spelt flour into a pretzel snack that she presents with mustard dipping sauce (call me old-fashioned, but I miss the shiny finish of lye on the pretzel’s brown curves), and—channeling her exploration into the realm of desserts—transforms rice flour into fritters that are shot through with rose water. She seems to dismiss altogether the flourishes many pastry chefs indulge in. The deep roast of a graham cracker crust might be as far as she’ll go to impose herself on a creation, relying instead on the force of simplicity.

Terrific fruit only heightens the effect. Big, juicy Ruby Red grapefruit segments give the layers of coconut sponge cake and dollops of lemon curd and Devonshire cream something to go up against. Presented in a glass coupe, the kind Aunt Myrna would serve canned fruit cocktail in, it’s an almost thrilling dish that is playfully nostalgic and forward thinking at the same time. In my favorite dessert, a tangelo custard pie, Jullapat captures a sense of downright innocence, the folded whipped cream loosening up the carefully sourced citrus. It’s like the ultimate Orangesicle, powerful enough to transport you from the room full of smart phones and skinny jeans into a timeless domain.

Cooks County
8009 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles

Best Dishes: Celery root rémoulade; grilled Delta asparagus with toasted hazelnut vinaigrette; fried cardoons; braised chicken with fregola sarda, green olives, and preserved lemon; hazelnut brown butter cake; tangelo custard pie
Drinks: Interesting wine list and craft beers
Atmosphere: Animated
Noise Level: Moderate
Kid Friendliness: Fine, if they eat their veggies
Price Range: $3 (bread) to $23 (duck breast)
Hours: Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11:30-2:30. Dinner: Mon.-Thu., 6-11; Fri.-Sat., 6-12; Sun., 6-10. Brunch: Sat.-Sun., 10-3
Parking: Street only
Reservations: Recommended for dinner
Credit Cards: All major
Contact: 323-653-8009

Post & Beam

By Patric Kuh — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:40:00 GMT

Photograph by Ryan Robert Miller

Going to Post & Beam requires some self-control. There’s the heap of rib tips with potato salad you could stop and order at Phillips Bar-B-Que on Crenshaw. At the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard you could make a left into the narrow parking lot of M&M Soul Food for gravy-smothered pork chops and warm corn muffins. Instead jog west onto Stocker, then hang a right on Santa Rosalia, which skirts the vast parking lot of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. Enter at the second gate. The building across from the Debbie Allen Dance Academy is where you’re headed. ¶ Dressed in stucco and wood, Post & Beam could be a prototype for a new line of restaurants by a big operator like Houston’s. But the interior is too personal, too idiosyncratic for that. A flat-screen TV is invariably playing sports, while olive green bentwood chairs crowd a space that has ventlike schoolhouse light fixtures dangling above the counter. Tomatoes and pea shoots grow on the patio near folksy floral-print two-seaters that recall a William Eggleston portrait of a Mississippi matron. A poster composed of old album covers overlooks the open kitchen—Curtis Mayfield, a young Richard Pryor, the O’Jays eyeing slabs of ribs glazed in honey powder that the bandanna-wearing cooks crank out.

Is it soul food? The steaming side of collard greens and the bowl of soupy black-eyed peas might qualify, but what kind of soul food restaurant gives you the option of keeping pork out of the dish? Is it a Southern-inflected gastropub? Not exactly. Chef Govind Armstrong isn’t about to be boxed in by any one tradition. As a child he’d help prepare food for the frequent parties his Costa Rican mom threw. At 13 he walked up Horn Avenue and entered through the back door of the original Spago in West Hollywood. “The first person I saw was Nancy,” he says, referring to La Brea Bakery founder Nancy Silverton, who was the restaurant’s pastry chef. “She was working at a mixer that was taller than I was.” Soon chef de cuisine Mark Peel put him to work breaking down crates of Chino Farms produce.

During the last decade, Armstrong has followed a somewhat sawtooth trajectory. His partnership in the early aughts with Ben Ford at Chadwick in Beverly Hills earned him wonderboy status. Then came Table 8, a boîte on Melrose where the white voile-draped interior and the graffiti-tagged exterior strained for originality. He swapped that out for the more casual 8 oz. Burger Bar, which closed last year, but not before spinning off a few satellites (one is slated to open at LAX later this year).

After just a few months, things at Post & Beam feel nicely settled. His business partner Brad Johnson went on to become a partner of BLT Steak after operating Georgia, a high-end Southern-style favorite on Melrose in the mid-1990s. David Borrego, who worked at Mortons and the Raymond, runs the dining room and seems to have instructed the waitstaff that being efficient doesn’t mean you can’t also be yourself. “These darned new openers,” says the waitress as she struggles to uncork a bottle of affordable cab from the short list. “I’m going back to my old one.”

Working the grill in a plaid shirt and his signature waist-length dreadlocks, Armstrong puts out smart, unassuming food that draws effortlessly from an array of sources. The Middle East provides inspiration for the appetizer of chickpeas served three ways—whole, flash fried for crispness, or as a puree under charred octopus tentacles. The julienne of preserved lemon that’s mixed in recalls a tagine, but only as a whisper. Deviled eggs show off the same kind of pitch-perfect layering while riffing on the hors d’oeuvres Armstrong helped make as a boy. He amps up the yolk with whole-grain mustard and horseradish before laying on thick flakes of house-smoked catfish. The crowning slaw of butter radishes is as much a detonator as it is a finishing touch.

At heart Armstrong is a modern California cook. For one thing, he knows the power of good produce. He is idealistic enough to source greens from the South Central Farmers’ Cooperative and cool enough not to make a big deal about it. That arugula salad is not just the pro forma rendering of what you see on every other menu in L.A. The sherry vinaigrette and the freshly roasted hazelnuts provide a meaty counterpoint to the salad’s herbal piquancy. Likewise, Armstrong approaches sauces in a less-is-more manner that was no doubt influenced by his time at Spago. Where Wolfgang Puck showed what can be achieved by easing up on the beurre blanc, Armstrong reveals the remarkable sauces that can be fashioned in a wood-burning oven. The one on the appetizer of plump turkey sausage meatballs is my favorite. Roasting pans of tomatoes provide the base; a hodgepodge of guajillo and arbol chiles, the complexity. Blended but barely strained, it’s rustic in the most fundamental way.

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In a sense, Armstrong’s restaurant is postgastro and, judging by the amalgam of ethnicities that work and eat here, postracial. If ever there was a hyphenate restaurant, this one is it. Armstrong’s approach to the main courses is so minimalist and practical that they mirror the democratic post-and-beam architectural style that served as the ideal behind Southern California’s midcentury subdivisions. Topping out at $23, each of the main courses comes with a pair of sides, which gives them the generosity of a blue plate special.

In fact, matching the main courses with the sides is one of the central pleasures of the restaurant. Will it be roasted fingerlings and cauliflower florets with anchovy-laced salsa verde to go with the sautéed salmon? Should you get them with chicken cooked crisp in a cast-iron pan instead? Or how about the marbled sirloin that sits in a tangy homemade steak sauce? Those airy mashed potatoes—Armstrong uses very little butter—may be the ticket if you’re wanting comfort food. Chunks of sweet potato send those black-eyed peas into the realm of down-home cooking, while broccolini spears dusted with chili powder and browned garlic is from the contemporary California playbook. They’d pair well with the beer-brined pork chop, but it’s the contrasting minerality of the side of long-cooked mustard greens that reminds you why pork and greens is one of the great unions.

At its best Armstrong’s cooking makes no claims about where it comes from, leaving the chef free to draw on shared culinary customs and philosophies. It’s a direct style full of subtle technique—for instance, he avoids the common mistake of overreducing the sauce for the braised short ribs—but devoid of culinary piety. Armstrong doesn’t have the $30,000 pizza oven some launches invest in. He doesn’t use Molino Caputo 00 flour that all the artisans favor. Stippled with wild mushrooms and chopped kale, his is a pie that’s not striving for wispy thinness; it’s about the basic pleasure of pizza. There’s wheat germ baked into a crust that with the right wrist action can be folded into a workmanlike slice. The only version that falls short is heaped with the same broccolini that made for such a neat side: Instead of a charred concentration, its flavor is diluted, registering as little more than something green washing around in tomato sauce.

In fact, produce makes the kitchen trip up more than once—a surprise, given how good Armstrong can be with the stuff. I’ve had brown romaine leaves in my Caesar. (You’d think checking for that is more important than cutting a decorative notch into the thickest part of the rib.) And why be specific on the menu about using Braeburns for the apple crisp when the crumble they are buried under is like kibble? (A visit to the nearby Leimert Park Cobbler Lady would be instructive.)

Far more satisfying is the panna cotta, a jiggly rendition whose cream has been cooked with vanilla pods in a water bath and allowed to set slowly. Even better is the freshly baked biscuit that the kitchen splits in two, toasting the sugar-sprinkled halves before filling them with whipped crème fraîche and juicy berries.

Food like this has an emotional tug that is as important to the atmosphere as anything adorning the room. Just as Armstrong grew up working in kitchens, Brad Johnson comes from a tradition of hospitality. His father, a dapper onetime salesman at New York men’s clothier Paul Stuart, owned the Cellar, a supper club on the Upper West Side. At the end of the last set he’d send loyal customers into the night saying, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” Seeing Johnson smile at a group of happy new arrivals, it’s clear this is a place that means a lot to the staff and to the diners, whether it’s the guy with a soul patch and tweed cap downing an ale at the bar or the group of dressy young professionals poring over the one-page menu.

Photograph by Ryan Robert Miller

POST & BEAM
3767 West Santa Rosalia Drive, Baldwin Hills, 323-299-5599

Best dishes: Deviled eggs, grilled octopus with garbanzos, boneless short ribs, cast-iron chicken, beer-brined pork chop, long-cooked greens, black-eyed peas, vanilla panna cotta, buttermilk biscuit with blackberries
Drinks: Craft beers and short wine list
Atmosphere: Lively
Noise Level: Moderate
Kid Friendliness: Good
Price Range: $3 (focaccia) to $23 (sirloin steak)
Hours: Mon.-Thu., 5-10; Fri.-Sat., 5-11
Parking: Free in the plaza lot
Reservations: Not accepted
Credit Cards: All major

Milo and Olive

By Patric Kuh — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Lisa Romerein

In the morning, Milo and Olive is still calm. You can sit at one of the eight counter seats eating a bowl of stone-ground grits with sautéed chanterelles and an egg, sunny side up, feeling as if you’re part of the working crew. A cook weighs out pizza dough on a digital scale; another checks a broad pot steaming on the stove. A young woman in a pink hairband peers into the wood-burning oven and tends to the embers. Meat is being fed into grinders for sausages. When an order for muesli comes in, a tall Tupperware container appears and a moist scoop is plopped into a cup. Adorned with thin slices of one of the organic pippins on display, it is a great way to begin the day.

Soon the quiet will be shattered. That communal table where a guy happily reads Lopez and Plaschke over a cup of coffee and buttered toast will fill with a crowd here for chef Evan Funke’s rustic cooking and Zoe Nathan’s neotraditionalist baking. By high noon the atmosphere could be called a collision of sorts. A woman with a Saint John’s Health Center ID clipped to the lapel of her pantsuit tucks into a salad of Coleman Family Farms lettuces with squishy cubes of Hachiya persimmons. A teen who has appropriated his grandfather’s hopsack blazer savors the fried lemon wedge atop the calamari. Two guys at the counter look like they gave up on the Kogi line. Over at the other marble-topped communal table, a bunch of women in good haircuts sporting all the shades of Eileen Fisher commemorate their get-together with cell phone pics.

With a menu that’s unchanging from 11 a.m., when breakfast mode is shed, to 11 p.m, when the last pizza with Calabrian chiles goes out, Milo and Olive is one of those ventures that seeks to obliterate demarcations between meals. Lunch, dinner—these are abstract junctures to a growing cadre of places (the Larder, Maison Giraud, and BLD come to mind) that can feed you mightily with nary a look at the clock. Milo and Olive both fits into the trend and marks a watershed for Nathan and her husband, Josh Loeb, who oversees the business.

Their talents first came together in 2006. That was when Nathan was hired as pastry chef at Loeb’s new restaurant, Rustic Canyon (marriage came later), a place that slung a moneyed canyon vibe onto produce-driven cooking (with plenty of pricey bottles of Oregon pinot noir). Huckleberry, a bakery and café the couple debuted in 2009, highlighted Nathan’s faux-innocent pastries. It was an immediate hit. Hers is an approach that is as dependent on the romance of baking as it is on rigor. Nathan’s breads are gorgeously unaffected, their floury surfaces white from the proofing baskets; her pastries have a hard-won lightness, the sticky buns just the right amount of butter, nuts, and sugar. The offerings are stringently executed but not frozen by professionalism; everything seems like it’s been prepared that morning for the best PTA bake sale ever. But Huckleberry has a romanticized coffee shop as its ideal, keeping food choices to soups, salads, sandwiches, and rotisserie chicken that it stops serving at 7 p.m.

Milo and Olive, which sits along Wilshire between the old Santa Monica tobacco shop the Tinder Box and a high-end women’s consignment store, ramps up the degree of difficulty considerably. With an open, beamed ceiling and a mere 24 seats, it’s not much larger than the Sweet Rose Creamery, an ice cream place in the Brentwood Country Mart the couple found time to open in 2010. Wine bottles vie for space in the bakery case, and reservations aren’t accepted—which explains the dagger stares you get from the queue of diners if you linger over an empty plate. Milo and Olive aims to be a spot to grab takeout or nab a seat for a quick bite, but it also wants to lay claim to some culinary cred—an all-day provisioner that can still give shout-outs to its farmers while showcasing quasi-garagiste wines like Donkey & Goat’s Roussanne from the Sierra foothills. It may be casual, but this is gastro territory.

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van Funke came up through the brutally difficult kitchen at Spago, working under Lee Hefter for three years. Some of the intelligent efficiency of that kitchen—at full speed it can serve 500 diners a day—is clear in Milo and Olive’s menu. The skillet of freshly steamed clams draped in tendrils of parsley and the fry-up of calamari served with a shot of soupy chimi-churri are the only two dishes in which all the ingredients are taken from a raw to a cooked state at the time of ordering; everything else that’s not a dessert can be whipped together with pre-prepped ingredients and a flurry of movements: a splash of stock, a pinch of butter and herbs. At its best this style has a certain bravado, as if Funke were on a mission to see how much clutter can be stripped from a dish without losing quality. Big slabs of McGrath Family Farms pumpkins seem to have been pried moments earlier from a roasting dish. The accompanying drizzle of buckwheat honey and a hit of black pepper lend the soft flesh a layered complexity. Crackling duck leg, a moist confit beauty, rests atop a jumble of See Canyon apple wedges, chestnuts, and charred brussels sprouts, a hint of saba and red wine agrodolce providing all the torque the combination needs.

Though always robust, the dishes are the product of some delicate fine-tuning. Tuscan kale has been blanched not an instant longer than necessary, so it never becomes cabbagey; chopped into a chiffonade, it has crispness that parries the richness of the ricotta that enrobes the long strands of ziti. Roasted cauliflower is cut into the tiniest florets, so they’re close in size to the pine nuts and plump raisins that are mixed in with fried rosemary needles; the whole makes for a brilliant modernist chopped salad. Dense with cannellini beans and winter vegetables, the white bean soup is so intense, I could swear a bucket of ham hocks has been cooked in the broth, and yet it is vegetarian.

Since a bakery is one of the restaurant’s taproots, there’s plenty of dough used in its many forms. Funke’s pizza is not as singed and gossamer as Sotto’s or as billowing as Mozza’s. With a thick, chewy brown crust, the pie is straightforward; the raft of dough is a staple, not a statement. And while chunks of earthbound butternut squash overwhelm one pie, the version that carries a payload of anchovies, black olives, and red peppers is spot-on. For the wood-fired garlic knot (essentially a peasant take on the caviar-filled beggar’s purse of the 1980s), dough is wrapped around heaps of steamed garlic, tied with a cord, and baked. Hearty and unpretentious, it’s a delicious combination soaked through with garlic juices.

That may sound like the kind of appetizer you’d like to tear into with companions. But there’s no telling when it will materialize before you because the kitchen keeps producing food with no sense of coursing or pacing. This is the drawback to Milo and Olive’s reach for the definitive democratic dining experience: Food arrives whenever the cooks are done with it. You eat so randomly that a meal becomes a series of unconnected events. The skillet potatoes are wonderful—crusty from the oven, with shards of browned garlic—but you’ve finished them by the time the herb-flecked chicken meatballs appear. Then comes the radicchio and arugula salad with deep-fried capers that you’d planned to start with. Had you known it would bring up the rear, you might not have asked for the glass of big red Spanish Sierra Salinas.

Timing aside, the most notable flops on the menu are the two crostini dishes: One is a thick slice of country bread heaped with too much ricotta and drenched in olive oil. Even if the bread is naturally leavened and the ricotta is from Bell-wether Farms, the thing is sloppiness masquerading as wholesomeness. The other crostini swaps melted Gian-duja chocolate for the cheese, splashes on yet more olive oil, and is finished with sea salt. Recipes for this gambit are all over the Web; there must be an audience, but with so many foodie ingredients smooshed together, the concoction seems like an unwitting spoof of modern, precious eating, a special dreamed up for Portlandia.

The desserts to order are displayed by the coffee urns in an array of layer cakes and chocolate-wrapped tortes that would make Wayne Thiebaud proud. The hominess of the warm carrot cake is heightened by an impasto of freshly applied cream cheese frosting marked by the back-and-forth movements of a spatula. Cut straight from a baking tray, the pear tart captures the functional and idealistic undercurrents of Milo and Olive. A fork slices through the poached fruit, first to a finger width of pastry cream and then to a puff pastry crust. Heck, yeah. It’s so good, I want to sit back and dab at the last crumbs from the plate. But can I do that with all those people backed up between the pastry counter and the door? More people press in as the manager delivers a stack of brown pizza boxes to a Range Rover idling at the curb. A waiter is reaching over heads with tumblers of Melville chard. The clock has struck ten, and one stranger is explaining farro to another. It’s time to let someone else join the fray.

Milo and Olive
2723 Wilshire Boulevard Santa Monica
Best dishes: Mushroom and grits with sunny-side-up egg, white bean soup with winter vegetables, crispy duck leg, anchovy pizza, poached pear tart
Drinks: Craft beers and short but smart wine list
Atmosphere: Except for breakfast, bustling
Noise Level: Loud
Kid Friendliness: Fine
Price Range: $6.50 (garlic knot) to $20 (mushroom pizza)
Hours: Daily, 7 a.m.–11 p.m.
Parking: Street only
Reservations: Not accepted
Credit Cards: All major
Contact: 310-453-6776 or miloandolive.com

Patina

By Patric Kuh — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:50:00 GMT

Photograph by Misha Gravenor

If there’s any place left in L.A. that plays by the rules of the all-frills grande maison restaurant experience, it is Patina. Food runners, captains in dark suits, sommeliers, and cheese experts gracefully execute their duties around a chef—the name changes every few years—who invariably has a résumé filled with posts at legendary establishments heavy on Michelin stars. A busboy in a natty smock dragging his silver-plated crumber across the high-thread-count tablecloth is but the coda to the evening. ¶ Patina founder Joachim Splichal clearly has personal reasons for maintaining these standards. A German steeped in the highest levels of French dining, he worked at the storied Hotel Negresco in Nice under Jacques Maximin in the late 1970s—a period when Provençal cuisine was figuring out how olive oil fit into the haute world—and made his name when he opened L.A.’s Max au Triangle in the early ’80s with similar goals in mind for the local cuisine. He followed the 1989 opening of Patina on a dark stretch of Melrose with a string of restaurants that soon became a ubiquitous force. The Pinots in Hollywood, Pasadena, and wine country were duds, but the strategy of glomming onto cultural institutions has been a fabulous success. Want to have a bite after viewing the Zurbarán still life at the Norton Simon, eat something before catching Tony Bennett at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, carb up at Downtown Disney before entering the park, or take a break from touring LACMA? The Patina Restaurant Group has you covered.

But to have Armani Exchange, you must have Armani, and this is where Patina, which moved to Disney Hall in 2003, comes in. It is the lodestar, offering the highest version of a house style that Splichal devised when he was at the stove in the restaurant’s early years. Though classic in its reverence for stocks and butter, it’s smart enough to incorporate Mediterranean influences. Whoever’s heading the kitchen may work his own predilections into the menu, but all of the restaurant’s chefs stay within the bounds of a Europe-inflected formality. Almost a decade ago, it was Theo Schoenegger, an Italian from near the Austrian border, who injected the menu with a quasi-Tyrolean accent. He was followed by David Féau (now at the Royce), an alum of Guy Savoy in Paris who drew a modernist rapier across the abundance of the French countryside. For the past two years the chef has been Tony Esnault, who worked with the two Alains—Dutournier and Ducasse—and helped relaunch the storied Boston Ritz-Carlton before coming to L.A.

The formality that bubbles beneath his approach is a refreshing departure from the small plates and pig parts that dominate the restaurant scene. As remarkable as the new order can be, there’s still room for tradition that rides on measure, nuance, and proportion. Fancy doesn’t mean fossilized. Esnault can take potage Du Barry, a cream of cauliflower soup drawn from the crypt, and update it by roasting the florets in a cast-iron cocotte, then adding fresh marjoram to bring out the essence of the vegetable. In winter he practically runs a master class on Dover sole—the real stuff, no petrale here—serving it on the bone and dredged in flour meunière style or with vin jaune.

////

Esnault’s food shines because of its reticence. The bite of cucumber vinegar (something he learned to use working at Alsace’s Auberge de L’Ill) tugs gently with the scent of pickling spice under the hamachi with avocado crostini. A galantine of hare is one of the ballsiest appetizers I’ve seen in a long time: All you get is a circular slice of terrine on a bare plate. But what a terrine. Marinating the hare in a mustard, green Chartreuse, and ground juniper mix ratchets the intensity, while cubes of foie gras and sweetbreads enhance the forcemeat; the juices are retrieved and used to finish the whole at the moment of serving. Both haute and unembellished, it’s a preparation so devoted to the central ingredient, it embodies the cuisine bourgeoise that New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling described as “peasant cooking elevated to its greatest possible heights.”

Not that Esnault is at any risk of taking the whole pea-sant thing too far. There’s plenty of Alba truffle being shaved tableside for opera backers who think nothing of spending an extra $80 to give the parsnip risotto a boost. (I’m like an ex-smoker, craning my neck in their direction and taking in deep breaths.) Occasionally the chef seems to forget his own principle of placing craft before appearance—like when he finishes a poached egg with wild mushrooms and shards of gold leaf. As a neoclassical flourish, the precious metal is far surpassed by the toast points shaped like waning moons that surround the skate wing meunière, nodding to a tradition but also helping to mop up the delicious acidic sauce.

His cuisine is intent on straddling the rustic-refined trench. For the vegetable mosaic, each vegetable (beets, salsify, jumbo carrots, and sunchokes in winter) is braised in a different cocotte before being arranged like pavé diamonds. Esnault achieves the same kind of traction, playing ideal against ideal—earthy against elegant—with the John Dory, which comes with big cross-cut wedges of fennel that are browned until almost caramelized; robustness nudges the fish into being more than just sautéed pearly fillets. But the warm slices of leek and potato terrine that arrive with his seared scallops cannot pull off the same feat: The dish is more muted than subtle, leaving your taste buds in search of something to latch onto.

Esnault’s obsessions are meat, game, and the sauces that go with them. His kitchen browns and braises veal breasts for stocks and deglazes roasting pans multiple times for reductions. Rather than degreasing his stocks in the traditional manner—a sure way to water down the taste—and adding butter, he strives to maintain the right amount of oils to create an accompaniment that’s both limpid and potent. The beef tenderloin served with roasted carrots reaches a high note with a rustic sauce made from roasted trimmings. When you order the $62 bécasse, or woodcock, Esnault sends out the bird with a cruet of dark, rich liquid that holds a tangle of bones, vegetables, and herbs but becomes a clear, luscious sauce when poured through a mesh screen at the neck. It’s as if you’re the saucier’s apprentice straining the goods. Esnault stuffs the woodcock with foie gras, placing a leg confit with garlic in the center—a touch designed to counter the richness. Attuned to the chef’s sensibility, sommelier Silvestre Fernandes, who finds room amid the grand crus for nicely aged varietals from his native Portugal, suggests a $12 glass of Fronton A.O.C. Rather than coddling the bird the way a pinot noir would, the hearty négrette grape brings the dish out of its gentility, like a hayseed who wins over a deb.

The night I had the milk-fed veal rack for two, it was presented in an oval copper sautoir before general manager Christian Philippo did the carving. After setting the pink slices on plates bearing roasted Weiser Farms potatoes and turnips, he separated the bones. “The best part,” he said as he laid them on side plates. It was an insider’s comment communicating that, however grand things get, no one forgets that the tastiest morsel will always be the bone.

From the start Patina has been an eater’s restaurant (Esnault calls customers who want to know when the kitchen gets grouse in), but that m.o. was compromised with the move to Disney Hall. I’ve been there at nine o’clock when only three other tables were seated. It is at such instances you see the price of hitching a top restaurant’s languid pace to an unmovable curtain time.

Around 7:30 there’s a general rustling, a movement of many parties toward the exit, which precedes the fluttering of tablecloths as tables are reset. Sometimes people have left room for dessert but skip it because they’re up against the clock. Which is a pity. Barely 30, pastry chef Sarah Koechling is a brilliant new talent. She carries on the classical theme while reimagining the sweet offerings. Vacherin arrives on a disk of meringue that looks like a Wedgwood bas-relief. Balanced on top are tiny quenelles of guava and passion fruit sorbet, vivid flavors barely tamed by dabs of coconut cream. In season her pumpkin chiboust—a dreamy mix of Italian meringue, pastry cream, and pumpkin puree—sits on a sliver of brown butter tart dough. Despite the scattering of diced beets and carrots, the dough’s slightly nutty taste grounds the creativity in the taste of home.

That vaguely extravagant hominess may in fact be Patina’s signature. It is probably why the move to Disney Hall must have seemed preordained to Splichal. Patina would be the destination in the ultimate L.A. destination. If it hasn’t completely worked out—the restaurant today is part high-end commissary and part special-occasion temple—what remains unchanged is the quality and focus that each new chef brings. At the right moment Patina captures a rare snapshot of the city, as dressed-up diners walk through a flurry of activity in which ushers in gilt-sleeved uniforms keep ticket lines in order and musicians in white ties rush to the stage door.

Patina
141 South Grand Avenue, Downtown

Best Dishes: Wild Scottish hare galantine, braised radicchio with red quinoa, milk-fed veal rack for two, game, Dover sole, exotic-fruit vacherin, pumpkin chiboust with brown butter tart

Drinks: Interesting choice of $45 bottles in a world-class wine collection

Atmosphere: Sophisticated

Noise Level: Subdued

Kid Friendliness: Difficult for younger children

Price Range: $18 (garden salad) to $90 (veal rack for two)

Hours: Tue.-Sat., 5-9:30; Sun., 4-9. Post-theater on L.A. Phil performance nights

Parking: $8 valet, with validation; $9 in the building

Reservations: Recommended

Credit Cards: All major

Contact: 213-972-3331

Red Medicine

By Patric Kuh — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:35:00 GMT

Photograph by Misha Gravenor

Just 28 years old, chef Jordan Kahn has built the sort of résumé that others take another decade or so to cobble together. After helping launch Thomas Keller’s New York restaurant, Per Se, he did a stint making desserts at cerebral showman Grant Achatz’s restaurant Alinea in Chicago before eventually landing in L.A. to head the pastry department at Michael Mina’s XIV. That Sunset Boulevard venture went on to become a sensible (and good) steak house before closing in August, but when it started, XIV was damn-the-torpedoes ambitious. Owner Sam Nazarian wants things no other way. Kahn tried to deliver the final note to already jarringly dissonant meals with such offerings as jasmine ice cream crowned with cashew shortbread and paired with brandied bananas. Presented on supersize plates, his swooping, curling fantasies seemed to be rubbing up against the boundaries of the pastry discipline. I didn’t predict he would shift from desserts and open a restaurant as a chef, but I wasn’t surprised when I heard he had, either. ¶ Kahn’s restaurant, Red Medicine, which he co-owns with Mina alum Noah Ellis and Umami Burger founder Adam Fleischman, sits in an art deco building at Wilshire and Gale. The winking O in the red neon COCKTAILS sign in the front window telegraphs the casual interior, where people crowd an industrial but finished space—wood and polished-concrete floors, metal-framed tables with rough-hewn planks, gray-washed walls—enjoying fastidiously presented Vietnamese-inspired dishes. Kahn isn’t Vietnamese, and he hasn’t been to Vietnam, but he is cooking at a level to dispel any misgivings about whether his version of the food is neo, ersatz, or authentic. He uses lime, herbs, peanuts, and a battery of sauces in ways both modern and traditional. A liquid lime gel injects vibrancy to crackling spring rolls; a splash of nuoc cham, with its traces of chili, sweetness, and salt, makes a green papaya salad with fried taro and pickled roots light up your brain. A Savannah native who was raised on his Cuban grandmother’s black beans and ropa vieja, a beef stew, Kahn seems too self-aware to pretend he can fashion this food with the naturalness of someone who’s been steeped in it his entire life. But by digging down to its essence, Kahn reaches a genuineness that would not be possible by simply memorizing and mimicking the gestures of a Vietnamese cook.

Of course, what a lot of people remember about Red Medicine’s opening last December isn’t the food; it’s the hubbub Kahn generated when his colleagues kicked out S. Irene Virbila, the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic, shoving a camera in her face and posting the image on their Web site. Apparently somebody from the restaurant didn’t appreciate her criticism of Kahn’s desserts at XIV, but the reaction seemed more thuggish than roguishly independent. (I can tell you a better way to lance a critic’s self-esteem far more coldly than booting us or blowing the anonymity we try to maintain: Pretend you’ve never read us. The reasoned reflection, those agonized-over adjectives, all that sublime opinion—for naught.) So I steered clear. To criticize would have appeared to be payback, and I sure didn’t want to have to praise the inhospitable. These many months later, however, it’s impossible not to praise Red Medicine. Though plates can take an inordinate amount of time to arrive, Kahn is working at something unique, approaching a great culinary tradition obliquely without surrendering the values at its core.

****

Of all the elements of Vietnamese cooking Kahn has gravitated to, his taste for herbs gives him the most assured point of entry. Fresh, raw herbs are integral to the cuisine—brightening, counterbalancing, adding bite. That thicket of basil and mint leaves beside a bowl of pho isn’t optional; it is as much a part of the broth as the beef. A bánh mì without cilantro and pickled carrots and jalapeño peppers isn’t a bánh mì; it’s a sub sandwich. Grilled shrimp paste on sugarcane stalks wouldn’t be half as spectacular if it lacked pickled horseradish and leeks and the wrapping of lettuce.

Kahn gets this. He can be seen in the open kitchen with his dark, scraggly beard as he plucks at planters of wild celery. During his time off, he and his crew forage in the deeper glades of local mountains, tweeting things like “Jackpot, wild baby fennel.” He is Thoreau in 140 characters; his cooking reminds us how the flavors of herbs can push far beyond the parsley and Italian basil that sometimes seem like afterthoughts and into the realm of the grassy or spicy or even rich. Redolent of clove, the tub of pork rillettes is freighted with morsels of crunchy chicken skin, pistachios, and juicy lychee segments, but it is the herbs—some wild, others domestic—that contribute the pleasantly bitter element on which the rillettes depend.

Kahn’s leap from pastry may have been preordained, but you still see aspects of his training in the minute handwork that goes into dishes. For the ocean trout small plate he lays out slivers of cured fish with lapidary exactitude, infusing the flesh with a deep-colored chili streusel and layering in verbena meringue for a contrasting grace note. Strands of tofu skin lend the artichoke en barigoule—a Provençal classic made with white wine broth—an unexpected creaminess, while thick ribbons of green mango provide zing; draped just so over the whole is a charred baby green onion. Kahn decorates his heirloom congee, or rice porridge, with pinches of hazelnuts, fried garlic, and roasted black malt that are so carefully arranged, they look like regiments in formation. When mixed into the moist rice that the kitchen has prepared with vermouth and chicken stock and finished with Echiré butter, the dish loses the formality such precision imparts and becomes completely satisfying. One night after a young woman nearby spooned it out for a table of friends, you could almost hear them purring.

A highly analytical chef, Kahn takes a single ingredient and studies how it interacts with other variables. The lime-laced mayonnaise that accompanies the cross-cut spring rolls—their blistered skin bulging with Dungeness crab and pea pods—sparkles with freshness. Nuoc leo, a peanut sauce, plays off the more concentrated flavor of the dried peanuts that come with the chestnut-laden beef tartare, which you heap onto crackers made in-house with tapioca. For the roasted brassicas he pan-sears savoy cabbages, accenting the strips with chopped dates and Chinese sausage rendered to a crisp, then deglazes them with fish sauce. The fabulous combination—salty and sweet, smoky and complex—had me feverishly working my chopsticks to clean out my bowl.

The inherent risk in being analytical is that you can overthink matters. Kahn’s seared squid gets lost in a web of associations, with the accompanying carrots rolled in fermented beans hinting at something Chinese and a bland onion soubise pointing to Vietnam’s French colonial era. (Fortunately Kahn keeps the Indochine references to a minimum: There was a time when, outside of the pho joints in Reseda and Little Saigon, the only Vietnamese you could get was the contrived sort Le Colonial served on Beverly.) I’m not sure what the pile of toasted barley and wild rice alongside a seared duck breast is trying to evoke, but my best guess is gravel.

The toasted oats served with the bitter chocolate dessert—dehydrated cubes of chocolate mousse with soy milk sorbet—suffers the same effect. What the blob of parsnip puree is doing in the mix escapes me. Maybe Kahn is attempting a nod to authentic Vietnamese desserts, which tend to be far more virtuous than Western ones, incorporating the likes of red beans or taro or kernels of corn. But he needn’t try so hard. The earthiness he aims for comes through much more clearly in the best dessert, a tumbler layered with basil leaves, chicory streusel, peanut croquant, coconut bavarois, and condensed milk in a finely calibrated homage to Vietnamese iced coffee. Direct and subtly rich, it goes remarkably well with the Dönnhoff Auslese, a German wine of languid sweetness.

The Riesling-dominated wine list is the most serious effort in the city to engage with Asian food; the varietal’s floral delicacy and backbone of slate tame without denaturing a fiery palette. That said, there’s a penalty for not choosing this grape. The pinot noir selection is, with a few exceptions, a collection of trophy burgundies, and only one out of seven chardonnays is below $70. A lone Rhône-style wine, the Parr Selection Santa Ynez Valley syrah, costs $64. The Rieslings here not only start out more fairly priced (a J.J. Prüm Kabinett is $45), but they are able to match Kahn’s cooking, nuance for nuance.

Noah Ellis serves as manager and sommelier, and one night he suggested a $60 Tatomer “Kick-on Ranch” Riesling from Santa Barbara County to go with my casserole of Santa Barbara prawns, which had been cooked over hot stones and various spices. Filled with rocks, the Le Creuset pot was so hot, a napkin had to be placed underneath to keep it from scorching the table. The presentation reminded me of kho, the Vietnamese tradition of clay pot cooking, but it was very much Kahn’s own sidelong creation. He’s not attempting to dumb down Vietnamese food; he pays his respects to the canon without trying to reinvent it or, for that matter, adhere to it. The effect can be transporting. When the Le Creuset lid was lifted, a heady vapor of anise, cinnamon bark, and lemongrass billowed up, capturing a latitude with scent alone.

Red Medicine, 8400 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, 323-651-5500
Best dishes: Green papaya salad, ocean trout, roasted brassicas, pork rillettes, heirloom rice porridge
Drinks: Well-edited cocktail list; superb Riesling selection, though there are few finds among other varietals
Atmosphere: Lively
Noise level: Moderate
Kid friendliness: Staff is friendly, but the food requires a sense of adventure
Price range: Chicken dumplings ($9) to Santa Barbara spot prawns ($110)
Hours: Nightly, 6 p.m.-2 a.m.
Parking: $7 lot next door
Reservations: Recommended
Credit Cards: All major

Son of a Gun

By Patric Kuh — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:15:00 GMT

Photographs by Misha Gravenor

It’s only been open since February, but Son of a Gun, the latest project from chef-owners Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, feels like it has been on 3rd Street forever. The framed deepwater charts, captain’s wheels, and arcing marlin that hang on the walls give the tight L-shaped room the vibe of a hoary bar with a seafaring clientele. Of course it is anything but; there’s not an anchor among the tattoos here. The communal table is packed with a chicly disheveled crowd that delights in salt-crusted mounds of peel-and-eat shrimp dappled with Old Bay spice and Hawaiian poke salad—a surfer shack classic with luscious California stone fruits. Crammed with dishes that delve into Americana, it’s clear the venture is modeled on those beloved lean-tos with trestle tables and weathered signs that cling to our landscape in the face of the plasticizing shit wave that has swept up so many beloved old hangouts.

Yeah, I went there. The anarchic energy of the duo’s cooking must be affecting my writing. Rules vanished during Shook and Dotolo’s rise to prominence. They had a book deal in the works and a TV show on the air by the time they opened their first restaurant, Animal, in 2008. What could have been one more promotional gambit for the pair quickly became a sensation. They tweaked a baseline nose-to-tail ethos with influences as diverse as French gastronomy and the late-night 7-Eleven food run. Glowing underneath dishes like foie gras and Spam loco moco was a joyful fixation on absolute taste. That they located the business two doors down from the original Schwartz Bakery made a claim of sorts, too: The days of shtreimels, bubbes, and Riga sprats might be numbered on Fairfax, but the future was bright, or at least interesting.

Sitting on a cupcake-friendly stretch near the Beverly Center, Son of a Gun shifts the focus from the land to the sea. Though the restaurant is sometimes billed as “the fish place from the Animal guys,” it is much more than that. Hanger steak with breaded oysters and coleslaw-laden fried chicken sandwiches fly out of the kitchen as often as anything aquatic. While the encrustation of nautical gear could come off as gimmicky, it doesn’t; it feels personal. After all, Shook and Dotolo met as culinary students in Fort Lauderdale. Given their network rise (you can book them as motivational speakers through the same agents who represent Magic Johnson and Katie Couric), maybe they’re yearning for the simpler times of a Florida youth spent among the mangroves.

But the place is too smart to get bogged down in sentimentality. The waitstaff—young women dressed in plaid shirts, jeans, and sneakers—is efficient and bubbly, the hostesses eager to find seats at the bar to squeeze diners in. Not some insufferably deconstructed concoction made with muddled herbs and rare spirits, my piña colada, delivered promptly after being ordered, was a slushy old-school homage bearing two maraschino cherries on a plastic saber. Even the wine service has a wink: a rusted old charcoal starter that serves to keep Sancerre chilled.

*****

Although they’d worked at various kitchens in L.A. (including Ben Ford’s Chadwick) before launching Animal, Shook and Dotolo built their reputation on catering gigs. That background is apparent in the pressurized power of the teeny lobster rolls that arrive on parchment paper. A pocket of brioche that owes as much to the Twinkie as to the New England standard, the morsel hikes the fat content by making the base a golden crouton rather than a browned roll. A heap of cool lobster salad is inserted into the slit in the bread before heat is added by fiery potato chips that protrude from the tiny creation like fins. One bite and you’re hooked.

The pair have an obvious appreciation for fat as the great vector of flavor. Butter, lard, cream, the ribbons of bacon slices, the trimmings of ham haunches—these have formed a culinary linchpin from homestead days to gastropub nights. Shook and Dotolo ricochet between the two poles with a kind of buccaneer abandon. A helping of Benton’s country ham, sliced paper thin, becomes a salumi plate by way of Tennessee. Far saltier than Italian cured hams (the humidity of the South demands the extra salt for curing), it begs for contrasting lushness, and the boys bring it with corn bread shaped like ears of corn and a schmear of honey butter. Layered with mayo and ignited with sriracha, the shrimp toast sandwich—rectangles of toasted white bread with shrimp paste between them—has the gloppy satisfaction of a po’boy.

Occasionally the two chefs are steam-rolled by their predilection for inventiveness. They try to Animal-ize their rendition of aglio e olio pasta, the oil-and-garlic staple, with a dollop of uni roe. While the uni has its merits—lending a bass note to the scattering of freshly steamed clams—the pool of orange-tinged oil at the bottom of the dish has none. The Ovaltine ice cream that sometimes is offered as a dessert special is gritty and pasty when it wants to be comforting.

Despite the down-home allusions and the kitschy decor, Son of a Gun likes to flirt with elegance. Osetra caviar is available for $120. Finger towels come out after the peel-and-eat shrimp shells have been cleared away. And the chefs have a subtle hand with sauces. Lime sharpens the angles of the pho broth—served with cod and fried shallots instead of beef and vermicelli. An OJ-
yakitori sauce runs along the razor’s edge of sweetness, but it is precisely what’s needed to release the latent fish wallop in the darkly roasted cured salmon collars. However, even the glorious roast chicken jus that bathes the escolar with creamed corn, chanterelles, and truffled pomme purée can’t mask the fact that except for the fish, everything is cold. Good technique demands that your sauté cook and your garnish person work as one.

Better thought out is the salad of octopus confit. A kind of marine beef jerky, the flesh is served with plump chickpeas, hand-torn radicchio leaves, and a carrot-and-onion mirepoix, but it is given backbone by the bracing acidity of a chile-red wine vinaigrette. It’s a perfect example of how Shook and Dotolo match their savvily promoted frat boy enthusiasm with straight-up culinary rigor. The blending of the two is part of the excitement that percolates beneath everything they do. Smoked steelhead roe with clouds of maple-infused whipped cream and pumpernickel toast leaves you unsure whether you’re at IHOP or watching a National Geographic special on America’s culinary heritage; still, there’s no doubt that precision is at the dish’s core. If the cream weren’t whipped soft or the toast thin and crisp—indeed, if the toast didn’t have the Nordic bite of pumpernickel—the whole would collapse under its cargo of allusions.

Though the daily fruit pie is good (you can see it through the kitchen’s open door cooling on top of the ice cream maker with its juices oozing down the pie tin), the must-have dessert is a scoop of frozen lime yogurt served with graham cracker crumble on one side of the bowl and toasted meringue coating the other. If key lime pie is the archetype, this one is deconstructed and reverential. The combination of citric acidity (courtesy of Schaner Family Farms), billowy sweetness, and dark sugar crunch that made the pie a classic are all here, but they don’t weigh you down the way traditional key lime pie does.

Cooking by its nature is an emotional enterprise, and creating a sense of place is one of the ways chefs channel those sentiments. Sitting in that cramped room over four visits, sipping Hemingway daiquiris as platters of oysters drifted by, I began to feel like a Tom McGuane character who’d stumbled into an air-conditioned spot after the Fairlane died along the A1A highway. The trucker caps, the fried hominy at Animal—Shook and Dotolo have never hidden their Southern roots. But here Southern cooking is on an equal footing with the French and the Polynesian and all the other elements that infuse the menu. The alligator schnitzel is an embodiment of the chefs’ evolving style, in which the cutlet’s crisp breaded exterior is topped with juicy heart of palm slaw and sweetened with a syrup of Myers’s rum and vanilla. Less renegade and more sincere, it’s a skilled interpretation that salutes where Shook and Dotolo’s road began.