Favorite L.A. Restaurants

The nation’s soggy economic climate has not dampened the imaginations of some bold Los Angeles restaurateurs. At The Bazaar, they freeze gazpacho with liquid nitrogen and turn it into a sorbet starter. They shave cauliflower so that it looks like couscous, sauté this in olive oil, then dust it lightly with ras el hanout. And they serve you a row of five ceramic spoons, each cradling what appears to be an olive—until it collapses on your tongue into a deliciously briny splash. 

The Bazaar, in the nine-month-old SLS Hotel, is the fantasy come true of José Andrés, one of America’s most interesting and prolific chefs. It is a grand, happy, showy L.A. scene, 11,000 square feet of bars and restaurants—five dining rooms for which Andrés has created almost 80 tapas, small plates, some hypermodern and some perfectly traditional, so authentic that the Ibérico ham (the best on Earth) on grilled bread rubbed with the ripest of tomato teleports you to a Barcelona tapas bar only seconds after the spherified olive juice left you reeling.

José Andrés intends his food both as a source of fun and as serious gastronomy, and which way you take it depends on your mood and as I discovered, your surroundings. One of my meals was at a long table in the larger, louder, brownish room, with eight friends and acquaintances. The waitress was overwhelmed; each drink appeared at least 20 minutes after we ordered it; few of us concentrated on the food or even discussed it. The smaller, quieter, blond-wood room is more conducive to appreciative eating. But the best way to dine at The Bazaar is to reserve a table in the recently opened room called, for unexplained reasons, Saam, which in L.A. is pronounced “Sam,” like the man or the missile. It’s a beautiful room reminiscent of a supper club with seats for 40 on plush banquettes that line the walls. In Saam there is a fixed menu of 20 small dishes, some of them exalted versions of the small plates available in humbler forms in the other dining rooms (here the cauliflower couscous is bejeweled with ruby pomegranate seeds, brightened with lemon zest, enriched with pine nuts, and crispened with fried quinoa), and some of them are unique to Saam (where lush tournedos Rossini are constructed of Japanese—i.e., genuine—Wagyu beef topped with a truffle gelée and long curls of frozen foie gras).

Many of Andrés’s dishes are what seems these days to be called “molecular gastronomy,” or sometimes just “molecular.” (This is a foolish, misleading way of referring to the very modern methods of creating novel dishes by using technical and scientific tricks to surprise and amuse the diner, enhance the flavor and texture, and in the ideal, provoke thought. But the term continues to increase in popularity, and for now, there’s no fighting it.) Molecular gastronomy was named in 1992, but the concept was discussed at least five years earlier and practiced independently by Spanish chef Ferran Andrìa (José Andrés’s mentor) and has penetrated mainstream cooking in small and mainly insignificant ways. Andrés’s dishes are technically creative and unusual, and they (nearly) always taste extremely good. That’s why his food is important and worthy of our attention.

If I lived in L.A., I would certainly subscribe to the L.A. Weekly; living in Manhattan, I make do with the Internet version. Among its major attractions, it lets the restaurant-goer read Jonathan Gold, the only restaurant critic in the world to have won a Pulitzer Prize. If you plan to eat anything beyond room service during your stay in L.A., Jonathan’s indispensable reviews will catch you up on the restaurant scene and steer you right. 

For years, Jonathan’s told me about the authentic Sichuan food (a great rarity in the United States) on the fringes of the city, and on my recent visit to L.A., several friends and I followed Jonathan and Laurie Ochoa (his wife and, as editor-in-chief of the L.A. Weekly, presumably his boss) to the Chung King restaurant at 1000 South San Gabriel Boulevard in San Gabriel. I’m afraid I can’t tell you exactly where that is. The last time Jonathan wrote about the place, he said he had dined there 40 times. When does he try new restaurants?

Jonathan ordered for all of us, starting with cold dishes: a powerful rendition of fu qi fei something something, which I know as “husband and wife,” pungent slices of beef tongue and tripe; fried peanuts with dried anchovies; a gentle version of camphor-smoked chicken; and “crunchy slippery slivers of pig’s ear slicked with red oil—pulsat[ing] with heat,” a quote from Jonathan to give you the flavor of his descriptive writing, much simpler than his lengthy metaphors, which lead you sometimes into the worlds of jazz and rock, and sometimes into places of decay and degradation. But in a good way. 

No sooner had the last slippery ear-sliver slid down one’s esophagus than the table was reloaded with nearly a dozen hot dishes. One was boiled fish; in a Sichuan restaurant, you can expect the fish fillets to be thinly sliced and cooked in a good volume of a complex, soupy, spicy sauce; on the menu, there were variations with sliced beef, pork, chicken, kidneys, and pig’s tripe. Another interesting, pungent dish was the Chinese bacon with garlic “shoots,” which may have been garlic chives or garlic scapes. Jonathan had also ordered Sichuan wonton with chili oil and noodles with Chung King flavor, which I am not prepared to describe. 

Sichuan chefs have at least seven ways to introduce hot, peppery tastes into a dish—ground black pepper, ground white pepper, hot red oil, ground dried red peppers, dried hot red peppers charred in oil, chopped fresh hot red pepper, and fermented chili bean paste (usually made with fava beans—known in China as Pi County beans)—plus two forms of the mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorn, ground and infused in oil. These are all powerful ingredients, each possessing its own flavor and its own chemical effect on the tissues lining the insides of our mouths. Developing each flavor, plus those of garlic and ginger, and harmonizing them all while preserving their individual force is a feat that challenges the greatest chefs in Sichuan province. And despite some rough edges here and there, Chung King serves up a true feast of Sichuan food.

Animal is a wonderful restaurant, and I doubt there’s another one like it. Except for one or two insignificant salads, every dish brims with animal protein, animal fat, animal spirits, and sumptuous animal flavors—beef, veal, and pork—often combined in the same mouthful. (My wife, who is a compulsive salad-eater, thought the salad excellent.) And Animal easily passes the ultimate test of a perfect restaurant—almost every dish includes bacon, even (or especially) the chocolate-crunch bar for dessert. 

Animal is found on a stretch of Fairfax that is slowly gentrifying, as the ethnic shops (serving an aging Orthodox Jewish population) lose their reason for being and are replaced by younger, hipper establishments, of which Animal is a notable example. 

Except that Animal’s version of hip isn’t exclusionary; it signifies a kind of freedom for all: for the customer, who can wear nearly anything and order as little or as much as he or she wants, and for the two talented chef-owners, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo—known as Two Dudes after their Food Network show about their 2 Dudes Catering operation—who get to keep their hair long and cook their favorite things without catering to vegans or adding the obligatory fried calamari or mozzarella with tomatoes to their appetizers. (A few years ago, the restaurant critic at The New York Times, William Grimes, complained that despite the misapprehension that New York City’s restaurants are incredibly diverse, there is in fact only one menu throughout the entire city, and it begins with fried calamari as a starter.) No, Jon and Vinny’s menu is unlike any other. Which is to say that Animal is a restaurant only for people who love Animal, apparently a large fraction of L.A.’s population that Jon and Vinny have nowhere near exhausted. The room is plain and has the shape of a gigantic shoe box and a very high ceiling; the wooden tables and chairs are arranged in rows and can be slid together for large groups; the service is friendly and effective. The ambient-noise level occasionally edges up into the raucous zone.

On to the menu: The six of us finished nearly all the appetizers and two main courses. I’ve never before been served duck rillettes shaped into a patty and fried; how delicious. When you cut into the deep-fried quail, its ample, savory juices mingle with a maple jus and flavor the grits and slab bacon. The green beans were vastly improved with the addition of egg and bacon. Barbecued pork-belly sandwiches were extremely tender and full of porky flavor. I must learn to replicate the homely crispy hominy served with a wedge of lime; maybe I’ll find it in Jon and Vinny’s popular cookbook, Two Dudes, One Pan. I was grateful to learn that poutine is a dish of French Canadian origin made by drenching cheese fries in a strong gravy; at Animal the cheese is cheddar and the gravy is oxtail. I’ll finish with the main course “foie gras loco moco,” a nicely ayered pile of a quail egg, a sautéed medallion of the liver of a fatted duck, a slice of Spam, and a good hamburger, all on a base of golden rice, a product of South Carolina.

If chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo were less talented, the entire operation might seem self-consciously over-the-top, and as fine a restaurant reviewer as the L.A. Times’s S. Irene (“Sherry”) Virbila has gone so far as to recommend a reduction in the restaurant’s overall quantity of bacon and to judge that Jon and Vinny do better with fish. Could this be a girl thing? 

I think not. First of all, Jonathan Gold reports that two-thirds of the customers are women. And second, my wife, a woman who on most days is also a lipophobe (with a permanent loophole for butter), appraised her dinner as light and not excessively fatty, though she ate what I did, plus a salad. I am completely unable to explain this. But when you’ve eaten Jon and Vinny’s food, you realize how good they are at cooking dishes that deliver huge, savory flavors and the large quantities of pleasure this brings; and you feel more than happy to let them compose their menu any way they please. 

Mozza is a pizzeria next to an excellent Italian restaurant called Osteria Mozza, both created by Nancy Silverton, for 20 years one of L.A.’s great bakers (and one of my favorite cooks), and owned by her and the genius New York partnership of Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali. Now there’s takeout next door, and soon Mozza will have a school for pizza-making. Everybody who cares as deeply about pizza as I do became aware of Mozza even before it opened on November 14, 2006, and so it was with feelings of embarrassment and, yes, shame that I ate my first five Mozza pizzas (not counting three that had been hand-carried to me cold, coast to coast) on a recent evening in L.A.—2.5 years late.

Here I could list and endlessly elucidate my fifteen or so criteria for the perfect pizza, but as bandwidth is not yet totally free, I’ll instead refer you to an essay in my second book, It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, or to the several print and Web publications that have reproduced it. Nancy was inspired in her endless experimentation by Chris Bianco and his “Pizzerria Bianco” in Phoenix. Phoenix? Please don’t let this capsize your worldview: Chris Bianco is from the Bronx. His pizzas have already reached perfection. A few years ago, on at least one trip to San Diego, I made a stop in Phoenix, took a cab to the outskirts of the city, ate my fill, and bought several more pizzas for my wife and dog in San Diego, where the last time I looked, they not only had no perfect pizza but only one pizzeria that matched my seven criteria, as yet unpublished, for being a pizzeria. 

In any event, Nancy’s pizzas are magnificent, and if I lived in L.A., I would probably stick to a strict all-pizza regimen until my subscription to L.A. Weekly began arriving. But Mozza’s menu is rich with alternate possibilities: 50 wines for less than $50, several bruschette, salads so fine you forget you’re eating salad, infinitely crisp deep-fried squash blossoms, roasted asparagus with speck and Parmesan, indulgent desserts—all reminding you that Nancy’s ability to find and cook perfect ingredients has not dimmed since her years at Campanile. 

This seems even more evident next door at Osteria Mozza. One evening I sat at the Mozzarella Bar, where the stars are a fine fior di latte, a moist and tender oblate sphere of mozzarella di bufala, and part of a large, gooey burrata (which is a pouch formed by inflating, like a balloon, a ball of cow’s-milk mozzarella and filling it with the rich cream and filaments left over from the process of making mozzarella. By shopping around New York City, I can duplicate Nancy’s three-mozzarella appetizer, but I know of no other restaurant that serves it, or that deftly pairs the various mozzarellas with grilled asparagus, braised artichokes and pine nuts, or leeks vinaigrette and mustard bread crumbs.) 

I spent another dinnertime with three friends and concentrated on the wonderful pastas. My favorites were the tiniest, most perfectly formed and flavored agnolotti you’ll find this side of the region of Piemonte in Italy; the bavette, cacio e pepe; and the tagliatelle with oxtail ragu. For secondi, the fish and meat dishes appeared to be excellent, but as I naughtily enjoyed an entire pizza next door before dinner, my aging appetite could not handle much Italian meat. Osteria Mozza is, I think, already in the top tier of L.A.’s Italian restaurants, and it has nowhere to go but up.

John Rivera Sedlar was one of the four or five inventors of modern Southwest American cuisine 27 years ago. Only a few weeks before my visit to L.A., Sedlar ended his fifteen-year absence from the restaurant scene and opened Rivera in the apparently booming and burgeoning L.A. downtown. 

(As I am not the first to explain, Southwest American restaurant cooking has little to do with the American Southwest, which until the importation of water from the Colorado River and the advent of air-conditioning was a desert. Before the first Spanish settlers arrived, there were no edible mammals larger than a hamster, no access to the sea, and no spices other than chile peppers, which had been brought from Mexico, possibly along the active trade routes for bird feathers. When the Europeans brought their spices, some of which we associate with Southwest cooking, they were extremely costly and available only to the rich; when Americans controlled areas such as the present New Mexico, all spices were kept in the governor’s own safe in Santa Fe. So the “native” cooking of the Southwest was extremely spare and austere, as it was on the Mexican side of the border, in the Sonoran desert and the nearly uninhabited state of Baja California. What became known as the New Southwest cuisine of Mark Miller, Robert Del Grande, Dean Fearing, Stephan Pyles, and John Rivera Sedlar was really a modernized version of Mexican cooking. [John Rivera Sedlar was born in New Mexico.] Now, 30 years on, it’s common to find contemporary Mexican menus on our side of the border, but not in Los Angeles nor, say, San Diego—a twelve minute drive from Tijuana. This also puzzles me.) 

Sedlar’s new restaurant is handsome and sleek, a lavish production, with a wall of windows on the street and a fascinating, softly shifting video on the opposite wall, a montage of Mexican culture and ingredients and Spanish colonial paintings. The first thing we ate was the finest tortilla of a lifetime—soft, somewhat thick, warm, and sweetly redolent of corn; Sedlar had pressed several herbal leaves in each one, a practice he says descends from the Mayans. We ate our tortillas slowly so that they wouldn’t disappear, as little lamb chops with Spanish chorizo, and quail with a spicy Oaxacan sauce arrived. Our favorite main course was a wonderfully juicy strip of pork shoulder, and later an olive-oil cake that competed for attention with other fine desserts. How has Sedlar’s once-pioneering cooking changed in the past fifteen years? His seductive menu deserves several visits. It’s wonderful to have John Sedlar back, even if he is on a far-off seacoast. L.A. has needed innovative but authentic Mexican food for a generation.