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FIELD TRIP: Eating my way through L.A.
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FIELD TRIP: Eating my way through L.A.
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| Photo | Drew Lazor |
I recently made my way across the country to Los Angeles for a few days of vacation. No, I didn't see any celebrities. But I did gain like five pounds. Pictures and recap of my trip after the jump.
On my first night in town, the girl and I landed an early table at Pizzeria Mozza, the brick-oven pizza parlor from chefs Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali and NY restaurateur Joe Bastianich. The hype surrounding this one was thicker than one million vertically stacked Little Caesar's crusts � Meal Ticket's Felicia D. had tried it and loved it. The L.A. Times gave it a three-star review. And pizza scholar Ed Levine of Serious Eats � who quite literally wrote the book on the topic � said in 2007 that the Highland Avenue restaurant might be "where you'll find the best pizza in the world right now." I half-expected to see the reincarnated corpses of Pope John Paul II and Frank Sinatra high-fiving each other behind the counter when I walked in.
The spot was packed for early Wednesday night, which I took as a good sign. We ended up getting shoehorned into a teeny two-top next to a table of middle-aged gay guys who all resembled Brian Grazer. Our server, a tall, sleepy-eyed dude who had the look of a collegiate volleyball player, was as pleasant as can be as we tossed in our order � a marrow plate with accompaniments of roasted garlic, toasted baguette and a sea salt; baby peppers topped with tuna; a beast of a meat pie topped with tomato sauce, mozz, sausage, salami, bacon and guanciale (pig cheeks); and a sauceless pizza with mixed mushrooms and taleggio and fontina cheeses.
My opinion? Starters were tasty. The pizza? It was ... good. The meat lover's was rich in all the right places, and a subtle hand with the sauce and cheese ensured the deep flavors of all those greasy, amazing toppings (housemade fennel sausage was my pick) weren't overwhelmed. The mushroom pie was aromatic as hell, but I couldn't help but wish that some sauce had been applied here � the salty bite of the taleggio quietly begged for an off-sweet accompaniment. The dough, Silverton's canvas � she's a lauded baker � was perfectly crackly and light in the middle, but I found the framing crust heavy and bready, not unlike a wheat-based hula hoop.
So Mozza's pizza is good. I would definitely go back and try more. But did the face of Christ appear in the crema of my double espresso, as I was basically promised? Naw.
On Night 2, the girl somehow finagled us a table at The Bazaar by Jos� Andr�s, inside the way-outside-my-pay-grade SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills. (Peep game: No one is better at talking her way into a supposedly impossible-to-land reservation than this girl. Get like her.) The Philippe Starck-designed restaurant, which looks a bit like what would happen if Salvador Dali, Tarsem and the cast of characters from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes had a really sterile orgy, is the hallucinogenic magnum opus of chef Andr�s, the renowned elBulli alum best known for his successful Latin spots in the D.C. area.
There are two dinner menus at The Bazaar: One's traditional Spanish tapas, while the other's straight-up crazy molecular nutso stuff. Though I hit up some deliciously recognizable items � fat kumamoto oysters floating in olive oil like high-style sardines, tissue-paper-thin jamon iberico de bellota (ham from black Iberian pigs that feed only on acorns) � we focused most of our energy on consuming science experiments. Some truly odd (and intermittently amazing) things on offer here. Cotton candy-wrapped foie gras. A baby ice cream cone filled with flying fish roe. Buttery slabs of toro draped atop watermelon (in place of rice in a nigiri setup) with a potent jalapeno slice and Don King-like poofs of some type of, ahem, "air" (I forget what kind precisely). In a truly innovative coup de grace to Joey Vento and his ilk, a "Philly cheesesteak" (hollow "air bread" filled with melted cheese and topped with decadent thin-sliced rich-person beef) and a "Hilly cheesesteak" (same thing, but with mushrooms instead of steak). And perhaps the nerdiest dessert on the planet � a nitro coconut floating island, with liquid nitrogen-dunked meringue resting atop bananas and passion fruit drizzle like a cream-colored pith helmet. Crack that helmet with a spoon and it shatters like an egg from outer space, spilling its whipped meringue guts all over the fruity battlefield. So very cool and so very good.
I had fun, but did the experience as a whole "arrive like fireworks bursting in the night," as L.A. Times reviewer S. Irene Virbila recently wrote in her criticism-free four-star coronation? Not precisely. I found myself chuckling at the sheer silliness of it all throughout the meal. I know that's the point � stuff like this is supposed to be playful � but at the end of the day, I realized I was laughing more at the Fosse-ian hand movements our various servers used while describing Brussels sprouts and the sunburnt European businessmen strutting around sockless in $900 loafers sipping "Magic Mojitos" than the inherent whimsical novelty of Andr�s' crown jewel.
We ate normal person food for the remainder of the trip.
The next day, we took a drive out to Orange County � Laguna Beach, specifically � to visit my dude Chris Boucher. Despite your nasty notions of this town thanks to the MTV show, know that it's actually a very quaint, peaceful and beautiful place � kinda like a Left Coast New Hope. Boucher took us up the road from his place to Taco Loco, a sick little Mexican counter where we grubbed out on carnitas, calamari and fish tacos. I sipped on a decent Hemp Ale from Humboldt Brewing.
That evening, made our way back to L.A. to meet up with some old friends and quickly became drinkdrankdrunk at a handful of different bars. You know what that means � junk food! A stop-in to a 7-Eleven to get beer (be jealous, PA) ended with armfuls of munchies, including El Sabroso Pork Cracklins (holler) and a too-weird-not-to-buy tallboy of Budweiser with Clamato � literally that beer mixed with tomato and clam juice. It tasted exactly how you might expect it to taste. (That's my L.A. resident friend Jenelle wielding and sampling it in the photos.) Laterlaterlater that night, I paid my first-ever visit to the famed In-N-Out Burger, where I was instructed to order a double-double (double burger, double cheese) "animal style," which means they smother your grub in a Thousand Island-like relish-y dressing and fried onions. My memories of this experience are admittedly fuzzy, so the only thing I can really tell you about it was that I ate all my food in about 5 seconds and enjoyed the shit out of it. It was so incredibly satisfying and made the whiskey in my tummy go to sleep.
On our last day in the city, we drove down Santa Monica Boulevard to check out Point Point Joint, a Filipino eatery with several locations. I grew up with Filipino grub, but since there's but one Pinoy restaurant in Philly � Manila Bay in the Northeast �I wanted to check out what L.A. had to offer. Ooh right: The place is called "point point" ("turo turo" in Tagalog) because you do just that � a bunch of sneeze guard-protected steam trays await you, and you let your friendly spoon-wielding attendant know what you'd like with a gentle thrust of the finger. I ended up ordering lechon (roast pork with super-crispy skin), fried bangus (milkfish) and pancit (a lo mein-ish noodle staple). The girl, who eats only seafood and no meat, had a bit of trouble here, as every Filipino dish in the history of ever has some sort of animal in it. She eventually landed on salmon belly and fried rice. Sorry about that!
For our final dinner in Los Angeles, we hit up Real Food Daily, an organic veg restaurant in Hollywood that'd been recommended to me by quite a few people. My first experience with tempeh left something to be desired, so I decided to give the stuff another shot here by ordering "Vivas Las Pasta," a tempeh spaghetti and meatballs type of thing. Yeah ... I don't like tempeh. I gave it a fair shot, my vegan friends! I really did! I just don't like that stuff. I sampled some of my companions' dishes, though � the Tac-O' the Town, with seasoned seitan and amazing chunky guac, was particularly yum � and thought everything else was solid.
Looking back on it, I think I should attribute my occasional disappointments in L.A.'s restaurant scene less to the hype around specific restaurants (The Bazaar) than to the all-pervading buzz attached to pretty much everything in the City of Angels. As far as I can tell, it's just part of the natural machinations of the place, and perhaps I was just hypersensitive to this coming out from the East Coast. I wish I had a few more days to delve into some of the time-honored institutions (Pink's Chili Dogs, Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, El Cholo, etc.) I missed � meaning I'll definitely be back. Here's hoping I'll see Justin Bobby or somebody next time.
I wish you would have hit up Animal, but am happy you got to the Andres spot. I am intrigued by his food because on one hand I see him as an ambassador of Spanish cuisine ala Jose Garces, and on the other he reminds me of a mixed up version of Adrian Ferra.
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