Anna Rose
My first morning in Los Angeles is a little overcast, and a quick downpour, one of many this year, explains the city’s atypical verdant tones. But I’m not worried about the weather. From the window of my hotel, I see the Hollywood Hills and the promise of sunshine sketched in the outline of palm tree fronds.
I’m up early from the time change, and before coffee or toothpaste I stack layers of Kleenex on the windowsill and start peeling blood oranges. The skin slips off easily, and beet-red juice falls into droplets when I pull the fruit apart. Slowly, I turn my morning reverie into a ceremony of sorts, letting the taste of the California oranges, sweet and sensuous, settle back into my memory.
Good God, I love LA, my adopted home before moving to Memphis, and the American promised land for many things, including fragrant citrus from the back of a neighborhood truck, bone-rich ramen thick with noodles at a Glendale mall, and a Carrara marble mozzarella bar serving, among other things, dreamy plates built around cream-filled burrata.
I save the mozzarella bar at Osteria Mossa for the last day of my trip, planned around culinary wanderings directed by my daughter, a Los Angeles transplant with a knack for trendspotting. In the LA food scene, it’s hard to keep up. Since 1982, when Chef Wolfgang Puck popularized gourmet pizza at his flagship restaurant Spago, the city’s California cuisine has exploded with pop-ups, food trucks, and defining chefs at restaurants large and small who are cooking some of the very best food in America.
The reasons are varied for why Los Angeles is hitting a creative culinary apex. There’s the diverse population with ethnic cooking styles, some fused into new American menus and others authentically preserved in ubiquitous strip-mall storefronts. There’s the sheer volume and variety of produce that makes seasonally conscious cooking seem easy, much like the beautiful Los Angelinos who are so effortlessly well-groomed that they float from work table to chef table without freshening up a bit.
Price plays a huge role, too. Yes, you can spend hundreds of dollars for a single meal, and I have done so with guiltless abandon, but the cheap eats are boundless and equally good. Visitors new to LA should track down baker Nicole Rucker’s splendid pastries and pies (@ruckerspie) and one of Korean chef Roy Choi’s pioneering Kogi BBQ trucks (@RidingShotgunLA). And while a little of that marvelous short rib taco — a fusion of Mexican and Korean tastes — drips down your arm, listen to the talk around you. People expound on eggs (“I buy them at the gym. They have deep orange yolks.”); chocolate (“I only eat ZenBunni. It’s raw and biodynamic.”); and the healing transformation of adaptogens — the plant-sourced alchemy behind over-priced bottles of Moon Juice.
Simply put, the people in Los Angeles are obsessed with food, so here’s a tip. Deal with the eye-rolling moments and join in. Better yet, head to the Sunday farmers market on Hollywood Boulevard for meadowland larkspur or branches of fresh bay leaves bundled together with string. Likely, you won’t be cooking on your trip, but meander anyway past the stacks of produce, artisanal breads, and olive oils the color of freshly cut hay.
Lush, beautiful, and bustling, the farmers markets in LA — and there are dozens — are a primer for the ingredient-driven menus I discover on a three-day eating binge that starts in Venice Beach, wanders throughout Hollywood, and settles happily into a Koreatown hotspot where a standout dish is charred shishito peppers dipped in spicy crème fraiche.
Day One
Anna Rose
Start with Gjusta in Venice
Delta’s daily nonstop from Memphis to Los Angeles leaves and lands early. By the time you pick up a rental car at LAX, you will be famished, so stick to the surface streets to avoid morning traffic and head for Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach. Grab a coffee at Intellegentsia or Blue Bottle and stroll the trendy shopping district to people-watch a bit. But don’t dally. Gjusta, located a few blocks away on Sunset Avenue, is waiting, and breakfast is served all day.
With its industrial building in a residential neighborhood, Gjusta can be hard to find and to navigate. But push open the wooden screen doors and the restaurant’s sun-washed energy is a little breathtaking.
Part food hall, deli, bakery, and café, an almost impossibly long deli case anchors the restaurant from front to back. Take a ticket number and know from the start that decision-making will be hard: scones, pies, and baklava croissants; pates, cheese and olives — pungent and colorful — seasonal shrubs and golden lemonade; build-your-own sandwiches with brisket au jus; and for breakfast? Perhaps a croque madame on sourdough with house-cured ham, Mornay sauce, and a single fried egg.
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320 Sunset Ave. (310-314-0320)
Three to Try: Egg sandwich with collards, Gruyere, bacon, and hot sauce; Build a Fish Plate (smoked river trout!) with pickled vegetables, labneh, and toast; Wake ’n’ Shake smoothie made with cold brew coffee, hemp seed, and cacao, among other wonderful things.
Finish with Here’s Looking at You in Koreatown
Anna Rose
Kitchen window at Here’s Looking At You
In Koreatown, the many Koreanbarbecue restaurants with their spicy scallion salads and platters of marinated beef cooked tableside are irresistible. So by all means, try some, but don’t skip a gem of a place from chef Jonathan Whitener where the small plates served in earthenware bowls are both Instagram-worthy and addictively good.
I am particularly infatuated with the restaurant’s sumptuous vegetables, like shishito peppers and the masculine vigor of their charred green skins. At first glance, even vegetable ingredients may seem a bit unknown. What is a Momotaro tomato, bagna cauda, and lap xuong? An excellent wait staff is happy to explain: Momotaro tomatoes, sweet and tangy, hail from Japan; bagna cauda is a fondu-type dipping sauce favored in Piedmont, Italy; and lap xuong are Chinese sausages. Three countries in one dish, plus an assortment of Asian herbs, capture the essence of Whitener’s umami cooking.
I am particularly infatuated with the restaurant’s sumptuous vegetables, like shishito peppers and the masculine vigor of their charred green skins.
A cozy bistro at heart with contemporary leanings, Here’s Looking at You also serves excellent cocktails. The current drink list pays homage to the restaurant’s neighborhood. The Persistent Rose, for instance, nods to Koreatown’s abundant rose bushes with a mix of Jamaican rum, lime, raw sugar, pickled rose petals, and splashes of rosewater.
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3901 W. 6th St. (213-568-3573)
Three to Try: Yellowtail with tamarind, serrano, radish, cilantro, and hibiscus onion; beef tartare with egg yolk, red chili, cress, and charred bread; yuzu tart topped with burnt meringue.
Day Two
Start with Sqirl in Silver Lake
When my daughter moved to LA two years ago, the first restaurant she texted me about was Sqirl, a breakfast nook on North Virgil Avenue. I was charmed by the name (as in “a girl who squirrels away”) and by its location half a mile or so from my former apartment on the same street. Since then, chef Jessica Koslow has become a media darling, and for good reason. She cooks what she wants to eat, and she wants breakfast and lunch served until 4 p.m. every day.
Tucked on the edge of Silver Lake in a scruffy small space, Sqirl for me is the essence of new California cooking: inventive but not fussy, righteous but not preachy, and seasonal, including house-made jams like strawberry and rose geranium. Koslow started Sqirl as a jam-making business, and the seasonal jams crown the restaurant’s iconic brioche toast. The brioche slice — so thick it doesn’t fit in a toaster — is buttered, burnt a little to make it crunchy, and topped with house-made ricotta that flutes around the jam like billowy whipped cream.
Coffee made by expert baristas and daily frittatas also usher in lunch. Try specials like cauliflower hash or a sorrel pesto rice bowl with watermelon radish, feta, and poached egg. Add kale because you are in California and bacon because why not?
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720 N. Virgil Ave. (323-284-8147)
Three to try: Chicken salad with dehydrated citrus and black garlic vinaigrette; avocado toast with green garlic crème fraiche; and a gift box of seasonal jam to take home to mom.
End with Gracias Madresin West Hollywood
Sitting on mid-century modern chairs at a low table tiled like a 1970s Mexican joint, I eat plant-based dishes that convince me of the lifestyle possibilities of vegan eating. The restaurant from chef Chandra Gilbert is popping with beautiful people, and the Mexican-skewed menu, several pages long, offers dishes like crab cakes and truffle cheese plates with no crab or cheese. Instead, hearts of palm, chipotle aioli, bread crumbs, cilantro, and bay laurel evoke the seafood cakes of summer. And on the cheese plate? Apple habañero jam, spice almonds, peppers, pear, and rustic toast.
We’ve come to dinner to meet Jerry Meadors, a longtime friend and vegetarian, and when he bites into an enchilada mole negro with fried plantains, he reacts with a low and pleasurable om sound, as when palate meets soul.
I’d forgotten Jerry’s culinary thumbs-up, one I’d heard often in the 1980s when we shared meals that cost a lot less. Here at Gracias Madres, on a patio near a popping wood fire, we sip cocktails made with cannabis oil that don’t get us high (a little disappointing considering their $20 price tag), but do make us happy. Organic and seasonal, even meat-loving eaters will leave Gracias Madres satisfied (and inspired) without missing their meat or dairy one bit.
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8905 Melrose Ave. (323-978-2170)
Three to try: Pozole with ancho-chili broth, cashew crema, and avocado; quinoa and black-eyed pea salad; and Sour T-Iesel, a high-vibe cannabis cocktail made with tequila blanco, lime, agave, and mint matcha.
Day Three
Start with Baroo in Hollywood
When we visit Baroo, we look for the 7-Eleven next door because the tiny strip-mall restaurant has no sign. Like many of the city’s culinary treasures, Baroo is all substance but no flash, a reminder that haute cuisine in LA can be discovered in $9 grain bowls ordered for lunch.
We know about Korean-born chef Kwang Uh because Bon Appétit named the restaurant’s rice bowl the best dish of 2016. (Baroo also made the magazine’s list of best new restaurants.) Squeezed on counter stools to read the menu, printed in colored chalk on the opposite wall, we begin to understand why. The bowls — built on grains like quinoa, bulgur, and basmati — begin simple enough but build out with exotic fermentations (rose onion pickles, passion fruit cabbage), foams (lemongrass and coconut), proteins (thick-cut bacon and sous vide egg), and toasted seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, mustard).
The menu offers only seven dishes, but reading the descriptions still takes time. The Bibam salad, for instance, lists 15 different ingredients; the kimchi fried rice a dozen or more. But when our food arrives, I stop thinking about ingredients to relish the astonishing mashup of textures, colors, and flavors. I am in the moment, much like the nasturtium petal clinging to the side of my oversized bowl.
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5706 Santa Monica Blvd. (323-819-4344)
Three to try: Asian fever made with kimchi fried rice with pineapple jalapeno slaw; noorook with kamut, farro, and roasted koji beet crème; house-made pasta with spicy oxtail ragu.
End with Osteria Mozza on Melrose Avenue
Chef Nancy Silverton, whostarted as a pastry chef for Wolfgang Puck, was my very first bread lady. In 1989, she opened the legendary La Brea Bakery, elevating artisanal whole grain loaves to their rightful place on American restaurant tables. Since then, Silverton has earned countless awards and accolades as both chef and restauranteur, and none is more deserved than her joint venture with Mario Batali at Osteria Mozza on Melrose Avenue.
The restaurant’s name translates into English as mozzarella tavern, an apt description for of the restaurant’s commanding mozzarella bar made with white Carrara marble. We eat at a table nearby but still select from the bar’s offerings, including buffalo mozzarella dressed with basil pesto, salsa romesco, tapenade, and caperberry relish. (Caperberries, by the way, are akin to capers but with stems.)
Be forewarned: Dinner can get pricy. For a table of three, we spend $100 each, but along with first courses, we add pastas and secondis and a lovely bowl of marinated shell beans topped with croutons. Looking back, we responded to the restaurant’s lively energy, amped up, I suspect, by excellent wine pairings and the heady enthusiasm for burrata, plated with radicchio, spiced walnuts, and a shallow pool of honey.
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6602 Melrose Ave. (323-297-0110)
Three to try: Goat cheese ravioli with five lilies; steamed mussels with Pomodoro and red pepper aioli crostone; rosemary olive oil cakes with gelato and rosemary brittle.
Anna Rose Yoken contributed to this story.
