Horny for Food

A Horny for Food Farewell

2011-02-28T14:23:00.000-08:00

The time has come, a little more than five years to the day of my first post, to retire Horny for Food.

It has served its purpose as a proving ground for my experiments in ways to intimately, passionately and aggressively express my opinions, observations and research in the world of food, wine, dining--always with an undercurrent of sex.

The good news is, the proving ground worked and I'm able to happily retire this blog knowing that I have other outlets for my writing.

You can continue following me every Thursday at The Satellite Show pop culture blog, where I write a weekly column on (usually) food and wine.

And in even bigger news, you can follow me as a regular featured wine blogger at The Huffington Post in the Food Section. Right now I'm posting once a week and intend to do at least 2-3 posts a month into the future.

To my very few loyal readers, thank you for all of your support. Please continue reading through these archives. I may periodically repost some older entries and definitely look for past topics to be reexamined and expanded upon in my new outlets. And maybe Horny for Food will return in the future.

To any food and wine enthusiast or professional I may have offended by my writings here, know that it's not personal and that my only objective is to elevate discourse and stimulate discussion. Too much food and wine writing is equivocating, unadventurous and dull. I attempted to be provocative and humorous. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I failed, but hopefully each time I failed, I failed better.

Cheers.

Eagle Rock Brewery - Los Angles, CA

2011-01-31T12:48:00.000-08:00

Slowly, Los Angeles is integrating itself into the California craft brew scene. I wrote a few months back about Craftsman Brewery in Pasadena and now it's time for Eagle Rock Brewery (and soon the relocated Angel City Brewery!). Eagle Rock Brewery's been in business for a few years in LA and finally opened up a taproom about a year ago.

Located not quite in Eagle Rock but in the decidedly less gentrified Glassell Park neighborhood, the modern brewery and taproom is located in a nondescript warehouse that can only be identified by the food truck parked in the driveway and the string of hipsters coming and going, lending the whole building the mystique of a speakeasy or secret indie brothel.

The taproom typically serves 5-6 Eagle Rock brews, including their staple Revolution XPA, Manifesto Witbier, Populist IPA and Solidarity English Ale plus 1-2 limited seasonal releases. They also have three guest-taps featuring beers from other tiny California craft breweries. Beers are available on-site by the taste or pint and available to-go in refillable growlers.

What I love about Eagle Rock Brewery (and about Craftsman) is that in a California microbrew scene that has become dominated by aggressive high-gravity high-bitterness beers, Eagle Rock produces a pair of excellent sub-5% abv beers including the Solidarity, one of the best true "session beers" I've had from California. The Revolution XPA is full-bodied with a nice dose of hops that should please the Arrogant Bastard drinker even though it clocks in at only 4.8% abv.

Even the higher gravity beers are well-balanced, with the Populist a fine example of a medium bodied moderately-hopped IPA that's more in the English style then in the bitter quintuple-hopped style that has become prevalent in California.

(Oh, and the beers are served in proper pint glasses for a mere $5--guest drafts are usually a buck or two more--bonus!)

There's no food for sale in the brewery, but there are complimentary peanuts and pretzels. A rotating cast of food trucks can be found in the parking lot almost every night Eagle Rock Brewery's open (Thursday-Saturday, 4-10PM, Sunday 12-8PM) and unique beer pairings are suggested for every truck's offerings. It's a laid-back and inexpensive way to enjoy great beer and great food in a friendly, convivial space.

Eagle Rock Brewery
3056 Roswell St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90065
www.eaglerockbrewery.com

HFF Quickie: Pelayo's Burgers - Long Beach, CA

2011-01-14T21:45:00.000-08:00

Because of its mix of density and sprawl and its position as the birthplace (or at least homeland) of modern American fast food, not even the biggest fast food chains can penetrate every corner of Los Angeles. As a result, there are many unusual local mini fast-food chains and one-off restaurants. Often they're idiosyncratic (Cowboys & Turbans, anyone?) and often they're quite excellent for the price.

I visited such an establishment down in Long Beach this week, Pelayo's Burgers. It's an archetypal LA burger joint/taqueria hybrid located on PCH right where Signal Hill meets the LBC. Was it great? No. Was it good? Yes. Was it fresh? Yes. Was it cheap? Absolutely.

I had the Huevos Rancheros and it was a delightfully trashy mashup of refried beans, rice, respectably good eggs, a crisp-fried tortilla and a very good spicy homemade ranchero sauce. A few dashes of Tapatio and some additional tortillas and it was hangover-curing heaven. It was also less than six bucks and rivaled any bourgie brunch version I've had for twice the price.

The Boss Man had a half roast chicken with beans, rice AND french fries for not much more than $6 and by all reports it was delicious. Did the fries come pre-cut from the freezer? They did. But that's not always a bad thing in the world of cheap eats.

So it was nice to support a local business and get a fresh, filling meal for two for well under $20. And we were in, out and on our way in about twenty minutes.

So here's to ethnic dives, neighborhood one-offs and taco trucks. They're the best thing about LA dining.

Pelayo's Burgers
2300 E Pacific Coast Hwy
Long Beach, CA 90804

Points of Reference; or James Suckling Doesn't Get It

2011-01-02T14:53:00.000-08:00

I watched the documentary Blood Into Wine recently. It's a very good and funny film about the efforts of Maynard James Keenan and Eric Glomski to produce serious wine out of Arizona. One of the featured parts of the film is when then-Wine Spectator writer James Suckling comes out to Jerome and tastes through Keenan's Caduceus Cellars line-up.

Now I have not tasted nearly as many wines as James Suckling has, particularly the wines of Northern Italy which some of the initial Caduceus wines drew from for inspiration, so I'll defer to his palate on flavors and nuance. Or for the sake of this article I will.

What pissed me off about Suckling's commentary is that virtually every comment he made was referencing the Arizona wines against wines from France and Italy--wines which are made thousands of miles away in very different places by very different people.

So I ask, what's the value in that?

Let me frame this argument with one basic conceit: the reason that certain wine regions of the world command a premium is largely a product of historical accident. In the United States, the eastern half of the country couldn't grow vitis vinifera grapes meaning that the established and entrenched wine making tradition had to begin in the West and Southwest. And even then, prior to Prohibition it was New Mexico that had the most land under vine, not California. California benefited from shrewd businessmen and a wealth of immigrants from wine-friendly regions of the world like Italy and Eastern Europe.

Globally, both the Middle East (probably the birthplace of the wine grape) and Eastern Europe (the home of some of its earliest and most significant varietal mutations) suffered under very wine-unfriendly regimes. In the Middle East, Islam's alcohol-prohibitions severely stifled growth of the industry, while under Communist rule in Eastern Europe, ancient vineyards and distinctive varietals were torn up and replanted with high-yielding vines to maximize production.

Or sometimes something as simple as a particular Champagne being acclaimed by a particular ruler, as was the case with Veuve Clicquot in the court of Tsar Alexander I, can catapult a wine's reputation. Alternately, flooding the market with a cheap little wine like Blue Nun can damage a wine's reputation for decades.

But these aren't products of deliberate effort or inherent quality--they're historical accidents. The English like wine. They can't (or at least couldn't) make wine in England so they purchased wine from abroad. Both historical ties and proximity meant that most of that wine was coming from France. This esteem for French wines transferred to the New World and as global demand increased, prices went up.

Are there some wineries which produce better wine than other wineries in the same region? Sure there are. Are there some countries which produce better wines, on aggregate, than others? Probably. But I would argue that there is no inherent reason that any region of the world within the grape-growing latitudes produces better wine than any other region. All it takes is finding the right combination of land, grapes and talent. The countries of Western and Southern Europe are the most esteemed and established wine producers largely because their wine industries have been allowed to develop relatively unfettered for a couple thousand years and have spent most of the modern era without either prohibition or centralization. We haven't even had 100 years of unfettered wine production in the United States.

Which is a long way of saying that it's pointless to refer to a wine produced in Arizona against a wine produced in the Northern Rhone or Tuscany. It's indicative, I think, of the out-of-date mindset of major wine writers. They still write from the reference point that wines, regardless of where they are produced, should be striving toward a perfection that is defined against a standard that is largely shaped by the big red wines of France, Italy and the Napa Valley.

And that's plainly absurd. These are wines that are produced in these places for specific reasons. Northern Arizona has about as much in common with Tuscany in terms of terroir as James Suckling has in common in terms of physique with LL Cool J and to continue to privilege these old-guard wines is foolish, counterproductive, and out-of-touch.

We live in a global wine world where great wines from every corner are readily available. The wine drinker who grew up without privilege and without reading Wine Spectator doesn't believe in the cult of the Esteemed Taster. Instead this drinker wants the raw data which, when coupled with personal recommendations, facilitates his or her individual decision making.

So we need to look at every wine region as aspiring to something unique to its location--not aspiring to Bordeaux. Tell me about the land, the grapes, the climate. Tell me how the wine tastes--is it balanced? Fruit-forward? Earthy? Don't give me some bullshit about how this wine isn't achieving something it never set out to achieve. What does that accomplish besides showing off how many fancy northern Italian wines you've tasted?

Continuing to privilege these specific wines and specific styles as if they're an aspirational goal for all wine regions is ridiculous. Anyone who continues to do so should, kindly, stop.

Some very good wine writing!

2010-12-19T11:23:00.000-08:00

There's a very interesting article from the UK-magazine The World of Fine Wine that's circulating on Twitter. It's the first insightful article I've read in a glossy magazine that takes on the current relevance of pioneering wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr that is not from a position of "is he under attack?" or "is he still influential?" but rather "he is under attack" and "he is influential but his influence is decreasing rapidly every year."

This is something I've been writing about a lot recently, so I won't bore you with rehashes of my arguments. It was simply refreshing to hear this from not only a Legitimate Wine Critic but a writer who has written one of the definitive Parker biographies.

Ms. McCoy writes about the self-evidence of Parker's decline in influence as inevitable and then outlines why: the proliferation of other critics using the 100-point scale, the rise of a younger wine consumer not concerned with the "imprimatur [of] an aging guru," the dilution of his own brand through score inflation and hiring additional tasters, and the expansion of the global wine market beyond something that is comprehensible by even the most thorough reviewer.

I also appreciated the reference to perennial wine douche bag W. Blake Gray acknowledging that he "admitted in an interview that he uses it (the 100 point scale) instead of awarding stars as a way of marketing himself." That's like buying a first-class ticket for the Titanic while it's sinking, isn't it?

Most telling is her analysis of Parker's "circling the wagons," first by deleting critical comments from his forums, then by putting all of his message boards behind a pay wall. It would appear that Parker recognizes the viability of the assault on his role as critical monolith and is shielding those who still drink his Kool-Aid (Flavor Aid, actually) by walling in his garden. He doesn't want those lawyers and ibankers who've been going to him for their holiday gifts every year to start questioning the value of his ratings.

So cheers to Ms. McCoy for a thoughtful and informative piece of writing. It's not just about Parker, it's a very astute and succinct analysis of the current power relationship in the world of wine media.

Umami Burger Redux

2010-12-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

So I went to Umami Burger again recently. That burger is still really damn good. It's so good, that I don't even object to it winning "Burger of the Year" accolades from GQ--even if such an assertion is dubious on premise.

I also think Umami Burger is unfairly maligned. Typically there are two inevitable responses by a gourmet burger-hater. Either: 1. it's just a burger or; 2. In-N-Out is better.

First, to the "It's just a burger" assertion--you're right. It is just a burger. It's ground meat on a bun with toppings. And lobster's just a bug on the bottom of the sea and caviar is just cured sturgeon eggs. To assign the burger any higher or lower state in the culinary world because of its nature is absurd. You can make a bad burger, you can make a good burger. Is it perhaps a bit easier to make a serviceable-to-good burger than it is a steak? Probably. But it's just as hard to make a great burger as a great steak, and the burger as to be less expensive and made at higher volume (typically).

Second: No, In-N-Out is not better. Not even for the price. In-N-Out makes a good burger, for the price it's a great burger. But Umami Burger is better. It's 3-4 times better. It's 10x better. The meat is better quality. Every patty is handmade on site, the meat is hand ground and hand seasoned. The flavor combinations are thoughtful and interesting. It is, in my estimation, a step better than all other premium ($8+) burgers on the market that I've had.

Why is the burger lesser privileged? There's no inherent reason why we happily pay $20+ for an 8oz steak but balk at paying more than $6 for a burger other than that we are used to burgers being cheap. And a frozen, grey patty that's made from random cuts of meat and is 20% oatmeal should be cheap. But good meat is good meat and should, theoretically, command the same price.

I like Umami Burger a lot. It's one of my go-to's if I need a good, filling lunch for less than $20. And by always coming up with new combinations and patty variations, they give customers a reason to come back. Get Umami Burger and leave your presumptions aside, at least until you take a bite.

www.umamiburger.com

Crappy Service

2010-12-09T17:41:00.000-08:00

I recently dined at a local favorite of mine here in Los Angeles. I won't name names because I do like the restaurant and plan to return. It's a restaurant, in fact, whose service I've defended to others in the past. It's a restaurant that has been lauded for its food and maligned for the quality of its waitstaff, which I'd never found wanting. Until, well....

Unfortunately, I had very shitty service there last night.

I'm lenient when it comes to service. As long as I feel modestly taken care of, I let a lot of things slide. Casualness. Harriedness. I don't really care as long as I feel that I'm being maintained--I'm being checked on, well recommended and not hurried.

Our server made zero appearances at our table except to 1. take our order and 2. refill our wine. That's it. Only things that could directly earn him revenue.

Sure, food can be dropped by a runner. I don't mind. I've worked at restaurants where that was the case. I did, however, always go by the table shortly after they'd taken a few bites and checked on everything. Not the case. And he wasn't particularly busy. We had a late reservation and, although still full when we arrived, by the time our food arrived there were only a half dozen tables and at least two waiters still working.

The problems went deeper than an inattentive waiter, too. The bussers--who admittedly did a good job keeping our water glasses filled--were very eager to clear our plates. On one occasion we were practically forced to take food off of the platter and move it to our share plates so that they could, inexplicably, clear the platter for no end other than to clear the plate or slightly accelerate our departure.

For dessert, we also had a very bad creme brulee. I blame this on the service because it was bad due it obviously lacking brulee-ness. This was plainly visible as soon as it was dropped. We would've said something but, again, the server was gone. The top was barely cooked and the dessert, although full of excellent flavor, was annoyingly bad because of it. The custard was cold in parts and, again, the bruleed top was barely browned. That's the type of thing that a server or food runner needs to notice and rectify before it's served. I've done it numerous times as a waiter and, sure I've been yelled at by chefs and cooks, but in the end I've never served an inferior product to a customer. I get it. It was late. Maybe they'd put the blowtorch away. But that's never an excuse to offer a poorly-executed dish. If you can't adequately serve the creme brulee, then 86 it after 9PM.

The last egregious error on the restaurant's part was that, despite there being 3 or 4 tables still left in the restaurant, the back waiter staff began rolling out the brooms and dustpans and sweeping up. That's completely unacceptable--it hurries your paying customers and makes them feel uncomfortable. It's not worth it. In another 30 minutes everybody would've been out of there. Every restaurant I've worked at have contracted with an overnight cleaning crew who takes care of the heavy-duty cleaning well after closing.

(Yes, we had a late reservation but it was for 9:15 and the restaurant closed at 10PM. The place was packed when we arrived and we were not the last table to leave. If you want to have everyone out the door at 10PM, you need to close at 9PM.)

Will I be back? Probably. But if this happens again I might not be.

What happened to California Cabernet?

2010-11-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

I was visiting my parents for the Thanksgiving holiday and, in what has become a holiday tradition, I raided their wine cellar.

My parents have long been wine enthusiasts. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of being dragged to tasting rooms on family camping trips in Napa or the Sierra Foothills. They have an extensive collection of small production California wines (from some wineries that don't even exist any more) that generally weren't available anywhere but from the tasting room or in restaurants. On my last few visits, I've been going through their wine cellar and pulling out wines that are ready to be enjoyed or nearing past-the-peak-ness to drink with our holiday fare. We've been drinking a lot of circa 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon.

These wines largely pre-date the advent of mass Parkerization, when California wine makers manipulated their wines to increase alcohol and concentration so as to appeal to the Wine Advocate's palate, a process that reached its peak in the early 2000s, when every new boutique winery strove for a 90+ to justify its existence to investors. As a result, these wines are lower in alcohol--13% or less, virtually unheard of in Cabernet from California in recent years--and showcase more lightly steeped tannins, better integrated cedar and spice aromatics, and actual blackberry fruit flavors instead of candy and cough syrup.

(And any asshole who tells you that California can't make lower alcohol wines because our climate is too good and warm and hot is full of shit. 1998 was still one of the hottest years on record and I've had Napa Cabs from that year that were 12.5% alcohol. Zins that were 13.5%.)

Are they great wines? No. They're wines that probably sold for the mid-to-high teens out of the tasting room. But they're largely estate-grown wines made in an honest, straight-forward way. No manipulation. Moderate oak. And while admitting that it lacked a certain heft that I've come to expect from my California red wines, after 10 years in the bottle, it had a level of balance and, well, pleasant-ness that I've never had in California Cabernet that was under $30 a bottle.

I found these wines to be in the same mode as the inexpensive imports from Spain, Portugal and Southern France that I enjoy routinely--the wines I buy for $15 a bottle at a good wine shop and drink with a simple evening meal. Medium to medium-full bodied, moderate tannins, acidity, and earthy characters to balance out the fruit. It's a style of wine I haven't encountered much from California in my 6 or so years of earnest, serious wine drinking, let alone at the price that these wines originally sold for.

So what happened? I'm not sure exactly, other than that we started manipulating wine instead of making it. The good news is, we still have excellent fruit and if we just picked good grapes and let good wine come into being, we can start producing something that's honest and interesting again in California.

HFF Quickie: Starry Kitchen, Los Angeles, Ca

2010-11-29T17:14:00.000-08:00

Starry Kitchen is that age-old tale of "local underground illegal restaurateurs make good." Husband-wife team Nguyen and Thi Tran began running a sort of speakeasy-style restaurant out of their apartment, serving their guests modern pan-Asian comfort food gratis on their patio, but with a recommended $5 donation. Though several attempts were made to shut them down, they toed the legal line well enough to avoid censure. In the mean time, the owner of a struggling downtown sushi restaurant decided to revamp his concept and invited the Trans to essentially take over his business with no upfront capital investment.

Preparation meets opportunity, no?

So now, in a small restaurant store front on Bunker Hill, the Trans are serving their signature pan-Asian mindfuck cuisine to bankers and lawyers, offering a welcome respite from Panda Express and all the generic soup and sandwich shops on the hill.

Every day, Starry Kitchen offers your choice of proteins, usually the signature free-range lemongrass chicken, an additional chicken option, a beef or pork option and a vegetarian selection. Sometimes a seafood choice turns up. You can then get your selected protein served as either a wrap, a banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich on baguette with jalapenos, cilantro and slaw), "Thai" Cobb salad, chopped salad or as a lunch plate over rice. Everything comes with one selection from the rotating side dish offerings (the lunch plate comes with two side dishes). Starry Kitchen also typically offers at least one stand-alone dish--a seared tuna salad on my visits--and some additional a la carte sides and desserts. Dishes are always rotating through and when one comes off the menu it doesn't return for several months.

The kitchen has no oven or microwave, so everything is prepared in either the deep fryer or on the large precision cook tops (the same kind used at the French Laundry). In my three experiences with Starry Kitchen (twice in the restaurant, once at the food truck) the food has been impeccably prepared. The Krab Cake wrap was fresh and tasty, as was the pork belly banh mi and the Japanese Kara-ge banh mi. On the side dish front, the kim chee fried rice was a highlight, but the fresh cilantro-y glass noodles and crispy fried tofu balls were also hits. An unusually sweet and earthy steamed pandan flan was a great dessert and quelled the heat from the house pickled jalapenos. Seriously, those fuckers got me high, I think.

Starry Kitchen offers interesting, honest and uncompromising cuisine at a very fair price--everything is under $9. Some folks might be turned off by their no-substitutions menu of weirdness, but honestly if you can't get in to something on the Starry Kitchen's menu, you really should just give up on life. Luckily, Panda Express is around the corner should that eventuality arise.

Starry Kitchen is open weekdays for lunch from 11-3 and for dinner on Thursdays and Fridays from 6-9:30.

Starry Kitchen
350 S. Grand Ave. D-3
Los Angeles, Ca 90071
www.starrykitchen.com

HFF On The Road: Washington, DC

2010-11-21T19:11:00.001-08:00

From a food standpoint, Washington and Los Angeles are very similar. Both cities benefit from and are restricted by a customer base that is affluent but also incurious and unadventurous. They are cities where fine dining restaurants rely upon expense account lunches and show-off dinners to support their bottom lines.

As a result, you have a collection of very good restaurants serving predictable food: steakhouses, trattorias, bistros and brasseries. You have a slew of high-end chain restaurants as well, places like Fogo do Chao and Morton's. They're destination restaurants where a clientele coming from all over the world can be indulged comfortably and not be challenged--you'll spend a lot of money but it'll be on a New York strip and a bottle of Cakebread, so it's okay. It's one of the main reasons, in my opinion, that Los Angeles lags behind cities like San Francisco, Chicago--even Portland--in being an innovative dining environment. Too much of the dining-out money wants to dine at boring, predictable places. I mean Morton's is simply TERRIBLE and how many of those are there in LA--and the DC area, for that matter?

(Five and five, respectively.)

But DC, like Los Angeles, has fantastic diversity and a lot of young professionals and there are neighborhood haunts to be found that are worthwhile. Some highlights from my recent trip to DC:

Meridian Pint: A very fun gastropub in the transition Columbia Heights neighborhood. Referred there by a friend, at first glance Meridian Pint looks much like a straightforward sports bar, loaded with flatscreen TVs. The menu, however, revealed a more adventurous culinary spirit with a mix of updates on sports bar classics (nachos topped with braised brisket) and modern New American entrees (grilled trout with fried polenta). If you come in without a reservation you can dine in the downstairs lounge which offers the full menu in a more casual seat-yourself bar environment. GREAT beer selection, focusing primarily on mid-Atlantic and New England microbrews.

www.meridianpint.com

Liberty Tavern: Across the river in downtown Arlington is Liberty Tavern, another New American gastropub. We went for brunch and opted for the buffet so I can't speak to the quality of the a la carte menu, but it's populated with an interesting array of New American dishes and wood oven pizzas. The Sunday brunch buffet was one of the best I've had in recent memory. The chafing dishes were being perpetually replaced and everything was quite fresh. Highlights were the fresh carved roast pork loin (one of at least a half-dozen pork dishes), baked trout, potato gratin, and fresh biscuits, ham and gravy. Come hungry and its an excellent value at under $20. The only thing lacking was my Bloody Mary, which was mixed in advance and very heavy on the cheap vodka and lacking in flavor beyond that.

www.theliberytavern.com

Spider Kelly's: Okay, so apparently we only ate at gastropubs. Sorry. The World Series was on. Located in Arlington, a door or two down from Liberty Tavern, Spider Kelly's was heavier on the "pub" and lighter on the "gastro," offering more straightforward pub grub with a few gourmet twists. I was looking forward to having a crab cake sandwich--I ordered that 99.99% of the time when I visited Virginia and Maryland as a kid. Spider Kelly's version surprised me as it consisted basically of a pile of lump crab on a bun--which was great in a way but I kinda missed the slutty mix of crab and breadcrumbs that makes for a good cheap crab cake sandwich. The food here was nothing worth returning for, but it was solid inexpensive bar food in a good environment to watch the game.

www.spiderkellys.com

I hope to get back to DC soon and when I have more time I intend to visit some of the city's flagship restaurants. I'm particularly curious about Jose Andres' projects in DC as well as Wolfgang Puck's The Source.

Any current or ex-DC area readers have other recommendations in the capital?

HFF Quickie: Toddy G's, Los Angeles, Ca

2010-11-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

After lamenting a dearth of good pizza in LA, I was pleased to discover Tomato Pie in Silver Lake a few months ago. Now, adding a second quality pizza establishment to LA's Eastside is Toddy G's in Downtown's Arts District. It's located next to Tony's on 7th at Santa Fe in what used to be an old Chinese restaurant. I'd heard a while back that Cedd Moses' 213 Group was involved in this project too, but I haven't found any corroborating evidence for that. Regardless, it's a welcome compliment to it's upscale dive bar neighbor.

It's more-or-less New York in style with big 18+" pies with a thin chewy crust. They offer eight or so regular standards like Margherita, Soppresata and Spinach pizzas with a few daily specials including homemade meatball and homemade Italian sausage pizzas.

I've tried several of the pizzas and the two standouts are the White Pizza and the Spinach pizza with feta, red onions and kalamata olives.

Pizza's available by the slice--either dine-in or from the pick-up window--and by the whole pie (currently dine-in or pick-up only, but delivery to the eastern half of Downtown coming soon).

Toddy G's
2019 East 7th St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90021
www.toddygs.com
213-627-1430

Crab Cakes!

2010-10-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

Dear anonymous restaurant in Arlington, VA:

A pile of canned crab on a bun is not a crab cake sandwich. It's a pile of fucking crab on a bun. Here I was trying to relive a love of my childhood, the Mid-Atlantic crab cake sandwich, and you give me a pile of (admittedly lump) crab meat on a crappy role with some jarred tartare sauce on the side. Lame.

Your onion rings were good though.

Love,
D

On Food Trucks: Starry Kitchen LA

2010-10-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

Do we need dedicated food trucks? Meaning, that is, do we need a truck that is 100% devoted to one business and one concept?

Food trucks have a lot more overhead than you might initially think--a tricked out modern truck can cost will north of $100K, sometimes as much as $200K or more. Plus there's gas, insurance--not to mention the actual food cost itself. Permitting is a little bit easier than a restaurant, but that's about it.

And competition is steeper, not only because you're competing with dozens of other high-end trucks, you're competing against the myriad lonchero trucks and street corner food stands. With most high-end trucks serving food in the $7-$10 range, they're also competing with hole-in-the-wall restaurants offering a sit-down experience for the same price. You're better off saving a bit more money, picking a good spot and opening up a brick and mortar restaurant. The food truck bubble will burst and it will burst soon.

So what, then, is the appropriate role of high-end food trucks in our ever-changing food world?

I think the Mandoline Truck and Starry Kitchen are on to something. Starry Kitchen, the modern Vietnamese restaurant that started as an illegal underground restaurant and has now gone semi-legit on Bunker Hill in Downtown LA, is taking a "residency" in Mandoline's slick Vietnamese food wagon for a few weeks. They're cruising around LA, slinging their specialties and promoting the hell out of their business.

A brick and mortar restaurant using food trucks as a promotional tool is genius, I think. If the restaurant is in business then the truck just needs to break even and if it brings even one new diner to the restaurant, it's a success. There's money to be made in someone investing in a small fleet of food trucks that he or she then leases out to restaurants and/or pop-up chefs (think Ludo) for short or medium term leases. Bring the restaurant to the people, promote your business and gather new customers.

The Starry Kitchen has some rockstar food and its food truck model was excellent. Like most successful trucks, they offer limited options in a couple different combinations. At the truck you have the choice of pork belly, curry chicken or fried tofu balls served either in a banh mi (Vietnamese baguette sandwich) or over coconut rice. And unlike almost every other food truck, the food came up very quickly.

I had the pork belly banh mi. The meat was delicious, flavorful, sweet and spicy, and sliced thin. The vegetables were interesting: sauteed more fajita-like than the fresh veggies I've had on past sandwiches. The only hiccup was the baguette, which was a little stale. I was envious of the chicken curry banh mi eaters dipping their sandwiches in the curry sauce. I also had an a la carte side of tofu balls. They're on to something here-- the balls are formed pretty small and then fried so they're crispy all the way through, not soggy in the middle like larger pieces of fried tofu.

I enjoyed the food quite a bit and the vibe even better--the Starry Kitchen team has a lot of fun and doesn't take itself to seriously--and I'll make a point to check out the restaurant itself. I guess you'd call that food truck a success.

LA only needs about 20 non-lonchero food trucks and just let a couple hundred restaurants use them over the course of a year. Those that do well can keep leasing them, those that do really well can buy their own, and those that only do okay will at least have gained a little extra business.

Starry Kitchen
350 S. Grand Ave.
Los Angeles, Ca 90071
www.starrykitchen.com
Twitter: @StarryKitchen

HFF Quickie: LudoTruck

2010-10-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

I had a rather lukewarm response to LudoBites' first pop-up at Breadbar a couple years ago, but I was intrigued by the many good reports on Ludovic Lefebvre's fried chicken truck.

My ongoing complaint about food trucks is not that the lines to order are long (that happens) but it's that the food takes too long to prepare and you're then forced to wait in an amorphous blob that slowly bleeds back into the line that others are standing in to order for 15 minutes or more. LudoTruck fixes this problem by having a very small menu of three different chicken options (wings, strips, balls) either alone or in combination with cole slaw and fries (sides are also available a la carte). By sticking to just a few things, the food is always cooking and my order came up promptly--two or three minutes.

I ordered the Provencal chicken balls and they were delicious. The classiest chicken nuggets on the planet, they're made from thigh meat that has been marinated for several days in herbes de Provence, then rolled in seasoned breading and fried. They're perfectly moist and permeated with herbal flavor.

The accompanying "perfect" fries are quite good, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. I also liked the piquillo pepper sauce for the chicken. I wasn't crazy about the slaw, which was very vinegar-y and uneven with alternating cabbage-y blandness and jalapeno spiciness. Small complaint.

Avoid the truck at food truck festivals since the lines will no doubt be long. In fact, avoid food truck festivals in general, but seek LudoTurck out on its many one-off outings throughout Los Angeles.

The LudoTruck
www.twitter.com/LudoTruck

A Really Good Tomato Sauce

2010-10-03T17:58:00.001-07:00

Here's my recipe for a really good tomato sauce. It's something I make about once a month and it typically lasts me a week or so. Sometimes I'll freeze half of it for later. It's simple, easy and delicious. It's also way better than any store-bought tomato sauce you can get. The steps:

1. In a large pot (I use my Le Creuset French Oven) heat enough olive oil to cover the bottom.

2. While the oil heats, dice a medium onion. Add the diced onion to the pot and saute for a few minutes.

3. Chop 3 cloves of garlic and add to the pot. I cut corners here and use Dorsot frozen chopped garlic cubes from Trader Joe's. Authentic? Nah. But I'm not Italian and this is a lot easier and gives a good result.

4. Chop about two tablespoons of fresh basil. Add to the pot. Here I also use two cubes of Dorsot frozen chopped basil.

5. Add one pound Italian sausage (casing removed). Break it up with a wooden spoon. Eliminate this step for a vegetarian sauce.

6. Add a healthy dose of salt (about a tablespoon), about a tablespoon each of dried oregano and dried basil as well as several cranks of fresh ground pepper. For a spicy sauce, add a teaspoon or two of crushed red pepper. Stir the contents of the pot to coat the sausage with the herbs and oil.

7. Let simmer for 5-10 minutes.

8. Add a quarter cup of dry white wine, deglazing the pan if necessary. Let the wine simmer with the meat for another 5 minutes.

9. Add one large (28 oz) can of either tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes or diced tomatoes. Add two medium (14 oz) cans of ready-cut tomatoes. I like to do one can each of fire-roasted and "Italian-style". Add one can (6 oz) of tomato paste. Stir.

10. Let the sauce simmer for at least 30 minutes or as long as 90+ minutes. The longer the better. Taste before serving and adjust seasoning as necessary.

11. Optional additions: 1/4 cup chopped olives; 3-4 chopped anchovy fillets; 1 can cannellini beans; 1/4 cup chopped parsley.

The beauty of this sauce is that it's hearty enough to stand on its own with just a little pasta. It's also excellent with rice or quinoa or as an accompaniment to grilled chicken or pork. You're welcome.

HFF Quickie: Nick's Cafe - Los Angeles, Ca

2010-09-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Finally made it to the venerable cop-owned Northeast Downtown/Lincoln Heights institution, Nick's. The breakfast and lunch dive is right across North Spring St. from the Los Angeles State Historic Park ("The Cornfield") in the midst of poultry wholesale warehouses and light/medium manufacturing.

At Nick's, your seating options are either at the u-shaped counter or at one of the outside tables and since this was an oppressively hot day we opted for the slightly cooler inside counter option. The young, friendly staff is quick and attentive, going against my immediate presumptions based on Nick's superficial similarities to Westwood's The Apple Pan where, great burger aside, the staff is old and not particularly spry. But on to the food.

We only went for the breakfast options so a lunch discussion will have to wait. Most of the breakfast options are some combination of eggs and ham (their signature), bacon or chorizo along with a few different pancake and French toast combinations.

I had the chorizo breakfast burrito which was enormous and delicious. Eggs, potatoes, jalapenos, and a load of chorizo stuffed into a giant tortilla. The whole burrito was quickly griddle before serving, a nice finishing touch. The eggs were of good quality, as was the chorizo. The jalapenos were a nice addition to the typical "egg-potato-meat" make-up of lesser breakfast burritos.

My companion had the French toast combination which was also quite good. Thick, hand-dipped slices of French toast with scrambled eggs and ham. The ham earns its reputation as the best cheap ham in town: thick-cut from whole ham steaks and crisped up nicely on the griddle.

Sure it's simple and cheap (our entire giant meal with coffee was $20) but virtually everything is hand made to order. No Sysco to be seen. It's the best diner dive breakfast I've had in LA period. Check it out.

Nick's Cafe
1300 N Spring St
Los Angeles, CA 90012
www.nickscafela.com

Can't we all just get along?

2010-09-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

Our national wine dialogue is at a very adversarial stage right now. On one side, you have the "Natural Wine" et al faction that is staunchly advocating for wines produced as simply as possible with minimal human interference.

Because this styile is advocated by a young, hip set and because it stands directly opposed to the wine styles that have been popular in the major wine journals of the last decade, this has provoked something of a backlash from The Establishment.

Essentially we've pitted young wine geeks with black plastic eyeglasses and ironic pocket squares against overweight attorneys swilling Bordeaux from Riedel crystal while sitting behind a Commodore 64 running WordPerfect. Unfortunately, the conversation has ceased to be a discussion about quality wine making and has become a shouting match between two firmly entrenched sides.

This boiled over recently when Robert M. Parker, Jr. wrote this about his recent experience at a restaurant. The Twitter-sphere took umbrage to this particular part of his comments:

"Add the BYO and no corkage....and better yet...no precious sommelier trying to sell us some teeth enamel removing wine with acid levels close to toxic, made by some sheep farmer on the north side of his 4,000-foot foot elevation vineyard picked two months before ripeness, and made from a grape better fed to wild boar than the human species..."

I was not particularly shocked, as I already assumed Parker to be an out-of-touch ass when it comes to his understanding of the modern wine world, but the severity of his tone does reflect his frustration at the idiot level of wine hipsterism on the other side of the spectrum where, yes, some wines are selected purely for their absurd level of naturalism over all other criteria. Though I can't think of what real-life wine Parker could possibly be referring too.

My tastes do run toward the "natural," terroir-driven style of wine advocated by the wine Twitterati, but there can be excellent, well-made wines that do skew to the higher end of the alcohol spectrum. Also (d0n't shoot me) the presence of new French or (even) American oak in the right kind of wine can improve it. I promise it's true. Take, for instance, Ridge Zinfandels or the red wines from Paulo Laureano in Portugal.

It's not an all-or-nothing proposition and if you become so entrenched in your wine ideology that you're not going to even begin to entertain the validity of wines which exist outside of your vinous fiefdom you're going to miss out on a huge chunk of the world's wine and you'll miss the opportunity to try some gems.

(The only wines I would say to avoid on principal are giant production factory-farmed wines, the types of generic-labeled bottles on the bottom shelves at grocery stories and BevMo. These are character-less wines produced using destructive farming practices.)

And, really, what are the stakes in this game? You try a wine you might not like, have a few sips, and if you really don't like it then just move on to something else. That's it. Your world won't come crashing down, your balls won't retract into your abdomen and your wife won't leave you for her personal trainer. You just might have a mildly unpleasant taste in your mouth that'll go away quickly.

(And if you explain that calmly to your wife, maybe you'll stop arguing and find a new common ground in your marriage, too. I'd still recommend firing her trainer though.)

HFF Quickie: Daikokuya Ramen - Los Angeles, Ca

2010-09-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my greatest personal flaw is my contempt for groupthink. When I drive past a restaurant and I see a big line outside, my first thought is "look at those suckers, standing in line for THAT! Come on!" My internal monologue sounds like GOB from Arrested Development.

For unknown reasons, I do make exceptions for Japanese restaurants, which is how I ended up in a (rather short) line for Daikokuya Ramen in Little Tokyo for lunch on a Monday afternoon.

I fell in love with real ramen on my trip to Japan several years ago. It's simple, quick and delicious for an easy lunch and it's the absolute best at three in the morning after a weird and wild night at a Tokyo dance club. I'd heard from reputable sources that Daikokuya was among the best in Little Tokyo, so I checked it out with a friend from out of town.

The restaurant itself was exactly like most storefront ramen houses I went to in Japan: long and narrow with a long row of barstools bordering the kitchen and a row of small booths against the wall. The staff is quick and attentive and food is served promptly.

It was fucking delicious. The broth is made fresh daily from Kurobuta pork and is dense and redolent without being too salty. The thin-sliced pork strips melt apart in the broth, the egg is perfectly just-barely hard boiled and the noodles are firm and fresh while still being just Top Ramen-y enough to be charming.

Since it was a hot day, I opted for the tsuke-men deconstructed ramen where the noodles are served cold with the hot broth and accompaniments (pork, egg, bean sprouts, green onion) on the side and you dip the ingredients in the broth. (My dish was actually the kichi-men, which added shredded seaweed on top of the noodles and had a spicier broth.) As soon as the slices of fatty Kurobuta pork touched the broth they disintegrated into the soup. It was awesome.

My friend had the classic ramen and, based on his tasteful slurping and periodic moans, loved it. He also ordered the tsukemono pickles, which were tasty but largely ignored in our voracious attacks on the noodles and broth.

Prices are reasonable (about $9 for a big bowl) and on a Monday around 1PM the wait for two was less than 10 minutes. Well worth a visit.

The menu is fairly extensive with quite a few other soup, rice and appetizer options to be tried, but get the classic ramen on your first visit for the best introduction to real ramen I've had this side of Honolulu.

Daikokuya - Little Tokyo
327 East 1st St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90012
www.daikokuya-ten.com
(Other locations in Costa Mesa, Monterey Park & Hacienda Heights)

Fogo de Chão - Beverly Hills, Ca

2010-09-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not an opponent of chain restaurants in theory, merely in practice. Actually that's not entirely true: I'm mostly ambivalent toward inexpensive chain restaurants as they have a clear-cut valuable role in providing consistent cheap meals. I've also spoken mild praises of certain higher-end chains like Fleming's Steakhouse.

My only particular contempt is for the upscale casual chain restaurants like Cheesecake Factory or Buca di Beppo, where you get a very poor product in a faux-chic atmosphere for prices only marginally less than going to a solid neighborhood restaurant. They have no purpose in this world and should quietly tumble into the sea.

But this post isn't to report on an upscale casual chain restaurant that succeeds but rather to praise another fine-dining chain that does it right and does it well.

Fogo de Chão is a Brazil-based international chain of churrascarias, a type of steakhouse where roasted meats are served tableside, hand-carved to order from large skewers. This being my first trip to a churrascaria, chain or otherwise, I can't personally speak to its authenticity, though my Latin dining companion said it was fairly authentic.

For one flat price (around $40 for lunch and $60 for dinner) you have access to an excellent salad bar with selections ranging from mixed greans, Caesar salad and grilled asparagus to smoked salmon, potato salad and thin-sliced ham. At the table, you're given hot side dishes of mashed potatoes, cheese rolls, rice, sauteed bananas and fried polenta. Only the mashed potatoes were mediocre, with the grainy texture of instant.

Each diner has a small disk with a green side or a red side. Much like at a stoplight party in college, the color on the card indicates how much meat you're ready to take. Green side up means the passadores dressed like Brazilian cowboys will come to your table with any one of about a dozen different cuts of meat on spears and carve strips off on to your side plate. Flip your card over to the red side when you've had your fill (at least for the moment).

Like any good Latin American steakhouse, beef was king. In particular, the bottom round was excellently prepared as was the picanha. The sausages and chicken wings were only so-so and the leg of lamb was gamey and dry. The pork ribs were quite good, however. I didn't try the lamb chops or the pork tenderloin.

The wine list is well-selected and reasonably priced, and not just by Beverly Hills Restaurant Row standards. They could have more Portuguese and Latin American wines on the list, however, so as to be more authentic to the cuisine.

Desserts (not included in the price), with the flan and the tres leches both being excellent takes on those classics.

Overall, Fogo de Chão is a bit too intense of an experience both on the wallet and the colon to make a frequent habit, more so if you're a light-to-moderate meat eater like myself, but it's an excellent spot for a nice meal out, especially with a group of friends. It is somewhat vegetarian-friendly as Fogo de Chão offers a salad bar-only option for significantly less than the regular all-you-can-eat price.

Check it out, especially for lunch, when the lower price presents a significant value.

Fogo de Chão
133 N. La Cienega Blvd.
Beverly Hills, Ca 90211
310-289-7755
www.fogodechao.com

Why Mainstream Wine Criticism Will Soon Be Obsolete

2010-08-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

I'm continuing to ponder why it is I despise most mainstream wine journalism so much. The scores, ratings and articles loaded with misinformation and manufactured controversy do a disservice to, well, pretty much everybody.

When I say "mainstream wine writing," I refer to the major national magazines (Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast, Decanter and Wine & Spirits) and, to a lesser extent, the wine writing in major national newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I also get annoyed at the LA Times, but only because I have to read it regularly and it appears to be staffed by writers whose critical thinking skills are marginally better than a baby entranced by peekaboo but worse than a Tea Partier who knows Obama's a Muslim "just 'cause." I do not, however, consider the LA Times to be of particular national wine importance, not least because of their continued insistence on publishing writing by W. Blake Gray. I also group in major independent wine writers, however I view their influence as being largely insular (i.e. limited to professionals, collectors, and wine geeks) and even more on the wane than that of national media.

The San Francisco Chronicle does have the best food and wine section in the country and is, in my opinion, the only newspaper worth reading on that topic. They even stopped doing star ratings in their wine reviews. Progressive!

So why do I hate it? I like wine. I like reading. I like writing, but 90% of national wine writing is either duller than your mom in bed or so poorly conceived that it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a Vinturi.

Most importantly, it fundamentally misunderstands the 21st century wine market.

I think it's because wine writing has remained largely unchanged for the last 30 years, back when Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator came on the scene and moved wine writing from the cerebral-abstract world of the British writers who dominated at the time toward the more visceral American style of criticism.

In 1980 the wine world was a very different place. Most American consumers of high-end (i.e. not jug) wine were a small, well-to-do elite. Wines on offer, both domestic and imported, were a fraction of what is available today and the sales of which were dependent almost entirely upon the reputation of the producer. The whole wine world was more easily navigable then and its audience largely homogeneous: upper middle class white professionals, drinking wine largely from California, France and Italy.

But in 2010 the wine world is an incredibly diverse place, with the number of wines and wine regions available in the United States having expanded exponentially. Premium wine is also consumed by a much more diverse cross-section of the population, including a sizable younger demographic that prefers to make its own decisions or make decisions based on personal recommendations rather than deferring to any institutional authority on matters of taste.

The idea that a national publication can attempt to effectively report on the real wine world is absurd. It reminds me of when my family first got AOL in 1996 and they actually sent an "internet yellow pages" with the software. It was a printed phone book listing several hundred URLs. I'm sure even at the time it was an absurdly quaint idea but now it looks absolutely ridiculous. A monolithic media entity for something as diverse as wine is equally ridiculous.

It's also incredibly limiting. An editor at one of the aforementioned magazines once told me that they generally don't write about wines if they aren't distributed in at least 30 states. The problem with that is that very few of the wines of true uniqueness or distinction are available in that many states. That's because unless it is one of a handful of ultra-rare expensive wines from wineries that only allocate a few dozen cases to each state, most wines, in order to be profitable in that big of a chunk of the country, needs to have a production run in the thousands of cases. There are many great wineries that produce fewer than 5,000 total cases, let alone of a single wine. They'll never make it onto the radar of the national wine media and therefore that wine will never be exposed to wine consumers who don't already know the winery locally. These magazines are akin to a food and restaurant magazine that only reviews restaurants with locations in multiple states. Those are the wines that these magazines review, the Morton's Steakhouses and Cheesecake Factories of wine.

(It's particularly troublesome given how easy it is to obtain wine now. Maybe twenty years ago it made sense to only review well-distributed wines because how else could the average reader get the wine if it wasn't reliably available in most of the country? But now, as long as the reader lives in one of the 35-odd states that allow for wine delivery, any wine that's written about can be obtained in a few mouse clicks.)

So what does that mean? It means the national wine media of 2010 is exactly the same as the national wine media of 1980 and it's still writing largely to that same audience: the casual, adventure-phobic wine connoisseur who wants to consume a score, not a wine. They want wines they can reliably find at their local big box wine shop and that they can open for their other wine-loving friends who will immediately know the brand, the reputation and the perceived quality: ironically the very behaviors in wine selection that the Wine Advocate originally helped dispel with its then-revolutionary 100-point rating scale.

Because this demographic, despite aging rapidly, still represents (for now) a significant chunk of the wine buying power they still have a massive economic effect on the wine industry. As the wine consumer has become more diverse, the wine critic remains largely middle-aged, male and white. Ipso facto, the mainstream wine media has ceased to be relevant to the vast majority of wine drinkers, while maintaining its relevance to the older minority who spend the most money. It makes perfect immediate economic sense but it's a recipe for obsolescence in a matter of, oh let's say five years or so.

I've grown up my entire wine-drinking life completely outside of the 100-point wine world. I worked at a wine shop that didn't give a flying fuck about scores (even if we did have a handful of perennial favorites on our shelves). When I worked as a wine shop clerk and as a waiter I never once had a guest who asked about wine scores. Did it help that I worked in Berkeley, perhaps the most progressive wine market in the country? Sure. But even in Los Angeles, with a few notable Westside exceptions, most reputable wine shops don't care about scores and don't use them to sell wine. These shops are quite successful. I mean sure they actually have to do their jobs and hand sell their wine to customers instead of relying on shelf-talkers and magazines to do their selling for them, but if you really love wine you wouldn't want it any other way. These are the places that will be in business for the next thirty years. The new consumer is adventurous, value-oriented and makes his purchasing decisions based upon personal recommendations, not from the authority of a distant group of stodgy white men--and yes, I consider Karen MacNeill a stodgy white man.

And so that's what it is: mainstream wine media is boring middle-aged white people writing for boring middle-aged white people and that's why it sucks. It's a holdover from an era when the WASP was the only American culture that mattered for selling high-end goods and they're still desperately clinging to that illusion.

As we move forward, the wine consumer who makes his decision based upon the recommendations of the wine media will continue to miss out on a majority of the world's unique wines and the wine shops that make the majority of their buying decisions based upon 90+ point scores will continue to lose market share and alienate the younger wine buyer.

Keep up the good work.

Chick-Fil-A!

2010-08-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

Many years ago when I ran a fancy little humor magazine, I wrote the following, in reference to "mythical places" that ought be explored by Leonard Nimoy and his "In Search Of..." crew:

Chick Fil-A: This chain of restaurants, referenced in Ben Folds songs, supposedly even sponsors a college bowl game, yet a thorough search of any Bay Area phone book is fruitless. Where are they? What do they serve? Why does it sound like the name of a South Indian porn star? Chana Masala and Chick Fil-A star in Dharma Does Delhi. But I digress....

Racism aside, I can happily say that this is one mystery that has been fully explored by myself without any assistance from Leonard Nimoy or his army of elf fetishists. I went to Chick-Fil-A, specifically its new location that opened up last weekend on Figueroa down by USC.

This was an unique opportunity to experience a cult fast food phenomenon as an outsider. California is home to most pilgrimage-worthy trashy cuisine, pizza and bagels aside, and my visit to Chick-Fil-A reminded me of my earliest pre-expansion visits to In-N-Out Burger, when they were still confined to Southern California and family trips down I-5 always meant several stops for burgers and fries.

Just like In-N-Out, Chick-Fil-A is a hyphenated, quirky family-oriented fast food restaurant (though not family-run, it's a franchise) with mildly off-putting but innocuous religious undertones offering a limited menu. Chicken breast, fried plain or spicy, or grilled.

It was pretty good. The chicken was very moist and had the texture of an honest, plump chicken breast as opposed to the airy chicken-flavored sponge quality that other sandwiches have. The breading is light and crisp. The bun is nondescript but not bad and the not-too-sweet pickles were a good addition.

The sandwiches are accompanied by cross-cut waffle fries, which had good texture and were clearly cut from whole, skin-on potatoes, and an array of dipping sauces. Honey mustard was good and the secret "Chick-Fil-A Sauce" was odd and intriguingly addicting. The buffalo sauce worked well to amp up the heat on the spicy chicken sandwich. Additional sides are available, including carrot and raisin salad, cole slaw, fruit cup and chicken soup, but I don't much see the point: the sandwich and fries make a pretty perfect combination.

Will I make Chick-Fil-A a habit? Nope, but I see the appeal.

Chick-Fil-A USC
3758 S. Figueroa St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90007
www.chick-fil-a.com

Why I Don't Like Wine Writing

2010-08-11T02:04:00.001-07:00

I'm going to be a little bit all over the place here, so bear with me.

I don't like most contemporary wine writing. I think that's been pretty clear. It's almost uniformly humorless and often reads like a self-important pissing contest of adjectives and a bragging match over trophy wines like they're college sexual conquests.

Wine is booze. Wine is fun. Wine can be beautiful and transcendent and wonderful and weird. Just like sex. If we described sex in the manner of wine writing, it'd be the most un-arousing prose on the planet.

And I think that's the issue. Wine writing is either cold and clinical or it's the flowery puff of romance novels and the trite sensuality of Bible Belt missionary sex. It fails to capture the nuance, intimacy and situational spontaneity that is inherent to wine tasting. Tasting and fucking are unique in that they are intensely personal while simultaneously requiring the willful participation of another, whether that be a winemaker or a leather-bound gimp tied up in your basement. Or something in between.

Wine writers are, generally, too indulgent in themselves to care that there is a wine or a reader involved. Most wine writing is the equivalent of mindless, violent masturbation where nobody is enriched but the actor. Your adjectival calisthenics do not impress me sir!

Strangely some people do care, but in the same way that people care about vanilla pornography featuring skinny bleached blondes with bolted on tits and muscular gentlemen with nothing to recommend them but one qualification, a sort of over-ripe high alcohol extraction of the penis. It's immediate, simple and easily accessible. Gender is obvious. Roles are clear. The viewer isn't muddled by questions like "Hey that short-haired girl is kinda cute, does that mean I'm gay?" or "What's that woman doing to that man in the harness? Isn't that against the Bible?" It's what we're "supposed" to find sexy. It's how we're "supposed" to write about wine.

When a writer pretends objectivity in wine writing and criticism, what he does is mask that this objective writing is writing for the lowest common denominator for mass consumption. It fails to actually stimulate or enlighten. It's the airport novel as opposed to literary fiction. It's comforting predictable prose and superficially titillating plot twists, not a challenging and provocative foray into history, culture, taste and odd personal perversions.

I get much more pleasure from reading the distinctive, idiosyncratic and eloquently personal ramblings of a passionate wine enthusiast than the rote critiques of the most organized, rational wine writers.

Perhaps this is cynical, but I think that mainstream wine writing is so poor because its ranks are filled largely by journalists who, writing ability aside, are little more than wine hobbyists. They are not wine professionals. Their connection to wine is that of an enthusiast and a tourist and they're writing for other tourists. They do not produce the product nor do they select products for import. There's a disconnect because they do not understand the passion required to be foolish enough to want to produce and sell something so weirdly personal and bizarre as wine.

Who are the major wine writers? Jancis Robinson? Travel writer. Robert Parker? Lawyer. Eric Asimov? National news journalist. Wine came later and wine came from a perspective of an elite consumer. Their first loyalty is to the writing and the idea of wine, not to the wine itself. They're out to sell themselves and their philosophy first.

The wine writers I like, people like Thierry Thiesse and Randall Grahm, are winemakers and importers. They're not writing about wine because they need to make deadline or want to sell some sort of safe Club Med package-tour idea of wine, they're writing because they are passionate about the business that has become their true vocation and, recent publishing success for Mr. Grahm aside, is the source of most of their income.

And as annoying and unwatchable as I might find him, most of the time Gary Vaynerchuk has done more to democratize wine since, well, Randall Grahm. And Gary Vee literally grew up in a wine shop. Wine is his life-long vocation and he wants to share all good wine with everybody, not some expensive wines with the initiated few.

So seek out those wine professionals who also write. Many restaurant sommeliers have wine blogs, as do wine shops. Sure these are going to be opinionated and biased, but that's what all writing is. It's just the wine critics who try to hide their bias by perpetuating the adjective-industrial complex where there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to describe wine; where wines can be quantitatively judged on its qualities and that the judgment of the Wine Critic, through some miraculous fiat, carries a declarative value somehow greater than one man's opinion.

In the immortal words of legendary wine enthusiast Thomas Jefferson: "That's some bullshit right there."

HFF Quickie: Tony's Darts Away

2010-08-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

Good things beget good things. You open up a successful Korean BBQ taco truck, shitty frozen yogurt franchise or beer-slinging sausage kitchen and there will be competitors. Most of these competitors will be craven imitators or third-iteration Michael Keaton facsimiles, but the best will build upon the initial idea and make it its own. Such is the case at the old Burbank dive bar-cum-suds and sausage eatery Tony's Darts Away.

Sure the basic premise is nearly the same as Wurstkuche. There's a broad selection of both conventional and esoteric sausages with your choice of fancy or quotidian toppings and washed down with a broad array of craft draught brews. But Tony's distinguishes itself in a few ways. First, it specializes in American, specifically Californian, micro-brews. Second, the sausages tend a bit more toward the conventional chicken and pork based varieties and less toward the rattlesnake and rabbit end of things. Third, Tony's deliberately targets the vegan and vegetarian crowd with four different vegan sausages and numerous vegan-friendly toppings including veganaise and meat-less chili. Fourth, and most notably, Tony's doesn't do Belgian fries. They make up for this lack of frites with very nice house-made potato chips and the ubiquitous LA sweet potato fry.

The Tony's vibe is still 100% Valley dive bar, albeit cleaned up a bit as opposed to Wurstkuche's post-apocalyptic industrial chic. The friendly staff is well-versed in its beers and readily offers up tastes from the rotating cast of Golden State brews. The sausages were excellent and well-prepared. My pork andouille was plump and moist with pretty respectable heat. My two "small toppings" were Creole mustard and garlic paste, my "large toppings" were sauteed onions and sauteed peppers. I wanted to try the more atypical toppings but I couldn't imagine enduring the mental somersaults required to eat an andouille with mango-melon salsa. Ah well.

For lunch, Tony's packages a sausage with a side salad and potato chips for a very reasonable $8.75 (fully loaded sausages are regularly $6-$7) and the beers start at $4.50 for that rare, elusive LA beast: the proper pint.

It's unfortunate that Tony's is so damn far away from my usual grazing pastures, but it's a nice stop before or after a trip to the airport or if you find yourself stuck in Burbank after your pitch meeting at Nickelodeon.

Tony's Darts Away
1710 W. Magnolia Blvd
Burbank, CA 91506
(818) 253-1710
www.tonysda.com

And Now For Something Completely Different

2010-07-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

I stutter. It's a speech impediment I've had for as long as I can remember speaking. The nature of the stutter has shifted over time. Originally it was mostly the letter "L" but now it's more often the letter "V" and "N." "D" has always been a tricky one which, given my name, has posed unique problems.

Since stuttering is both physiological and psychological, the severity of my impediment fluctuates and, while never fully absent, it has been in a manageable state since I was a teenager. It's least prevalent when I'm drinking and around friends, most prevalent when I'm in stressful environments. The great joke about stuttering is that it is almost always more pronounced when one is stressed out and nothing stresses the stutterer out more than a fear of stuttering and the fear of the reactions of others to the stutter. I will also say that I have known severe stutterers and fully acknowledge that mine has never been more than moderate and has never inhibited my ability to communicate significantly nor did it impede my academic success. It did, however, greatly inhibit my willingness to communicate greatly during my childhood and adolescence.

I hated to speak. I was terrified to speak. I knew that if I opened my mouth in any institutional situation, I would stutter and as a child I wasn't able to rationally comprehend the relative meaningless of a blocked consonant or prolonged vowel here and there. You stutter, everyone laughs at you. What's more terrifying to a nine year old than everyone laughing at you? At restaurants, I remember, I would slip away to the restroom and I would tell my mom or dad what I wanted to order "just in case the waitress came," neither wanting to suffer the embarrassment of asking outright for them to order for me nor the embarrassment of stuttering out "crab cake sandwich." I never introduced myself to people. I never struck up conversations with strangers. I did somehow manage to get through a summer theatre camp and be my middle school's spelling bee champion, however.

As a result of my fear of speaking, I learned to listen. I learned to listen very closely. Speech was my most precious commodity, when I did have to speak I wanted it to be as quick and effective as possible. I didn't have the luxury of being a recreational talker, bullshitting and gossipping and yammering on. I also cultivated a massive vocabulary and learned how to use it. If my tongue's getting caught on the "c" in "comprehend," let's try "understand" instead. "Requirements" tricky today? Let's go with "exigencies." English and its massive, flexible vocabulary drawing from several different linguistic traditions might be the most friendly to the stutterer.

Because of the preciousness I have for speech, I'm left sometimes with a feeling of contempt for those who waste it. Talking without meaning, words signifying nothing. Boilerplate nonsense and non-answers to questions. Conversations that are words into the ether, not true intercourse. Or my least favorite, answers that serve not to further the conversation but to push the respondent's own agenda. Dialogue is the only way to truth and dialogue doesn't exist without thoughtful question being met with thoughtful answer.

Because of my early life as 90% listener, 10% talker I'm left with a contempt (sometimes seething) for those who don't listen; for those people who latch on to three or four words and formulate a non-relevant response in their head before the speaker is even done asking his question. The art of conversation, the crucial give and take, doesn't work if people are in a hurry to speak and have an interest in only speaking their agenda, relevance be damned.

I ended up managing my stutter because I matured and realized it wasn't that big of a deal. The willingness to (mostly) not worry about it and plow ahead greatly reduced my stress over my stutter and therefore greatly reduced its prevalence. I had reversed the stuttering feedback loop and used it to my benefit.

While reviewing some recent videos of myself I realized that my stutter is still very much there and I'm sure at times it is distracting to others, but in the end there's little I can do about it. There's no cure for stuttering and of all the various (sometimes lengthy and expensive) treatments, acceptance has been shown to increase fluency the best. And it's totally free. So I'm happy and content in my current world of mild stuttering that I've been living in for about thirteen or fourteen years now. I'm told some girls think it's cute.

But I've maintained my respect for speech as well as the value I ascribe to it. Articulate speech communication is what sets us apart from the animals: utilize it with attention and care. Also, speech is meaningless in a vacuum so unless you're engaging another you're not actually speaking. I would encourage everyone to think about what they're saying and why: Are you talking for yourself or for others? Are you advancing discourse or just repeating known facts? Discourse in America has devolved largely to non-existence and it's time to take it back. As someone who has spent his entire life listening, there's a lot to be learned and it's the most powerful weapon you have.

Luis Pato, Leitao and Six Foot Baga Vines: Fear & Loathing in Bairrada

2010-07-24T10:04:00.001-07:00

“It’s leitao.”

I stared at the plate in front of me. Crispy red skin. Gooey oozing fat. Moist, dripping meat. Was that a snout? No. Wait? No. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe?

So this was the legendary leitao of Bairrada, a balmy region of red clay and sand landscapes twenty kilometers inland from the Atlantic, an hour and a half south of Porto and four hours north of the Algarve, where pasty pudgy British tourists disembark every July to quickly turn a seared bright red, a modern sort of invading Lobsters replacing the Redcoats of colonial America. But what is it? It’s more than food. It’s a lifestyle. It’s regional pride. Every restaurant we sped past on the winding unnamed roads advertised “LEITAO” in massive letters. Or minimal letters. Or letters in between, but mostly massive letters. The dish is consumed with a religious devotion reserved for only the finest of the world’s regional dishes: okonomiyaki in the Kansai, poutine in Quebec, vodka and Red Bull in West Hollywood.

But what is leitao?

It’s a baby pig. A suckling pig. A piglet, sans striped singlet. It’s a six-week old pig, slaughtered and dressed fresh: the larger purveyors have pens of piglets on the property where the squeal and scurry contentedly before being zapped unconscious and disemboweled. Its body cavity is rubbed with a proprietary mix of lard and spices which vary from purveyor to purveyor but all involve some combination of salt, garlic and lots of pepper (both black and white). Some assaderos (as Leitao specialists are known, basically Portuguese for “grillmaster”) also inject that spice mixture between the skin and flesh. The piglet is unceremoniously skewered on a spit and suspended in a hot clay oven. The best leitao is fired in an oven made from the local red clay, whose temperature is judged by the color of its heated glow. Village gates in Bairrada are adorned with statues of young pigs. Should an uninitiated traveler barrel down the highway and notice such glorious homage to such pre-pubescent swine he might be concerned that there was some odd Wicker Man-esque shit going on here and virginal policemen best stay away, or at least avoid the bees.

The roast pig is then cut into numerous small pieces and served on a plate with boiled or fried potatoes, an obligatory side of green salad, and slices of orange to cut the fat after you’ve consumed a few pieces. Every piece is cut to preserve meat, bone, skin and fat. The skin, puffed from meat by the layer of fat, crackles like, well, like the best pork skin on the planet. Underneath the mostly liquid pork fat oozes around the flesh which was always moister than a nun on Easter; that’s no small feat considering the tiny-ness of the pigs and the heat of the oven. My favorite bits were the meaty squares cut from the flanks, though the pieces from around the rib cage were tender and flavorful.

Our host for this particular porcine excursion was Luis Pato, one of the “three popes” of Portuguese wine making. Not my term. Luis has been producing wine since 1980 when, then working as a chemist, he made wine from his father’s old Baga vines, aged them for four years in concrete vats because he couldn’t get a bottling line together, and then entered it into a Bairrada wine competition in London where it was promptly declared the best red wine in the region--not bad for a first effort. So Luis quite the chemistry game and entered the family business full time. He’s built a reputation not only as the pre-eminent vigneron but as one of Portugal’s most ardent ambassadors, embracing nearly forgotten varietals like Baga and Maria Gomes and turning them into some of the world’s best wines.

And if there’s a wine to drink with the delicious, crackling ripping obscenity of Leitao it’s Baga, either as a vinho tinto lightly chilled or the traditional accompaniment of cold espumante tinto, Portuguese red sparkling wine. The shining acidity and sturdy tannins cut through the fat and the wine’s cooked cherry fruit flavors compliment the peppery meat in the same way a good cherry compote rounds out a nice tenderloin. We visited Luis’ local where the massive piles of meat were neverending and the rotund diners left smiling back out to the vineyards to ensure there’d be grapes to replace what they’d drunk.

Luis was such a staunch proponent of Bairrada at a time when the grape was about to go extinct that he earned the sobriquet “Mr. Baga” which he wears with great pride. His vineyards are scattered throughout the region, including his Quinta do Ribeirinho grapes from vines planted by his father almost 50 years ago and a small plot of Baga vines he acquired that are well over 100 years old. This vineyard is located off the main thoroughfare down a rutty dirt road where, while en route, we passed a pair of policemen on horseback who had just scared away a prostitute. She had driven her car off the road with a john in tow to presumably get down to business, a common practice we were told for roadside “car prostitutes” in rural Portugal. After being forced to get out of the Suzuki 4x4 so it could clear a particularly nasty bump in the road, we found ourselves surrounded by the gnarled, ancient vines, some of which were well over six feet high.

In one sandy corner of mostly clay soil Bairrada, Luis has planted some Baga and Touriga Nacional on original European rootstock: because it is difficult for the phylloxera aphid to maneuver in sandy soil the vines are able to resist the pest. The very low-yielding grapes produce concentrated wine with more brambly fruit notes than the grafted vines.

Despite being Bairrada’s shining star, Mr. Baga didn’t use the DOC on most of his wines for a number of years, fighting the region’s administrators over its overly legislative attitude, which he believed was restricting many producer’s abilities to bring Bairrada wine making into the 21st century. Because of Luis’ efforts, the DOC made extensive revisions to its regulations and beginning with the 2008 vintage all of Luis Pato’s wines again bear the Bairrada DOC label.

Whether the regular “Casta Baga” Tinto 2007 or Baga Vinhas Velhas 2005, give the grape a try and uncork what is as much one iconoclast’s story as it is the history and culture of his region. And if you can, enjoy it with delicious, fatty, crispy, spicy leitao.

The Lovely Leitao

2010-07-15T19:49:00.000-07:00

In the center of Portugal, both in the granite towers of the Dao and more famously amidst the clay soils of Bairrada, is a signature regional dish. A signature regional dish among all the signature regional dishes of the world. A dish that is more ubiquitous in Bairrada than fat people in Mississippi and technical virgins at a Twilight screening. That dish? That dish is Leitao. Leitao is so ubiquitous that (honestly) every single restaurant in certain villages had "leitao" in the name.

So what is Leitao?

Leitao is a young suckling pig, no more than two months old. The skin and internal cavity is rubbed with a proprietary blend of salt, garlic and white & black pepper. A lot of white & black pepper. The pig is skewered on a spit and roasted in a hot clay oven, traditionally made from the local red clay of Bairrada (its name comes from barro, Portuguese for clay). The leitao is then chopped up and served on a platter with potatoes (traditionally boiled, more commonly now fried) and fresh oranges. The sweetness and acid of the oranges cuts the peppery fat of the pig.

The piglet's skin is crisp and puffed off of the flesh, which is rich, moist and tender with a serious black pepper spiciness. My favorite incarnation was served with peeled, thin sliced potatoes fried into a status somewhere between french fry and potato chip. The lesser versions of leitao did suffer from rubbery skin syndrome, but most of the time the skin was crunchy buttery crisp and the perfect vehicle for deliciousness.

In the end, despite the deliciousness of leitao, I was more inspired by the regional devotion to a classic dish that nearly every restaurant did expertly. It's something we miss out on. California is bigger than Portugal yet, other than a carne asada, nacho cheese and french fry burrito from San Diego, we have no significant ubiquitous regional cuisines. We should fix this problem and do it with great haste.

HFF Quickie: Highlights from Portugal

2010-07-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'll write a more extensive essay about my travels, but in the mean time here are some culinary highlights from Portugal, an absolutely fantastic country.

Leitao: The signature dish of central Portugal, Leitao is a young (6-8 week) suckling pig rubbed heavily with a proprietary blend of black pepper, white pepper, and salt and then roasted in a special oven. Its crispy skin, tender meat, and copious fat paired with roast potatoes and sliced oranges is simply fantastic. Traditionally paired with tinto espumante, a red/pink sparkling wine made from indigenous Touriga Nacional or Baga, it's a delicious colon-clogging adventure.

Migas: Not a damn thing like the Spanish version, Portuguese Migas is peasant food cum laude. Stale bread crumbs sauteed in olive oil and/or pork fat and then mashed with cauliflower, garlic, and any of a number of vegetables, the texture takes some getting used to but the flavor is rich, dense and transcendent.

Perceves: The fabled gooseneck barnacles of Galicia, perceves are a distinctive regional treat. The barnacles themselves bear more than a cursory resemblance to iguana feet. You pinch the rubbery sheath, twist and pull it off to reveal the sweet white flesh underneath. Its texture is similar to lobster with a simply salty freshness.

Bacalhau: Fuck the Spanish, the Portuguese have salt cod fucking pwned. I had bacalhau only three different ways (they say there are over 300), but all three were delicious. First, we had a pretty simple bacalhau roasted with tomatoes and garlic--very tasty. The next preparation was pretty esoteric but really fucking good: the cod was topped with ham and pineapple and then baked in a rich cheese sauce. That might've been a particularly unique dish as no other Portuguese person we talked to seemed to know what that preparation was. Last, there was a bacalhau side dish consisting of shredded bacalhau baked in a cazuela with fried potatoes and cheese. Pretty much the best mac and cheese ever.

Black Pig: The same Iberian pig as the Spanish jamon iberico, when made into the Portuguese presunto it is the bomb. Tender and fatty, it's some of the best ham in the world. The black pig can also be roasted (impossibly tender)or fried with clams for the southern Portuguese dish porco a alentejana.

So yeah, some highlights. More detailed analysis to come.

Biodynamics & Nazism, Two Peas in Different Pods

2010-06-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

Biodynamics, as I've mentioned, is a trendy topic in wine making. It's also a term whose specifics are pretty much unknown by the unwashed masses. Even wine purveyors belie their lack of knowledge when they say something to the effect of Biodynamic being "organic on steroids" or "extra organic."

That's patently false. Biodynamically farmed wine means that the vineyard's farming practices have been certified by the Demeter Association. In turn, the Demeter Association draws its criteria from a series of lectures and writings by Austrian Rudolf Steiner in the 1920's. In a broad sense, Biodynamics involves treating your vineyard (or any crop field) holistically as a self-sustaining entity with interdependent organisms. You farm so as to maintain that balance, through crop rotation, cover crops and natural pest abatement. Where Biodynamics starts to become questionable is in its use of geomantic soil preparations whose science is dubious at best. You can read about Biodynamic soil preparations here.

What Biodynamics do is require the farmer to pay closer attention to his crops and that, regardless of motivation, is a good thing. But Biodynamics is not organic, even if all Biodynamically grown grapes are effectively organic, since organic farming is based at least in part on legitimate scientific research, not the pseudo-scientific ramblings of a traumatized mad man.

Speaking of traumatized mad men, it's no wonder that Biodynamics came about in the 1920's, hand-in-hand with the emergence of Fascism, Futurism, Psychoanalytics and an increased attention to Communism and free-market Capitalism. These are all frameworks for understanding a confusing, dangerous world and all propose convenient but impossible solutions. Europe was devastated after World War I. Empires were destroyed, power dynamics shifted, and cities were devastated, entire villages razed. This left a strong psychological impact on the survivors that forced them to question the belief structures that they had so firmly believed in yet had led to such destruction. In these philosophies are one of two broad solutions: the world is flawed, let's go back to a better time or; the world is flawed, let's work toward a flawless future. Either way, existence and practice as we know it was irretrievably broken.

The common thread that these philosophies share is their purported foundation in legitimate science which is actually little more than unsupported conjuncture and steadfast faith. In the right balance in the right hands, most of these philosophies can be progressive and productive and in the wrong balance in the wrong hands they can be utterly destructive. Germany's bankrupt, let's blame the Jews. Modern farming is broken, let's bury some cow horns filled with manure in our field on a full moon.

They're all examples of the self-destructive and inauthentic adherence to "Bad Faith." They're philosophies that purport to understand the incomprehensible through comforting ritual and in most cases a hoped for Deus Ex Machina revelation.

As an entertaining academic and intellectual engagement, Biodynamics is a fun and interesting exercise. As the key to better grapes and better wines, however, it's substantively meaningless.

HFF Returns: Vino Volo - Philadelphia, Pa

2010-06-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

I'm traveling again and I was pleased to find another Vino Volo location at Philadelphia International Airport, where I was waiting before my connecting flight overseas. As I wrote about a while ago, Vino Volo is a growing chain of high-end wine bars located in airports throughout the country. They've expanded quite a bit since I visited the location in Dulles, with new locations in Oakland and Philadelphia, among others.

There's nothing exceptional about Vino Volo, but it is quite solid. The wine lists are well put together given the limitations and prices are reasonable, not just by airport standards. And the food menu, served in two different portion sizes, is some of the best and fairly priced airport food I've ever had. Everything has been solid-to-good which, by airport standards, is commendable.

Plus, every location has ample outlets and very cushy chairs, so the opportunity to sit, have some good food and wine, and plug in and get some work done is quite welcome. Beats sitting on a filthy carpet and jockeying for outlet space with a pouting tween and her MacBook.

www.vinovolo.com

HFF On The Road: New York, NY

2010-06-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

I went to New York City with girlfriend Charlie last week for the first time and we ate and drank our way through the city. It rocked. Despite my skepticism, New York really is a city apart from the rest of the country in terms of culinary excess and diversity. The food is not necessarily any better than the best that the rest of the country has to offer, but the concentration of quality is unsurpassed.

We had the pleasure of staying at the Ace Hotel in midtown (a beautiful, quirky and reasonably priced hotel) and our first night we hit up the Breslin restaurant located in the hotel. Named after the historic hotel on the same site, the Breslin is an upscale gastropub from the same folks who brought NYC the Spotted Pig. The food was pretty damn good, though a few dishes were bordering on oppressively salty. The speck tart was very good, layered on puff pastry with crescenza cheese. The brandade with bread salad was one of those oppressively salty dishes I mentioned. The appetizer highlight was the "Scrumpets," essentially lamb fish sticks, served with mint vinegar. On the entree front, the lamb burger with feta was delicious.

This proved to be our only fancy pants dinner we did in New York, the rest of our trip being spent at street vendors and neighborhood joints.

We made a point of trying some New York classics. Pizza was tasty: the crust had a great texture though it lacked salt. Bagels were particularly amazing, with their moist chewy interior and light crisp exterior. The legendary Seinfeldian classic, the Black & White Cookie, was something of a revelation, more like a flattened cupcake than a cookie. It was very moist and not overly sweet, most of the sugar coming from the frosting. Good bagels were found at Izzy & Nat's in Battery Park and great pizza was found at Bleecker Street Pizza in the West Village.

Another highlight was arepas, a South American dish popular in Venezuela and Colombia, consisting of something like a fried corn pita stuffed with spicy seasoned meats and vegetables.

One of the best wine bars in the country, Terroir, has two locations in Manhattan: its original storefront location in the East Village and its new, expansive digs in TriBeCa. Great global wine list that doesn't pander to the world's major players. A well-publicized recent feud with the Village Voice food critic recently raised its profile amongst food and wine hipsterati.

In the end there was far too much to eat and drink in the city for just one long weekend, but it's definitely a food wonderland with unique, quality ingredients and fresh takes on regional standards.

As an aside, the binge drinking culture of New York is pretty epic too. I don't know if its the lack of cars, the ubiquity of subways, or the general miserableness of the weather year round, but New Yorkers drink until they pass out, wake up, and drink some more. It's kinda crazy.

New York's decidedly not a city you can experience food-wise in a week and will reward regular visits. Go New York.

www.thebreslin.com
www.wineisterroir.com
www.caracasarepabar.com
www.bleeckerstreetpizza.com
www.izzyandnats.com
www.acehotel.com

Rethinking Terroir

2010-06-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

There’s this fancy pants word in the wine world and no, it’s not “spats.” It’s terroir. Anyone who uses the word terroir is quick to mention that it is A: French, B: Untranslatable, and C: Has no specific meaning. Near as I can tell terroir is defined as “a sense of place” which is about as specific as referring to a woman as a “living thing with a vagina.”

But the blowback from the descriptor “a sense of place” is that many wine-reviewing douche bags have come to decide that this means the sense of a specific place in the world and therefore any wine that is not 100% from a specific place lacks any “sense of place.” I’ve even read reviews from wine writers who decried a wine for lacking even 10% fruit from one particular location. Asinine.

What, after all, is a place? Sure it can be a place in geography but it can also be a place in time, a place in thought, a place in emotion. It can be a place in an individual’s mental index that is irrespective of any geographic grape growing location. I’ve had Sauvignon Blancs from many different geographic places in the world that all smell like very specific cat pee. That’s evocative. That’s terroir.

Terroir is a tasty wine with friends in a dive in Tuscany. Terroir is a juicy red blend you had with dinner after a marathon day of Sonoma wine tasting. Terroir is a cheap Champagne toast to a friend after she completed her Ph. D. Terroir, despite its French pretension, I would argue is not specifically about geography. Terroir is about all that a wine stimulates in the senses in any specific place and time.

In this way, wines made from a blend of fruit from disparate regions can be a terroir-driven wine, while at the same time some shitty over-oaked 100% Napa Chardonnay can be a shit box stored in a feces locker. Terroir is a mental space–it is that sip of Rheingau Riesling or it’s that gulp of Vin de Pays. Chances are if you had sex in the Rheingau or you had sex all over France, your association with either wine would be similar.

I won’t argue and say that different wine-growing regions don’t have specific grape characteristics, but I will argue that the quality of a wine is uniquely defined by that in all cases. The wine world is too full of multi-region blends that kick the latex ass-less pants off of 100% regional varietal wines.

So what are your terroirs? What are the “senses of place” that drive your taste buds? Hot dogs at a high school picnic? The perfumed lotion of an early girlfriend? The smell of your dad’s pickup truck on a summer day? If the structures of a wine give you evocative pleasure, that wine is expressive of terroir, regardless of its literal make-up.

It’s no fluke that terroir-driven wines are most evocative for the consumer who has traveled in the mentioned wine’s terroir. Because it’s not merely taste that defines the term, it’s taste synthesized with experience.

If I wanted to taste a specific place, I’ll go there and lick the dirt myself. I want to taste good wines.

(Originally published at TheSatelliteShow.com.)

HFF On The Road: San Francisco, Ca

2010-06-07T21:15:00.001-07:00

I love LA. I really do. It's a weird, sprawling, schizophrenic ex-girlfriend of a city. It's a blank page, a blank canvas. It's smog and implants swaddled in a warm Art Deco blanket. It's stupidity of the second-highest order but charming in its own shambling ineptitude. And it just might be the largest city in the developed world utterly devoid of true geniuses. It's not LA's fault, it's just that LA doesn't reward genius. It rewards beauty, sycophancy, and (in rare instances) legitimate talent.

By all of which I mean to say, LA is not San Francisco. San Francisco is proud, brash, arrogant and intellectual. It's frustratingly closed-minded at times and even more frustratingly almost-never-actually-warm. But its citizenry knows how to dress and knows how to eat. San Francisco's culinary world runs circles around that of Los Angeles all the while generally charging a lot less money (even with mandatory health care).

I was back up in my old pretend stomping grounds (I never actually lived in Baghdad by the Bay, preferring to stay instead on the western shore of Alameda County) a few times last month and revisited some of my favorites and also hit up some new spots.

Maverick: Perhaps one of my all time favorite restaurants of all time, Maverick is nothing fancy but does everything right. Doing New American right as the movement was being defined, Maverick does great modern takes on American classics. I visited them twice and they're still going strong. The fried chicken was delicious: crisp, moist and a little spicy, paired with greens and mashed potatoes and the vegetarian pasta dish also rocked. The chicken liver toasts are a must-get appetizer.

Sea Salt: The Berkeley organic/sustainable seafood restaurant hasn't lost its touch either. A whole grip (hyphy) of new brunch items in particular were great: Hangtown Fry (oysters, bacon, eggs), steak and eggs, and some other stuff I can't remember because the website is down and I can't look at the menu. Curses.

Limon Rotisserie: Located in what used to be a grungy part of the Mission but is now spectacularly clean, the Limon Rotisserie is the casual family-dining spin-off of famed Peruvian/Nuevo Latino hot spot Limon. Specializing in killer roast chicken, the Rotisserie also has some of the signature ceviches and sides. Delicious and inexpensive with a great wine list.

Tacolicious: Terrible name, great restaurant even if they do inexplicably sell their tacos by the one or the four. Why by the four? Everyone knows tacos are sold by the three! All the tacos were good, the beer-and-a-shot braised chicken and the potato and chorizo tacos were particular standouts. The other killer dish was the tuna tostada: seared albacore on a crispy tortilla with avocado and chipotle mayo. Fun, busy place for a reasonably priced meal. Sucks that it's in the Marina though.

Elixir: One of SF's OG "mixology" bastions. The cocktails were pretty good (if a bit steep--approaching LA prices) but I was more intrigued by the diverse beer selection and the general dive-y vibe of the place.

Som Bar: This place sucked. If I wanted a shitty club I'd go to SoMa. Is this what happens when Google moves into your neighborhood? A bunch of over-paid under-experienced nerds go out on Saturday nights in douche-y clothes and turn your Chicano tranny bars into sorry excuses for Berkeley sorority invitationals? Fuck that.

Which does bring me to this one "back in my day" moment. Back in my day the Mission was still a little bit scary. And there definitely weren't bars where fucking ass clowns in Banana Republic wearing too much cologne spit game at a bunch of sixes-who-think-they're-tens who need to stay in the fucking Marina District. Or Walnut Creek. Where were the homeless addicts? Where were the true dive bars? Where was my fear of being jumped if I went below Mission St? Gone in a tea bag of Forever 21. Blergh.

Still, great city though. Highly recommended.

HFF On The Scene: Silver Lake Jubilee

2010-06-02T22:04:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Okay, so apparently I have the memory of a gold fish. I also don't read my own blog very closely, so.... Wow.... This post's better anyway.

I know this is two weeks belated, but the damn festival would've been over regardless so it's not like you missed out on anything you would'n't've had to wait another year for anyway.

First, some serious props to the Silver Lake Jubilee folks for putting on a great festival. Fun, relaxed and very mellow. A few blocks of Myra Avenue below the Sunset Bridge were blocked off and stages were put at both ends, each with a Firestone Walker beer garden. In between the stages were two rows of local vendors and roughly thirty food trucks. Inoccuous-to-good live music, good more-or-less reasonably priced beer, food trucks. A nice combination. Plus it wasn't crazy crowded, just crowded.

Even now, 2+ years post-Kogi, the food trucks were still the main draw and I'll confess, despite seeing a newly-unemployed and re-bearded Jeremy Sisto in the beer garden while a pretty cool band was playing, the food trucks were the main draw for me too. As someone who is ambivalent to the whole food truck scene, it was nice to have an opportunity to taste multiple vendors without having to exert too much effort. My report follows.

Calbi: I'd been curious about this Kogi rip-off, especially since Kogi apparently doesn't want to come Downtown anymore. I don't count the weekly residency at Market Lofts in South Park. That's not Downtown. I had a spicy pork taco and it was a reasonably good facsimile, though lacking the full richness and depth of Kogi's marinades and sauces. But Calbi parks a few blocks from my house and Kogi's definitely not drive-across-town better.

India Jones: My personal favorite of the day. A really good paneer "frankie," basically paneer cheese, egg, onions, and a cilantro/tamarind chutney rolled up in a fresh roti. It was nice to find a modern food truck actually serving real street food. Warm and fresh and perfectly snack-sized.

Coolhaus: Okay, so this was pretty good, don't get me wrong. I had the bacon brown butter ice cream in a snickerdoodle sandwich. But, the line was ridiculous. It's just ice cream folks. And even though LA isn't the Bay Area (there you can't swing a dead cat with your dick without hitting a crazy gourmet ice cream shop with weird flavors), but it's still LA and shmancy iced cream is still somewhat readily available. And, to be honest, standing in line for (literally) 45 minutes for the privilege of paying four bucks for an ice cream sandwich was embarrassing for me. The eleven-year-old me being thrown naked into the girls' locker room at my middle school would've been less embarrassing (and I didn't grow pubes until my second year of grad school!). Plus, if I had to listen to another hipster douche ask to taste every fucking ice cream flavor before committing to something I was going to beat him with his own Vans and strangle him with his own moustache. Christ. No wonder your girlfriend dumped you for an ugly lesbian. Next time Coolhaus, at an event like this why don't you pick like three pre-made ice cream sandwich combos instead of doing the choose your-own-thing. Also, don't have only ONE FUCKING GUY TALKING ON HIS CELL PHONE making the ice cream sandwiches. But the ice cream was good. Still, doubtful I'll be back.

World Fare: As LA's only "bustaurant" (as far as I know), World Fare is pretty cool. Kitchen is on the first floor and there's seating on the top of the double-decker bus. Though it has many global rotating specials, World Fare is known best for its "Bunnies," which are a South African street food dish consisting of chili or slow-braised meats served in bowls made from scooped out bread rolls. Smaller than what you're imagining, the Bunnies are perfectly sized to be able to enjoy a couple different flavors for your meal. I didn't have one though, instead I had the smoked cheddar mac and cheese balls. The verdict on those was "meh." They lacked enough cheese and salt to be interesting and tasted mostly like breaded and fried macaroni.

My basic impressions of food trucks were generally reinforced: the vast majority are slightly poorer quality versions of your basic neighborhood go-tos for slightly less money. I'd rather pay the slight premium to sit in a nice space and support my neighborhood businesses. And the cult of the food truck has reached the point where some have a miniature Grateful Dead-type followings, defeating the point of the food truck: fast cheap and convenient. The trucks that stand out, the Kogis and the India Jones' of the world, work because they remain true to their roots, offering upscale and/or innovative takes on what is, at its core, your basic global street cuisine.

But do go to the Silver Lake Jubilee next year. It was a grand time.

HFF Quickie: Food Trucks at the Silver Lake Jubilee

2010-05-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

I spent last Sunday at perhaps the best street fair ever, the Silver Lake Jubilee. Besides enjoying some relatively reasonably priced Firestone Walker beer and a beard-y (and newly unemployed) Jeremy Sisto, there were a shitload of food trucks. I ate at some of them. This is my story.

Calbi. I've been wanting to try this dubious Kogi knock-off for a while, since there's always a truck parked in my neighborhood. The first attempt at a true corporate food truck (a team led by an ex-Baja Fresh exec is spearheading the franchising), Calbi is pretty much a textbook cynical ripoff, which I admire. Overall it was okay. The spicy pork was solid and similar to Kogi, though the accompaniments were not as good and the tortilla kinda sucked.

Maui Wowi. So I'm not 100% sure that this is where I ate, but I'll go with it. I had a crispy tofu bun (bao) and it was delicious. Crispy, nicely spicy tofu on a very fresh, moist and soft bun. The pork belly bun also looked good.

India Jones. Perhaps the highlight of the day. I had a paneer "Frankie," which is onions, tamarind, egg, and (in this case) paneer cheese, wrapped in a roti. Densely flavorful and very inexpensive. And it's one of the few food truck snacks that was really built to easily eat on the go.

Cool Haus. So, look, the ice cream was really good (I had the bacon and brown butter) and the cookies were good too. But.... over a half an hour in line for ice cream haphazardly slapped between two cookies? For $4? The crowd got to Cool Haus and they were sloppy with the service. And despite the hectic crowd, the one (that's right, one) guy making sandwiches was talking on his cell phone. Each sandwich took close to five minutes to serve because of a weird insistence on allowing the teeming mobs of hipster douches to taste and customize every sandwich. Next time at an event like this? Pick like three or four combos and pre-make the sandwiches. Everyone will be happier.

World Fare. The coolest food truck in town because it's in a double-decker bus with seating on the roof. Had the macaroni and cheese balls (smoked cheddar, because truffles are for mumblegrums). The balls were alright, needed more salt.

And that was the extent of the compelling trucks. I suppose I should've hit up Frysmith and I would've hit up the Dim Sum Truck except it wasn't there. But there's time.

So, some pretty good food truck opportunities presented themselves--this was what the Food Truck Food Fare wanted to be but failed at in its ill-conceived Icarus-like aspirations. Good stuff.

HFF Rant: Arbitrary Hours

2010-05-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

So it's 9:30 on a Sunday night. I have a friend in town who just drove down from Northern California. We're hungry. We want to show him the town. First stop? A restaurant favorite of mine that's billed as open until 10PM. We get there? Locked up shut. Closed with a capital Q. Okay, fine. Understandable. Pretty close to their closing time and it was a Sunday night so they closed early. Fair enough.

Next stop? A wine bar in Downtown LA. Their hours are advertised as "daily from 11:30AM to late." That's the business equivalent of the high school party invitation: "9PM-???" Holy shit! Our party's so crazy we don't know when it's going to end! Except you're a business. You should know when your party's going to end. And when you advertise a post-11PM Happy Hour with drink AND food specials, perhaps your kitchen shouldn't be closed before 10PM. That kinda makes as much sense as a platypus and have you seen a fucking platypus?

Restaurants are not businesses to be run on whimsy. Unless I can see a restaurant's open sign from my window, I'm not going to drag my ass out to a restaurant that may or may not be open. Pick your hours, advertise them, and stick to them. That's how you'll build a loyal clientele. In a business full of flakes, reliability and consistency can go a long way to establishing your reputation.

And come on, a restaurant that's known for being open late--that makes a name for being open late--that advertises being open until late--and is shut down by ten o'clock? That's lame. If I'm hungry at say 11PM on a Tuesday, where am I going to go? The place that I know is open or the place that might be open? Even if I might prefer the second restaurant, I'm going to go for the first restaurant so I don't end up wasting part of my night.

Restaurants are not that different from any business. Success isn't rocket science. It's producing a quality product for a good value that people will enjoy. Google can't just decide to stop working because not enough people are googling and a hospital can't stop administering aid because not enough people are getting shot in their neighborhood. Restaurants can't just decide to close an hour early because, well, they just fucking want to.

It's bad business and will equal a failed restaurant.

Arts & Crafts

2010-05-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

I’m a skeptic. Pretty much everything for me has, in legal parlance, a “rebut-able premise.” I’m not going to take as a given that anything is inherently worthy of worship, deference, or even just my being impressed.

Despite my passion for all things culinary, I regard very little of it as an art form–it’s a craft. Unfortunately we’ve de-emphasized the importance of craft in favor of the illusion of art. We want to perceive our memorable gastronomic experiences as moments of ephemeral genius rather than what they actually are: the culmination of years of training coupled with a bit of ingenuity and intuition. The fact is, anyone can cook. Anyone can cook competently with a bit of practice. But it takes years of chopping, slicing and sauteeing before you can work effectively in a commercial kitchen. Coming up with the menu is, in many ways, the easiest part of being a chef. Effectively training your staff to serve that menu consistently to a restaurant full of hungry, demanding diners at 7:30 on a Friday night is the tricky part.

Cooking in a restaurant isn’t cooking in a vacuum. You could come up with the greatest dish on the planet, but if it takes an hour to prepare and can only be cooked correctly one out of three times, it’s utterly impractical to serve in a restaurant. If there’s no way to effectively make a viable margin without charging $80 for your entree, it’s utterly impractical to serve at (most) restaurants.

I worked for a number of years as a bartender in the SF Bay Areaduring the nascent stages of the “mixologist” boom. We came up with a number of interesting, artisan-spirit driven cocktails with fresh herbs and fresh squeezed juices. Of course we just called them cocktails and charged $8 for them because we weren’t retarded. I’m not saying I was the best bartender on the staff, but I was effective and fast. I churned out consistent cocktails quickly, got my customers’ buzz going, and moved (in the words of Jay-Z) it was on to the next one. Perhaps I could’ve spent longer to ensure an exact ratio of bitters to grapefruit juice, but taste is relative and I’d rather be quick and effective than unnecessarily meticulously slow.

And that’s what makes for good craftsmanship, producing a quality product reliably and efficiently. We’re not painting the next Guernica: we’re mixing a fucking cocktail; we’re grilling a steak; we’re making an Albarino. I don’t want to wait twenty minutes for a cocktail, no matter how good it is. At that point, the bartender has failed in his craft. There’s no “worth the wait” when it comes spending $16 on a cocktail.

We should take pride in our craft. Craft is a noble thing and good craftsmanship is exceedingly rare. Good craftsmanship is being replaced by pretense to artistic glory fairly rapidly. Instead of the Wolfgang Pucks and Thomas Kellers who toiled in obscurity and honed their craft for years before achieving well-earned success, we have flash-in-the-pan “celebrity chefs” whose genius is extolled by publicists while their restaurants fail. Or worse, we have failed actors who consider themselves revolutionary because they decided to actually pay attention to what kind of booze they use in their Manhattans.

You’re not a revolutionary, you’re a douche with a Boston shaker.

HFF Quickie: Senor Fish

2010-05-06T19:06:00.001-07:00

Senor Fish is a name that doesn't inspire confidence. And its logo, a mustachioed and be-sombreroed fish that looks something like a Mario Bros. mermaid, inspires even less confidence. But finally, despite driving past nearly every location dozens of time, I've now dined there a couple times and I'll say that it's pretty good. Great? No. But good quality and reasonably priced.

First stop I had, what else, the fish tacos. Good fresh fish, fried crisp, and served on soft tortillas. Nice crema, mild salsa. A perfectly tasty white boy fish taco.

On my second trip I had the fabled scallop burrito. Delicious. Fresh-tasting (though no doubt frozen) scallops, whole pinto beans, crema, salsa. The usual. A nice combination of flavors and at seven bucks and change (and enormous) it's a freaking steal.

My only complaints are that the large flour tortilla for the burrito (not the ones for the tacos) is a bit too chewy and none of the salsas were particularly compelling in terms of default spiciness. I'll make it back to the Downtown LA/Little Tokyo location for their late night happy hour with $1 tacos, $4 margaritas, and $3 beers. It's a very cool space with an open bar area, indoor cantina dining, and a big outdoor patio.

It's simple, fresh honest food at a fair price.

Senor Fish Cocina & Cantina
(several other locations in the San Gabriel Valley)
422 E. First St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213-625-0566
www.senorfishonline.com

WP24 - Los Angeles, Ca

2010-04-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

I had the rather fortuitous opportunity to go dine at WP24, the ass-slappingly new Wolfgang Puck restaurant on the 24th floor of the ass-slappingly new Ritz-Carlton at LA Live. I had the even more fortuitous opportunity of having someone else pay. Bonus. Despite being in LA for a couple years now, I don't believe I'd ever experienced a Wolfgang Puck-branded enterprise, other than his delightful canned soups, frozen pizzas and that one hooker in Salzburg.

It was pretty fucking good. The restaurant. The hooker was meh.

I'm a skeptic, especially when it comes to restaurants and especially when it comes to celebrity chef restaurants taking up an entire floor at a brand new swank hotel in a city known for beautiful, expensive restaurants with terrible food and shittier service. Despite only being in its third week of operation, WP24 is rocking out pretty hard.

Make sure when you enter the hotel you ask for directions, even if you know how to get to the restaurant. Since it's the Ritz-Carlton you'll be escorted by an impeccably groomed and friendly employee all the way from wherever you shambled in off the street all the way to the host station at the restaurant. The restaurant takes up the entire 24th floor, starting with a relaxed and spacious lounge--I believe the lounge serves the full dining room menu as well as its own menu of bar bites. An army of thin, beautiful hostesses escort you through the lounge to the dining room itself, past a bamboo forest of wine racks, each of which carries exactly 36 bottles of wine which, as far as I learned, have no intention of being opened any time soon. Then you are delivered to the army of thin, beautiful hostesses who handle the dining room proper.

The dining room is sumptuous, modern, and only ever-so-slightly overwrought. That's a compliment in LA. We were sat in a very cool booth/table hybrid with snooze-inducingly comfortable chairs. Three separate staff members simultaneously placed the napkins in each of our laps. It was a beautifully clear day so were able to enjoy a 270-degree view of LA at sundown. Gorgeous.

Already my experience was worth the (hypothetical) money. The space is beautiful, the atmosphere is welcoming, and the staff is very well trained--Klaus Puck (Wolfgang's brother and his front-of-house admiral) left the now-defunct Vert Brasserie to oversee the team at WP24 as well as the Bar & Grille on the ground floor of LA Live. Some of the younger staff members were visibly nervous, which is to be expected in a new restaurant with such grand expectations, but the waiters and managers were placid yet affable. I didn't really care how the food was, as long as it didn't shit the bed, as my sainted grandmother used to say.

But in the end the food was pretty damn good. The menu shares the Asian-Continental fusion style of many of the Puck restaurants--this skewed more heavily to the Asian (primarily Chinese, but also Indian and Thai) side. We had the kitchen send out a few of their signature appetizers. The prawn toasts (from the lounge menu) were warm, buttery and perfectly seasoned. Ditto the lobster and prawn spring rolls--fried crisp without a drop of excess oil. WP24 makes liberal use of pork belly--the pork belly bao was fatty and meaty without being overly sweet. That was followed by the sauteed duck liver and ume bao which was my favorite of the first course: sweet, tart and rich without being unctuous.

The wine list is excellent--originally assembled by Spago sommelier Chris Miller and now overseen by Klaus--with a beautiful selection of aromatic whites, ranging from the bone-dry to the semi-sweet, and a great selection of medium-bodied reds; perfectly selected for the cuisine. Mark-ups were not unreasonable, hovering right around 4-4.5 times wholesale, which is on the lower end for a fine-dining restaurant of this caliber. WP24 wine prices are in line with a slew of much more casual and poorly programmed restaurants in LA. We had an excellent Alsace Riesling before drinking our own wine with the main courses.

I had the Assam Prawns--five or six good sized shrimp simmered in a garlic-cardamom curry and served over rice. The curry was amazing--deep, concentrated slow-cooked flavors with a healthy but not overpowering spiciness; well-balanced and not overly salty. The prawns were plump and meaty though there was a barely perceivable "old" flavor on the finish of the meat that made me think that they had either been thawed and refrozen or had been ever-so-slightly freezer-burned.

I tasted my two companions' entrees as well. The Kobe steak, seared rare, was meaty and tender with an excellent sweet peppery sauce. The Angry Lobster was delicious. A whole two-pound Maine lobster, quartered live and rubbed with cayenne, salt and flour and then pan-seared before being finished in the oven. The spicy heat permeated the flesh and is complimented perfectly by the garlic-lime sauce. We shared a side of fried rice with Lap Cheung sausage and the best fresh peas I've had in a while. We also had a side of sauteed Chinese greens (a personal favorite of mine from my Daimo days) which were tasty.

Despite our better judgment we shared two desserts--I can't remember exactly what they were since we didn't order them and the dessert menu's not on the website. They were chocolate-oriented and well-executed. The stand out was the "Thai Ovaltine" which was a malted milk chocolate mousse on a chocolate crust with a chili-lime dusting. I think. It was a long night.

The restaurant is expensive to be sure but it's not overpriced. It might even be on the lower-end of restaurants of its type in Los Angeles. Appetizers are mostly in the mid to upper teens and the main courses start in the low 30s. Sides and desserts are in the $10-$15 range. Couple those prices with a wine list that features some excellent selections for under $50, and you can have an honestly elegant night in Downtown LA that isn't obscenely expensive.

My only significant complaint with the whole experience was that the menu was very safe. It was the same Asian Fusion cuisine that California's been churning out pretty reliably since Wolfgang Puck helped introduce the style three decades ago. It was probably the best-executed example of that style I've ever had, sure, but I always appreciate when even established successful chefs continue to challenge their diners.

But that's a minor complaint overall. Check out WP24. Great restaurant.

WP24
900 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca 90015
213-743-8824
http://www.wolfgangpuck.com/restaurants/fine-dining/57129

The Double Down

2010-04-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

Despite what many think, I”m really not too pretentious about food. I sneak a Del Taco burrito when I need a quick bite that’s easy to eat while driving. I’ve eaten at least one Lunchable in the last year. I eagerly and excitedly ate a McRib.

So as a naturally curious person who has a deep sense of irony, I was pretty damn excited about the Double Down.

For those uninitiated, the Double Down is Kentucky Fried Chicken’s new “sandwich.” It consists of bacon, cheese and special sauce sandwiched between two signature fried chicken breasts. No bread. Fried chicken replaces the bread.

(I will note that you can get the Double Down with “grilled” chicken, but that would be moronic. The calorie and fat difference is negligible and the KFC grilled chicken contains powdered beef. That’s as unnecessary as condoms at an open-carry rally.)

Unlike with the McRib, which I consider to be the spiritual cousin of the Double Down in its culinary fuck you absurdity, I found absolutely no pleasure whatsoever in the Double Down. The chicken breasts were dry and not crispy. The bacon and cheese were impossible to taste. The spicy sauce was pretty nice, I’ll admit. The McRib was meaty and pleasant, albeit fairly flavorless and too sweet. The Double Down is a fuck you salt fest that tea bags your taste buds and leaves your esophagus slightly mummified.

And can we talk about MSG? Now I am by no means averse to MSG. It’s a seasoning that’s been used for centuries. But KFC both seasons the chicken itself with MSG and adds copious MSG to the chicken breading. I think that the Colonel’s secret 11 herbs and spices are just 11 different varieties of MSG.

The sandwich has a lot of salt. It has something like 1400mg of sodium. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s almost 75% of your RDA on a 2000 calorie diet. It’s highly unnecessary. The Double Down could’ve had half the salt and still been too salty.

But I appreciate KFC’s take-no-prisoners approach, I just wish the sandwich was better. I mean, fuck it, I don’t get the uproar. There are a whole fuck tonne of sandwiches that are one chicken breast with bacon, cheese and sauce between a bun. I think that the subtraction of the bun and the addition of another chicken patty is a net nutritional gain.

Unlike the McRib, which I will recommend as a one-time indulgence, I see nothing redeeming in the Double Down, especially given its $5.49 price tag. Several thumbs down.

Alcohol in Wine

2010-04-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

So here's a really fucking stupid article in the Wall Street Journal:

Wines That Pack A Little Extra Kick

First of all, the Wall Street Journal is about as progressive on wine matters as Michelle Bachman on a backwards running train into the Spanish Inquisition. Anybody looking at the Wall Street Journal, Wine Spectator, Robert M. Parker Jr., or, well, I could go on, for any kind of taste-making wine journalism could be more productive by hand trimming their front lawn with rubber scissors. Seriously, these guys wouldn't know what's actually going on in the cutting edge wine world if the cutting edge wine world sodomized them with a broken beer bottle. Second of all, the article conflates several points.

1. It conflates the belief that Chardonnay and Pinot Noir shouldn't be over 14% alcohol with the contention that no wine should be over 14% alcohol. I know the author really wants to defend the wines that he loves but one should not induce a journalistic article based on an opinion that is contrary to the facts presented. Objecting to a 14.5% pinot noir is not the same as objecting to a 14.5% zinfandel. 14.5% zinfandel is standard, 14.5% pinot noir is an abomination unto god and your children.

2. It suggests that such dogmatic opposition to wines based upon a specific alcohol percentage is widespread. It's not. Like all blanket disqualifications it's the rhetorical tool of the desperate poseurs, faded authorities attempting to reclaim lost glory, or an arbitrary distinguishing marker for those chronically desperate for attention. Most sane wine folks have tastes and preferences but fully acknowledge that there are blurred borders, not hard and fast thresholds. And it neglects the fact that there is a grey area in terms of the TTB that can be as much as 0.5% each way so really a 14% (reported) alcohol wine could be 13.5% to 14.5%. And so if you set a specific alcohol threshold, well, the arbitrary closed mindedness of that is self-evident.

3. And the selling point of the article, that "alcohol delivers flavor," is asinine. Alcohol is a by-product of ripeness. Ripeness produces immediately pleasurable sweet, full-fruited flavors. Alcohol has nothing to do with it. If anything, alcohol deadens or interferes with the other flavors of wine--alcohol's a necessary byproduct of quality wine production and all wines have plenty of alcohol, but it has nothing to do with actual quality of the wine.

4. It references this dubious idea that wine over 14% is classified as "dessert wine." It's not. It might sound good, but so do the Rolling Stones and the Rolling Stones suck buffalo cock. I know it's fun to think that we have these magical outdated alcohol rules that classify things in comically outdated ways, but the real world is actually (usually) more logical than we hope. Wine is taxed the same way from 0.5%-14% and then it's taxed 50 cents/gallon higher from 14.1%-21%. It's not called "dessert wine" it's just a higher percentage wine and taxed accordingly. Plus, lest we get too excited about such a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE increase in taxes, that equals all of an additional 10 cents a bottle in taxes. It's really not particularly significant to wine pricing on any wine more than, well, two bucks.

Wine grapes are different. Some get riper than others, some ripen earlier than others. There's a huge range of styles of wine. Some wines can be 12% alcohol and suck, but some wines at 16% can be really good (you heard me!). What it comes down to is appropriateness for the varietal and quality of the wine-making. That's it. I've had 16% wines that taste like 13% wines and I've had shitty 13% wines that taste like equal parts Concord grape juice and rubbing alcohol.

Like the wine that you like and don't make apologies for it. But also don't attack the haters of your wine style with dubious statistics and misinformation. While that has become the American way, it shouldn't be. It's not adversarial, it's a matter of taste. Have enough balls to like what you like and not feel assaulted by provincial douche bags who need to add significance to their lives by ensconcing them in arbitrary rules. What they don't know is that it won't fix their impotency, but it will let them pretend they aren't impotent for another year or so.

But, in the end, please don't overly manipulate wine in pursuit of scores or the bullshit mainstream wine zeitgeist. Good honest wine will prevail over all pretenders. If we just drink the wine that is appropriate--i.e. the wine that produces naturally from a region's grapes, soil, climate, and tradition--then we'll have a world of unique, distinctive wine and not a world of dark, inky, high-alcohol bullshit that all tastes the fucking same: like butter and candied Grenache.

The Double Down

2010-04-10T12:20:00.000-07:00

Just as I did with the McRib, I will make a full report on the bun-less fried chicken & bacon sandwich that is KFC's Double Down ASAP.

It debuts on Monday.

Stay tuned.

More Pulled Pork in the Mix

2010-04-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

I've already written about my love of pulled pork sandwiches here, but I figured I should throw out a couple new ones I've tried recently.

The York: I finally got out to this fabled gastropub tucked away in a secluded corner of Highland Park. Really damn good Carolina-ish sandwich. I say Carolina-ish because, although the meat was moist and vinegar-y, it also had a healthy dose of a sweet barbecue sauce--something very un-Carolinian. But the meat quality was excellent and the fresh slaw was a nice complement.

Spring Street Smokehouse: Meaty pulled pork with nice chunks of pork and good residual fat. The smokiest of all the pulled pork I've tried, but the smoke was that intense but cheap quality. Really sweet sauce--Kansas City in style. Decent slaw and well priced at $9.95 (including a side).

Do these affect my conclusions from the previous post? Not really. My favorite for the price is still probably the Oinkster (plus those fries!) and both Lou and T-Rex use the best damn pork you can get. But the York is pretty good and their beer selection rocks. Spring Street won't win any awards, but its earnest sluttiness is appreciated and the traditional bbq-house style sides is another plus.

Still to try? Sketch in Culver City and Zeke's Smokehouse in WeHo.

The York
www.theyorkonyork.com

Spring Street Smokehouse
www.sssmokehouse.com

Craftsman Brewery

2010-03-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

There's an odd micro-brew black hole in California centered right on Los Angeles and Orange County. There are dozens of small commercial breweries from Santa Barbara up to the Oregon border and more than a handful south of the Orange Curtain. But in LA? I know of three--Angel City Brewery and Eagle Rock Brewery in Los Angeles and Craftsman Brewing Company in Pasadena. There are no doubt others but none have achieved the market penetration (however modest) of the aforementioned.

I wonder why that is? Is it not a beer town? The rise of beer-loaded gastropubs would suggest otherwise. Maybe it's too expensive? Too much bureaucracy in the county? I would think that there's a ready market for unique local beers and there are empty warehouses waiting to be filled with malt and hops by ambitious entrepreneurs.

Despite Angel City's eye-catching billboard and seeming attempts to position itself as the Anchor Steam of Los Angeles, it's Pasadena's Craftsman Brewing Company that seems to have found its way into the most restaurants and reached the most esteem among the beer cognoscenti.

Some friends were in town from Chicago and had heard of Craftsman. They called ahead for a tour and we met up with owner Mark at the brewery--a couple of roll-up garages in an industrial business park in northern Pasadena. The brewery is not open to the public per se but call ahead and if the schedule's not too packed they're happy to chat about their beers for a bit.

The brewery is small, but it's packed with fermenters and mash tuns which are constantly going to keep up with ever-increasing demand. Craftsman just recently picked up a distributor, prior to that Mark made deliveries himself in his vintage pickup. We had a good chat with the brewery staff: owner Mark, head brewer Todd and his assistant whose name escapes me, alas. All very friendly.

Craftsman makes three beers regularly, all excellent. The 1903 Pre-Prohibition style lager is fantastic, and their top seller. They also make a light, aromatic "Hevenly Hefe" in the Bavarian style and a nice golden English Pale Ale--one of the best of its kind. At any given time they have another six or so seasonal brews or one-offs. We tried two of those, the winter seasonal Cabernale, a lager mixed with juice from Texas Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and a sour Saison-tyle ale that was delicious.

Check out their beers when you have the chance. Nothing in bottles yet but these spots all have several Craftsman beers on draft:

Mission Wines
www.missionwines.com

Lucky Baldwin's
www.luckybaldwins.com

The York
www.theyorkonyork.com

Lucques
www.lucques.com

Craftsman Brewing Company
1260 Lincoln Ave, Unit 100
Pasadena, Ca 91103
www.craftsmanbrewing.com

Mixology Was Bad Enough

2010-03-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

I love beer. Despite my personal and professional obsession with wine, beer is often a more honest and satisfying beverage. It's like Jay-Z said: "Got a project chick, that plays her part / And if it goes down y'all that's my heart." Parades of Burgundies and Bordeaux and Wachaus and Riojas are fine for a hot night at the club, but if the shit hits the fan, man-- a Guinness, Pabst, Hite, Lagunitas IPA--well damn.

But it's still just fucking beer.

I was at a big trade wine tasting the other day and overheard a dumpy white dude in a suit (who wears a suit to a trade tasting in LA?) telling (bragging?) to a not-quite-as-dumpy white chick in jeans and a strappy top that he was a "Certified Beer Educator."

I really wanted to teabag him right then and there. Just unzip, jump up, and ::thwap::

I already have such limited esteem for a "Certified Wine Educator" since, largely, certifying organizations are just self-perpetuating bureaucracies at best and pyramid schemes at worst/in most cases.

But at least with wine there is an enormous breadth of distinct product to cover. There are 2000+ different varietals of wine grapes, plus geometric expansion of those varietals into blends. And there are nearly infinite variations in the soil where the grapes are grown. Then throw in an hour seminar on winemaking. So right there you have at least a semester-long course in the basics.

A beer class would have none of the above, except for maybe a two hour seminar on brewing techniques. All beers have the same ingredients: barley and/or wheat (and in cheaper beers, other cereal grains); one (or several) of about eight major hop varietals; one of a handful of yeasts; water. By virtue of the brewing process, wherein all of the above are cooked together (except for the yeast and sometimes the hops) terroir expressiveness is eliminated.

What you have instead is an expressiveness of a cultural history, which is fantastic and awesome, but it's not something that can be transported, it's something to be experienced on location. If you drink a well-made wine from the Rheingau in Los Angeles you're experiencing a small part of the actual Rheingau. Drinking a Belgian beer in Los Angeles you're not experiencing Belgium. Having a Belgian beer in Bruges you're experiencing Belgium to a higher degree.

Throwing beer up on a pedestal is in the same class of disingenuous foodie douchebaggery as "gourmet" burgers and academic discussions about pizza. Beer, burgers, and pizza are all delicious and can be made really really well. But you can't really fail at beer, burgers and pizza either--I mean really fail. They can be disappointing or mediocre, but they can't fail.

Or, more accurately, beer, burgers and pizza only fail when ambition overshoots their humble purpose. A $16 burger is more likely to fail than a $3 burger. So it is with beer. I've yet to have a cheap beer that was bad. Mostly, cheap beer just tastes like dirty water--often water that tastes better than the Zone 7 shit I grew up with. But sometimes expensive beers served in wine bottles aggro-ed out with four separate hop treatments, a fistful of wormwood, and some cardamom, can fail spectacularly.

Let's all just calm down and like what we like because we like it. It's just food, it's just beer, hell it's just wine. It's meant to make our lives more pleasurable and more interesting. Don't turn that crucial, personal right over to some shlub who shelled out $200 for a few classes so he can get piece of paper. Great! Now he can make $14.75/hr. assistant managing at the Yard House instead of $14.15.

A certified beer expert is about as interesting to me as a certified handjob expert. And just about as hard to become.

Demand the Best

2010-03-09T16:02:00.001-08:00

After an unremarkable dinner at a very nice restaurant in a very nice hotel in Huntington Beach, I was reminded that we as consumers have a long way to go.

The restaurant wasn't cheap--it wasn't crazy expensive either--and it wasn't bad. But its ingredients sucked and were inelegantly prepared.

Based on the pleasant smiles on the sea of middle-aged white people eating, though, it didn't matter.

Do you really not realize that the lobster is overcooked and rubbery? The salmon is farmed Atlantic? Most of your produce isn't fresh or in season? Your coffee is sour and your desserts are frozen?

All of the above would be acceptable at Chili's for Chili's prices, but at a restaurant considered one of the OC's best?

Come on!

Oh, and then there was the wine list. With exception of the sparkling wines it was 100% California and the whites listed "chardonnay," "sauvignon blanc" and graciously "other whites." That last group? All of four additional California wines. The reds? "Merlot," "pinot noir," "cabernet sauvignon" and "other reds." That last category had all of five or six wines. It was the most asinine and myopic wine list I've ever seen at a reputable restaurant. Honestly, it was fucking shameful.

But whose responsibility is it? Does the consumer need to demand better? Or do the stewards and gatekeepers need to take the lead and make the effort to expand the palates of their customers?

I would argue the latter. The public palate is a massive oil tanker. It needs tugboats and pilots to get it out of safe harbor and into open waters.

If, as a wine and food professional, you merely respond to what your customers want, you're going to be fucked when that giant ship finally does change course. But if you push your customers, they'll follow you for who you are, not just what you sell.

An Easy Meal To Get You Laid

2010-03-04T20:38:00.000-08:00

They say the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. This is incorrect. As any ninja who keeps up with the trends will tell you, the quickest way to a man’s heart is a quick jab through the sternum.

However, the quickest way into a woman’s pants is through her stomach, because women like to eat. That is also something a ninja will tell you if you get a couple sakes in him.

So in the interest of everybody getting their hands dirty in the kitchen before getting them dirtier in the bedroom, I humbly submit an easy and delicious pre-coital meal:

Oven-Roasted Pork Tenderloin, White Potatoes, and Broccoli.

The oven gets a bad rap since it doesn’t have the immediate gratification of visible flames. But oven cooking rocks. It’s clean and easy and you can cook multiple things at once. It does take a little extra time because indirect heat, like a Frenchman, is inefficient.

0. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. Get yourself a roasting pan or Pyrex baking dish. Lube it up with some olive oil.

2. Cut up 6-8 medium sized white potatoes. Halve or quarter them depending on the size. Place them in the roasting pan. Throw some salt, pepper, and a little more oil on the potatoes.

3. Remove the tenderloin from its packaging. Try not to make penis jokes.

4. Rub tenderloin with olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, basil and rosemary. Or herbs de provence. Or any meat-oriented herb rub. Again, refrain from dick jokes.

5. Place tenderloin in the roasting pan on/around the potatoes.

6. Throw the whole mess in the oven. Set a timer to check on it in 30 minutes.

7. Grab a bowl. Throw in broccoli florets (probably 2 crowns’ worth).

8. Chop 4-5 cloves of garlic. Add to broccoli.

9. Drizzle broccoli and garlic with olive oil. Add a big pinch of salt.

10. Mix it up and evenly coat the broccoli and garlic.

11. Arrange the broccoli evenly on a baking sheet.

12. After 30 minutes have gone by with the pork, put the broccoli sheet in the oven on the top rack. Bake for 10-15 more minutes.

13. By bake 10-15 more minutes I mean “bake until done.” 40-45 minutes should be enough, but go ahead and cut halfway through the tenderloin at the thickest part. If its not pink but still juicy, you’re good to go. Take it out of the oven. Take the broccoli out too.

14. Let the pan sit for 5 minutes or so.

15. Take the pork out of the pan and slice into medallions on a cutting board. For two, you probably only need to cut half of the tenderloin. Save the rest for a special occasion, like Flag Day.

16. Arrange your food on two plates, half the potatoes, half the broccoli and 3-4 pork medallions on each.

17. Enjoy with a medium-bodied red wine. I’d recommend a domestic Pinot Noir, a red blend from Portugal, or a Southern Rhone.

18. Get it on.

19. Wake up the next morning with shame on your face and make the long walk home (but don’t forget your leftover tenderloin).

Alright, so, okay, and...or am I just crazy?

2010-02-27T00:09:00.000-08:00

So I've been blogging for a long time--like eight years which in internet years is basically longer than the universe has existed, which is roughly 6000 years.

I've never made an assertion of being anything other than a knowledgeable person with a decent amount of experience and some opinions. That's it. I don't deny that experts exist, but I do believe that 99% of people who claim to be experts are charlatans. They're not deliberate charlatans, they probably do think that they're experts. They're just deluded.

Either that or I'm an expert, and I really can't believe that to be true. I forget my wallet and go the whole day with my undershirt on backwards way too often for that to be the case. We're all just people who can be knowledgeable and opinionated in certain areas and maybe we like to share our knowledge and opinions with others. Hopefully we can do this in a way that entertains and engages.

The problem with "experts" is that it creates a one-sided non-dialogue. The expert creates, by definition, an inequal relationship except in cases where there are two experts on the same topic talking with teach other. And that's often boring. The expert is talking, the sea of non-experts is listening. This would be fine except that almost all experts are, as I said, Charlatans.

And not the Charlatans U.K.

I much prefer two (or more) curious knowledgeable people talking to each other about something they're passionate about and, in so doing, move toward a dialectical truth.

As skeptical as I am of self-professed experts, I'm even more dubious of institutions that seek to certify expert-dom. The reason? These institutions are never free. An organization that truly seeks to acknowledge experts would be free, independent, and anonymously peer-reviewed. It should not be an organization of questionable provenance into which applicants pay large amounts of money to attempt to become inducted into an alleged elite.

This is why the Court of Master Sommeliers can suck my cork.

Every single thing that is "learned" in the program can be learned by reading approximately two books, tasting a whole fuck tonne of wine, and learning how to tie a necktie. That's it. If the CMS was legit, it would let applicants test into whatever tier was appropriate. But that wouldn't work, because it needs the hundreds of people failing the $400 basic test to run its dubious operation. In college I didn't have to take Introduction to College Writing because I scored high enough on my high school AP test. I was none the worse for it. This makes sense since it saves time, money, and sanity.

And I can't tell you how many fucking people I've met who've passed multiple levels of the CMS programs who haven't known wine from a flaming bag of Jancis Robinson's feces.

(Which I think is a wine. Or at least should be.)

This means that either:

1. The CMS program is horribly flawed and allows for ignorant and unaccomplished people to pass its exams--in the same way that kids who go to private college graduate in four years but public school kids don't (I did).

2. The CMS doesn't care who the fuck it passes in its first tier or two as long as it can collect its $$$$ so that the handful of actual Master Sommeliers can enjoy their platinum codpieces and vajazzled pudenda.

If it's the former, it should be done away with. If it's the latter, it's shrewd but cynical. I'm okay with that (the free market after all is about taking ignorant peoples' money by making them think that they aren't), but I don't respect it.

Because the fact is, wine is a lifestyle--it's something that is lived, not just learned. And no examination and no one hour seminar is going to make up for that. No intense study for a year is going to make up for that. So why flush your money down the toilet when all you need to do is just keep doing and keep learning for the rest of your life?

Don't spend money for someone else to tell you what you already know or can quickly learn from reading Wikipedia, Wine Grape Glossary, and tasting dozens and dozens of wine. It's 2010, the need for instant recall of arcane knowledge no longer exists.

We have iPhones. There's an app for that.

This Shit's the Bomb: Saam, Los Angeles, CA

2010-02-24T23:11:00.000-08:00

I'll admit that despite my foodie blog pretensions, I haven't been to all that many crazy destination restaurants. Matsuhitsa, Chez Panisse Cafe (maybe), Redd (barely)....that's pretty much it. It's hard to justify the price but I have found that once you hit a serious price threshold on food, the quality is almost invariably superb.

So when my friend invited me to dinner at Saam, Jose Andres' private tasting room at The Bazaar in the SLS Hotel I said, "Sure, what the fuck?" I'd eaten at Bar Centro at the Bazaar a couple of times and I'd been reasonably impressed.

But Saam was pretty fucking ridiculously amazing. An added bonus? Jose Andres was in the kitchen that day--I believe he's in town for the next several weeks, so take note cult-of-personality followers. And Andres is probably the most important and innovative chef currently working out of the USA. And that's what he was doing at The Bazaar too, expediting in the kitchen, not out gladhanding the crowd.

So even if you don't live in LA and you don't particularly care about food, you'll care about my course-by-course review of the twenty-two course tasting menu at Saam.

As a quick pre-cursor, Jose Andres is the sort of pioneer of what is rather incorrectly called "molecular gastronomy" by the food press. At its core it's the use of chemistry to explore new ways to experience food and drink. When it's great, you taste something like, say, a margarita in a whole new way while it stays at its core a margarita. When it's bad, it's a superfluity of salty air and seaweed foam.

Saam was great.

Course 1: The Golden Boy. Sherry and Cava with orange bitters and 14kt gold dust. A delicious drink. The gold powder suspended in the cava carbonation was hypnotizing in the same way that a ventriloquist's dummy is hypnotizing to homosexual hypnotists.

Course 2: Beet Tumbleweed. Shaved beets stuffed into a ball and then deep fried. It tasted like deep fried beets--sweet, earthy. I wanted a basketful.

Course 3: Olive Oil Bonbon. Thin lightly sweet candy shell filled with some of the most awesome extra virgin olive oil of all time. Very clean, fresh and grassy. This was the first "molecularly gastronomical dish of the night." Great.

Course 4: Bagel & Lox Steam Bun. Crazy interesting. Bagel dough stuffed with dill sour cream topped with smoked salmon. The first exceptionally innovative dish of the night. The dough tasted profoundly of bagel and the combination of flavors resulted in a perfect deconstruction of the classic lox bagel.

Course 5: Tuna Handroll 2009. Mini tuna handroll with top shelf chopped tuna, liquified nori, avocado puree, in a crispy cone. Fabulous

Course 6: Black Olives Ferran Adria. Adria, the crazy chef-dictator of El Bulli, is the inspiration behind this dish, olive juice spherified in a sodium alginate suspension. It burst with fresh olive saltiness.

Course 7: Jose's Combination. Perhaps the best dish of the night, a slice of Jamon Iberico loaded with Spanish sturgeon caviar. The meatiness of the delicious almond-fed ham bounced fabulously off of the salty zip of the caviar.

Course 8: Boneless Coconut Thai Chicken Wing. One of the few seafood-less dishes on the menu, this was great as well, even if the flavor was very TGI Fridays. The chicken was impeccably tender and the flavors of the Thai seasoning were well composed.

Course 9: Sea Urchin Ceviche. Sea urchin is delicious. Except when it sucks, which is often, and then sea urchin tastes like dirty sea water. But at Saam, the sea urchin was poppin' fresh. It was not dirty and Jersey-shore tasting. It was also topped with a hibiscus air which was quite complimentary.

Course 10: Chipirones en su Tinta. Squid braised in its own ink. Boring but tasty. One of the few dull dishes of the night. Not bad, just dull. The sauce (made from squid ink and shellfish stock) was tasty.

Course 11: Japanese Baby Peaches & Persimmons. Of the purely vegetarian dishes of the night, this was da bomb-ingest of da bomb. The persimmon was in the form of seeds and persimmon foam. Tasty cakes.

Course 12: Guacamole New Way. Here was a molecular gastronomy dish that was done without spherification or flavored air. Thin sliced avocado wrapped around tomato sorbet with onion foam and micro-cilantro. It was an incredibly complicated way to make guacamole, but it made me experience the flavors in a new way.

Course 13: Hot & Cold Foie Gras Soup with Corn. Melty foie gras and retarded good chicken broth topped with some whippity whip cream. Oh yeah, and corn nuts. Good. Straightforward.

Course 14: Norwegian Cigalas. I'm going to pretend this means Norwegian Cigar because that is awesome. Its a small Norwegian lobster that looks like, well, a shrimp-toned cigar. The meat was sweet and tender.

Course 15: Smoked Arctic Char with Tzatziki. This might've been the best dish of the night. The tzatziki was suspended in spherified awesomeness and the char was a fabulously tender piece of smokey fish goodness.

Course 16: Not Your Everyday Caprese. Tomato sorbet with a cherry tomato stuffed with sherry vinegar and paired with a spurty balloon of buffalo mozzarella whey.

Course 17: Wagyu Beef Cheeks. Finally another non-fish dish. The beef cheeks seared medium rare were served with some baby mandarins and caramelized cipollini onions. Great.

Course 18: Philly Cheesesteak. All good things in life are served by a monkey. Saam's cheesesteak is no exception. Nor is a cliche referring to something as being no exception a cliche. Except when it is. Which it is in this case. But yeah, there's a little brass monkey (that funky monkey) carrying a tray with a bit of air bread (like a football shaped cracker) inflated with creamy cheese and topped with seared slices of Wagyu beef.

Course X: The special supplement course. Mushroom risotto with piles of shaved black Italian truffles. Rich and earthy truffles to make James Spader spooge in his trousers complement some seriously stanky mushroom risotto. Really good and literally covered in shaved truffles.

Course 19: Dragon's Breath Popcorn. A signature dish that all the ladies love because it means you can breath smoke out of your face. A bit of praline popcorn frozen in liquid nitrogen that you eat with your mouth shut so that the liquid nitrogen smoke comes out your nose. For some reason. This was the most mediocre dish of the evening, though it did get me kinda high.

Course 20: Thai Dessert. Chocolate mousse with curried peanut dust and coconut sorbet. Tasty despite the peanut dust that clogged up my lungs like a Mississippi lung clogger.

Course 21: Hot Chocolate Pear. Poached pear with hot milk chocolate, some hazelnut shit, and pear sorbet. I liked this dish quite a bit, though it was really similar to the Thai Dessert in its basic composition. I guess in Spain they don't know about dark chocolate.

Course 22: Petit Fours. Totally innocuous chocolate tablets and candy bonbons. Nothing to really say. Pleasant.

I didn't have much booze since my dining partner wasn't a drinker, but the two glasses of tasty white wine were enough--a Cava Rosado and a great small-production Gruner Veltliner.

So at the end of the day a 22 course tasting menu for $95 (plus service) is probably the best deal in global fine dining, especially when Jose Andres is working in the kitchen. I mean seriously the regular tasting menu, without any supplements, is TWENTY-TWO COURSES for just NINETY-FIVE DOLLARS! Where is there a deal that fantastic in ultra fine-dining?

Plus the service is stellar, well-trained without being ponderous. You're even ushered to your table individually by a hostess--they never seat two tables at the same time at Saam. I think they leave at least fifteen minutes between seating people. The small dining room is attended by three waiters, plus the hostess.

23 courses! w00t!

Saam at the SLS Hotel
465 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca 90048
www.thebazaar.com

Umami Burger Part 3: Umami Burger FAIL!

2010-02-22T16:51:00.000-08:00

So if you've read this and this you know that I am a huge Umami Burger fan. I'm such a fan and I think so highly of their product that I was very excited to take a couple chef friends who were in town from Berkeley to try what I considered to be one of the best burgers I've ever had. It would figure that on this one occasion where I really needed Umami Burger to shine it would fall flat on its big, juicy, ground beef face.

To be fair, we were going to the heretofore unvisited original La Brea location--a spot known for its tiny-ness and lack of a liquor license, but it was a fairly inexcusable performance.

First, they only serve their burgers one temperature, medium-rare. That is not inherently a bad thing--it facilitates speed and efficiency to serve all your meat at one temperature since you can just crank the burgers off the grill regardless of particular orders. But here's the thing, it's pretty much the POINT of a hamburger to use meats you wouldn't necessarily serve medium rare to make the ground beef. I don't mean bad meat, I just mean meat from that 90% of the cow that isn't really suitable to be served dripping.

But fine, I'm with you, you do a medium rare burger, cool. I respect that. I don't recall the other Umami Burger locations being so temperature-specific, but I could be wrong--I will say that my burgers had been right around medium. But at the end of the day if you're going to serve a requisite medium rare burger, make sure it's medium rare. At our table, all of the beef burgers were dripping red rare. They were so rare that none of the patties even held together, this was in contrast to the previous burgers I've had which retained shape and firmness admirably while still being plenty juicy. The rare burgers soaked the bottom bun to the point of destruction, basically they were impossible to eat without a fork. And Umami Burger La Brea doesn't provide forks. This was again in contrast to the previous burgers I'd had which all toed that crucial line--always on the verge of juicy destruction, always succeeding in not going all the way over the top into sloppy burger wreckage.

Another oddity were the thrice-fried French fries, which were not very good. Thick, potato-y, and bland, they had the flavor and texture of undercooked elementary school lunch oven fries. The onion rings were a hit, however, as was my perfectly prepared turkey burger.

So what happened at Umami La Brea? I think they were busy and had very little oversight in the kitchen. When you're throwing up burgers all day you want to keep things simple and quick. Simple is fine, hence the uniform temperature burgers, but quick rapidly becomes too quick and you end up serving barely cooked burgers for the sake of, well, nothing really. Our burgers came out in a matter of minutes despite the dining room being packed. That's entirely unnecessary. I'm happy to wait another ten minutes for an appropriately cooked burger.

I'm going to chalk this up to an off day and I'll give the Umami Burger La Brea location another go-round. Everything else has been too damn good for me to assume this last experience to be anything but an outlier.

Umami Burger
850 S. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, Ca 90036
www.umamiburger.com

HFF Quickie: The Lazy Ox Canteen

2010-02-11T18:33:00.000-08:00

There's a certain category of restaurant that is under-appreciated. It's a restaurant where you can go for any purpose: on a date to have a fun time trying a bunch of different menu items; with your parents for a nice dinner where you leave sated; or alone at the bar for a late night snack and a glass of wine without shelling out too much $$.

I like restaurants where you can basically decide for yourself how much you want to pay, where portions are generally commensurate with price, where you can spend $25 on a late night bite for one or spend $150 on a splurge for two.

Little Tokyo's Lazy Ox Canteen, the newest addition to my 'hood, is just that place. The menu's an eclectic mix of Asian-tinged Cal-Med divided into three categories that can be roughly translated into "small appetizers," "large appetizers," and "small entrees," but that would be a very 2009 way of thinking about the menu. In reality it's a gently sloping curve of diverse deliciousness starting at $4 for a plate of house-made pickles on up to $25 for steak frites (or $42 for the steak for two on the specials menu). Which brings up the extensive chalkboard specials menu (easily visible in the hip but modest dining room) which serves to effectively double the size of the printed menu with a broad assortment of limited and seasonal selections.

The food has all been good to great, particular highlights were cauliflower gratin, slow-cooked pork shoulder, creamy farro, hand-torn egg pasta with egg & brown butter, and an awesomely retardedly good rice pudding with burnt caramel for dessert.

On the beverage front, Lazy Ox has a big well-priced wine list that is as eclectic as the menu, featuring that most endangered of all species, the $6 glass of wine at an upscale LA restaurant. In terms of beer Lazy Ox has a very nice selection of drafts and bottles, with a particular emphasis on Japanese beers and California micro-brews.

With a broad mixed-price menu, good fairly priced drinks (wines by the bottle are half-price on Mondays) and all day hours (11AM-3PM for lunch, 5PM-12AM for dinner), is Lazy Ox the perfect place for a nice but casual dinner in Downtown?

Pretty damn close.

The Lazy Ox Canteen
241 S. San Pedro St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90012
www.lazyoxcanteen.com

Food Porn?

2010-02-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

There's this term, "Food Porn," that some of you've no doubt heard of. It has two definitions--the more common definition is used to describe close-up, graphic pictures of food preparations often done in a manner to make the food look as intensely desirable as possible. In this age of ubiquitous low-res internet pornography, a more apt phrase perhaps would be "Food Erotica" for such pictures and not food porn.

The term Food Porn is also used to describe haute cuisine dining experiences, exotic cooking shows like Iron Chef, and technical ambitious cookbooks--things that showcase the most elaborate and extreme kitchen achievements. In this context the word is usually used derisively or at the very least dismissively--that just as pornography showcases unattainably built people performing unachievable acts, so too does food porn show impossibly talented people preparing impossible dishes.

This is a bullshit, thought-terminating cliche because:

1. Both pornography and Iron Chef show actual people doing actual things and

2. With the exception of hard to obtain and/or expensive ingredients and hard to physically achieve positions and/or expensive plastic surgery, the vast majority of what is done on Iron Chef and in most pornography is achievable by the average person in the average home. Just because you aren't John Elway doesn't mean that throwing a football around isn't pleasurable.

3. The participants in both pornography and on Iron Chef do enjoy most of their activities, both the product(s) of their labors and the process by which it is obtained. Objectors would have you believe that is not the case.

So if you don't want to try and make trout ice cream with foie gras chantilly because you don't think you'll like it, that's fine, and if you don't want to try out froggy style for fear of penile fracture, that's fine too. But to deny the validity of either on the premise that there can not be anything aspirational for the average person is ludicrous and regressive. Food porn can undoubtedly provide positive inspiration for the kitchen and porn porn can provide positive inspiration for the bedroom, den, conservatory, Volkswagen backseat, or BART station bathroom--whether or not you successfully execute that which you're trying to imitate.

So be adventurous or else you'll just eat meat and potatoes the rest of your life. And hell, meat and potatoes do hit the spot every now and then--but it can never hurt to try new things, at least not very much.

HFF Quickie: Umami Burger Part 2

2010-01-30T18:51:00.000-08:00

After enjoying an Umami Burger from their food truck a few weeks ago, I can say that I was more than intrigued by their product. So a few days ago when I had an appointment with a friend in Los Feliz I suggested that rather than the douchebaggery of Fred's or the pretentiousness of Psychobabble, we hit up the Umami Burger around the corner from Vermont Ave. on Hollywood Blvd.

Strangely, that is their "Hollywood" location, despite being in Los Feliz, and the location on Cahuenga in the heart of Hollywood is called the "Urban" location. One can presume that should an Umami Burger open Downtown it will be called the "Venice" location.

This Umami Burger was an overnight turnkey redo of the old Cobras & Matadors, retaining virtually all of the original design, embellishing it only with Kanji painted and/or carved on the walls and shelves full of wood Japanese dolls that look like crosses between bowling pins and Hello Kitty vibrators. It's the most elaborate of the three locations and has the most extensive beer selection: in addition to the well-curated line of draughts, the Hollywood Umami Burger also has a bottle bar of Japanese beers.

I had the Maple Bacon Pork Burger. I'd had my eye on that since I first read their menu a few months ago. It was fucking amazing. A well-balanced mix of ground pork and smokey chopped bacon that was impressively juicy. The burger's topped with a slightly sweet cranberry aioli, roasted & diced apples, and bits of crispy fried chard which provided an extra textural dimension that made the dish. Perhaps the best burger I've ever had.

The side of tempura onion rings was nice too--the fluffy tempura batter was still a bit greasier than the best tempura I've had at Japanese restaurants, but a fuck tonne lighter than the doughy messes that pass for "tempura" at most gastropubs and fusion joints. They're sprinkled with what appeared to be ground sea salt, which helped to unobtrusively salt the rings.

As a last note, the staff was friendly, attentive, and well-trained.

So Umami Burger, I think, has me hooked. Prices are reasonable ($10-$14 for good sized top-notch burgers) and the selection is dynamic and innovative without being over-elaborate or pretentious. It's that rare LA beast: a restaurant with a strong concept and big ambitions but where the food quality still, unequivocally, comes first.

Umami Burger (Hollywood)
4655 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca 90027
www.umamiburger.com

HFF On The Road: Pleasanton, Ca

2010-01-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

It's late January now, so it's time to assess all the fabulous dining I did in the corridors of suburbia while seeing friends and family over the holidays.

So:

There are two kinds of suburbs: the Berkeleys, Napas, Albanys, Los Gatoses, and Healdsburgs of the world which cultivate their own indigenous culinary flowerbeds; and the Concords, Fremonts, San Ramons, and Livermores where chain casual dining is the name of the game and the locally owned businesses aren't much better. I spent most of my holiday in Pleasanton, which is largely the domaine of the latter.

A brief discussion of the I-680 corridor. The freeway runs the length of Contra Costa and Alameda counties in the eastern part of the East Bay--over the hills that separate Berkeley/Oakland/El Cerrito/Richmond from Concord/Orinda/Lafayette/Pleasant Hill. It continues all the way south into Santa Clara County, ending when it turns into I-280 and spins around back north through Downtown San Jose and up the Peninsula into SF. While the northernmost reaches of the freeway are in decidedly blue collar East Bay, most of the corridor, from Pleasant Hill through Fremont, cuts through one of the wealthiest swaths of cities in the country. Walnut Creek, Danville, San Ramon, Alamo, Blackhawk, Pleasanton, Sunol, and much of Fremont is home to million dollar homes, SUVs, and country clubs. Pleasanton is the wealthiest mid-sized city in the country according to the last census, Blackhawk is the originator of the zero-property-line McMansion, and Walnut Creek is the East Bay hub of luxury retailers. And yet....

I can count the restaurants of distinction on the back of one hand and still be able to pick my nose AND suck my thumb.

But here's the thing, I can't really fault the restaurants. I fault the uninquisitive audience they're cooking for. The fact is, why would you bother getting anything better than Sysco foodstuffs if your audience will: A, not know the difference and B, object to the nominal increase in price.

So where did I go?

Redcoats - A perfectly serviceable British-themed brewpub in Downtown Pleasanton. Astonishingly cheap, especially by LA standards: my happy hour 20 oz. pint of Guinness was $3. Pretty tasty fried green beans, shitty frozen wholesale french fries with a middling curry sauce, decent fried zucchini, and well-prepared fried fish with the same shitty fries. But given the prices, the good cheap drink selection, nice atmosphere, and late hours, it's one of the better places to eat in town.
http://www.redcoatspub.com/

Amakara - Across the freeway is Dublin, Pleasanton's autistic younger brother. Though autistic in the same way that one brother works hard and becomes a modestly successful lawyer while the other brother drinks and fucks his way through college and becomes a billionaire investment banker. Dublin, despite being half Pleasanton's size, is home to a million fast food restaurants and every big box retailer known, driven beyond the overpass by Pleasanton's "planned progress" requirements. Amakara was pretty damn good overall. My mackerel was overcooked, but the grilled edamame, jalapeno hamachi, and grilled oysters were quite delicious. Additionally, Amakara prepares an array of sushi rolls that rival anything out there and that are largely cheaper than its rivals. In particular the "Klondike Experience--" a massive presentation of crab, tempura shrimp, scallops, and three flavors of tobiko roe.
http://www.amakaraco.com/

Oasis - Oddly masquerading as an Afghan Restaurant, which is a particularly strange pose to take in a relatively conservative part of California, and a Wine Bar, Oasis is really neither. It's a quasi pan-Mediterranean joint, which primarily means a bunch of mezze stuff interchangeable with any eastern Mediterranean/Central Asian restaurant, and a few actual Aghan things like borani. On the wine bar front, it was a wine bar inasmuch as anyplace that pours Rombauer btg can be a wine bar. The space is pretty and the location right on Main Street is quite nice.
www.oasisgrille.com

My Parents' House - Killer food as always. Great adventurous cooking, paired with good wine, and the lack of a need to drive in this traffic cop-happy town means that the parents' house is always the best place to eat. Dining highlights included grilled mackerel with fresh pasta, poached salmon with capers, a version of cochinita pibil, and, as a more-than-honorable mention, a killer prime rib cooked by grandma.

And really the point of going home isn't to go out to eat, it's about about seeing friends and family, relaxing, and falling asleep on the couch after drinking a couple bottles of the wine.

Happy New Year!

On the De-Mythification of the Re-Mythification of Wine

2010-01-10T22:01:00.000-08:00

Wine is the simplest alcoholic beverage to produce. At its most basic, wine is squished grapes sitting in a bucket, naturally fermented by wild yeasts. Unlike beer, grape juice doesn't need to be brewed (cooked) to make wine, it really is the beverage of the people. Anyone can make it in their garage rather quickly. There's a reason that the major beer producing countries of Europe like Britain, Germany, and the Czech Republic exist at the northernmost fringe of where wine grapes can grow. If they were further south, they would've just made wine.

America never got into the wine thing early on. It couldn't. The phylloxera aphid damaged the rootstocks of European vitis vinifera grapes, forcing winemakers to use indigenous vitis labrusca grapes which produced a sweet musky (aka "foxy") wine that was serviceable for home winemakers but lacked the refinement necessary to convert connoisseurs of European wines made with vinifera grapes.

On the other side of the country however, European grapes flourished. Phylloxera hadn't yet crossed the Rockies so the vinifera vines brought over by the Spanish produced quality wines throughout California and the Southwest. When that region became part of the US, winemaking was carried on and advanced primarily by Italian and Eastern European immigrants (take a look at the names of the oldest California vineyards). The United States finally began producing quality wine from European grapes on a consistent basis.

But that delay came at a price. The population centers of the country weren't interested in wine, preferring beer and whiskey. And the serious wine drinkers, centered in the Atlantic metropolises, were inclined to keep drinking the same French wines they always had.

And then there was Prohibition and any progress that had been made in American winemaking was destroyed.

All of this is a long way of explaining the process by which wine, a simple simple beverage, became the bastion of the American elite. A jealously protected symbol of wealth and refinement--for a long time "good wine" was expensive, rare, and cerebral. That perception persisted as we became reaccultured to wine and the availability of wine increased, helped by the fact that there really weren't a lot of "in between wines" available until the 1980s, wines that were neither ultrapremium nor jugged rotgut.

But as good and relatively affordable wines began multiplying, the desire to compare, categorize, score, and rank increased as well so that we could still find out which wines the discerning elite should be drinking, even as that wine-drinking elite began to number in the tens of millions.

When Robert Parker helped make wine scores a big business, a certain vocabulary for discussing wine materialized, based on nothing but the consensus of a fairly small clique of wine writers. Why "cocoa" versus "chocolate?" Why "framboise" instead of "raspberry?"

I'm not saying these aren't valid descriptors, but the homogenization of wine descriptors in the wine press has created a wine vocabulary hegemony. It facilitates the perception that wine tasting is something to only be enjoyed by the inaugurated few, who can perceive cedar and tobacco in Cabernet or leather and bacon in Syrah. Couple to that is the belief that to describe wine in a way that is more personal, using a vocabulary that is familiar and intimate to themselves, is invalid.

Fuck that.

I've had wines that taste like Jolly Ranchers, wines that taste like banana Now & Laters mixed with dirty guava. I've had wines that smell like sweaty gym socks, wines that smell like sweet musky pussy. Could I have described these using accepted wine terminology? I suppose. But I don't have any personal connection to most of the conventional wine lexicon. Maybe if I grew up amongst cedar trees or on a farm with drying tobacco I would.

Our senses of smell and taste are inimately tied to memories--who hasn't been transported back in time from the smell of a fresh fruit that used to grow in the backyard of your childhood house? From the aroma of a flower that reminds you of your high school sweetheart's shampoo? The taste of a papaya with a squeeze of lime that reminds you of.... ?

I ask.

I argue that the enjoyment from food and wine (beyond the basic survival needs) is in its ability to transport. And it can transport you one of two places: a place from your past, or a place you've never been. Either way, an impersonal lexicon of rote descriptors serves neither purpose. A bunch of words that sound good to a cabal of overweight white men in their 60s carries about as much meaning to a 23 year old Japanese woman as well, the inverse of Robert Parker's attraction to young Japanese women.

Not a lot.

The idea that you can objectively describe a wine's taste to somebody else and have that adequately reflect the next individual's tasting experience is as bizarre of an assertion as being able to describe sex with a specific partner and expect the next person's night in bed with your past lay to be exactly the same. Everyone has their own tastes and chemistry and that taste and chemistry changes not just day to day, but minute to minute.

You + your mind & body + your partner = More than the sum of those three.

You + your mind & body + your food and/or wine = More than the sum of those three.

The next time you taste wine, think back into your mental library of tastes and smells--those sips and aromas from your childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, that are memorable or meaningful, good or bad. I love the smell of toasted peanuts because of my grandma's peanut pie, I come close to vomiting whenever I smell sweet artifical cinnamon flavor because of an unfortunate incident involving Goldschlager when I was eighteen.

Can you tie those memories to what you're tasting and smelling?

It's a transformative experience, the involuntary Proustian memory, full of nostalgic sadness and bittersweet remembraces, often half-formed in the brain but fully-formed to the nth in the body, casued by applying adult understanding and adult regret to the lovingly beautiful memories of a time when everything was simple, honest, and intense: sucking on a watermelon Jolly Rancher while playing pickle with the neighbor kids on a hot summer night; eagerly and clumsily finding your way between a girl's thighs with your tongue for the very first time.

Despite the facts, nothing can ever taste as sweet and new again, but keep tasting wine with an open mind--you'll get close.

HFF Quickie: Umami Burger

2010-01-06T18:55:00.001-08:00

I was highly skeptical of Umami Burger when it first opened. Here's why:

First, shops that sell eight dollar burgers are up there with twelve dollar sandwiches on my list of businesses we don't need any more of.

Second, Adam Fleischman, Umami Burger's principal, has a questionable past in terms of sticking with his projects, having left both Bottle Rock and Vinoteque shortly after their respective openings.

Third, and most important, with the original location open for only a few months expansion plans were already underway. Premature expansion is one of the hallmarks of restaurant hubris that can rapidly contract or even demolish a once-mighty empire (cf. Gordon Ramsay, Steven Arroyo, SBE, Gaucho Grille, et al). With three locations and a food truck open after a mere year or so in business, that move looked like a hallmark case of overextension.

So while the jury's still out on how shrewd a move this Umami Burger saturation of LA is, I can't deny that the burger is really fucking good.

I hit up their food truck location since I happened to be in the area where it had parked. I ordered the basic "smashburger," a mobile take on their basic Umami Burger--about a third pound beef patty with sauce, sweet and tangy pickles, lettuce, tomato, and a killer soft roll--maybe a potato roll? Hard to tell. The burger was densely flavorful and, despite being cooked medium well/well, still chin-glisteningly juicy.

With decent fast-casual burgers consistently pushing past the six dollar mark, Umami Burger's rich, fresh burger that actually taste like meat (especially in the $8 food truck version) is a serious bargain.

Locations in Hollywood, Los Feliz, La Brea/Mid-Wilshire, and mobile throughout LA.

www.umamiburger.com

Meat on Meat: French Dip Fest '09

2010-01-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

Arguing about French Dips is like arguing about pizza, burgers, or blowjobs--in the end, even the bad ones are pretty good. But I live in Downtown LA so I figured I should tackle the great Cole's v. Philippe's debate. Since this isn't a queer pretentious food blog I won't pretend to standardize my tasting. I didn't get the same dips at both locations, didn't go at similar times, or with the same people, or even in the same state of intoxication. Despite all that I think I can unequivocally say that, crappy service aside, Cole's knocks Philippe's out of the water.

And I say that with grave hesitation because there's a lot to like about Philippe's: it's family-owned and has been staffed by some of the same people for years. The sandwiches are a step cheaper than Cole's (though Cole's has just dropped its prices) and the casual cafeteria layout, despite its limitations, is better in a lot of ways than the dour inattentiveness of Cole's staff. But Philippe's meat is mediocre and the bread isn't any better. Cole's has good bread and rich, densely flavored meats. Time to break this down:

Philippe's
The Dip: Turkey
The Side: Potato Salad
Pros: Home-y atmosphere, more traditional pre-dipped sandwiches, cheap, (usually) quick, huge array of sides and non-dip entrees, good pie, dirt-cheap drinks (9 cent coffee, 60 cent iced tea)
Cons: Stale bread, bland meat, sometimes long lines, just overall meh

Cole's
The Dip: Lamb
The Side: Spicy garlic fries & atomic pickles
Pros: Great meat, decent bread, good fries, tasty spicy pickles, classier vibe, jus on the side for self-administration of jus
Cons: Inattentive service, expensive drinks, limited selection,

(Also, what's the point of the spicy pickles? Spears on the side? Why not slices to put on the dip?)

With Cole's dips now $6.38 versus Philippe's $5.55, the price difference isn't as significant as before but you'll still have to contend with mixologist-priced drinks to jack up your tab.

In the end? Definitely don't stay away from Philippe's, but if you're only going to do one DTLA dip, do Cole's.

www.colesthefrenchdip.com
www.philippes.com

24 Hours in Las Vegas

2009-12-27T08:12:00.000-08:00

(This post was originally going to be called 24 Hours in LV, but I remembered Coolio made that porno ten years ago. It won 37 AVN awards.)

"My flight's in 15 minutes."
"You'll be fine."

I was standing within spitting distance of the security metal detector, watching as five of America's finest TSA officers staried at the X-ray screen, trying to figure out the contents of a bag. Seriously, this was taking minutes.

"Can't you pull the bag aside and open it up?"
"Quiet sir."
"But my flight's in ten minutes."
"You'll be fine."

Through the metal detector, I grab my bags, run to the gate, and: doors closed.

"Can I still get on the plane?"
"No, the doors are closed."
"Don't you page passengers as a courtesy so they can get through security?"
"Yes."
"I didn't hear it."
"You can't hear it in the security area."
"..."

Luckily LAX to LAS is a frequent flight so they got me on another one in about an hour. Not so bad--but the lack of efficiency and general myopeia of the GED-wielding TSA team was distressing.

I've never been to Las Vegas before, an assertion that is inevitably followed by an incredulous "You've never been to Vegas?" to which I respond "Nope." Usually that ends it, but sometimes it's followed by "Really?" and capped with "Really."

The shuttle from the airport to the Strip is only $7, which would prove to be the only cheap thing in Las Vegas. My previous gambling foyers having involved Reno and Tahoe, locations almost criminally cheap, the LV sticker shock was intense.

I met up with my traveling team at the Bellagio's Sports Book for a cocktail and a lament that Michael Mina was closed on Wednesday, the only day we were in town. We hopped a cab to the Hard Rock because we thought we were seeing a concert there. Turns out the concert was back at the Mandalay and we're retarded. But at least we got to have lunch at the Pink Taco, a restaurant whose name I found amusingly titillating when it first opened and I was in high school but now it's just wearisome with its faux-scandalous schoolyard snicker-inducing name. Also, three orders of carnitas and a pitcher of margaritas for $80? Christ. The carnitas were really bland. Homemade tortillas were good though.

And here's where we almost made our second fuck up of the trip--apparently the concert (Dethklok and Mastodon)--started at 5PM.

Yup, a death metal show in Las Vegas at 5PM. Back in the cab.

Given that this is a food blog I'll forego many details about the show other than it was epic and we were the only guys in the crowd not wearing black and/or a neck beard. Also, if you tip your bartender well the first time at the House of Blues you quickly get her attention on subsequent bar trips.

In what was another first for the world, after our head-banging death metal-a-thon we went for a late dinner at Aureole. A 5PM concert has its advantages.

Every one of the destination restaurants on the Strip were doing 3-course $50 prix fixe dinners so it was a no brainer, even if all these proxy versions of their NY/LA/SF originals are second-tier facsimiles--like the third or fourth iteration of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity.

Aureole is known for its epic thousand bottle wine list and its vertical wine storage skyscraper from which bottles are retrieved by wire-suspended "wine angels." The list is presented on a tablet PC which allowed for pretty quick searching and sorting by varietal, region, and/or price. When the Pinot Noirs all proved too pricey I quickly found a Beaujolais that was perfect.

The food was good but unmemorable, not really worth the price tag--even as a prix fixe. Clearly this wasn't going to be a showcase of the best they offer but it also shouldn't be an afterthought. This meal leaned toward afterthought.

As we waited at the Mandalay's cab stand, the attendant asked if we wanted to go to a strip club. As much as I appreciated the profiling (three drunk white 20-somethings), we declined and hopped a cab back to the Hard Rock (we were staying across the street). After an attempt at finding a cheaper than $10 blackjack table we gave up on gambling and crashed hard at our hotel.

Our flight out was at mid-day which gave us pretty limited lunch options and we made what would be our third and final mistake of the trip by hitting up the Hofbrauhaus. That's right, Munich's venerable tourist-trap has gone global. The only thing that kept the lunch from being a total mess was our very cute, very world-weary dirndl-sporting waitress who kept trying to get us to buy shots of Jaegermeister. The selling point? The shots come served on a paddle which she then spanks us with as a reward for our drinking, a popular activity amongst the Electors of Bavaria. We passed. My pork schnitzel was giant and greasy and the advertised "vegetable side" consisted of a single carrot slice, a solitary wedge of tomato, and one lone sprig of parsley. Inexplicably our food took 30+ minutes to get to our table, despite being the only three people in the restaurant.

After shelling out another seventy bucks for a mediocre meal, our last cab of the trip awaited. As an aside, every cabbie in Las Vegas is a late middle-aged white guy who speaks English and actually knows his way around the city. I've never experienced this with a taxi before.

We parted ways at the airport (after easily breezing through security--I swear LAS has as many security officers as LAX for a quarter of the traffic) and made the 45-minute journey home.

I'll have to give Vegas another (longer) chance--though I'm not sure how I'd afford it--but my first impression was pretty unfavorable. Since I can eat at the better versions of any Las Vegas restaurant in either SF or LA, I'd rather do my drinking and gambling in Reno where I'd have just as much fun for half the price.

www.aureolelv.com
www.hofbrauhauslasvegas.com
www.pinktaco.com

And now for something completely different...

2009-12-15T23:50:00.000-08:00

MC Rib and the Furious Five

2009-12-12T20:40:00.001-08:00

Fast food gets a bad rap amongst the fooderati. There's a lot of value in businesses providing fast, cheap, and nutritious food to a struggling middle class.

And if you steer away from getting sodas and limit your side of fries to a small, a fast food meal isn't really all that bad for you, even nutritionally speaking. Sure there's going to be a good amount of fat and heaps of sodium, but that can be said about a lot of dining options (pork belly slider anyone?). And almost everything is raised and grown in the USA and that's something significant. Sure it's cheap factory farmed meat which is reprehensible, but also a problem that isn't, for now, going away.

At the end of a meal of a quarter-pounder with cheese and a small fries (that's enough food for a meal, it really is) you've consumed 750 calories, 38 grams of fat, 1360 milligrams of sodium, along with 6 grams of fiber and 32 grams of protein. Is that ideal? Not really. Is it bad for you? Not really. Is it good for you? It's better than a soda and potato chips.

What I'm saying is this: fast food once or twice a week is fine if you order smart and control your portions. Hell, skip the fucking fries and get a side salad or fruit (standard options at some fast food-eries now).

Which is a long way of saying that I had a McRib last week.

I hadn't had the McRib in ages, not since the early 90's I imagine. The McRib is sometimes described as the most dubious of all fast food items, largely due to its absurd shape: ground pork formed into a reasonable approximation of a rack of ribs, but ingredient-wise it's actually pretty straightforward. The patty is pork, water, a little dextrose, and a few standard preservatives (BHA, BHT, Sodium Benzoate).

The McRib sauce is a bit more dubious: Water, high fructose corn syrup, tomato paste, distilled vinegar, molasses, natural smoke flavor, food starch-modified, salt, sugar, spices, soybean oil, xanthan gum, onion powder, garlic powder, chili pepper, sodium benzoate, caramel color, beet powder. But really, other than a few texturizers and preservatives, it's pretty quotidian by most processed food standards.

Notice something? No added "natural" or artificial flavors other than the smoke flavor, no extenders, no autolyzed yeast extracts, meat broths, or souces of backdoor MSG (my porn star name)--just the straight-vanilla preservatives and texturizers.

Compare the McRib to the McDonald's Angus Beef Patty: 100% Angus beef prepared with Grill Seasoning: Salt, Pepper, Angus Burger Seasoning: Salt, sugar, onion powder, natural and artificial flavors, maltodextrin, natural beef flavor [beef broth, yeast extract, maltodextrin, salt, lactic acid, natural flavor, beef fat, citric acid], spice, dextrose, autolyzed yeast extract, garlic powder, dried beef extract, sunflower oil, caramel color, worcestershire sauce powder [distilled vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, salt, caramel color, garlic powder, sugar, spices, tamarind, natural flavor], spice extractives, annatto and turmeric, calcium silicate and soybean oil added to prevent caking.

And we won't even begin to get into the McChicken ingredients.

The McRib, despite it's shape, seems to be the least Frankenfoodie of all the McDonald's proteins. Is it good for you? It's got a lot of sugar thanks to the sweet sauce, but I would give it a solid "kinda."

And does it taste good? Also a solid kinda. The texture is pleasant--surprisingly similar to really tender pork ribs--and the sauce isn't cloyingly sweet. The McRib is nominally topped with two pickles and maybe eight pieces of chopped onion and the impact of either is nominal. If I were making a similar sandwich at home, I'd throw a lot of onions on there, especially since the flavor of the pork itself is really bland. That happens when you have inexpensive processed meat and don't re-add meat flavor to it (as McDonald's does with its beef and chicken).

Fast food's not good, but it's not bad. I don't recommend it but I don't judge if you partake and try a McRib, even just ironically.

Great Pizza--Found!

2009-12-08T19:08:00.000-08:00

I've been decrying the lack of quality pizza in LA for a while now but, to be fair, I hadn't been to perhaps the two most lauded local dough tossers: Pizzeria Mozza and Tomato Pie. I doubt I'll go to Pizzeria Mozza, at least not on my dime, as it appears to be exactly like A16 or Pizzeria Delfina and I bet dollars to doughnuts that Mozza will be no better and probably worse. High-profile restaurant openings and food quality tend to be inversely related. But if someone wants to change my mind and buy me a Mozza pizza, hit me up. I ain't hidin'.

I did hit up Tomato Pie last weekend with Brother Noah who, contrary to how his name sounds, is not in the Nation of Islam nor does he brew beer in Belgium.

Tomato Pie, for those who don't know, was one of only two LA pizza parlors to make it on GQ editor Alan Richman's list of the nation's best. I wasn't able to get a full pie, so this isn't a full evaluation, but the two slices I got were easily the best I've had in LA. Most notably, the crust was crisp without being burnt, holding its shape despite being New York thin. I'll be curious to see if this holds up on a full pie, as the second cooking that pizza by the slice undergoes can go a long way to crisp up the crust.

First slice was the signature "Grandma," the same pizza Richman swooned over (didn't know that at the time). Hot, fresh-tasting crushed tomatoes and fresh garlic topped with a fistful of Italian herbs and pecorino cheese. Simple but still flavorful and full-bodied.

Second slice was the "Syracuse," a sort of "hot wing" pizza with grilled chicken, wing sauce, spices, red onion, and ranch. This one rocked. The spicy sauce set off the slightly bland crust well and the chicken was amazingly not overcooked. The crust was pooled with olive oil (in a good way) that didn't soak through the crisp crust. I don't like greasy pizzas, but I love oily ones if the oil's good. This slice really kicked the ass of its Two Boots analogue, the "Bird."

I was impressed by the balance of toppings, quality of the crust, and Buddhist Middle-Way distribution of cheese. From a menu standpoint, the mix of traditional pizzas like the "Grandma" with more adventurous options was refreshing. It was neither the uber-refined pretention of a high-end Mozza rip-off or the hipster pretention of a Two Boots; it was simply good honest pizza at a fair $3 a slice (cheaper than Two Boots).

Complaints? Yes. Still not enough salt in the crust (the edge tasted a bit like an Italian restaurant breadstick) and I could even go with something a little froofy in the crust like a tiny bit of red pepper or oregano. But that wouldn't be very New York.

It's too bad they don't deliver to my neighborhood as they're a good step above the (still quite tasty) Purgatory Pizza and a whole lot better than Rocket Pizza.

So there we have it, Tomato Pie is the first pizzeria in LA to get the full 100% HFF Seal of Approval. I'll have the seals printed up right quick.

Tomato Pie
2457 Hyperion Ave.
Los Angeles, Ca 90027
323-661-6474
www.tomatopiepizzajoint.com

HFF Re-Returns (again): Maverick

2009-11-29T16:39:00.000-08:00

There are very very few restaurants that I return to regularly, or at least at the premium dining level (places that'll set you back at least a hundred bucks for two). They were uncommon in SF and are currently rare (non-existent?) in LA. But a holiday weekend stumble back up to the Bay took me to one of my favorites for the nth time: Maverick.

So what brings me back to a restaurant time and again? It's worth a musing or five....

1. Value. This is essential. It's not a matter of inexpensiveness (good inexpensive places I'll go to weekly in some cases), but rather a sense of satisfaction with my dining experience combined with a feeling of not only not being robbed but that I got a good, solid deal. I've had fabulous meals at restaurants I'll never return to. This isn't because of sticker shock (I knew what I was getting in to) but because the fabulousness was matched by restaurants at half the price. Maverick delivers on that count, with prices 10-20% less than comparable restaurants.

2. Variety. If there's a restaurant I enjoy but it's a place where I can essentially eat through most of the menu in a couple visits with friends, I'm not going back regularly, except in the rare instance there's something truly indispensable (i.e. Zuni's chicken). Maverick tweaks its menu daily and makes wholesale changes frequently, making each trip a chance to try something new.

3. Atmosphere. A restaurant's a place to hang out. I'm more than competent in the home kitchen to prepare interesting food, so going out to eat is as much about enjoying the space and service as the food (provided the quality hits a certain benchmark). And that's tough to pull off. I'm turned off by overly attentive service and overly stuffy spaces, no matter how elegant (cf Aureole in Las Vegas) but something a place too cheap and brightly lit has the same effect. And once again Maverick--simple, uncomplicated space that's perfectly lit, dark, and welcoming--succeeds. Service has been the one inconsistency, ranging from friendly but inattentive to quiet and withdrawn.

4. Consistency. Otherwise good restaurants have been dragged done by consistent inconsistencies. For instance Bendean never had good desserts, Chez Panisse Cafe's entrees were always heavily outshined by its appetizers, and Zuni never seemed to pull anything out of its hat that was ever as retardedly great as its chicken. Maverick has had a few individual duds here and there but nothing categorical, nothing reliably problematic.

5. Wine. Wine has proved to be more of a problem in LA than SF, where most high quality independent restaurants have a nice diversity of wines from small producers and boutique importers. But in LA I've encountered restaurants with killer food that have wine lists that don't go beyond a Whole Foods selection. But then there are lists that can diverge into total wine geekery (Hotel Biron, A Cote), which is great for me but is not, I imagine, for everyone. Maverick has an approachable list with plenty of noble options from small producers coupled with a nice cluster of esoteric oddballs.

So on to this meal.... We hit Maverick up with a five-top and tasted through basically half of the small menu.

First round: we started with a couple salads. The grilled persimmon salad was fresh and fall-y, though the featured persimmons were second-fiddle to the Little Gems lettuce, so billing the salad as "grilled persimmon" was kinda bogus. The second salad, chioggia beets, was delicious and beet-laden. We also finished up with a baked cheese and apple dish, tasty but unmemorable.

After the salads we had chicken liver pate--rich, creamy, and only slightly livery, pretty fabulous--and the salt-cured sardines. The sardines kicked ass, like giant meaty (and less salty) anchovies.

The entrees shown spectacularly. The buttermilk fried chicken was as good as ever. My pork shoulder was rich, tender, and perfectly paired with the braised cabbage and cippolini onions. The braised lamb brisket was one of the best pieces of lamb I've had and reports on the winter squash ravioli in leek broth and grilled hanger steak with fries & turnip/radish/pea sprouts were strongly positive. I didn't try the last two.

Desserts hit the brakes though, in the form of an odd sweet cheese-y profiterole dish that was neither sweet enough nor savory enough to really make sense. It was just kinda unpleasant. Our other dessert, something chocolatey that I don't quite remember, was very good, as was the cheese preparation.

Wine-wise we did it up with a couple bottles of our own (an 03 Mendocino Zin and an 05 South African Pinot Noir) along with a nice toasty Cava and a brisk Georgian (the country) white that was round and fruity, in stark contrast to the often bitter, underripe selections I've had from that country.

If you're in the Bay Area and still haven't hit up Maverick, please do. It's a great, locally-owned eatery that's doing everything right. Plus, it won't break the bank when compared to other dinner options in the neighborhood.

www.sfmaverick.com

Wherein the Protagonist Reflects Upon His Time as a Food Blogger and What the Future of Web-Based Food Writing Should Hold

2009-11-28T17:11:00.001-08:00

I've been doing this a long fucking time. I've been blogging since 2001 and food blogging since 2006, longer than most of these other fuckers out there.

I'll admit that those early posts do look a lot like current food blogs. Course by course critiques with photos, vital details about the business, an overll evaluation, and a cost recap. Reasonably well written but dull.

I quickly moved away from that because an attempt at critical evaluation of restaurants is pointless. It's also steeped in exoticism and mysticism, of the bizarre otherness of food and dining. It reinforces the notion of restaurant dining as a bingo adventure, marking off cuisines and chefs like they're merit badges for your Boy Scout sash. But no amount of merit badges can hide the fact that you were diddled by your scoutmaster.

So I changed my approach. I decided to write about extremes, loves and hates. Anything I like, I love. Anything i dislike I hate. Mild annoyances I portray as inexcusable affronts, simple pleasures are worthy accomplishments. And crucially i try not to write about the in betwen or when I do I attempt to put it on its ear. I fuck it up at least half the time, but I think when things click it's pretty entertaining.

So I spent a night out a little while ago eating my through late night LA on a semi-organized junket that included foodies, bloggers, Yelp!ers and a bunch of other annoying people.

We bounced around town and I quickly found myself needing to fight the urge to gouge my eyes out with a chopstick. From the orgasmic fawning over the pork belly slider (good sure, but it's fucking pork belly in sweet barbecue sauce--not exactly a tricky feat of tastymaking. Like being an Asian woman with clear skin. It's easy) to the delighted squeals over the raw wriggling octopus, I was engulfed in a cloud of self-congratulatory ether.

The octopus squeals were the worst. I'm all for adventurous eating but eating sliced, raw, convulsing octopus isn't that. It's Fear Factor. It's a food dare. I've had octopus countless times and like it. This dish tasted like chewy nothing and chewy nothing is not good food.

At it's heart, eating is about fulfilling that basic human need. Ideally that act should be as pleasant and stimulating as possible but you aren't a special person for enjoying it. You're just a living thing. You aren't a great guy because you spent $300 on dinner at Bouchon. In fact you're kinda retarded. And I've been that retard numerous times.

Enjoy your food. Go out and have a good time and experience your meal for the simple transitory pleasure that it is--nothing more than that. Don't go out collecting Michelin stars and throwing up point scores and star ratings. Start being part of the solution and let's change how we talk about food and dining.

Salt Your Crust Motherfuckers!

2009-11-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

I like pizza a lot. I've posted about pizza before. I like simple sleazy pizzas (Lanesplitter, Gioia) and classy roccola-topped wood-fired pizzas (A16, Pizzeria Delfina).

In LA I was underwhelmed by Two Boots but had a good experience with LaRocco's in Culver City and now Purgatory Pizza in LA's Boyle Heights. Well balanced, nice toppings, good sauce. But what I've encountered at all of the above (except Lanesplitter & Gioia) is way-the-fuck undersalted crusts.

A16 and Delfina are able to squeak by because their crusts are well-made, yeasty, razor thin, and cooked at blistering heat. But when you don't have those luxuries, undersalted pizza dough tastes like, well, dough.

The motive to undersaltiness makes sense on a superficial level. You're topping your pie with a whole shit-tonne of salty ingredients: cheese, pepperoni, tomato sauce (which is also often undersalted), so why blow all your salt load on the crust? Logical, if your comprehension of logic goes as far as "the more firefighters sent to a fire, the more damage the fire causes--therefore we should send fewer firefighters to fires." You're not throwing the pizza in a blender before you eat it. You have to eat the crust so you need salt in the crust too.

Salt salt salt salt! Put it in the crust! The crust is 1/3 of the pizza, it's not ancillary. It's what makes a pizza a pizza, show it some respect.

Adventures on Larchmont Blvd.

2009-11-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

Larchmont Boulevard sucks. It really really sucks. There's all of one good business on Larchmont: Larchmont Village Wine Spirits & Cheese. It's great that the more-money-than-sense Hancock Park crowd likes to think of Larchmont as "LA's Main Street," but if that's the case then LA's about as interesting as Diamond Bar or West Covina.

Although it is one of the few places where you can enjoy Starbucks, Peet's, Coffee Bean, Jamba Juice, AND Blockbuster, all in one fantastically dull little block. Main Street Pleasanton looks like a fucking Normal Rockwell painting compared to Larchmont.

(Main Street Pleasanton kinda does look like a Norman Rockwell painting.)

"Oh wow look at me, I'm going to go out of my five million dollar mansion and walk over to Larchmont Boulevard to enjoy spending my money that I earned the hard way--by being the child of a wealthy parents. What's a better way to spend money in a classy tasteful way than with a Pumpkin Spice Latte and some Jamba Breads while I go and patronize a video rental store for some inexplicable reason?"

Why are you still going to a video store?

"But we are so lucky to have this street with all these great amenities that CAN ONLY BE FOUND RIGHT HERE and not IN EVERY SUBURBAN STRIP MALL IN CALIFORNIA."

Which makes all this hullabaloo over Larchmont Bungalow kinda quaint.

On one side: Albert Mizrahi, Larchmont real estate investor who appears to value nothing but getting his buildings rented out to the highest bidder.

On the other: I Love Larchmont Blvd., a group of neighborhood residents who for some reason see Larchmont as a Blvd worth saving.

And you know what? Larchmont is worth saving, but preserving the shitty boutiques and coffee shops isn't the answer. There's no reason Larchmont can't be something simultaneously local and a destination, like Venice's Abbot Kinney Blvd. I blame the out-of-date tastes and NIMBYism of Larchmont's residents.

In the middle (or actually on the Mizrahi side) is Larchmont Bungalow, a newcomer to the block that, despite signing documents with the city stipulating it would be retail/take-out only, threw up tables and chairs and prepared a menu that's pretty clearly not meant for a primarily takeaway establishment.

So the Bungalow, which is Mizrahi-backed, is facing stiff protest from I Love Larchmont Blvd. And ILLB has a powerful ally in local councilmember Tom LaBonge.

So what's my analysis? Larchmont DESPERATELY needs an actually good restaurant, so allowing for the Larchmont Bungalow property (which would make a beautiful restaurant spot) to be rezoned should happen. All reports from the food at Larchmont Bungalow would suggest that this is not going to be that "actually good restaurant."

So ILLB needs to calm down and get with the times. Good restaurants can be the anchor that revitalizes a neighborhood. Holding on to a long-gone ideal of a "main street" is pointless. Other than a pharmacy and, if you're a wine drinker, Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese, there's no business on Larchmont Blvd that a resident would ever need to patonize on a weekly basis. If you want your street to stay local, actually shop at your local businesses so they can stay in business.

But if Mizrahi thinks he can turn Larchmont into a Robertson Blvd or a Third Street Promenade, he's also delusional. Hancock Park is too old and too rich to submit to the usual bully real estate tactics. (Though it is strange that they even let Mizrahi get hold of that many buildings--couldn't the neighborhood pool together $23M pretty readily? Buy their own neighborhood!) Robertson Blvd was a sleepy street on the middle-class fringes of Beverly Hills and West LA ripe for the picking, not an established retail district in LA's oldest millionaire 'hood.

But hell, I'm tired of talking about it.

Yelp! Attack

2009-11-04T18:52:00.000-08:00

Not food related, but Yelp! related.

Some breaking (ish) news from the SF Weekly Blog. Apparently a disgruntled book store owner tracked down a customer who had written a negative review of her shop, Ocean Avenue Books. She allegedly harassed him via Yelp! and email (Yelp! took down two of her accounts) before showing up at his front door and assaulting him with...free movie passes.

But let's be realistic here, writing a negative review of a neighborhood book store is like selling your own meth in prime Hells Angels territory. It's a death wish. Book store owners, by their very nature, are mentally unstable, especially when you refer to their no doubt disorganized store as "a total mess."

Those boxes of books are stacked that way to prevent the Pope from getting herpes. Duh.

Plus, their website's straight out of 1999: www.westportalbooks.com/

Quick Myths Busted!

2009-10-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

A recent episode of Bored to Death reminded me of a few food/drink myths and half-truths that annoy the fuck out of me.

1. VODKA IS MADE FROM POTATOES. Vodka is not made from potatoes. Some vodka is, but the majority of vodka is made from grain or beet molasses. Many American vodka producers are using grapes as well. Vodka as a beverage predates the potato's introduction to Europe. Potato vodka developed in the 19th century as it was a cheaper alternative to grain and could also be used to scale-up production. Improvements in distilling have rendered the cost difference between potatoes and grains essentially moot, but many vodka connoisseurs still consider potato vodka to be a lesser quality spirit, though I personally like the flavor.

2. RED WINE HAS MORE SULFITES THAN WHITE WINE. Wrong. Incor-fucking-rect. Though many ignorant read-half-the-study douche bags presume this is so because they always get a worse hangover from their shitty red Yellow Tail than from their shitty white Yellow Tail and decide to blame it on the "sulfites" and not on the fact they drank cheap sugar and cogener laced rotgut. Red wine is red because the grape juice remains in contact with the grape skins. Along with color comes flavor and natural preservatives in the form of tannins. White wine has fewer natural preservatives than red so winemakers add a bigger dose of SO2 to maintain wine stability (EU has a maximum threshold of 160ppm for red but 220ppm for white). And let me also say: the addition of sulfur dioxide to wine goes back well over a thousand years. It's not bad for you unless you're in the minuscule proportion of the population with an actual sulfur allergy, which involves an anaphylactic response, not just a little headache and some congestion. The best way to avoid a hangover is to drink less and drink better. I've gone through bottles of good stuff and woken up the next morning none the worse for wear, but I've also had two glasses of Lindemann's Shiraz and woken up with a splitting headache.

3. WHITE WINE HAS LESS ALCOHOL THAN RED WINE. Not true. Perhaps in general the average alcohol content of red wine might be a bit higher than white wine, owing to the existence of some 16+% alcohol bombs, but there are as many 15% burn-your-throat white wines as there are mellow 12% alcohol reds. Just read the labels. Chances are your oaky California Chardonnay has a higher alcohol content than that earthy Cotes-du-Rhone.

That's all.

Shake-Ups in the Wine Business

2009-10-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

I apologize for this very business-related post since I think most of y'all probably don't give a fuck. But word on the street is Kermit Lynch Imports, the Berkeley-based importer of arguably the best Burgundies and Southwestern French wines in the country, has left the Henry Wine Group.

Henry Wine Group is one of the largest (if not the largest) California-exclusive wine distributor and s known for having the biggest selection of wines that good restaurants and retailers would actually carry. There are a few bigger multi-state companies, but they mostly carry prestige imports and mediocre mass-produced crap. Henry had the good shit or, at least, the decent shit.

But after having lost Italian powerhouse Winebow Imports last year and Kermit Lynch now (and Spanish oak-monger Jorge Ordonez teetering on the brink of departure), Henry Wine Group appears to be hurting bad.

"The economy" has damaged the wine business, but only kinda. It has damaged the companies that chased prestige wines like Bordeaux and California Cult Cabernets--they've seen their sales numbers plummet. Many of these companies left themselves with few inexpensive wines and the inexpensive wines that they have are so ubiquitous that restaurants and retailers who pride themselves on uniqueness and distinction aren't interested in them, leaving them for chain restaurants and hotels. Distributors who were already positioned for distinctive value are swooping in to take advantage.

Additionally, with better maneuverability, lower overhead, generally better customer service, and more distinction, mid-sized distributors can more easily weather the storm and many are even experiencing singificant growth. People are still going to drink they're just drinking differently. Margins are down but volume's up. They want value across the board.

In my cursory research for this article I stumbled upon Steve Heimoff's Wine Blog and this post in particular about the current financial instability of the wine business caught my attention. What struck me was this quote:

"What California brands will they buy? One clue to that is to see who’s hiring in the sales, marketing and finance areas at winejobs.com. The Wine Group. Don Sebastiani & Sons. Henry Wine Group. Bronco. Gallo. Brands, in other words, that hope to be competitive in 2009’s tough economy."

Or maybe these companies are hiring because instability and uncertainty in the corporate structure has seen people leave and get re-organized. Long-time reps are moving to different companies or being forced out, opening up space for newer, cheaper employees. And in a business world where your sales staff is paid largely on commission, there's not a lot of financial risk in hiring more feet on the street as a last-ditch effort to improve sales. Hiring can be just as much a sign of instability, desperation, and flux as it can be a signifier of stability and growth. These could be brands that are doing whatever they can to hold on by the last shred of cotton in their ass cracks brought on by the wedgie that is 2009's tough economy.

Honesty Honestly

2009-10-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

Over a pleasant Dine LA lunch with a friend at Water Grill, I think I distilled what's at the root of my disdain for restaurants that I, well, have disdain for.

They're dishonest.

I understand that this is wholly subjective and based in nothing more than my own phantasmagoric knee-jerk opinions. I'm just elaborately and self-importantly justifying my own decisions. But hey, that's food writing.

Take the restaurants I've recently "panned":

LudoBites. Claim? "Combine Old World simplicity and New World imagination in innovative dishes to tantalize diners' taste buds." Reality? Middling vanity operation with more style than substance.

Two Boots. Claim? Cajun-tinged take on classic New York pizza. Reality? Over-reaching and under-performing limp crusted mediocrity.

Akasha. Claim? "New American cuisine offering comfort food with big flavors and sustainable ingredients, for carnivores and herbivores alike." Reality? Decent organic home-cooking in a million dollar dining room for fine-dining prices.

(As an aside--would LA restaurants please stop putting their business plan mission statements on their websites? Holy crap, no casual visitor to your site cares that the Westside Tavern is: "An expansive, social and urban-minded restaurant, Westside Tavern features chef-driven yet affordable interpretations of California Tavern Cuisine alongside a complementary selection of fresh cocktails, craftsman beers and thoughtful wines. Encompassing 10,400 square feet and 300 seats, Westside Tavern is open for dinner daily and is designed to be used as a casually upscale gathering place by a broad cross section of Los Angeles professionals.")

The restaurants that I like are honest. They either make no claim to be anything in particular or they make a claim that they live up to. Bar Pintxo claims to be a reasonably authentic Basque tapas bar. Done. CitySip claims to be a friendly neighborhood wine bar. Done. Wurstkuche serves sausage, fries, and beer. Done. Church & State claims to be a French brasserie/bistro. Aces. All these places do what they do and they do it well and fairly.

That's all that it takes. Really. No high-falutin' concept. No crazy cushy chairs. No booths full of lithe models and swarthy men in stripy shirts and designer jeans. None of that.

Just be honest.

Tha Dolla' Dolla' Billz Behind Wine Pricing Y'All

2009-10-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

An answer to the question you've never asked but always thought. How is wine priced?

Retail Shops:
The standard margin for independent wine shops is net 33%. So 50% over wholesale. If they pay $10 a bottle from the distributor they sell it for $15--when you consider general boutique retailers (jeans, skin care, shoes, et al) run a net 50% or higher, wine shops are giving you a deal.

Grocery stores will generally run a tighter margin, as they do with all their products. It's usually a net 10% give or take. When you couple that margin with huge volume (buying 2000 cases of a wine for regional distribution will get you better price then three cases for a stack in a small shop) then you see how grocery stores can fill their shelves with <$10 wines when most independent shops can't.

There're also a handful of independent "discount" wine shops that run out of warehouses, shop around for close-outs, and generally keep a lower overhead. Here you'll find wine at a net 15% but you'll have to travel pretty far afield and/or not get the hands-on customer service that you'll get from a neighborhood shop. Worth it for big ticket items maybe, but not to save a buck or two on an everyday wine. Some big hybrid discount/specialty retailers run a net 20%-25%.

Finally there are some shops that specialize exclusively in close-outs, odd lots, and grey market direct imports. Trader Joe's gets most of their imports on this market. Here you'll find wine at crazy low prices and it'll often be wine you don't see any place else. But just because it's cheap doesn't necessarily mean it's a good deal. Distributors and importers will close-out wines for pennies and since there's nothing else around to compare against, the store can pretty much fix its price. And grey market direct importing means cutting out the middle man and quasi-legally sidestepping California regulations.

In my opinion you should do most of your shopping at your neighborhood boutique wine shop and hit up your local discounter, Costco, or Cost Plus for your pricey gifts if you want to save a few bucks or you're buying for a party. Generally speaking, grocery stores don't sell wine worth drinking.

Restaurants:
It used to be that margins were pretty standard. Neighborhood spots marked up their wine about 3x wholesale, upscale restaurants closer to 4x, and fine-dining could be as high as 5x wholesale. Glass price was generally set at 1/4 or 1/5 bottle price depending on the size of the pour.

In Los Angeles, all that is out the window. Some nice restaurants have really aggressive wine prices and some neighborhood dives are running French Laundry prices on wine. Particularly interesting is the "glass first" approach where a glass of wine is priced at the wholesale bottle cost and then the bottle is priced at triple the glass price. It makes for fair bottle prices but freaking expensive glasses of wine.

At the same time I'm seeing a trending toward lower bottle prices with new restaurants like Bar Brix and Noir Cafe pricing their wine at just over 2x wholesale. A shrewd move in my opinion--sell two $24 bottles of wine instead of one $36 bottle. The customer gets more variety and the business moves more product and makes less margin but more real cash. That's what all businesses need to look to do right now.

The Great LA Pulled Pork Face-Off

2009-10-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

I love pulled pork. Really, I seriously fucking love pulled pork. It's the coming together of my favorite meat, the fatty delicious pig, and my favorite cooking technique, slow-roasting. The added practice of pulling the meat off the bone in delicious, fatty tendrils of gooey transcendent tastycakes is merely a bonus.

I had the pleasure of sampling a few different LA pulled porks recently. A critique:

The Oinkster: A super meaty style. Thin shreds of pork with minimal embellishment on a nicely baked bun. At the Oinkster they hedge their bets by having all the sauces available on the side instead of committing to dosing the meat in just one sauce. The price can't be beat and the meat is of excellent quality. That's right, I used beat and meat in the same four word phrase. The Oinkster's fries with aioli rock, too.

Lou: Killer fatty Niman Ranch pork with cabbage slaw on, again, a great bun. Lou opted for a heavier dose of sweat and spicy sauce than at the Oinkster. That's not a bad thing. I'm a firm believer in a chef not being afraid to lay on the sauce as long as its good and adds to the quality of the dish. The Lou pulled pork fits that bill.

The Park: This wasn't a pulled pork sandwich, but rather a pile of pulled pork with cabbage slaw and a sweet corn pudding. The Park uses fattier Kurobuta pork and it's not a waste. Their pulled pork has a richer, fattier quality to it. The slaw, using Napa cabbage, was very nice.

So in the end? I still really like the pulled pork sandwich at T-Rex in Berkeley in terms of quality for the price. Lou's sandwich was delicious but not much more so than the one from The Oinkster and The Oinskter's sandwich is half the price. The Park's corn pudding rocks but I can't really compare that one to the others since it's not a sandwich.

The Oinkster is the closest to real Carolina pulled pork that I've had and, as long as you're willing the go nuts with the a la carte sauce, you're in good shape. Go for it.

The Oinkster
www.oinkster.com

Lou On Vine
www.louonvine.com

The Park Restaurant
www.thepark1400sunset.com

LudoBites - A Belated "Meh."

2009-09-27T12:07:00.001-07:00

This post has been stuck in the pipeline longer than Baby Jessica. I apologize, but unlike her I don't have access to waterjet cutting.

A primer: LudoBites is the "guerrilla pop-up restaurant" from Chef Ludovic Lefebvre, late of Bastide and L'Orangerie. Currently on hiatus, LudoBites ran for three months over this past summer in the evenings at BreadBar on Third Street.

Chef Ludo seems to be in that family of LA chefs who, thanks to a slick website, good looks, and a strong PR man or two, prematurely claim "celebrity" status. Prematurely is a poor choice of words--maybe unsubstantiatedly? If being behind the counter at a couple locally renowned restaurants makes you a celebrity chef, I have a couple dozen ex-French Laundry folks for you to sign to development deals.

There's also a charming naivete to the average Los Angeles diner. They're easily distracted by bells and whistles like foam, foie gras, and the novelty of oddly juxtaposed ingredients. It's cute. In other major dining cities--San Francisco, New York, Chicago--these odd juxtapositions, trendy ingredients, whimsical preparations are merely the jumping off points for quality innovative dining. There's nothing wrong with using cute ingredients, but use it in the service of a higher art. Make it the culinary equivalent of Peter Jackson's live-action/CGI-integration in Lord of the Rings, not an eye-catching Michael Bay plotless special-effects bore.

I'm going to be careful with my discussion here of LudoBites because I did have a good meal. It was well-made, sometimes intriguing, and overall pleasant. But at the end of the night I paid premium prices for what was, in my mind, a moderately compelling meal conceived and prepared by the equivalent of an adventurous, talented home cook. Couple that with a dining room and service quality that was uncomfortable and amateur you have a situation where you're paying Lucques prices for a Zankou Chicken service experience.

It's not to question Chef Ludo's pedigree--he's got a good resume, no doubt--but LudoBites was greatly lacking. Maybe it was the kitchen, designed to bake bread and make sandwiches and salads, not prepare fine dining entrees. Or maybe it's the LA diner that demands foie gras and squid ink rather than interesting innovative food. Or maybe it was the uncomfortable stools and nearly-competent servers. Or maybe it's just "meh."

Having a look at the LudoBites menu, it reads fairly impressively. But the preparations themselves were sloppy and inelegant--assembled with a heavy hand. That's where the home cook criticism comes in. I could buy ham, foie gras, bread, slap the ingredients together and grill it to the level of Chef Ludo's kitchen. In fact I do it, sans foie gras, a couple times a week. But I can't wrap a perfectly-packaged panino like Bacaro or the Cheese Store of Silverlake.

Throwing foie gras on a decent grilled cheese sandwich is like bolting implants on a bucktoothed hooker. Worth your time? Maybe. Worth the money? No. Fine dining isn't about indulging in luxury products for the sake of indulging in them or experiencing a bacon-maple cupcake for the sake of the story.

Contrasting LudoBites with its closest cousin I've experienced, Le Pigeon in Portland, shows LudoBites falling short on all counts. Where Le Pigeon did weird and whimsical steeped in honest innovation and virtuosic preparation, LudoBites wallows in high-concept just enough-itude.

LudoBites' chocolate cupcake with foie gras chantilly and maple-bacon crumbles is the strongest case in point and contrasts disfavorably with Le Pigeon's foie gras pumpkin pie. In LudoBites' case, the cupcake itself was of a quality on par with what you might get at a Kindergarten birthday party, the chantilly was liver-y, and the bacon-maple bits were tooth-crackingly carbonized.

At LudoBites, the menu description intrigues you enough to draw you in, but so does a neon marquee advertising "Live Nude Girls." Either way in the end you leave kinda happy but with a lighter wallet and the vague sensation that you've been scammed.

LudoBites (on hiatus)
8718 West Third St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90048
www.ludobites.com

Standing in Line at Wurstkuche

2009-09-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

You're excited. It makes sense. Ever since Marketplace profiled your favorite Downtown LA sausage house you've been jonesing to go back. Sure you've only ever had the bratwurst and a Fentinman's ginger brew, but in your mind you eat the rattlesnake and rabbit on a tri-weekly basis while pounding yards of Kwak and hitting on svelte portfolio-toting coeds from Sci-Arc.

You walk through the parted sliding warehouse doors--like entering the vagina of a concrete Decepticon--and find a line. Not a crazy long line, but a line. Maybe a dozen or so people split up into a handful of groups. It's okay. This won't get in the way of your lunch break. After all, you have a whole hour to get there and back to your Bunker Hill cubicle.

But what's this? Twenty minutes have gone by and you haven't moved. Why might this be? Everyone's looking at menus. It's not that complicated at Wurstkuche. Twenty or so sausages, two sizes of frites, and a whole lot of beer. I mean, admittedly you do have to pick two toppings for your sausage. And that's two toppings from an imposing menu of four. With those odds you have only a 75% chance of getting at least one topping you like. Those are odds that'll confuse even the most moronic autistic bookie.

Forty-five minutes roll by with the ease of a Speedo-rockin' Venice Beach denizen on RollerBlades ™ and somehow you've barely moved. Apparently selecting a sausage and deciding on onions versus sauerkraut takes the mental discipline of a seventh generation zen master. And that's without considering the anguish you'll have to go through over the dipping sauces. Sure every sauce is delicious, but you have to choose your two most delicious sauces. Because if you choose wrong, you know what happens? You will only have a VERY delicious sauce instead of the MOST delicious sauce.

Do you dare make such sacrifice?

Do you?

DO YOU?!?!

But finally you make it to the counter and you still have ten minutes to grab your sausage and, I guess, eat at your desk next to the photos of your ex-wife and your Joe Jonas poster while listening to your "Coldplay" channel on Pandora. But at least you have your sausage. Bratwurst again, but, well, hey--maybe next time.

The moral of the story? Sack up and order your damn sausage. It's not that hard. No wonder your wife's fucking the pool boy. And Wurstkuche? Put a freaking menu above the service counter. Christ, it's not that hard. Buy some fucking chalkboard paint. You deserve it. You're delicious.

Wurstkuche
800 East 3rd St.
Los Angeles, Ca 90013
213-687-4444
www.wurstkucherestaurant.com

HFF on the Road: Jerome, AZ - Day 3

2009-09-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

It's so rare in this post-iPhone UrbanSpoon App-age to dine at a restaurant that isn't on the e-radar SOMEWHERE. But I experienced such a phenomenon on our return trip from Jerome.

We opted to take the mountain highways back, as they run the hypotenuse from Jerome to Blythe. Two lane roads versus interstate, but there's a whole helluva lot more character. And I love the Highway 50 drive through the Sierra Nevadas, but US 60 through the Colorado Plateau is pretty goddamn beautiful. It takes you through the (relative) metropolis of Prescott but other than that you're dealing with ranches and creepy trailer park oases waiting for their snowbirds.

Prescott, Arizona came too early for us to be hungry, which was somewhat unfortunate as we discovered that it was basically the only place with multiple food options until, well, Palm Springs (not counting fast food options, naturally).

So we drove and drove and drove and drove and we got really fucking hungry and then we saw it, shimmering on the horizon, some sort of diner. We pulled off the freeway. We ate there.

The establishment in question is Steve & Shelley Bergeson's Ranch House. A thorough google search yielded nothing so it's a good thing I took a picture of the menu.

This was the sort of cash-only greasy spoon with a motorcycle-filled parking lot that exists in my imagination of Hollister is like. Once we found the door to get in, we were greeted warmly and found the place freaking packed. Which given its status as the only place for a home cooked meal for sixty miles makes sort of sense. The menu is a pretty typically diner selection of breakfast favorites with a vague white southwestern tinge.

Service was prompt and friendly and the food was good. My breakfast burrito was retardedly huge, loaded with eggs, potatoes, and peppers. Grandmaster A got a combo loaded with pancakes, eggs, bacon, and a biscuit/gravy combo. Biscuit & gravy was a real shining star, though the applewood bacon was also freaking tasty.

So really, in the world of random sit-down road trip lunhces, this was tops. My only complaint was as follows....

Somehow, our lunch which was advertised at costing ~$18 based on our listed prices ended up somehow coasting close to $40. Sure we got coffee. Sure we got "smothered" hash browns as our sides. But paying double what the listed menu price is makes me think that we were involved in a tourist scam.

And honestly? I don't object. This makes perfect sense. Why not scam douchebags who are cruising through your town to make a buck? Makes sense to me. It was the totally transparent nature of the upsell that pissed me off. "Do you want coffee?" Sure. "Do you want onions and peppers with your hashbrowns?" Fine. "Do you want to pay significantly more for nominal flavor enhancements to your dishes?" Why yes I do! Thanks for asking.

So, despite all the positives I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. It makes me less likely to go BACK to the Bergeson Ranch House on subsequent visits on Arizona highway 60....

Okay, not the most likely scenario, so maybe they're onto a new business model.

Other than being scammed and raped, it was a good restaurant, it's just disappointing that they would resort to such quotidian money stretching maneuvers.

As our day continued we ended up not being hungry again so we basically just kept driving and there isn't anything more to write about. Except for our evening Echo Park cocktail party courtesy of Pharmacie, so....

HFF on the Road: Jerome, AZ - Day 2

2009-08-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Day Two was the big day. This was the day we were spending with Paula Woolsey, AZ Stronghold's national marketing director, former co-owner of The Asylum, and the woman who has just maybe done more for Arizona wine's visibility than even Maynard himself.

We met up with Paula at the Flatiron Cafe in Jerome, a tiny corner restaurant on the approach into town. Little coffee counter with about eight seats inside but they also have seating at the patio across the street--a bonus on this warm morning. The cafe's got an upstairs kitchen that throws out some pretty cool sophisticated takes on southwestern food and diner cuisine. My breakfast burrito was simple and clean--egg, chorizo, nopales, et al nicely griddled. The patio was great though we had to deal with a gaggle of sexagenarians demanding that the vintage clothing store upstairs open up. Apparently the three blocks of Jerome was far too large of a city to be roaming around in waiting for a store to open. No doubt they were really looking forward to complaining about the prices and not buying anything.

Paula drove us out to Page Springs Cellars, giving us a roundabout tour of the Cornville wine country: Merkin Vineyards, Maynard's produce market (it's the most organic market in the world, if you don't mind the limited selection), and John McCain's driveway. Apparently "Sedona Cabin" sounds better than "Cornville Ranch," no matter if that ranch isn't within a Navy plane crash of Sedona.

We had vague plans to visit a couple other wineries but Page Springs was far more compelling than we anticipated so, well, the rest of Arizona's wines will have to be saved for another trip.

I've learned two things in AZ:
1. Eric Glomski is a talented winemaker.
2. Arizona is uniquely suited to aromatic white varietals.

As regards point one--it's hard to quantify, but I tasted through a large array of Glomski's wines from many different vineyard sites and they were all well-made, nicely structured, and compelling. Transcendent? Only some. Good? All.

As regards point two--holy fucking shit, Page Springs can make the fuck out of Malvasia Bianca, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, and blends therefrom. And, actually, some tasty Chardonnay as well.

A few (two) reasons for this:

1. Heavily volcanic soils. Northern Arizona is covered in volcanic soil. Serious, it's like a Peter North volcano went to town on the earth and the earth liked it.
2. Although it's hot as hell in much of Arizona during the day, it gets really cold at night. Lots of wine regions get to 100 degrees during the day (Napa Valley, Paso Robles, Lodi), but not as many get to close to freezing at night. In fact, frost is the biggest problem Arizona fruit faces, with UV exposure probably a distant second.

It's an odd coming together of terroir that echoes both cool-climate wine regions like Alsace and hothothot regions like Bierzo and the Alentejo. Godello and Arinto, anyone?

But I think that raises the most interesting question in this whole discussion: why do we insist on describing Arizona in terms of other wine regions? There's a sort of projection of the other aspect to that, no? I suppose that will go away with time: I'm sure in the 1970's the Napa Valley was described in Francophilic terms and Keenan himself talks about his decision to grow grapes in Northern AZ because it "looked like Spain and Portugal."

I'd like to just think of the subregions of AZ--there's actually officially only one AVA--as simply another grape growing region of the USA slowly (quickly?) figuring out what grapes grow well. Sure we can infer some successes based on similar climates--I'm not shocked that Petite Sirah grows so well here or that Pinot Noir doesn't--but we should be open to some surprises. Who would've thought Riesling, that stalwart of cool Alpine climes, would take so well to Arizona?

After tasting through most of the current Page Springs wines in the tasting room, we were given a tour of the creekside estate vineyards. Hermitage-clone Syrah makes up much of the vineyard: its widely spaced clusters resist rot. But Glomski's also planted Chateauneuf clones of Grenache and Mourvedre, California-clone Petite Sirah, and some Cabernet Pfeffer daringly waving about on its own rootstocks. I'm excited to see what Grenache on this site can do, given its similarity to sites in the Rhone and Spain (there I go being all comparative like a shmuck), but the vines are still too young to harvest. Of the Page Springs Estate reds, the Petite Sirah stands out. Full-bodied but not nearly as jammy as some of its California competitors, with a palate-enticing acidity and lots of dusty earth and leather on the nose. This is what French Durif tastes like...in my mind.

After the vineyard tour we headed into the cellar and met the man himself Eric Glomski. He generously popped open a freshly-bottled 2008 PSC Petite Sirah (the first 08 red I've had the pleasure of trying). Tight and shocked to be sure, it quickly lubed up with a few swirls (if only it were that easy), and definitely showed its promise. There seems to be a general excitement about the 08 vintage in AZ.

I plied Eric with a bottle of 06 Domaine Gauby Calcinaires Blanc (have you had a French Muscat-Macabeu blend? I didn't think so) so he shared a couple tank samples of freshly crushed Marsanne and Viognier. You haven't actually tasted grapes until you've had freshly crushed Marsanne--sweeter than Jesus with diabetes, it tastes like a ripe white peach dipped in honey; it'll stick in your memory as vividly as the first time you went south on a girl.

(And it [probably] tastes a helluvalot better.)

And that's not to belittle PSC's Viognier which was also rich and vibrant with some pronounced floral aromatics--they're flirting with Condrieu country here. I'll be curious to see how the finished product compares with the offerings from Demetria in Paso, so far the best non-French Viognier I've had.

And fuck Pride Viognier. If I wanted my wine to taste like shampoo I'd shower with Carlo Rossi. It'd cost me less.

There's still very much a sense of play at Page Springs, from the children's toys in the tasting room to the broad array of varietals on hand. Arizona is the Wild West (east?) of winemaking and there's lots of experimenting to be done. A mix of careful study, educated guesses, gut calls, and whimsy over the coming years will help determine the shape of AZ's flagship grapes.

We wrapped up our visit at Page Springs by picking up a mixed case of whites. Did I mention I liked them? I'm currently sleeping with a bottle of PSC La Serrana Viognier/Roussanne blend, it's stern but still likes to cuddle. Paula dropped us off at our divey motel in Cottonwood (the Connor in Jerome was alas fully booked by a gay New Zealand motorcycle club--I'm only lying about one of those descriptors). We cruised out to Sedona with a plan for dinner and a visit to Slide Rock State Park. Slide Rock was very cool--it's basically a natural waterslide formed by erosion in the slippery bed of Oak Creek. The whole park is pretty fun and (unfortunately) kid friendly.

After surveying our options in Sedona--mostly expensive touristy places--we opted instead to go back into Jerome, having still not gotten enough of the town. Dinner was at Quince, a Cal-Mexican diner offering big portions and good prices, as well as the compelling option of "pulled pork" in one's burrito. Nothing to write home about, but a more than solid bet for dining in Jerome when The Asylum's out of your price range.

We walked around Jerome some more and checked out the twilight views before calling it an early night and coasting back to Cottonwood.

In terms of getting Page Springs wines, your best option is to visit the winery on a long weekend from LA. They currently have limited distribution in Arizona and have no intention of expanding outside the state. You can also buy the wine online and some Page Springs wines are available at the Caduceus tasting room in Jerome.

I'm not intennding to sound like an AZ wine geek fanboy, and to be honest I'm no more excited about Northern AZ as I am the Anderson Valley or the Alentejo. It's just exceedingly rare that you can be one of the first outside voices touting the virtues of an emerging region so you better believe I'm going to pimp that for all its worth.

www.pagespringscellars.com

The Asylum - Jerome, Arizona

2009-08-22T22:08:00.001-07:00

It's exceedingly rare to find a decent restaurant in an out-of-the-way tourist town. Selections are often limited to the kitschy tourist-themed (Uncle Petey's Wacky Mountain Chuck Wagon) to the expensive faux-fancy (Chez Petey's House of Steak and Beans). But befitting an organically atypical town like Jerome, I wasn't surprised that there was at least one top-notch restaurant in town.

They Asylum's located in the Jerome Grand Hotel, a concrete beast that looms above Jerome like Willard Scott's cliffside El Centro sex den. The hotel was originally built in 1927 as the town's hospital and then lay dormant (like much of the town) for most of the second half of the 20th century. In 1994 the hospital was rehabbed into a luxury hotel.

Being a few hundred feet above a town that's already a thousand feet above the valley below affords some of the best views of any restaurant I've been to.

We had a couple local beers at the dark wood-appointed bar and then moved to the patio overlooking the Verde Valley. Appetizer was the fried squid--medium sized squid rings and tentacles lightly dusted and quickly fried and perfectly tender. Well seasoned, not greasy, nice heat from the accompanying spicy aioli. Good stuff.

Our server recommended a really nice inexpensive Pinot Noir (Barra of Mendocino) served at a perfect temperature for out-of-doors dining on an 85 degree night.

Entrees. Grandmaster A had the New Zealand rack of lamb special which was excellent, albeit pricey (unlisted and a good 25% more than the most expensive item on the menu--a practice I'm not too keen on). I had the vegetarian entree--roasted butternut squash with sesame-crusted tofu, brown rice, vegetables, and pickled ginger. Great flavor combinations but an odd preparation: the squash was one big chunk of roasted squash instead of pieces, so it was a bit bland with an inconsistent texture. Mild hiccup.

We also had dessert, it was good--chocolate--don't remember what it was. We were drunk at this point.

Great space, gorgeous views, great wine list, solid food, and fair prices. It's nice to have an opportunity to end a day of exploring that isn't either McDonald's or diarrhea-inducing Mexican food. Worth a stop if you're in the area--near as we could tell it was nicest spot for dinner in the greater Jerome-Cottonwood-Sedona area.

The Asylum
200 Hill St
Jerome, AZ 86331
(928) 639-3197
www.theasylum.biz

HFF On The Road: Jerome, AZ - Day 1

2009-08-20T09:16:00.001-07:00

I fucking hate Phoenix. It's admittedly an irrational hatred stemming from one extended visit several years ago where I ended up in the middle of a monsoon and stuck 10 miles of asphalt from anywhere. Still, Phoenix reminds me of the worst parts of the San Fernando Valley without any of the charm of being within 30 miles of the ocean. It's unfair, but it is what it is Phoenix has my title for "Worst Big City in America." And I've been to Philadelphia.

As this was my only exposure to Arizona, my disdain for Phoenix had sort of extended to the entire state. But my relocation to Los Angeles and its relative proximity to the Copper State--along with my general love for deserts--put Arizona back on my radar.

But it was a little tasting at Silverlake Wine that made reconsider what 'Zona had to offer besides binge drinking, blond Republican coeds, and the good half of Lake Havasu (the topless half).

I've always said two things (and I mean ALWAYS):
1. California Wine that's any good is too expensive.
2. California became the wine production capital of the country by accident--a product of Prohibition, a lack of phylloxera, and a lucky break in 1976. New Mexico had more land under vine prior to Prohibition than California did.

Caduceus Cellars turned me on to Arizona wines (though most of the wines aren't 100% Arizona fruit) but AZ Stronghold (partnership between MJ Keenan and Eric Glomski) sold me on what can be had out there. Really nice, food-friendly wines at an attractive price. So I made a few calls, packed up my suitcase, and rode through the desert on a horse with no name. Or rather it's a Kia Soul with a name that I won't disclose (let's just say it rhymes with paint yockey).

My travel partner on this journey was Grandmaster A--friend since elementary school and frequent co-adventurer to places as far afield as Denver, Japan, and Anaheim. We got an early start and hit the state line by lunch time. As we debated our fast food preferences (both having jobs that keep us on the road a lot, we've redeveloped an appreciation for quick cheap eats that belie our organic mindsets). We agreed El Pollo Loco to be our favorite but hunger and an empty gas tank found us at a Burger King in Blythe.

We both grabbed the "Angry Tendercrisp Sandwich." Crispy chicken breast on a roll with lettuce, tomatoes, fried onion strips, jalapenos, cheese, bacon, and a spicy mayo. To our shock and awe the sandwich looked surprisingly like the picture on the wall and I'm not embarrassed to say that it was fucking good. Juicy, drippy, spicy--and not cheap. Since when did a fast food sandwich and some onion rings cost eight dollars? A couple bucks more and I'm getting Oinkster. Meh.

The next exit had an El Pollo Loco.

There are two ways to get to Jerome, AZ (where you'l find the Caduceus tasting room). You can take a straight shot on I-10 through Phoenix and cut north on I-17 to SR-89A or you can cut northeast at Blythe and take a series of mountain highways through a series of high desert trailer park oases. Unfamiliar with the terrain, we stayed on the interstate this time (our return trip would be different). The low desert country gives way quickly as you make your way up the Colorado Plateau out of the Lynchian hellscape of Phoenix into the Coen Brothersian heckscape of rural Arizona. Scrub desert gives way to saguaro forest, then rocklands, until you get to the fringes of good old-fashioned Ponderosa pine forests.

We sped through the local metropolis of Cottonwood (pop. 11,000), wound our way through no less than three roundabouts with central berms so high you couldn't see oncoming traffic, negating the purpose of roundabouts, and made a hard left (still miraculously on SR 89A) up a winding mountain road to imposing, haunted Jerome, AZ.

In the less than six miles from Cottonwood to Jerome you gain 2,000 feet in elevation and you do it quickly, like huffing glue while riding an escalator. A copper boom town in the late eighteen hundreds through the 1930's, Jerome was all but abandoned by the early 1950's, when the mine closed after yielding over a billion unadjusted dollars in copper, gold, and silver. Jerome stayed virtually empty and decaying until the the late 1960's when hippies, bikers, and outcasts began calling the quasi-ghost town home. At present, Jerome is a town that looks largely like it did at the turn of the 20th century with most residents restoring the town's beautiful Victorian homes. But the town still has its ruins.

The town reminds me a lot of the mining towns of the Sierra Foothills, like Murphys or Columbia, but without the history theme park veneer. With the exception of a couple tacky t-shirt and jewelry shops, Jerome isn't flaunting its mining heritage. The town is very much Jerome 2009, everybody there just happens to live in buildings out of Jerome 1909. It's also not as family-friendly as some tourist destinations: in its roughly four blocks, Jerome sports three wine tasting rooms, two full-service saloons (along with several restaurants with full bars, one of which is a local gay bar), a tattoo parlor, a sex shop, a Thunderdome-esque basketball court, and Keenan's Puscifer Store which, despite the cute cartoon devil, is neither for kids nor for for the dull and obtuse.

Basically, it's heaven for the off-beat, progressively libertarian, Mr. Show-worshiping, 25-60 year-old music-loving wine geek.

Done.

We arrived at the Connor Hotel, est. 1898, were greeted by the extraordinarily friendly staff, and tossed our stuff in our room. Nice hotel. It maintained all its historicity while having most modern amenities: in-room fridge and coffee maker, (superfluous) TV, in-suite bathroom, good AC, etc. And reasonable too. With a AAA discount we got a nice big room for right around $100 on a Friday night.

Since the Caduceus tasting room was open until 8PM we spent the remaining daylight hours bouncing around the town, looking at the mining exhibits, stumbling into the aforementioned Puscifer shop, hiking up the gravel roads on the perimeter of the city, admiring the views, exploring the town flume, and getting hit on by camera-toting art students from Phoenix. But there was business to be done, and that business was wine.

Here's a basic rundown of the northern Arizona wine scene. It revolves, at least in the wider national consciousness, around Maynard James Keenan--lead singer of Puscifer/A Perfect Circle/Tool and accomplished vigneron. He makes his home in Jerome and has about a half-acre of Cabernet Sauvignon growing on his property. Keenan's winemaking partner and co-celestial orbiting grape body is Eric Glomski, formerly of David Bruce winery, and owner/winemaker of Page Springs Vineyards in nearby Cornville. Together, they've formed Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, whose winemaking facility is in Cornville but whose vineyards are in southeastern Arizona. This is where the bulk of Arizona's grape-growing takes place; it's a fairly fertile valley and the soil retains water well. But with Keenan's personal estate fruit, Glomski's fruit at Page Springs, and the grapes at Keenan's Merkin Vineyards project in Cornville, there is a lot of wine to be made from grapes in the Jerome area.

Which is a long way of saying that the Arizona Stronghold Vineyards wines are made mostly from Keenan & Glomski's estate vineyards all over AZ as well as some purchased fruit from selected sites in California. The Caduceus Wines are still largely California-based since it took 3-5 years for the new AZ vines to be ready for their first harvest, though Caduceus' new "Dos Ladrones" white wine is 100% Arizona fruit as is the "Nagual del Judith" (a tiny production premium Cab Sauv from Keenan's personal estate vineyard, dedicated to his late mother). Eventually the Caduceus wines will transition to more AZ fruit.

I'd had most of the Caduceus wines before at Silverlake Wine and they impressed me, in particular the powerful aromatic Dos Ladrones (half Malvasia Bianca and half Chardonnay) and the funky Cote-Rotie inspired Primer Paso (88% Syrah and a hefty 12% Malvasia taking on the role of ersatz-Viognier). In a domestic wine market that is producing more and more ripe, extracted, high-alcohol wines that taste more like brandy than wine, Caduceus Cellars is producing red wines that are, to use a horribly over-used douchey wine term, a revelation. Musuclar to be sure, but structured as hell with nice tannins, dusty earth, modest alcohol, and rocking acidity.

I tasted some of the Page Springs wines too, but I'll get into that in more detail with my Day 2 post. I'll also get into detail about or dinner at "John McCain's favorite restaurant," The Asylum, on a different post. You've all read enough for one sitting.

HFF out, with love.

www.caduceuswine.com
www.connorhotel.com
www.azjerome.com

Wherein the protagonist becomes self-righteous in defense of tradition and old-fashioned intuition

2009-08-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

It was a quiet night, quiet even for a Tuesday in downtown. I stumbled out of King Eddy's Saloon into a balmy Los Angeles evening. Fitting for an evening in Los Angeles, I was on Los Angeles Street, walking south and not quickly enough--my shoes are worth more than a month's rent at a local SRO. I lit a cigarette. I threw it on the ground. I forgot. I don't smoke.

Lucky for me the City's coming back to mama, back to where it was born, and it's filling up mama's womb with million dollar lofts. Where there's a million dollar loft there's a bar serving pretentious cocktails, 'cause when someone's paying a million to live adjacent to a cardboard-box tenement he's willing to spend $14 on a glass of vodka shaken con brio. I'd say he or she, but women have more sense. More sense but no dick, that's what mama always said.

I made a quick right onto Sixth right before three tough-looking hoods in skinny jeans and white belts wearing eyeliner made a grab for my iPod. And who could blame them? I was listening to the Faint. But Quick's my middle name and I made sure my birth certificate didn't lie as I left the toughs grabbing only at air, like when I tried to feel up Molly Archer in the tenth grade. Her middle name was Quick too.

When you make that turn onto Sixth and walk toward Main, you leave Skid Row squalor for a new kind of squalor--the kind that wears Rock & Republic jeans. I hurred across the street and down a small set of stairs. I was walking into Cole's, but I wasn't looking for a French Dip I was looking for booze cold and straight. The bouncer nodded at me and I nodded back. I pretend his name is Marquise.

Cole's after feeding time is an eerie place. Barstools sit on top of the bar, booths are empty, there's no au jus. The mise en scene is unsettling--it looks like if Charles Bukowski shit on a Picasso after eating an Edward Hopper. If you ever make that movie, give me a "story by" credit.

In the back of Cole's there's a door. Behind that door is a bar. That bar is Varnish and it pretends to be a speakeasy. I walked in and sat at a booth in the dim light. I picked up the cocktail menu but I couldn't read it--it's been hard for me ever since my cousin was killed by a cocktail menu. That and the light was too damn dim to read by--crucial oversight or deliberate hip douchebag maneuver? Dollars to donuts on the latter.

I picked up the candle at my table to shed more light on the menu. The menu caught fire. I watched it briefly burn--fire licking at the corners of the paper as vigorously as Mayor Villaraigosa on a Hollywood Blvd. tranny--before extinguishing it beneath my palm. Ouch.

A cocktail waitress slinked up to my table but unlike a slinky she wouldn't be falling down my stairs tonight. She leaned forward and smiled, her low-slung neckline slinging lower from her not insubstantial chest.

"What'll it be," she would've said if this was a movie from the 1940's. Instead she said:
"What do you want?"

You have to love a town that'll spend a few million on a new bar but won't spend five minutes trying to hire friendly staff.

"Well manhattan, up."
"We don't really have a well."
"Excuse me?"
"We don't have a well."
"The fuck you don't have a well."
"We don't have a--"
"Do you have a speed rack where your bartenders keep their primary liquors?"
"Yes."
"So you have a fucking well."
"It's not--"
"I'm ordering a fucking well manhattan because I don't want to have to fucking think, yeah?"
"So is Maker's okay?"
"Is that what's in your well?"

Pause. I stared at her. She stared back. She blinked.

"Yes."
"I'll have that."
"Are you sure you wouldn't like our Skid Row Flip? It's like a manhattan--"
"No I don't want your fucking Skid Row Flip. I want my fucking manhattan as I ordered it from you what feels like a fucking hour ago."

She walked away. I watched her. She was cute but I was sober and in the morning she'd still be dumb.

I watched the pair of bartenders behind the counter. They were surrounded by flasks and beakers. It was a scene more appropriate for a laboratory trying to figure out a way to artifically inseminate a cantaloupe with Burt Bacharach's sperm--and not in the fun way.

The mixologists each didn't look a day over sixteen and unlike in pornography in the drinks business that isn't a good thing. I watched as they carefully measured everything in jiggers and teaspoons. Everything. Every drop of booze, liqueur, bitters, fruit juices, ball sweat, and orphan tears that goes into a Skid Row Flip or Old Bank District Sour or Bunker Hill Rickey is rationed like a Soviet whore apportioning handjobs. I got up and walked to the bar.

"Excuse me, but would you hand me that bottle of vodka?"
"What?"

I grabbed the bottle of vodka.

"Hey!"
"Shh, easy there chief. It's okay. You see this top?" I asked, pointing at the resin pour spout on the tip of the vodka bottle."
"What about it?"
"That's a fine piece of technology my friend. It measures your pours. You invert the bottle and about a quarter ounce comes with each second it pours. Are you following me?"
"Sure."
"How much vodka does that bullshit cocktail you're making require?"
"Two ounces."
"How many times does a quarter go into one?"
"Four times."
"So how many times does a quarter go into two?"
"Eight times."
"So?"
"So what?"
"So just pour your fucking vodka straight into the shaker. Put down the spoons and shot glasses and mix your drinks like a man, not a pretentious little prick who thinks he's a freakin' scientist because he pours homemade bitters from a graduated cylinder. And maybe that way you won't take so goddamn long to make a FUCKING MANHATTAN!"

I felt a large strong hand on my shoulder. It was the bouncer whose name I pretended was Marquise.

"Is there a problem?"
"No my friend, I was just heading back to my seat."
"Good."

I sat back down. My iPhone buzzed--someone was Tweeting and that someone was a director of dirty movies. He was throwing a DVD release party in a warehouse off Alameda. Decisions decisions.

The cocktail waitress came back with my drink.

"Your manhattan."

I stared at the drink. I stared at her. I stared at Tom Sizemore making out with a model in the next booth over.

"That'll be $14."

I handed her a twenty.

"Keep the change--and the drink."

Out through Varnish, out through Cole's, a quick nod at Marquise and into a taxi. I was out the door before my drink started to sweat.

"Where to?" said the cabbie. At least he played his part perfectly.
"Just start driving," I replied. "East."

C for Effort

2009-08-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

As a Bay Area transplant it's something of a novelty to see the LA County Health Dept. letter grades posted in the window of every diner, taqueria, Walgreens, and Office Depot. Los Angeles diners seem to love those letters, especially when it's because the House of Pies has a B, or so says every fucking person in line for a fucking table at Fred62.

Well, get ready to have your minds blown Los Angeles:

The letter grades don't fucking matter!

Are you startled? Did I shake you up? Good.

Here's why not:

If a restaurant passes its health inspection, what does the score matter? Is there a sliding scale of "possibly-make-you-sick-itude" for restaurants? Am I more likely to die of salmonella at a "C" than I am from an "A"? If I'm at all likely to die of salmonella, shouldn't that be an "F"? Seems to me that a health inspection is a pass/fail proposition. We're determining a business' fitness for serving food to the public, not the quality of its analysis of the theme of the "phallic female" in Hemingway's later works.

So what's the point in the grading system? In what is pure rampant speculation, here's my theory:

1. A restaurant that had an "A" receives a "B."
2. Angelenos with the ingrained belief that these letter grades mean something slow down/stop their patronage of that restaurant.
3. The economic impact forces the restaurant to make rapid adjustments, bringing the Health Dept. back before their next scheduled visit. (Perhaps for a fee?)
4. Health Dept. is able to show that they're relevant, get more funding, hire more inspectors, go on gambling junkets to Macau.

Health Inspector letter grades should go. A restaurant passes and stays open or fails and is shut down. Keep the inspections on file and make them available online to the consumer, but the posting requirement gives the grades more weight than they deserve (I mean, what is the difference between an 88 and a 92 anyway?). Letter grade distinctions are arbitrary and the economic impact of dropping down a letter is too great.

This creates yet another hurdle for restaurants operating in LA and disadvantages new or immigrant-owned restaurants whose operators are not familiar with the byzantine requirements of Los Angeles bureaucracy. It's not that they don't keep a safe restaurant.

Two Boots Pizza - Echo Park, Ca

2009-07-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

For reasons that are entirely arbitrary I grant fancy-pants pizza much more leniency than fancy-pants hamburgers. I suppose the one un-arbitrary reason is that even the fanciest of pantsed 1-2 person pizzas top out in price at around $14, as opposed to burgers that can top $20 for what is, at best, a hearty appetizer. Plus, pizza has always existed in the whambamthankyoumaam variety and the classier forkandknife variety, as opposed to the hamburger which had been a filling fast food and diner standard up until, oh, about 1999 (to pick a wholly arbitrary date).

I judge pizza against two standards. The Lanesplitter Standard and the Pizzeria Delfina standard.

The Lanesplitter Standard: Inexpensive, generously topped thin-crust pizza in a dive-y environment with plentiful modestly-priced booze available.

The Pizzeria Delfina Standard: Moderate-to-expensive, thoughtfully topped with premium ingredients on a thin, lightly scorched crust baked at high-temperatures.

Two Boots, the recent NYC transplant to Echo Park, compares favorably against the Lanesplitter Standard but it's a bit more ambitious than Lanesplitter and a bit more expensive (and served no beer), so overall my impression was mixed.

I had two slices. I opted for the more unusual selections. First was a "Bird" slice--buffalo chicken, blue cheese, scallions, jalapenos, on a white pizza. This was a pretty good slice, though not very spicy. I would've liked more scallion and jalapeno and less blue cheese which hid itself in stinky pockets throughout the pizza. The second slice, Bayou Beast, with crawfish, andouille, and jalapenos, was a disappointment. Sparsely topped, it just tasted kinda salty.

And that was my general complaint: the pizzas were salty as hell. And not because the components were particularly salty--the crust, sauce, cheese, everything was loaded with cheap-tasting salt. Fine for a pepperoni slice from some dive, but when I'm eating crawfish and andouille on a pizza I want to taste crawfish and andouille.

My secondary complaint: the pizza was soggy. This is my frequent complaint with Lanesplitter too, but whenever I get a slice from Lanesplitter it's usually pretty crisp (as opposed to a pie which is always soggy in the middle). At Two Boots, even the slices were soggy at the ends. Lame.

My tertiary complaint: the pizza is too lightly topped. With inexpensive pizza, you can forgive the shortcomings in sauce and crust because there's a heap of tasty toppings. Not so at Two Boots. If you're not going to load up on toppings, your sauce and cheese had better shine, but Two Boots' sauce and cheese is serviceable at best.

Still, it's the most interesting pizza I've had in LA and the prices are still pretty good, even if they're a few cents more expensive then some of my old favorites. I'll give it a go on a regular basis--and they deliver to my neighborhood. Bonus.

The All-Time Greatest Thing of All Time

2009-07-23T11:19:00.001-07:00

So Chowhound, the grande dame of foodie message boards, is home to the closest approximation of reasoned dialogue in the internet food world. Part of that is because Chowhound aggressively moderates its message boards to keep discussion on topic, cordial, and as objective as possible. Food professionals are not allowed to comment on their own establishments or directly about a rival, flamers and fucktards are kept at bay, and purely malicious comments are deleted.

But if you're a regular Chowhound reader, you'll often catch choice gems in the brief window before they're deleted that will make your day. Sort of like when you find a Wikipedia article that reads "Bob Dole likes golden showers" before it refreshes with the truth that Bob Dole merely tolerates golden showers when Liddy insists.

A chef friend of mine sent me this screenshot from Chowhound (click for full size):

As a bit of background, Mark Malicki, the angry respondent, is the chef-owner of the St. Rose Cafe in Santa Rosa, the target of the poster's vitriol. And you know what? Good for him. The guy who wrote this post is clearly a high-functioning moron who won't ever be coming back and anybody who would be upset with Chef Malicki for his comment shouldn't be going to his restaurant anyway.

And now a guy like me who'd never heard of this place before will make a point to visit the St. Rose Cafe the next time I'm in Santa Rosa. You gotta support the cause, you know?

Plus I'm intrigued by this "bag of dicks" he has on his menu. Never heard of that before. I think it's Greek.

2009-07-16T19:34:00.001-07:00

Had the chicken fajita pita at Jack in the Box today, desperate for food but with very little time. That's one of the best fast food items for the urban hobo. Spicy, whole grains, and a decent amount of veggies.

Well, at least he doesn't have hands any more....

2009-07-14T20:26:00.001-07:00

Molecular Gastronomy gone horribly awry....

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090713-20575.html

But at least this happened in Germany. They have the technology. They can rebuild him.

The Future of Wine?

2009-07-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of wine. Let me explain. I'm tired of the wine regions that people care about. Napa, Sonoma, all of France, most of Spain, northern Italy, and lets throw in Paso Robles just for kicks.

So where then do we look for the next great wine region that we can plunder and and force into over-price-itude?

Old World: The re-emergent Eastern European wine scene is of interest.... Slovenia was quickly ravished by nearby Italian winemakers, but further down the Adriatic coast in Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia have some great white wines at great prices. Red wine is still tricky for this region, but we'll see how that develops.

A good spot for red wine is Portugal. Just like Spain fifteen years ago, Portugal is seeing a new generation of winemakers taking over and modernizing the process, creating wines with a little less funk, a bit more stability, and a bit more approachability from a new world palate. Check out wines from Alentejo for an easy point of entry.

New World: I'm still not sold on Australia. I think they make some decent wine but it's all ripe, straightforward stuff until you get into the ultra-premium range. New Zealand is worth a watch, but their varietal selections are limited. South Africa makes some very cool wines and price points seem to be coming down in recent years. Some of my favorite Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon comes out of South Africa.

In South America, there is some quality coming out of Argentina but you have to sift through the acres of cheap swill that represents the bulk of Argentine imports. Uruguayan Tannat is stellar, but it's a tough sell. I like Chile for its price point.

Which brings me to the United States. In California, I encourage you to stock up on Mendocino County wines before the prices get prohibitive. Lake County is producing some nice inexpensive stuff and the Sierra Foothills is underappreciated for its quality. We'll see some more emerging AVAs from the Central Valley producing wines of quality, akin to what we've seen from Lodi AVA and Clarksburg AVA. I dislike Washington and Oregon's nice but expensive. I'm very intrigued about what's coming out of Arizona and think that's a region to watch. I'm underfamiliar with New York wine, but I like Caberner Franc. I also like wines from Western Virginia and North Carolina, but it's expensive to get the wine out here and production is still too small for real value.

In conclusion? Mendocino, Sierra Foothills, Croatia, Portugal, and Arizona.

Cookbooks About Actually Cooking

2009-07-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading Mark Kurlansky's new book, The Food of a Younger Land. It's not actually his book, he's more of the annotator/editor. Sort of like how Flavor Flav doesn't really write Public Enemy songs, he just adds his two cents here and there and wears a clock.

The book is a printing of the scrapped Depression-era WPA project called America Eats. Like the immensely successful WPA guidebooks that were published in the 1930s, America Eats would offer insights into regional cuisine and, just as much, regional food culture. State projects submitted notes and essays to one of six regional headquarters who then compiled the information into guides like "The South Eats" and "The Northwest Eats." Unfortunately, flagging interest in the WPA during the waning days of the Depression combined with disparate regional funding slowed the project and World War II put a decisive end to the program entirely.

Kurlansky makes no attempt to recreate what the theoretical guide book would be. He simply presents the article he's selected with short introductions. He lets the vintage writing from the late 1930s speak for itself.

It's an engaging read because it reflects how recipes should be written. The recipes aren't quite as haphazard and whimsical as 19th century cook books (where a "good joint of mutton" was a common ingredient), but they do require an active engagement with the cooking process and the local culture behind the recipe.

Cookbooks now are about measuring ingredients, aseembling, setting timers, and walking away. Even as recently as the 1930s where clocks and timers were rather common, recipes required vigilance, advising you to "cook until done" or "cook until bright green." Sure there are some specific measurements, but there are also directives like "cover with water, add more if needed" and "if you want spicier, add more Tabasco."

Now we treat cooking as a sort of paint-by-numbers rote exercise instead of a fluid act of creation. This is why we can never make something "like Grandma used to make it." Sure Grandma followed recipes, but she wasn't a slave to them.

The best contemporary cookbooks for real cooking I've found are How To Cook Everything and The Best Recipes in the World by Mark Bittman who, despite his recent late-to-the-game Locavore transformation, still does a good job of integrating food, culture, and history into his recipes.

And if you haven't read Kurlansky's Salt or Cod, you really must. They're indispensable food history books.

HFF out.

Let's take this literally....

2009-07-03T18:08:00.000-07:00

So this website is called Horny For Food. Sometimes I write about the interrelationship between food and sex. I like the blurry boundary that exists between the two. It's interesting.

So let's take food and sex literally. I am now about to do Google Image searches for several different food items. I'll let you know how many results (not pages, results) deep I need to go before a pornographic photo pops up. SafeSearch is definitely off.

1. Cucumber: 26 (16 if you count the picture of a very penis-shaped sea cucumber)
2. Banana: 57
3. Watermelon: 489
4. Sausage: 43
5. Cheese: 586 (actually a photo of a topless Mischa Barton highlighting her cellulite, but I'm counting it)
6. Donut: 110
7. Mayonnaise: 97
8. Pepper: 285
9. Melon: 12 (and not what you're expecting. Try the search yourself)
10. Pie: 55
11. Hamburger: 343
12. Manwich: 60
13. Tortilla: 736
14. Roast Beef: 62
15. Gravy: 675
16. Taco: 199 (I'm actually surprised how far I had to go for that)

Well that wasted some time.

Caduceus, Merkin, & Tool - Oh My!

2009-06-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

There are lots of famous wealthy people who decide to diversify once they strike it rich. It's about brand building I suppose. Or maintaining a 360-degree media consciousness. Actors open restaurants, singers start clothing lines, strippers become porn stars and then become escorts. It's all about squeezing money out of every possible stream, channel, and orifice.

But in most of these instances, it's not a labor of love. It's just a bunch of big companies figuring out new ways to make money on the same crappy Chinese sunglasses. Jay-Z is no more a fashion designer than Sasha Grey is a legitimate actress.

But when the motivation to use your considerable financial resources to pursue non-autochthonous business ventures is pure--driven by an honest passion--you get some damn good salad dressings. Or, in the case of Caduceus Cellars, some really good wine.

The baby of Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan, Caduceus Cellars represents an effort to bring world-class winemaking back to Arizona. Maynard was at Silverlake Wine last weekend presenting a few releases from Caduceus and its brother, Merkin Vineyards.

Only one of the wines poured was from the Arizona vineyards--they were planted in 2004 so wine from the first harvest was just bottled this past year--but there's nothing wrong with what they've been doing so far using fruit mostly sourced from Paso Robles. Eric Glomski takes the lead on the winemaking, but after a short conversation with Maynard (where we talked about yields, distribution, and temperature, amongst other things), it was eminently clear that he's more than just a money guy. He's out there in the dirt, in the cellars, and has a clear mission for his winery and a very active hand in the winemaking.

First up was a white wine (the Arizona one), Dos Ladrones, roughly equal parts Chardonnay and Malvasia Bianca. Girlfriend Charlie and I were both, at first pour, turned off to the wine. It was very tight and tasted underripe. We were thinking "Oh hell, some over-hyped celebrity wine here." But as the wine warmed (reaching about 57 degrees, Maynard said, the wine is at its best) it opened up beautifully. Really beautifully, actually. Very cool stuff and I think clearly expressive of what Arizona white wine can be.

Next up was the flagship "Primer Paso" wine, made up primarily of Syrah with a dose of Malvasia (from Arizona) in there. What would prove to be a trait of all the Caduceus wine was what made it eminently appealing: there was a lot of acid for a red. This was a food wine.

My favorite of the tasting was the Naga, a primarily Sangiovese blend made from Paso Robles fruit. Unlike most Sangioveses I've had from Paso Robles, this wasn't overly extracted and the acidity shown through nicely. Mostly Italian-styled, but with more bright fruit.

As much as I did like the Naga, I'm stoked on the Merkin Vineyards Chupacabra. The one thing about Caduceus Cellars and the cachet attached to its owner is that they can charge quite a bit for their wine. The wines are priced fairly given the quality, production size (tiny tiny) and the serious costs associated with starting up a vineyard from scratch, but I'm not going to lie: there are plenty of wines to be had of comparable quality for considerably less. But the Chupacabra, made from an annually changing blend of varietals (mostly Cab & Syrah), hits a nice ~$20 price point and serves as a solid introduction to the style of the more prohibitively priced Caduceus wines. Big fruit, good tannins, and that brisk acidity--a good barbecue wine for summer.

What was just so cool was to hear a guy who could easily use the novelty of his star power to make some horseshit crap but instead he's made wine a part of his life, all while campaigning hard for what could be a new major wine region in the United States.

So the only negative opinion I really have about the wines is that they're really expensive. But with the Chupacabra and a growing estate vineyard, hopefully Caduceus/Merkin will have more wines across the price spectrum.

Caduceus Cellars Wines are available throughout Los Angeles, including at Silverlake Wine, The Cheese Store of Silverlake, Liquid Wine & Spirits, and select Whole Foods.

www.caduceus.org

Big news! Michelin Man dumps LA, Vegas, citing irreconcilable differences, general malaise

2009-06-26T23:32:00.000-07:00

So this is something. Apparently the Michelin Guides won't be publishing either a Los Angeles or a Las Vegas guide for 2010.

I think this is a good thing. In the short time that Michelin's been active in these markets, very little has happened. The fine dining market in these two money-above-all-centric cities has been absolutely stagnant. The list of Michelin-starred LA-restaurants reads like a who's-who of bland and dull. When your biggest openings are fifth or twelfth efforts from non-indigenous chefs like Michael Mina and Gordon Ramsey, you know your city's shit just isn't straight. And from watching the Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel penned classic "Multiplicity," we know what happens by the third or fourth iteration--you end up with a retard who still gets to fuck Andie McDowell.

LA's neighborhood dining has flourished, don't get me wrong--Animal, Street, Palate, Barbrix, Father's Office, all pretty exciting stuff. But LA's $100 a plate restaurants are a list of dreary Cal-Med retreads and fusion endeavors that reak of the late 1980's. Why isn't Los Angeles nurturing its local chef-owners to produce stand-alone restaurants of a destination calibre? Where are the restaurants like SPQR, Range, Redd, and Cyrus in the SF Bay Area? (Meaning restaurants that have opened in the last five years or so that are innovative and appealing and not backed by giant restaurant groups).

Money can't buy honesty and it definitely can't buy class. Thanks Michelin for taking a temporary hike.

Kogi - Los Angeles, Ca

2009-06-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

There're trends. There're innovations. There's novelty. There's quality. Often, a restaurant achieving two of those four benchmarks will enjoy fabulous success. A novel concept will retain its clientele if the quality is good. A trendy restaurant can endure if it continues to innovate. A restaurant with a quality product can persevere without any of the other three criteria but it can't hurt to throw in a bit of novelty and innovation here and there, at least to please a prick like me (c.f. Chez Panisse Cafe).

So it's kinda surprising that a weird little quirky taco truck mastered all of those benchmarks, did it quickly, and capitalized on it vigorously.

I'm no fan of trends or bandwagons. I'm a skeptic to the very core. You really have to prove to me why you're so freakin' awesome, I'm not just going to accept it. Point is, I never sought out Kogi. It sounded kinda cool but it also sounded like relatively simple street food, albeit kinda unconventional: Korean meat and accompaniments presented in the charming aesthetics of an East LA taco truck.

What we see with Kogi is the perfect confluence of events. It launched in Los Angeles, a city unequaled in the nation in terms of its street food (fuck you New York). It launched during a recession when value dining was at peak demand. And it shrewdly utilized social networking (especially Twitter) to (artifically?) generate a cult demand for its product. The result? What was a quirky experiment in fusion cuisine became a regional sensation with national coverage. A phenomenon that tore up the food blogs for almost a year. Motherfucking Kogi.

I give Kogi massive credit for taking up residence at the Alibi Room in Culver City. Most of us who aren't total trendy douche bags find something weird about waiting two hours for a taco truck, so knowing that we can go to a fixed location and get most of the offerings on a regular basis is a very good thing.

So it was that I met up with Hollywood Legend Kenny at Costco in Venice (he was getting his tires rotated) and we had two hours to kill, so I proposed hitting up the Alibi Room for some Korean BBQ Taco Action which, coincidentally, is the title of my current adult film project.

We showed up early--5:30 when the bar opens--so we knew we'd have to wait for our food. But, showing up as early as possible is key as the Alibi Room quickly filled up and 99% of the patrons were eating Kogi. A good number were eating Kogi and drinking nothing but water, so I wonder how much the Alibi Room is really making in this relationship.

The Alibi Room is a nice space. Lots of room, big bar, comfy lounge areas. Not a bad way to kill a half-hour before our food arrived. Good beer selection and friendly staff too. Kenny and I both ordered taco combos (chicken, pork, short rib) and we shared an order of sliders (short rib) and a kimchi quesadilla.

Did I mention I was a skeptic? I am. I really freaking am. It's easy to get my respect but pretty damn hard to earn my admiration.

So knowing that, I say without qualification: Kogi was fucking good. Really fucking good. Really really fucking good.

I mean, it's the perfect fusion of cuisine. What is Korean bbq? Meat and pickled shit. What's a good street taco? Meat and pickled shit. Throw in some cilantro and they're basically the same cuisine except for skin color and math aptitiude.

I'm sorry I'm a racist.

Tacos: really nice. I actually kinda like how they griddle the tortillas so that they're vaguelyslightlykindacrisp. Short ribs were, as most have reported, the best. Tender, meaty, and vibrantly flavorful. Spicy pork was also very good, though not particularly spicy. Chicken was excellent but, compared to the other two meats, it just didn't shine. It's like being Scarlett Johansson in the same room as Anne Hathaway and Zooey Deschanel: excellent doesn't hold up against spectacular (unless you're showing off your ass at the beginning of Lost in Translation--that's spectacular with a capital T--but Kogi's chicken isn't Scarlett Johansson's ass, it's Megan Fox's ass, nice but not splooge-worthy).

Kimchi quesadilla: Also very very delicious. Good cheese, well made, excellent non-gas-inducing kimchi, and nicely griddled tortilla. A surprising highlight of the meal.

The sliders: the only dud. Mediocre roll. Great meat. Too much cheap cheese. I wouldn't kick it out of bed, but why get the middling sliders when you can get superb tacos for the same price?

Which brings me to the matter of price. Even here, in residence, Kogi tacos were eminently reasonable. Three tacos were $7 and in a town where it's hard to find a delicious diarrhea-inducing street taco for less than $1.75, that ain't bad. $2.333333333 for a taco that you're able to enjoy in a cushy chair? That's an extra $0.5833333333333 well spent.

So I guess that every now and then something comes around that is both worthwhile and trendy. Unlike Goa or Pet Rocks, Kogi provides a real quantitative value and it appears to have launched imitators (Chinese fusion tacos, fine-dining food trucks) which will ensure that Kogi's legacy lives on.

Kogi Korean BBQ
@Alibi Room
12236 Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90066
www.alibiroomla.com
www.kogibbq.com

The Yelp!ification of Opinion

2009-06-13T22:52:00.001-07:00

So I recently wrote about sandwiches. I think I was pretty clear that I was just talking about sandwiches I liked from places I've been. I didn't pretend that I was an expert on sandwiches. I didn't pretend that I'd been to every sandwich place in town or that I was making an unequivocal list of the best and anything not on my list was bad.

Apparently, however, every positive mention of a business means you are, by definition, damning every other similar business you aren't mentioning. My sandwich post garnered the most comments of any post I've done in a while and all were ostensibly from new readers, most of whom were soiling their panties over my failure to mention their favorite sandwich shop.

Come on fuckers, I didn't title my post "the best sandwich in LA" or any other crap like that. I was just writing about good sandwiches. And so sorry I didn't go to your little sandwich shop in Santa Monica, but have any of you been to all the sandwich shops that I listed in my post? I mean, if you have then I'll think a bit more about caring for your opinion. I still won't care for it, but I'll at least consider it.

Now I will respond to each comment:

"56295629 said...: Does Bay City Deli not fit some equation here?"

And what equation would that be? Borderline illiteracy + opinion = dipshit? Because in that case, it does fit into the equation.

What equation it does not fit, however, is the subject of my post which is PLACES I'VE BEEN. I haven't been to Bay City Deli. Sorry.

"tin said...: Artisan Cheese Gallery in Studio City has superb sandwiches!"
I've heard this. I haven't been, hence not writing about it. But that's the Valley, and the only things in the Valley are porn stars and pumpkins.
"Francisco said...: Seriously, the exclusion of Bay Cities completely invalidates this list."
Now I don't want to go to Bay Cities because apparently its fans are militant retards. Sort of like NOW on a short bus. Nothing invalidates anything. Please check the subject. It's a list of places I've been that I've liked. It makes no pretense to comprehensiveness or objectivity.
"SR said...: I'll second Artisan and third Bay City. And throw in Langer's for good measure."

Cool. Good for you. But I don't recall asking "Give me your recommendations for some other good sandwiches."

Does the internets really have most of us convinced that every little musing is an objective unequivocal assertion of truth and value? Or do we really just love our little parochial sandwich shop that much? Or do most of us not read?

Just to check: "I really like Bacaro."

Now I hope to get a flurry of comments declaring my statement invalid because I don't also like some place I've never been.

Save it for Yelp!

And tell your mom I said whaddup.

Short Cuts

2009-06-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

In a perfect world I'd chop all my veggies and slow-cook all my sauces. But last time I checked North Korea had the bomb and Ray Romano's still alive, so it's clearly not a perfect world. Here are a few of my favorite culinary shortcuts:

1. Frozen garlic cubes. You get these little frozen bits of chopped up garlic--like all great things a product of Israel--at Trader Joe's. They're quick, convenient, and actually contain pretty much just garlic (unlike a lot of the other garlic pastes or jars of chopped garlic). A little tricky to use at first--make sure you keep your stove top temperature pretty low and keep stirring the cubes around until they melt into your oil--but when you figure it out you get a flavor and aroma that's pretty damn close to freshly chopped garlic.

2. Pasta sauce. Yes, I know. I use jarred sauce. I'm sorry. But I mean, really, unless I'm making from-scratch sauce from fresh tomatoes, what's the REAL difference between making a sauce from canned tomatoes and from a nice simple ready-made marinara? You can still add your sausage, veggies, and herbs--it's just that initial heavy lifting that's been done for you.

3. Salad dressing. Yeah, I'll even buy vinaigrettes. It's just easier and usually tastes better.

4. Salsa. Actually, this isn't so much a short cut, but I just really like cheap, cooked, room-temperature jarred salsa. It actually tastes like something, as opposed to salsa crudas or salsa fresca which just taste like cold and cilantro.

This wasn't a very interesting post. Sorry.

A Really Good Sandwich

2009-06-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

I like sandwiches. I also know how to make sandwiches and inevitably my homemade sandwich that costs me 95 cents is 10 times better than the $5 fast food/deli sandwiches out there and at least as good as the $9-$12 "gourmet" sandwiches that white people like.

But as someone who spends his days on the road and frequently finds himself inside businesses that deal in said expensive sandwiches, here's my quick take on a few of LA's standouts. Note that I'm sticking to take-out "gourmet market" sandwiches and panini and not deli sandwiches (kosher or otherwise).

Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits, & Cheese is perhaps the flagship sandwich counter, located on weird Larchmont Ave which is equal parts quaint and Beverly Center--one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, yet the sandwiches at this neighborhood wine shop are your best bet for gourmet dining. The simple set menu (all around $9) of nicely thought-out sandwiches leaves Larchmont with a line out the door most every lunch hour.

Pros? Top quality meats. Well composed sandwiches. Delicious bread. Lots of produce. Half-size sandwiches are a perfect inexpensive light lunch.
Cons? Menu rarely changes. Sandwiches are tough to eat on the road.

Cheese Store of Silverlake has stellar panini and, believe it or not, friendly helpful staff. The selection changes daily and showcases newly arrived cheeses, charcuterie, and condiments. Virtually every ingredient in a panini is available for sale in the store. Go for any sandwich that has muffaleta or a chutney. While the panini are the draw, their un-paninified baguette sandwiches also rock. A recent baguette with brie, arugula, and fresh strawberries basically made me jizz my pants.

Pros? Hot, tasty, portable sandwiches. Fresh ingredients. Great cheeses and chutneys.
Cons? Often light on the fresh veggies. They run out of sandwiches quickly.

Goudas and Vines, a relatively new addition to Santa Monica, has great simple sandwiches. The designs aren't any different from what you'd get at your local Safeway, but the ingredient quality is several steps up.

Pros? Fairly inexpensive. Quick. Friendly.
Cons? Uninspiring combinations.

Venice Beach Wines, fresh from a recent remodel, has added a great selection of cheese, charcuterie, and the inevitable pressed sandwiches that come with that territory. The lamb and manchego sandwich rocks.

Pros? Inspired combinations. Nice indoor/outdoor space to enjoy your sandwich in.
Cons? Limited selection. The small space can get easily overwhelmed.

So yeah, get your sandwich on. The Earl will appreciate it.

2009-06-01T23:16:00.001-07:00

Bar Hop - Downtown LA

2009-05-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

So I live in Downtown LA now, which I absolutely love. And I'm aware of the humor that it was only after moving to the most suburban of big cities that I actually moved into a city center to live in a converted warehouse on a rutty street with close-up views of LA's idiosyncratic downtown skyline.

A friend informed me that our lack of towers and spires is due to the arbitrary decision to require all skyscrapers in LA to have a helipad on top. True.

I'd been out a few times in downtown prior to my move but not recently. And since I moved to the "Arts District" I've only really been out in my 'hood and adjacent Little Tokyo, since the rest of downtown is blocked off by a moat of warehouses and poop-on-your-car hobos. That all changed last week.

After our below-mentioned dinner at Barbrix, the restaurateur colleague of mine headed back to my place and called a cab to truck our asses into the Old Bank District/Historic Core/Whatever the fuck marketing name realtors come up.

But first we needed to make a stop.

"Kind Eddy's" my colleague told the cab driver, who looked at us with a mix of awe, shock, and disdain.
"What's that?" I asked.
"A dive bar in Skid Row."
"Oh."

Damn. I wore my good wristwatch.

"Here." My colleague requested to the cabby. The cabby seemed concerned that he was stopping three storefronts away from the bar.
"You sure you don't want closer?"
"Nah man, it's cool."

And out we went. We strolled past a few Skid Row denizens, including a gentleman being arrested by a pair of LA's finest, with no harassment and popped into King Eddy's at the corner of 5th & San Pedro.

(It should be noted that, thanks to a rather vigorous ramp up of law enforcement coupled with an increase in social services, Skid Row is actually a pretty decent 'hood. It's dirtier than SF's SoMa, but seems safer overall. The drug problem has been more or less addressed and reduced to small-time pot dealers hocking "cabbie" and prostitution in this most sex-focused of cities is unenforceable at best, so what you're left with is, well, people who live on the streets and/or in the many [many] SRO hotels in the area.)

On to King Eddy's. Just like the trailer for an internet porn site that tricks you into getting a trial membership, the idea that was presented on paper of King Eddy's was so much more appealing than what the bar actually was. Because "cheap ass dive bar in Skid Row" sounds as immediately intriguing as "Big Tits Round Asses," by the fourth or so video it gets pretty tedious and now you're on the phone trying to cancel before the monthly rebill kicks in.

Point being, once you get inside, King Eddy's is your pretty prototypical dive. Cheap drinks. Cheaper food (reheated stuff from Costco). And a clientele drawn from the neighborhood: the homeless/underhomed, legitimately employed SRO occupants, the aforementioned small-time dealers, a handful of ladies/transwomen of the night, and a cluster of the young and adventurous. The bar boasts an "A" Health Department grade and is "Zagat Rated." It also has great flat screen TVs, friendly bartenders, and a dude in latex gloves whose sole job is to walk around with a rag and disinfectant spray and clean off every surface regularly. Cool.

After our beers we left and walked the not-even-two-blocks to Main St., which begins the "real" gentrified downtown LA. It'd be like if you your first girlfriend was a chubby transwoman you picked up at King Eddy's and your second girlfriend was Scarlett Johansson AND you picked up the latter while still copulating with the former; that's how proximal $$$ downtown LA is from !!! downtown LA.

First stop, some queer speakeasy-ish bar (Varnish) in the back of Cole's. It was nice, but that whole "mixology" thing is so 2005. And I wouldn't even have minded except that I ordered a "well Manhattan, up" and I was immediately informed that they "don't have a well." The fuck you don't have a well. Every place has a well. Well just means whatever the fucking default spirit is you serve you pretentious douche. I understand that this might mean that my drink still costs whatever the going rate is for a premium cocktail. I get that. All I was indicating by my request was that I want something simple, classic, and quick. And I would've forgiven even that except the waitress THEN asked if I'd like to try some fucking rye and bullshit drink on their "cocktail list" as if I should be fucking honored to try some fucked concoction that a couple of high on their horse 22 year-olds came up with while stoned. I cut her off mid-sentence. The drinks took for fucking ever, too.

But my Manhattan was, actually, excellent.

Next stop was The Association. Now this was a bar I could support. Good vibe, friendly bartenders, appropriately lit, and a cocktail list made up of nothing but standards from the golden age of American drinkin'. They proudly proclaim that their "newest" drink recipe is the James Bond-inspired Vesper dating from the 1950's. We can never hope to match the drinking prowess of our grandparents, but if we hope to even come close we need to master the drinks they drank: boozy and strong and not the queer shit made up of syrups and homemade bitters and fresh squeezed juices that pass for "cocktails" in places like Varnish. My French 75 was fabulous.

Following the Association, we went to the Crocker Club. Located in an old bank vault, complete with thick swing-open vault door and booths set off in money cages, the Crocker Club was pretty cool. At this point I was drunk as hell so I really don't remember much, but my overall feeling was quite positive.

And then our evening took a turn for the awesome, because we hopped into a cab and headed back across town to Sam's Hofbrau.

Sam's Hofbrau is a strip club straight out of From Dusk 'Till Dawn, minus the vampires but with a lot of guys who look like Harvey Keitel. It's a topless/bikini place so there's plenty of booze to be had and a good mixed up crowd of equal parts men and women, hipsters and gangbangers. No cover. Cheapish drinks. Delightfully authentic dancers. Five thumbs up.

Last stop before a cab dragged our asses back to my apartment was a taco truck parked just outside. It was the best fucking taco I've ever had.

Because every drunk 3AM taco is the best fucking taco you've ever had.

Where we went:
King Eddy's - 131 E. Fifth St.
Varnish - 118 E. Sixth St.
The Association - 610 S. Main St.
The Crocker Club - 453 S. Spring St.
Sam's Hofbrau - 1751 E. Olympic Blvd.

Barbrix - Silver Lake, Los Angeles

2009-05-14T19:08:00.001-07:00

In what is the earliest initial visit HFF has ever made to a new restaurant, I headed to Barbrix with a restaurateur colleague on their third day open. It was rockstar fabulous across the board, even at this early stage.

We showed up early to kick off our evening that ended up wending through some of the seamier parts of Downtown Los Angeles (King Eddie's anyone?)--but that's a different post. Our early arrival was inadvertently shrewd as the place was packed with a line out the door by 7PM.

The space is well designed and pleasantly simply--a welcome relief from the oft overexecuted ripped-from-the-Hanging-Gardens-of-Babylon LA dining rooms that would be more appropriate as VIP lounges in Vegas strip clubs. There's a front patio with a cluster of tables, a big square wine bar in front, a bunch of tables (actual tables), and a back dining counter at the open kitchen.

The wine list is stellar (no surprise given co-owner Claudio Blotta's track CV) and dirt dirt cheap. No glasses over $10. No bottles over $55. A handful of very good bottles for under $20. A global selection of small-production labels, the most quotidian of the bunch is the Qupe Syrah. Wines on the list are priced only nominally over retail and well under the 3x wholesale bench mark that even the most casual LA restaurants seem to use as a starting point.

We went with one of the priciest bottles, the Sean Thackrey Sirius Petite Sirah at the absurdly low price of $55 on the freakin' list. Delicious, subtle complexity, pleasurable without tasting a damn thing like stewed prunes and grape jelly. Paso Robles this isn't.

We had a lot of food (it's all small plates), so I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. Roasted cauliflower salad was great, very well done. Wild boar sausage with white bean ragout was fabulous. Porchetta-style pork belly was really nicely cooked, though the skin was absurdly (bordering on inedibly) crisp. Shrimp and chickpea "tortillas" (actually soccas): very good. Crostini misti (crescenza/fig/prosciutto, favetta & pecorino, jidori chicken liver pate) rocked, particularly the pate. Crispy grilled polenta with mushrooms: simple, tasty. The kitchen proved adept at the eclectic menu, showing themselves just as at home with pasta (an excellent beet arancini). The only so-so dish was the pork rillettes. It was fine, but I wanted stronger seasoning and a little more fat.

Now here's where it gets really weird. Service was excellent. When I walk into an LA restaurant staffed mostly by cute girls in their twenties (which is every restaurant that isn't staffed by ripped men) I'm immediately skeptical. The emphasis on looks above all else in a service staff has rendered LA service either mediocre and neglectful or eerily over-trained but under-engaged, vacantly rattling off info about the menu like a Hungarian speaking English phonetically. But at Barbrix the staff was very well-trained (you can tell they've had the opportunity to taste everything on the menu) while remaining honest and personable. I like idiosyncratic service. I like individual service. I like personality. The fact that everyone's hipster pretty (it is Silver Lake, after all) is merely a bonus.

And, seriously, I'm not trying to blog-fellate Barbrix but it's just so easy: even our fucking espressos were perfectly pulled, nice temperature, thick crema.

Our tab was like $150 including a generous tip, but that was with a pricey wine and way too much food. You could easily eat there for $30-$35 a head with wine. That's the sweet spot for a neighborhood place, which is what Barbrix is (and doesn't pretend to be anything else). It's the price that'll get locals in on a weekly basis. A lot of affluent and adventurous people live in the neighborhood and they need a place to eat. Keep the prices down, the menu evolving, and the atmosphere friendly.

It's a simple formula but incredibly easy to fuck up (cf. most every restaurant in Los Angeles).

Barbrix
2442 Hyperion Ave.
Los Angeles, Ca 90027
323-662-2442
www.barbrix.com

HFF Reexamines: The Tax Question

2009-05-11T15:52:00.000-07:00

EaterLA linked to this article in Bon Apetit regarding tipping on takeout and delivery. I agree wholeheartedly on takeout: tip a couple bucks, regardless of price. The author's opinion on delivery is also good, 15%-20%. Though I'd bump that down toward 15% on the scale actually as a delivery driver is, generally, tipping out much less than a server at a sit down restaurant. A server is going to tip out 20%-40% of his gross tips in a given night, a driver very little if any.

But here again that canard of tax comes into play: "at least 15 to 20 percent of the check before tax," he writes.

You should tip AFTER tax. Always. Here's why: a server has to pay taxes based on GROSS sales. Because of years of service staff underdeclaring tips and restaurants turning a blind eye, the IRS set a benchmark a several years ago of a minimum assumed tip income of 8% of gross sales, information which the restaurant has to provide as part of its payroll accounting. Not net sales, gross sales. Gross sales include tax.

So if a server grosses $200,000 in a year, the IRS will assume a minimum tipped income of $16,000 on top of his or her wage income for the year. When you factor in tip-outs and (in some cases) credit card service charge deductions, you get a situation where if you tip less than 10% the server is at best breaking even, at worst losing a bit of money.

That distracts from the main point, though: why does a small fraction of a small fraction matter? I know sales tax went up, but not by much. The difference between tipping before and after tax is the difference of 9.25ish% of whatever percentage you were planning to tip. A 20% tip? It's a difference of 1.85% of the total bill. Assume you have a $200 (before tax) tab. A 20% tip would be $40 before tax or $43.70 after.

You're really going to squabble over $3.70? And that's on a sizeable tab. More importantly, are you really going to squabble over $0.37 on a $20 tab? It's not a procedural issue, it's a generosity issue. When I go out (restaurants, bars, hotels, cabs) I smile, say thank you, and tip generously. I don't make a lot of money, but I'm probably making a bit more than whoever's serving me (or maybe not). And those few extra bucks I spend in gratuity come back to me in the form of better service, room upgrades, neighborhood discounts, and free drinks. It takes time to build those relationships, but they pay off.

So here's HFF's ironclad rule for tipping: for competent, attentive service tip at least 20% after tax. Only for egregiously rude service should you tip less than 15%. Period. When in doubt, round up. Those extra pennies will come back to you, as the no doubt racist idiom goes, "in spades."

Bizarre Foods: LA

2009-05-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods trip to LA (I know it aired last fall, but I missed it then so bear with me).

Cool stuff. A lot of things I didn't know about. For instance: Typhoon, the Pan-Asian restaurant at the Santa Monica Airport of all places. It's time to put my krugerrands where my mouth is and head to Typhoon to try crickets, scorpions, Thai white sea worms, and ants. Who else is in?

I'm also embarrassingly underfamiliar with LA's taco trucks, having have eaten at all of, well, one I think. Maybe two. I was really drunk.

And his visit with Nobu Matsuhisa is a reminder of what happens when true, honest innovation takes hold: you have a bunch of plastic surgeried housewives eating octopus tiradito and uni shooters. When culinary risk-taking comes from a lifetime of experience coupled with blind (perhaps even foolhardly) commitment to the correctness of your culinary decisions you get great authentic food that is approachable.

Take note.

HFF Quickie: Street - Los Angeles, Ca

2009-05-04T17:37:00.000-07:00

Had lunch at Street, the love-it-or-hate-it new restaurant from Susan Feniger located in Hollywood on Highland just off of Melrose.

Pretty good stuff. Their lunch combos featuring your choice of a small salad and small dumpling plate for about $14 is a good deal. My radish cake with sweet Chinese sausage and egg was more than awesome and my "New Jerusalem" bread salad with jerusalem artichokes and feta was also nice, though I prefer softer bread than the garlicky croutons served here. They're tough to stab with a fork.

Sweet and spicy millet puffs served in lieu of bread are delicious.

The table also shared the puri appetizer which was simple and tasty and a dessert of Turkish doughnuts glazed in rosewater. Retarded good.

Service was friendly and knowledgeable. Food took a little bit longer to come out of the kitchen than it probably should, especially the doughnut dessert which took quite a while.

Street's interesting, fresh, and reasonably priced given the quality of the ingredients and the space. Check it out.

Street
742 N. Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, Ca 90038
323-203-0500
www.eatatstreet.com

Budwesier American Ale

2009-05-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

Let's go back in time, shall we?

It's 1919 and everyone's sittin' pretty. America has had two centuries of quality small-production local brewing, wine making, and distilling. We're kickin' it, enjoying a brew or three--and a lot of whiskey and gin--and well on our way to becoming the biggest swingingest dicks on the planet. And then.... WHAM-O! Prohibition and the Vosltead Act come right out of the blue and end boozing as we know it in America.

(It should be noted at this point that Prohibition as a movement had existed in America since its founding and many states had already enacted alcohol restrictions and outright exclusions at the time the Eighteenth Amendment had passed. And the passing of the Volstead Act did in no way end the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in America. -ed.)

The greatest casualties of Prohibition weren't American Law & Order or the scores of deaths from organized crime bootlegging or Joseph Kennedy's acquisition of massive wealth. Hardly. The greatest casualty was America's boutique winemaking and, especially, its tradition of (for the lack of a better term) microbrewing.

Brewing is an intimate endeavor. Unlike winemaking, which can be done essentially spontaneously, even the crudest, crappiest beer requires a significant level of human involvement. Brewing requires cooking. Beer is nowhere near as shelf-stable as wine or spirits. Brewing requires fires and cauldrons. Brewing is best done where it had always been done until the late 1800's: small, local breweries. Every tavern brewed its own beer, kept in casks in the cellar for the consumption of guests and villagers. Monasteries brewed beer. And even when beer production began to be industrialized, the cost of transport kept beer an, at best, regional endeavor.

Finally, a few American entrepreneurs, perhaps Adolph Coors most notably, took advantage of a few technological innovations (primarily refrigerated rail) to begin distributing beer super-regionally, just in time for the banishment of alcohol production in America.

Prohibition killed every small brewery in America. Big breweries which were backed by larger holding companies could stay in business producing near-beer or malted milk, putting a handful of well-heeled giants in prime position to expand once the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed.

(Wine was spared such a fate because many wineries could stay afloat making sacramental wine and by selling grapes to home winemakers. Smaller production winemaking was able to recover more quickly than brewing, though it did take several decades.)

When Prohibition was repealed it wasn't a magic switch that Roosevelt flipped to send all the booze flowing again: individual states, counties, and cities reallowed booze at their respective pace (Kansas didn't allow on-premise liquor sales until 1987), creating a situation that only large brewers could exploit. Advanced refrigeration and transportation techniques created a national distribution network and, in the grand Cold War American tradition, beer became as homogenous as the nation we pretended to be.

But pretend homogeneity is just that. As the long tail of America grew and grew, shrewd innovators began to capture the lucrative market of the disaffected and craft brewing came back strong. In 1977 Jimmy Carter formally legalized homebrewing and American beer lovers began reproducing the beers they had drunk and loved in Britain, Germany, Belgium, and beyond. Some of these homebrewers had enough success to make the foolish decision to go commercial and, even more foolishly, succeed at that as well.

So full and complete was the craft brew revolution that the big American brewers belatedly tried to jump back into the game, like Chrysler attempting a hybrid a half-decade into the post-Prius world. First, macrobreweries half-heartedly made some of their own niche beers (remember Red Dog? No? Good). When that failed, macrobreweries began partnering in distribution deals with successful smaller brewers. Have you ever noticed that Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen is almost ineveitably lined up next to Anheuser-Busch beers at bigger bars? That's why.

Instead of opening the doors for smaller brewers, these partnerships succeeded in macro-izing formerly niche producers like Sierra Nevada, Pyramid, Sam Adams, and Red Hook--to the detriment of all (based on my purely empirical evaluation).

Eventually the American macro-breweries gave-up, quit, and let themselves be bought-out by bigger, more diversified European beverage companies.

So where are we now?

Budweiser has released a malty, dry-hopped "American Ale." And it's not bad at all. It tastes significantly like Newcastle, but with a bit more hoppy bite on the finish. Good structure, but a bit lean on the mid-palate. Actually, I'd call it a dead-ringer for Newcastle, if not a slight improvement thanks to the added edge of hops on the finish.

Couple this with Michelob's pleasant Amber Bock and maybe we're seeing macrobreweries returning to their roots. Because if you can't beat them (or buy them out) you might as well join them.

Maybe Budweiser can capitalize on the hipster anti-elaborate backlash and chisel themselves a Pabst-like niche with craft brew-lovers who've become disenchanted with the douche-y developments in the last decade or so of American microbrewing (how many neo-Belgian beers do we need? Seriously!); a mainstream punk rock volley against the eighteenth note nonuplets of late 70's prog.

What More Do You Want?

2009-04-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

The level of assumed entitlement in this post-Yelp! world is amazing.

There was a time where a consumer and a business-owner obliged each other with this simple, basic ground rule:

If something purchased did not meet the consumer's satisfaction and that item could be reasonably returned (or was faulty, or was only partially consumed in the case of food) then the business-owner would accept the return and refund their money. That's good business.

Now it seems that only "kinda" liking something is grounds for demanding refund and sending a dish back is grounds for an entire check to be comped.

Two cases in point:

Consumerist Blog writes about purchasing a chimichurri salmon dish at Trader Joe's and finding a dead, cooked worm on the fish as he's consuming it. That's gross, sure. Fine. So he returns the uneaten fish and the worm to his local Trader Joe's and gets a refund and several complimentary items. Well done Trader Joe's. However, on the blog, Consumerist is annoyed that he hasn't received any response from Trader Joe's corporate. What possible response would they have that wasn't already addressed by his local store? What does he want? Free TJs for life over a stupid worm? Come on! Organic matter exists with other organic matter and every so often you'll find unintended organic matter packaged with intended organic matter. That's life. I'd be more concerned about finding inorganic matter like broken glass or "bleach-like" substances. But a worm on a fish? Especially a dead one? Who cares? Pick it off and keep eating.

A recent Yelp! review of Street in Hollywood had this to say:

"I ate their on Saturday night. The food ranged from good to forgettable. The left side of the menu (small plates) is MUCH better than the right side. In a city like LA, with amazing and authentic Korean and Thai restaurants, there is little reason to eat korean BBQ short ribs or mediocre Bibimbop here. My biggest complaint is that we were not seated until 9:30pm when we had a 9pm reservation. To make matters worse, they did not offer to buy us a round of drinks and only took a few appetizers off the menu when we asked them to "do something" at the end of the meal. On a $250 bill (before tip) they took of $17 worth of apps. Many of the cocktails cost above $10, so this really was not much. (BTW, the $16 cocktail is SO over in LA; just ask Bar 1912).

Overall, they need to shore up the way they run the restaurant. Relying on Ms. Feniger's hard earned reputation alone does not make a great restaurant. Unless they shore up the front of the house and focus the food on being unique, STREET will fail...and there will go Ms. Feniger's rep. It will be a long time before I spend my $$$ here again."

Oh, so you weren't blown away by the food and you had to wait 30 minutes to be seated for a reservation? Okay, so that sucks. Oh, but they comped some appetizers? Cool, so what's the problem? You could've left if you didn't want to eat there. Should they have maybe comped a little bit more? Sure. But you were the entitled prick who asked that they "do something." When I was a waiter that was a cue for not caring if you ever did come back.

So what should you reasonably expect when a restaurant fails to meet your expectations?

For egregious wait times for a reservation: comped drink or appetizer.

For unacceptable food: either comped or replaced, if replacement causes a significant delay then perhaps the entree or a drink should be comped.

For an incorrect order: replacement and, if it causes a significant delay, a comped drink or dessert.

For unacceptable service: a lot of discretion here, ranging from free drinks to gift certificates to a total refund.

Basically buddy, for having to wait 30 minutes for your table (and knowing your type it was probably more like 15) you should MAYBE get a free drink while you waited.

You're lucky you didn't get a cockslap across your face.

Kickin' It Old School: Castlewood Country Club, Pleasanton, Ca

2009-04-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

There was a time when America was truly great. When marital rape was legal and the only Negroes on a golf course were caddies, greenskeepers, and W.E.B. DuBois. I got to experience a whiff of that era on a recent trip to the venerable Castlewood Country Club in the foothills of Pleasanton. And let me tell you, that whiff smelled strongly of Burma Shave.

My parents, for reasons still vague, were recently invited to join the club (they let Jews in now!) and they accepted as social members, providing access to all the facilities and two tee times a year on the admittedly beautiful golf course.

I was up seeing my parents for the recent pan-religious holidays and we went to the club on a Friday night, wearing the requisite sport coat. We were greeted by the friendly young hostess and ushered into the bar for a cocktail, which we enjoyed with an appetizer of fried calamari which was surprisingly tender and tasty. I didn't actually enjoy my cocktail which was probably the worst Rob Roy I'd ever had, tasting strongly of scotch for the first half of the drink and strongly of vermouth for the second.

We moved into the dining room which was really really nice in a very old school way. Sort of a hybrid of a vintage downtown SF steakhouse and a vintage North Beach strip club, all overlooking a shady golf course.

I was charmed by the menu which offered a "complete" option for every entree. For $4 extra you got soup or a house salad and a scoop of ice cream for dessert. My mom informed me that this used to be standard.

You know what? The food was actually pretty damn good. I mean, the ingredients were of middling quality and questionable seasonality, but the preparation was impeccable and there were flashes of innovation in the flavor combinations.

I went with a lettuce salad with Fuji apples and candied pecans to start--pretty nice, though the supersweet apples and the supersweet candied pecans made for a supersweet salad.

For my entree I steered clear of the who's who of circa 1963 menu items and opted for the "appetizer" of mac and cheese with lobster meat and vegetables. Pretty tasty and more than enough for an entree.

The wine list, although small and offering all of ONE non-sparkling wine that wasn't Californian, was well thought out and not as predictable (or slavishly devoted to Livermore Valley wines) as one might've thought. We had a Paraiso pinot noir from Monterey County. Good stuff.

And a quick note on the service. Did they know a shit ton about food? Not really. Was the service attentive, friendly, professional, and deferential? Absolutely. It was really great service. They replaced flatware and napkins, cleared dishes promptly, and were generally convivial.

Why can't we have such service at places that don't feel like a time warp? Why?

So yeah, I do recommend Castlewood Country Club to y'all. Of course you have to be a member so, well, nuts to you.