December 22, 2010

A Taste of Red Medicine

As proudly announced on their blog, recent Beverly Hills addition Red Medicine took some joy in not only throwing out but also publicly unmasking L.A. Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila. According to that post, the managing staff took issue with Virbila’s “unnecessarily cruel” and “irrational” reviews as well as her lack of “understanding of what it takes to run or work in a restaurant.”

But given that Sam Sifton and Jonathan Gold haven’t run any restaurants lately, was there something more to the boot? Consider Virbila’s 2009 review of Michael Mina’s XIV in which she had this to say of former XIV pastry chef and current Red Medicine chef/partner Jordan Kahn’s desserts:

By dessert, you’re longing for a couple of delicious bites to cap off the evening. But the pastry chef, Jordan Kahn, is trying too hard to top what came before. Witness the baby block-sized white chocolate cube filled with seven layers of various red fruits and such. It makes quite a visual statement until you break into it with a fork and it collapses into an unappetizing mess. There’s no way you can taste the layers the chef has so laboriously prepared: It’s all mush.

And a glass of what’s described as hazelnut milk with frosted flakes is served with a sugar “barrel” with whiskey at the bottom. With its cacophony of flavors, this may be one of the worst desserts I’ve tasted.

According to Food Editor Russ Parsons, the Times will continue with its plans to review Red Medicine.

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December 21, 2010

Leftovers: Bruxie

The emerging world of waffle sandwiches for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by GINA FERAZZI / L.A. TIMES

Some culinary trends come with promises concocted in the vague argot of marketing executives and brand managers. But a few rare ideas spring from something universal. They’re the restaurants and recipes that tap into unknown pleasures, manifestations of all our unconscious cravings.

Such is the case at Bruxie, a weeks-old stand in Old Towne Orange whose s’mores-stuffed and prosciutto-packed Belgian waffle sandwiches are fulfilling the fantasies of every syrup-soaked childhood and late-night binge.

Bruxie is a sweetly nostalgic place. Rather than load up a Twitter-equipped food truck, the waffle shop sought out history among downtown Orange’s innocent Americana. It found just that in the former home of Dairy Treet, an aging burger and shake shack that had been in operation for more than 60 years. Still, Bruxie is modern, self-aware and already crawling with students from nearby Chapman University. The novelty of it all is so precisely calibrated to the surroundings that some customers have been wondering aloud whether Bruxie is part of a fledgling franchise.

Read the rest here.

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November 22, 2010

Leftovers: El Pollo Imperial

Drive-through Peruvian in North Long Beach for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by GARY FRIEDMAN / L.A. TIMES

A voice crackles from the tinny speaker in the kitchen, and the staff at El Pollo Imperial listens closely to someone in a minivan at the drive-through window placing an order — not for pallid hamburgers stacked two patties high or limp fish encased in sheaths of greasy batter, but for stunningly fresh ceviche and impeccable lomo saltado, the Peruvian dish of stir-fried beef and French fries.

El Pollo Imperial inherited its fast-food trappings. Six months ago, partners Oscar Ramirez and Carlos and Alicia Cortez repurposed a shuttered KFC in North Long Beach, adapting even the drive-through to the restaurant’s new Peruvian flavors. It’s a significant transformation for this stretch of Atlantic Avenue, a neighborhood where ship supply companies occupy former Chinese restaurants and a striking Art Deco theater awaits demolition.

There are playful nods to El Pollo Imperial’s Kentucky Fried past: its avian name, its feathered mascot outfitted like Incan royalty. But the restaurant isn’t a mere paean to poultry. Though you certainly will order pollo a la brasa on your initial visit — juicy, well-seasoned rotisserie chicken that demands to be eaten with your hands — the impressive breadth of the restaurant’s menu will compel you to try any of the dozens of other dishes.

Read the rest here.

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November 15, 2010

Leftovers: Tom Yum Koong

Crossing the border into Laos for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by LUIS SINCO / L.A. TIMES

Thatched baskets of sticky rice arrive alongside tart pork sausages still sputtering from the pan. Papaya salad follows, the strands of green, unripened fruit stained a murky brown from fermented blue crab paste. At Tom Yum Koong in Westminster, among the offal-laden boat noodles and coconut-rich curries of Thailand are the flavors of Laos.

Traffic flows past Tom Yum Koong in a stream of steel and rubber, pouring off the nearby freeway into the concrete delta of strip malls and suburban churches. The restaurant is looked at and looked over. To some, it may look like just another neighborhood Thai restaurant: salads sluiced with lime juice and chiles, broad rice noodles snaking through puddles of soy sauce. But the kitchen maintains a distinct duality, capable in Thai and Laotian cooking.

Tom Yum Koong’s Laotian influence belongs to chef and owner Manivanh Chansmouth. She and her family purchased the restaurant two years ago, restyling it with warm chocolate walls and a constellation of paper lanterns. Owing to her Laotian heritage, Chansmouth retrofitted the menu by adding a concise selection of Laotian specialties and Isaan-style Thai favorites. The latter are Laos-influenced dishes from Isaan, Thailand’s northeastern region that sits just across the Mekong River from Laos.

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October 28, 2010

Leftovers: Dat Thanh

A new nem nuong cuon contender for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by MARIAH TAUGER / L.A. TIMES

In the hyperspecialized kitchens of Little Saigon, where dining by dac biet (a restaurant’s prescribed list of house specialties) is almost a moral obligation, nem nuong cuon is a matter of contention. For every dozen batches of slack, sloppy spring rolls, there are a few that approach brilliance: ruddy pork patties branded by the grill, cucumber spears that snap with farmers-market freshness, dipping sauces derived from equal parts recipe and alchemy.

Consensus has long steered the spring roll-obsessed to Brodard. It’s the restaurant that transformed nem nuong cuon from craving to commodity, an immense place so popular that it staffs an entire assembly line to construct those sheer, swollen rolls. But a newcomer has all but unseated Brodard.

Dat Thanh operates on a much smaller scale. Its tiny, well-kept dining room is so compact it seems a mere outgrowth of the kitchen, as if each seat were arrayed around a chef’s table. The 4-month-old restaurant runs in the family: Hai Nguyen, affable and gracious, mans the front while his parents, who hail from a village near Vung Tau on Vietnam’s southern coast, stick to the stoves. The Nguyens previously owned a larger, otherwise identical restaurant in Little Saigon before selling it six years ago.

Read the rest here.

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September 25, 2010

Going local at the Food Rendezvous

Checking in on the newest platform for L.A.’s emerging food artisans for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by KATIE FALKENBERG / L.A. TIMES

Outside the old Venice jail, toddlers in tie-dyed shirts lick avocado-vanilla popsicles and graying couples aim their Leica cameras at a small-scale organic garden. Inside, wines are dispensed from behind the mahogany reception desk while curious cooks page through dog-eared recipes at a cookbook swap.

The inaugural Food Rendezvous brimmed with comestible energy, an assemblage of L.A.’s food artisans, gardeners, chefs and nonprofit organizations. The event sprang from the minds of Laurie Dill and Dominique Leveuf, two former San Franciscans who were inspired by the underground markets there. The pair had spent more than six months planning last month’s first Food Rendezvous, a populist platform designed to unite L.A.’s vast, sometimes fractured food community.

“The idea is not just to bring in new food producers and artisans that are making things from scratch, but it’s also to reconnect with the centrality of doing things from scratch,” Leveuf says. “It’s about sparking a conversation.”

Visit the Food Rendezvous tomorrow at the Abbot Kinney Festival. Read the rest of the story here.

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September 13, 2010

Leftovers: La Huasteca

Rocio Camacho’s pre-Columbian cuisine for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by GLENN KOENIG / L.A. TIMES

Cars cruise through the roundabout under the waning afternoon sun, leisurely circling a reconstruction of Mexico City’s Angel of Independence. First-timers marvel at the faux-colonial facade seemingly imported block by block from Guadalajara. Lynwood’s Plaza Mexico is Latin America the L.A. way, an elaborate set onto which visitors can graft memories and forge new ones.

La Huasteca is the shopping center’s grandest stage: sylvan murals that appear to recede into forested infinity, wrought-iron chandeliers that could light up a whole town. For six years, the restaurant has been a reliable outpost of high-end alta cocina, a study mostly of Mexico’s Huasteca region. Six months ago, however, the kitchen came under the command of chef Rocio Camacho.

Camacho earned the attention of an entire city at Moles La Tía in East Los Angeles. The César Chávez Avenue restaurant is where she transformed the very notion of mole, where vague ideas of chocolaty sauces exploded into a prismatic array of cheery yellows, herbaceous greens and brilliant magentas. Camacho’s move arrived by word of blogger Javier Cabral, who was also instrumental in raising the profile of Moles La Tía. Now at La Huasteca, Camacho has unveiled a refined new menu.

Read the rest here.

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September 2, 2010

Leftovers: Merry’s House of Chicken

Indonesian fried chicken and coal-black kluwak for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by MARIAH TAUGER / L.A. TIMES

There’s a glistening chicken somewhere under the blanket of crispy rice-flour crumbles. The crystalline snowflake-like particles are scattered over the entire bird, its skin sluiced with a squeeze of lime and spiced with a dab of sambal, shrimp paste and chiles ground into a pungent, penetrating blast of heat.

Time seems to stand still for that chicken: Phones quit chirping and fidgety kids suddenly snap to attention, transfixed by the fried delights of the ayam goreng kremesan at Merry’s House of Chicken, a months-old Indonesian restaurant in West Covina.

The eastern edges of the San Gabriel Valley might be L.A.’s epicenter of Indonesian cuisine. Sprawling across strip malls and city lines is an archipelago of food-court cafes and full-fledged restaurants, some serving offal-intensive curries and others sweetly lacquered barbecue. But there isn’t a single stick of satay at Merry’s; the restaurant instead purveys classic Javanese cooking.

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August 3, 2010

Leftovers: Uyen Thy

A French-inflected breakfast in Little Saigon for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by LAWRENCE K. HO / L.A. TIMES

In Little Saigon, modest fortunes have been made on spring rolls alone. Entire legacies have been decided by the buttery crunch of a warm baguette. Diners anoint only the most exacting items: fresh-pressed sugarcane juice with muddled kumquats, whole baked catfish with skin caramelized into candy. Here, restaurants are immortalized in the details.

It’s with that diligence that Uyen Thy Bistro so often succeeds. This is a restaurant innately aware of its strengths even when the immensity of its menu sometimes indicates otherwise.

Uyen Thy is predictably secluded in a sliver of space at the bottom of a three-story strip mall behind a 7-Eleven. But the restaurant isn’t easily eclipsed — it’s the namesake of Uyen Thy, host of a well-known Vietnamese cooking show on the Garden Grove-based Saigon Broadcasting Television Network.

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July 20, 2010

Neil and Phyllis Strawder: SoCal’s Two Brisketeers

Profiling Bigmista’s barbecue empire for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by GENARO MOLINA / L.A. TIMES

The Torrance farmers market is in full bloom: pluots mottled with patches of red and green, bottles of fresh-pressed pomegranate juice, eggplants as thick as tree trunks. Weekenders huddle under canopies clutching pupusas and plates of pad Thai, the electric hum of a blues man’s guitar and the distant patter of steel drums colliding in the air above. The market’s meat seekers, however, are unfazed by the clamor, eyes affixed to the brisket being carved at Bigmista’s Barbecue.

Pounds of that blackened brisket — beef massaged with a spice rub and then smoked into submission for about 12 hours — are dispensed until there’s nothing but scraps left. Some diners opt for racks of ribs and overloaded sandwiches. Regulars are drawn to one of the day’s sybaritic specials, pulled-pork nachos.

Bigmista’s is a farmers market force, propelled to the upper stratum of Los Angeles barbecue by husband-and-wife team Neil and Phyllis Strawder. They’ve earned the adulation of every local magazine, talk show and website with an appetite. In May, Bigmista’s was a finalist at the inaugural Vendy Awards, which celebrated the city’s best street and otherwise itinerant food vendors. Recently, Neil has been bouncing between TV appearances and cooking demos for Fresh & Easy markets in California, Nevada and Arizona. And now, the Strawders are making their basic cable debut on “Over Your Head,” an HGTV home improvement show.

They’ve built this burgeoning barbecue empire in just under two years, a mobile meat paradise that currently encamps at the Torrance (Saturday and Tuesday), El Segundo (Thursday) and Atwater Village (Sunday) farmers markets. It’s a business built as much on Neil’s wide smile and masterful slow smoking as Phyllis’ irresistible laugh and financial know-how.

Read the rest here.

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