was it peer pressure or just gluttony?
Chef Annette, my friend and instructor at NYC’s French Culinary Institute, and I met up on Monday, this time in Los Angeles, for another one of our celebrations of regional foods. (Also called an all-day pig out.)
The morning began at Little Next Door, a cafe so French you can easily pretend you’re in Nice the second you step over the threshold. The restaurant offers ever matter of European pastry, made with organic flour, but we were saving ourselves for the cakes at Kiss My Bundt, so we stuck with the magnificent boules of coffee served with a foam of milk so thick it resembles shaving cream. We ordered our drinks with skim milk, the only restraint we showed all day.
Fully caffinated, we wandered past a few storefronts to land in bundt heaven. A surprise awaited me when I walked through the door of Kiss My Bundt: owner Chrysta Wilson had baked a 7Up pound cake – one of my all-time favorites! Chrysta popped her head out from the back of the shop to ask if I would like a slice of “jellybean cake,” code for 7Up pound, a nickname I gave the cake when I learned just how much sugar it takes to create this confection. (Check out the recipe in the Kiss My Bundt cookbook. This cake is no joke!) After chatting away about everything from liquid peanuts the robbery of a local gourmet foods shop, we settled on a mini red velvet and cookies and cream bundt and a thick slab of jellybean cake.
Annette and I tucked in to the sweets, starting with the 7Up, slicing it in half then each eating a half of our half before devouring red velvet. Annette commented that she’d only ever enjoyed one bakery’s red velvet before. But after tasting the KMB cake, she has a red velvet on each coast to fill her cravings!
We saved the rest of the jellybean and the cookies and cream for later and hit the road to see the Oscar decorations before they were stripped from the Kodak Theater’s facade. (The awards show was held the night before and the elaborate decorations were still in the process of disassembly.) Although the red carpet was long gone, we arrived in time to pose with 15-foot high golden statuettes and stroll up the grand staircase traversed by all of Hollywood only hours before.
Next it was off to downtown LA for an In Vino Unitas wine trade tasting. It had been at least an hour since we’d last eaten, so we were excited to spot the Kogi Korean taco truck just down the street from the building in which the tasting was held. Kogi is the brand that started the food truck craze that has spanned the nation. And both of us were kimchee taco virgins! I tried the tofu and kimchee taco, Annette the pork. Our savories were made to order, a fact that would normally delight such food whores as ourselves, but a sudden, icy Santa Ana wind left us wishing food truck was synonymous with fast food. Once our tacos were cooked, we took the parcel to a sheltered, outdoor staircase and dug in as we warmed up under the California sun.
The tacos were hot, the kimchee cold and crisp, not too spicy but not bland. Annette’s pork was soft, without fat or grease and deliciously tender. My tofu might have been a slight ordering error because the cubes did not want to conform to taco shape and bounced out with every bite but their simple flavor allowed me to appreciate the taco’s freshness and deft seasoning.
Now, I enjoyed the snack, don’t get me wrong, but the experience left me wondering why people are so obsessed with the truck that they follow its whereabouts on twitter, chasing down the tacos and sometimes standing in half hour-long lines for… tacos? from a truck?
The taco truck provided the afternoon’s only “first.” The tasting featured California wines with which both Annette and I were both familiar, but it was good to taste some new vintages and say hello to some familiar faces.
We returned to the West Side just before rush hour set in and polished off the rest of the Kiss My Bundt cakes washed down with some reviving coffee. Then before it was time to dress for dinner, we squeezed in a trip to Paper Bag Princess, a consignment shop which I liken to a fashion museum – only you get to touch everything.
Dinner was planned in a series of three stops. The first was at the home of Anne Janzen, a friend who happens to live three houses down from Providence, my favorite Los Angeles restaurant. Anne, a caterer, had just done a party for Bacardi and wanted to show us one of their newest flavors, a honey rum. She whipped the rum in the blender with fresh pineapple and ice to create a frothy, faintly sweet cocktail. It was a refreshing aperitif, although one that went down a little too easily if you know what I mean!
Next a short walk to Providence, where we met another friend, Amy. (I only fraternize with women who share my first initial.) Providence is known for seafood so we ordered three different seafood appetizers and selected three different glasses of wine. First came a complimentary surprise, a homemade wasabi-rolled savory marshmallow square, a gougere and a tiny glass with trout on a lemon gelee with spiced cream, rice crispies and gold leaf.
Next were the three dishes we selected. The big eye tuna was thinly sliced and rolled with black sesame seeds on a spiced cream with perfectly shaped, pickled cucumber cubes. The crab salad, a favorite of mine couples simple, sweet crab with avocado prepared is several different fashions. There was a thick paste painted across the plate, a wedge, frozen and served in its purity and a little phyllo cigar with avocado cream. The scallops – the best of the three dishes, were seared and served with chanterelles, peas and a garnish of pea tendrils. As Annette observed, part of what made all three dishes so special was their simplicity. None of the dishes boasted more than 5 ingredients, (not including salt, pepper, oil, cream or butter). Yet the food was exciting, the flavors pure, inspiring and energizing.
Sad to leave, we realized it was time for our second reservation, so we paid the bill and went on our way – (but not until Annette somehow talked her way into the kitchen for a tour and reported back, her eyes dancing, that there were 2 women working on the restaurant’s front line).
Next we visited Hatfields, a bistro that, after a brief closure, had moved from a tiny Beverly Blvd. storefront into the rather glamorous, former Citrus restaurant space. Hatfields, which had previously been a quiet favorite among LA’s food community, was receiving some serious buzz in its new digs.
We were pleased to see the restaurant, only open for a few weeks, buzzing with activity at 9pm, (late by LA standards), on a Monday night. Shown to our table, we once again selected three different dishes to share and three wines to pass around with the dishes. Amy, a wine and spirits distributor, works with Hatfields and steered us toward some fun and unusual white wines as well as a rose that was a shockingly great value at $7/glass.
To eat, we enjoyed a cuttlefish salad that offered a rainbow of colors and at least three different textures from crunchy to smooth. With it we tried the restaurant’s signature dish, a croque madame on brioche with sashimi and a tiny (quail, I think) egg, its sunny yolk like a smile atop the tiny sandwich. It was decadent, highly flavored and wildly buttery little dish. That, along with our third dish, agnolotti on a cinnamon banyuls wine cream with paper thin cheese shavings made it quite clear that although Hatfields’ menu reads like a typical California restaurant, what it offered was in no way Angeleno food. Both tasted of butter, offered decadence and something often absent from the LA version of California cuisine: fat. I actually happen to like the clean flavors of typical LA bistro food but I have to say I loved seeing that Hatfields isn’t afraid to go against the grain and, in doing so, they’ve truly set the restaurant apart in a really great way.
Fully sated, we were just about to request the check and plan a visit to a Hollywood club when the restaurant’s sommelier appeared with two fists full of glasses. He had ordered us one of each dessert and insisted upon wines to accompany each. We certainly wouldn’t say no to that! My favorite of the wines was his personal creation, a thick, black stout topping Taylor Fladgate’s 20 year Port to pair with a chocolate and nib napoleon. There was also a plate of beignets, a delightfully tart key lime confection with little buttery crispies – I know, my writing here is vague but my memory blurred a bit by sugar, Brachetto and Trockenbeerenauslese. My favorite of the desserts was a coconut meringue on tapioca topped with the most lovely passion fruit and elderflower sorbet.
I would like to say that the eating ended here but it wouldn’t be painting a true picture if I didn’t admit that, after Annette and I walked the 8 blocks back to the car we left at Providence and went for a joy ride down the Sunset Strip, the two of us stopped for donuts at my favorite 24 hour joint on Santa Monica Blvd. Would either of us stopped for a donut had we been alone? Probably not. But was it peer pressure that drove us to indulge in the simple sweetness of donuts after the complex desserts we’d consumed less than two hours before? I believe it was simply the haze of gluttony in which we were shrouded that led us to celebrate the evening with one final hurrah.
[...] day after my day of eating LA with Chef Annette, I met up with Chrysta Wilson, author of Kiss My Bundt and baker extraordinaire for a cupcake [...]