LA Luxury Chocolate Salon 2009: A Photoessay

Los Angeles Luxury Chocolate Salon

The Pasadena Center
300 Green Street
Pasadena, CA
Sunday October 11
11 AM- 5PM

Sunday October 11th, we piled into the car and headed to Pasadena for some early morning chocolate tasting. Brunch came later.  As a tasting panelist, I got to weigh in on the best in show in many different categories, including but not limited to: milk chocolate, dark chocolate, packaging, eco-friendly chocolate, specialty chocolates, luxury chocolate, and so on and so forth.

Walking down the stairs to the main hall, I was first greeted by some of my favorite packaging, Jade chocolates.

 

Chocolate covered eda mame. Nice concept, not the tastiest of the day but not bad either.

DineLA Night at XIV

XIV
8117 Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046
(323) 656-1414


Friday night was the much anticipated DineLA dinner at XIV with L from Gastronomnom and his fiancee, the lovely and sweet A. L made the reservations weeks ago, and this was their 7th DineLA restaurant visit of this years's DineLA week(s).  You may or may not know that DineLA is a series of weeks in which restaurants offer a 3-course prix fixe menu for a bargain price. The prix fixe at XIV was $44 per person, with an optional $21 wine pairing.  There is much conversation around the interwebs about DineLA and whether some of the high end restaurants put out fare that rivals the quality of their normal menu.  Worthy of note is that The Bazaar's DineLA menu is their regular menu. They simply ask that you order one from a selection of appetizers and three additional dishes anywhere from their menu. Personally, I am a huge Bazaar fan and knowing that I would be ordering from their regular menu would remove any doubt that a DineLA menu would somehow be dumbed down.  L argues that the food comes from the same kitchen and the same cooks, however, I feel that the food at XIV on this visit was, while not of different quality in terms of ingredients, just not up to the same par in terms of flavor and interest as the food during my prior visit in December, 2008.

Choices on the menu for starters: Wagyu tataki skirt steak, corn soup, and beet salad with burrata.

Choices for entree include: Jidori chicken, asparagus risotto, and Alaskan halibut.

For dessert, XIV offered: dark chocolate cake, Nutella custard, and a root beer float.

 

Per usual, we started with individual portions of the warm naan with a creamy feta and herbs. Heavenly, as always.

 

L & I both chose the Wagyu skirt tataki. Wonderfully aromatic, well marinated, and cooked well done.  Nothing to argue with here in terms of flavor, I love beef tataki. 

 

The tataki was accompanied by a cherry tomato salad with micro greens and cucumber. This had an almost pickled taste to it, however the vegetables did not seem pickled.  Fresh, bright and acidic. A nice counter to the sweet and savory of the tataki.

 

D ordered the beet & burrata salad, with a balsamic reduction, olive oil, arugula.  I adore the earthy flavor of a beet, and this is a lovely little salad. However, I feel like the beet salad is such a predictable stand-by at so many restaurants, from those of the celebrity chefs to gastropubs, that it slightly surprised me to see it on at XIV.  It's just a little too platitudiness.  A ordered the beautiful corn soup, which although it tasted divine and luxurious, was incredibly unphotogenic.

 

Surprisingly, we all ordered the halibut. Most likely paying attention to my camera while everyone else was ordering, I was shocked when 4 halibuts arrives at the table. For a group of food people, how unadventurous!  A generous portion of well cooked and incredibly moist meat, it was served in fish broth on a bed of kale, with cherry tomato halves and cantaloupe balls.  Not a huge lover of the cantaloupe, here it worked perfectly. I loved the sweet melonious flavor popping against the slightly fishy taste of the halibut. This was a solid dish, flavor wise.  If it were on the menu in a restaurant I frequent, I would order it often.

Not being inclined much toward the sweets, I let D steer me toward the chocolate cake.  Really, not a chocolate cake in the true sense of the term. This was a long thin cake-like strip down the long narrow plate, chocolate stripes interspersed between peanut butter stripes.

At the end of my "cake" was a scoop of coconut gelato which was wonderful.  Almost made up for the weird cake product thing stuff.

 

L chose the Nutella custard, said it was delicious.

 

Espresso.

 

In the end, I thought the amount of food, the choices and the portions were definitely a bargain at $44.  Again, the quality of ingredients was above reproach. Somehow, however, the meal lacked a little of the thrill of my last visit. Previously, the food seemed so inspired.  Also, the crowd has changed. When XIV first opened the crowd was incredibly elegant, Angelenos to whom dining is important populated the dining room, filled the bar. The room felt hushed, genteel. This last Friday's crowd was similar to the crowd cramming into the bar at Bazaar these days.  The entire feel is that of a nightclub/restaurant akin to Mesa in Costa Mesa, but more Los Angeles in mood. Think: urgent, electrified, parvenu, and all the other axioms that describe nightlife in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, the food was solid. And there is almost nothing that good company cannot overcome.

Dessert for Dinner at Restaurant Omakase in Riverside

Restaurant Omakase

3720 Mission Inn Ave

Riverside, CA 92501-3216
(951) 788-8820

Traveling as frequently as I do for work and rarely to places with much in the way of culinary interest, (some might say that in California there should always be good Mexican food around, but how much Mexican can one eat? I eat a lot of Mexican), I was excited to discover Restaurant Omakase on my radar via a few restaurant review sites.  Restaurant Omakase is not a Japanese restaurant.  Rather, it is a restaurant that encourages the diner to allow themselves to be put into the chef's hands for creation of their meal at his whim in that given moment. Above, please see a list of possible ingredients that might be included in the chef's tasting menu the evening I dined at Restaurant Omakase.  We did indeed cave on the 5-course tasting menu, and two of the ingredients from the list were utilized in our supper.

Above is the explanation Restaurant Omakase gives to its diners, describing the nature of a chef's menu and their boutique approach to wine. While unusual in a restaurant of this caliber to explain an omakase/chef's menu dining experience, I think it is worthwhile to have the qualifications in the menu as it is located in a neighborhood where dining experiences such as this are (next to Restaurant Omakase) non-existant.

I enjoyed my evening at RO with a good friend who is an adventurous and food loving soul. And a shutter bug. We both are learning how to use our DSLRs to their fullest, and there is nothing more fun than doing so with someone else engaged in the same activity. Playing with settings, macro lenses, lighting, composition, etc.

We started with a bottle of sparkling water.

I ordinarily don't garnish my bottled water with fruit. However, I learned from S. Irene Virbila in her 2008 review of Restaurant Omakase that the chef, Brien Clements, works in partner with the Citrus Variety Collection at nearby UC Riverside to offer beautiful local citrus.  Additionally, Chef Clements gets much of his produce from Randy Reeves 1-acre plot of land nearby.  This was true at the time of SIV's review, and still holds true to this day according to one of our servers.  That orange slice was citrus perfection.

 

Our amuse-bouches of the evening were a pair of gougeres, a savory little pastry with cheese mixed right into the batter.

Occasionally, I have had gougeres where the cheese part is detectable from the batter. Here, however, the cheese was completely integrated into the batter, indecipherable in mouthfeel but detectable in flavor. (This was K's favorite course up until course 4).

 

For the first starter, fairytale pumpkin soup with soft cheese (ricotta), brioche croutons and vanilla oil. Autumnally delicious, but very very sweet. K has a much larger sweet tooth than I and she couldn't finish hers.  It was wonderful, though, with the vanilla being subtle if you took a nice mixed spoonful of ingredients, more forward if the ratio of vanilla to other ingredients was a little higher.

For the third course, we were served Maine lobster over a salad of pear, radicchio & fennel with a spice emulsion.

This course was also delightful, the juiciness of the pear making the salad rather sweet.  I tasted no spiciness in the spice emulsion. I am not sure what Chef Clements was going for here or what the ingredients were in the emulsion, seen to the bottom left of the above photo.  The flavors were not so strong they overwhelmed the perfectly cooked lobster, but again, the impression this dish left was rather sweet on the palate.

My favorite course was a poussin two ways. The breast on top was roasted with a crispy herbed skin, and the leg underneath was perfectly confited. Surrounding the dish is a pomegranite jus (sweet), and underneath are chunks of butternut squash (sweet fall squash bounty) and curry oil.  I thought this dish as a whole was soundly delicious. But again, a couple of sweet elements after all the sweet before. This dish was probably the most well balanced between sweet & savory with some acid and spice thrown in for good measure, but after the previous two sweet dishes, the refrain was tasting a little overly repetitive.

Cheese course. This was hands down K's favorite.  To the right are thin slices of Pink Lady apple decorated with large sugar crystals.  In the middle is a piece of brioche, reminding me very much of French toast. Crunchy not quite all the way through, and nicely buttery.

A goat cheese is the protagonist on this plate, doused in a lovely peppered honey.

For dessert, out strolls a chocolate lava cake with ginger ice cream.  Everyone loves a molten chocolate cake. EVERYONE, don't lie.  However, a molten chocolate cake is nothing special to me. I could order this at the Cheesecake Factory. It wasn't special and I didn't eat it. For my palate, Chef Clements should have reversed the order of the courses, omitting the molten cake and serving me instead the fairytale pumpkin soup for dessert.

I was disappointed by a few things the other night at Restaurant Omakase.  I came expecting the chef to create some dishes extemporaneously. However, nearly everything we ate came directly from the regular menu. Soup, on the menu.  The salad under the lobster was a small course from the menu.  Poussin, on the menu.  Molten cake, not on the menu and has no place in a restaurant with these aspirations.

Service was genial but fast. So fast they nearly served us the next course while clearing the previous course. I have both read and been told by previous diners that the wine pairing brings the 5 course prix fixe from $60 to $100, however my server that evening gave me an entirely different impression.  Perhaps he misspoke when he stated that wine parings for the $60 "omakase" were an additional $100.  Reading a review elsewhere prior to my visit, I thought it was $100 including wine pairings, which I might have caved on. But given the rapidity of our service, I doubt I could have done justice to a $100 wine pairing, or even a $40 wine paring whichever the truth may be.

What I did love? My company. I haven't known K long, nor do I see her often. But when I do, it's always like I have known her forever and see her every single day. And that made the meal perfection.

Saturday Morning Brunch

There is nothing more beautiful on a Saturday morning than a quick little brunch a deux, sitting heads bowed together, scheming to take over the universe.  On my way home from spinning off tomorrow's Chocolate Salon tasting, I stopped at the store, grabbed some fresh ingredients (because I admit to having no clue what came in the CSA box Thursday) and dashed home to put heat under the poaching water.

Half a dozen organic brown eggs. I love a brown egg, the little speckles on the shell.  For me, this is an aesthetic issue. I would have to do a side by side taste test to see if there were a marked difference between brown and white flavor-wise.

 

Poaching eggs with some vinegar added to the bath helps prevent feathering. My haphazard methodology of tossing the eggs into the bath instead of placing them gently almost negates the use of the vinegar. However, I use balsamic vinegar instead of white because I love the rich flavor of a balsamic. 

 

For the asparagus, drizzle EVOO into the pan and add freshly chopped garlic, sea salt and ground pepper.

 

Pan frying the asparagus give the tips a beautiful crispness, and helps me to keep an eye on their progress more easily preventing overcooking. I always overcook steamed asparagus.

 

Lox, from a plastic envelope in the deli section. Not the same quality lox one might find while ordering room service at the Four Seasons, but delicious nonetheless.

 

The finished product. Some might not like the brown coloring from the balsamic vinegar in the poaching bath, but I do. The flavor was wonderful all around, and my tummy is full of Saturday morning goodness.

I dedicate this post to Verv & Moto, who both much prefer home cooking posts to restaurant reviews. Consider this the first of many to come and a warm up for a new project.

Umami Wednesday: Sous Vide, is it?

Umami Burger
4655 Hollywood Blvd
Los Feliz, CA 90027
http://www.umamiburger.com/

Wednesday early evening we hopped on the 4 heading west toward Los Feliz and the thus far elusive Umami burger experience. This is the first fall evening in 2009 that I can recollect needing to wear a long sleeved sweater and scarf.  It feels like a cool October this year, has the fall chill come early?

 

Umami is cool fo' sho, and that's all there is to that. We were shown to a table next to owner Adam Fleishmen wining and dining a couple gentlemen. He was telling them in depth several times about the sous-vide cooking process of Umami Burger's meat when Steve Arroyo, hanging out with some family members, strolled over to say hello.  We overheard Adam congratulating Steve on the design of the interior. Some research leading me to LA Times blogs informs that Steve and Adam are in partnership in the post Cobras & Matadors space. A lot more eavesdropping on the table next door, more or less involuntarily, informs that Adam plans to open several more Umamis all over LA. An Umami empire, if you will. Drive-thru?

Late Summer Fig in Santa Monica

Fig
Fairmont Miramar
101 Wilshire Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90401 
310.319.3111

The proper way to eat a fig, in society, 

Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,

And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

A few weeks back, on a lazy late summer Sunday riding our bikes through Santa Monica, down to Venice and back again, we decided to sup at Fig. Fig good. Worth a drive over the hill and through the woods for with a resounding, why YES!

Then you throw away the skin

Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,

After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

Fig is located in the posh Santa Monica Fairmont Miramar hotel, but don't be overly put off by the poshnessossity. Fig is more or less normal restaurant price, a lot less expensive than Melisse or Bistro LQ, and a bit spendier than Church & State. The bar is stunning, and we would have settled there had there been even the tiniest space to squeeze ourselves into.

But the vulgar way

Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.
 

Decor is ever so reminiscent of an upscale Westwood home, circa 1970-something, owned by a professor and his bohemian wife. Lots of wooden earthy details, spare glitz, dish towel napkins in walnut rings.

Every fruit has its secret.

And there is diversity to the seating arrangements, not a bad seat in the house. We sat toward the front of the restaurant, great for people watching. The rear overlooks the pool and an expansive patio.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.

As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:

And it seems male.

But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

We started with one of our favorite wines, one we have never seen on a menu. Sean Thackrey Pleiades.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:

The fissure, the yoni,

The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

 

Balsamic herb butter, salt cellar.

We started with chicken liver pate, a country pate, rough texture with beautiful cornichons and chunks of seat salt.

Involved,

Inturned,

The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;

And but one orifice.

We shared one of the most elegant mussel dishes I have ever had, with grilled bread, a garden's worth of herbs, white wine and butter broth in this beautiful Staub cast iron pan. To the left there is a little grate, slightly separating the crunchy bread from sinking too deeply into the broth, yet allowing it to suck up the flavorful juice from the bottom like a straw. My mouth is watering.

 The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.

Symbols.

 We both ordered steak au poivre, mine accompanied by a beautiful little salad with early grapefruit slices, giant cloves of roasted garlic and bleu cheese butter.

D ordered his with a giant mound of herbaceous frites and housemade catsup, very very tomatoey.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;

            Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

We passed on dessert, not because it wasn't wildly tempting...chocolate pot de creme, strawberry shortcake, Meyer lemon curd. But mainly because we had shot our wad appetite wise on our appies and entrees.  A'hem.

It was always a secret.

            That's how it should be, the female should always be secret.

Even the bill presentation was in keeping thematically with the ambience and decor.   Tim Zebrowski (Del Coronado Hotel, San Diego, Eden Roc Hotel Miami Beach) is responsible for the interior. Way to follow through conceptually, Tim.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

            Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;

  Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

            Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

            Openly pledging heaven:

            Here's to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!

 The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.
 

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,

            And the year is over.

Excerpts of poetry from Figs, by D.H. Lawrence. Who else can write that legitimately porny, quoted in my blog, with me still holding my head high in public? Not Penthouse Forum, that's for sure. Not saying I checked.