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Our dinner on Saturday night was at République, a place that needs no introduction if you live in LA. (Our genius plan was to start the night there before catching some of the 24 hour screening of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” at LACMA, but there was a horrendously long line so we bailed. Do better with crowd management, LACMA!) République is and Institution with a capital I, housed inside the iconic, airy space that was once the great Nancy Silverton’s Campanile. Just look at that light!

République does casual daytime and seated dinner service, wine and cocktails, in-house bread and pastries. (I own their baking book; it’s fittingly fussy.) Every time I go, I’m astonished just how many bodies are working the floor and hustling around the open kitchen, resulting in service that’s remarkably high touch while not technically being fine dining. It’s almost as fun to watch operate at that level as it is to eat there, and the food is very good.

For reasons neither of us could discern, the restaurant was especially generous with the free stuff — the amuse bouche of corn soup with brown butter, and a vermouth aperitif, and corn beignets with cilantro cream. Maybe they’re big fans of rambling Substack posts and/or TV criticsm and/or local government and/or had a lot of extra corn to work through. But then it was on to what we actually ordered, like this extremely Alpine caramelized onion tart with bacon lardons and Gruyére:

This was so rich I didn’t have room for dessert later, a true anomaly for me. Probably a dish better shared among four then two, but you live and you learn.

We also had arugula-infused pasta with chanterelle mushrooms, which I appreciated for making it feel like fall even though it’s still 95 degrees during the day:

And a ridiculous quail dish that not only included bone-in quarters scattered among the fig halves, roasted beets and puddles of jus, but also egg rolls stuffed with ground quail meat. What! (Between this and the San Francisco squab, I suddenly have the small game bird diet of a minor British nobleman. I swear I’m still a chicken girl at heart.)

Anyway, I hadn’t done dinner at République in several years, and it’s nice to know for certain the place remains at the top of its game. Not a bad way to sit across from your spouse in a restaurant for the first time in a month.

Hunter was also unsurprisingly itching to get back into the kitchen, where several pounds of homegrown tomatoes were waiting on the counter for his return. On Sunday, he made them (plus some extra I got at the farmers’ market) into a recipe from On Vegetables, a cookbook by local chef Jeremy Fox — and cowritten by our friend Noah Galuten, who writes a wonderful newsletter about feeding his family.

What you see above is a riff on pappa al pomodoro, the rustic bread stew that’s popular in Tuscany. (Except properly salted. I am brave enough to say that the Tuscan practice of making unsalted bread and then cooking with that bread is frankly unappetizing, even if it’s authentic and Italian!) This one is deconstructed: the tomatoes are de-skinned and cooked down for hours into a — trigger warning: 2010s Bon Appetit-ism — jammy sauce, then poured over parmesan croutons. The whole thing is topped with kimchi, burrata and basil for a delicious bowl of peasant slop.

Because Hunter is Hunter, the bread was homemade (he’s reviving the household sourdough starter), as was the kimchi (with Row 7 sweet garleeks we impulse bought at Whole Foods). The burrata was store-bought, to his shame.

Anyway, this was a well-balanced, vegetable-forward dish that worked as a complete meal: spicy and tomato-y, cooled and enriched by the burrata. Hunter pointed out that On Vegetables is a great book for when you want to make something stunty and feel accomplished while also nourishing yourself for the week ahead. And on my end, it was nice to be cooked for again after a few weeks of having the kitchen all to myself.

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I’ve been up to the Bay more times than I can count. The flight takes less than an hour, a bunch of friends live up there (including my exceedingly generous hosts), the weather offers sweet relief from LA’s current 90 degree norm, and the food is incredible. I like to joke that I have a hard and fast 72 hour rule with the region because otherwise I overhear too many phrases like “agentic commerce” and need to flush out my ears with Lysol, but the truth is it’s one of my favorite places in America and I feel lucky to know it so well.

But this newsletter is about food, so let’s talk about that.

La Taqueria

I can’t say much about me reflects my San Diego upbringing, but one telltale sign is that I instinctively prefer burritos to tacos. (There is no sensation more comforting to me than biting into a plush flour tortilla.) This gives me a natural affinity for SF Mexican food’s most iconic creation: the Mission-style burrito, which tragically lacks French fries but otherwise is right up my alley.

La Taqueria, whose wrap was once named the best in the country by a now-defunct website, has a few qualities that put it above the competition. They’ll griddle the outside of the tortilla if you ask for it dorado style; they skip rice, which I dislike in a burrito anyway for the starch-on-starch blandness; and it’s steps from a BART station, so I could roll up with my suitcase less than an hour after disembarking at Oakland.

This was everything I needed after an irritating travel day that included my seat mate spilling his Coke on me mid-plane nap. There’s a line, but it moves quickly and the staff are experts at managing seating space. There was even live music! I recommend sticking it out, though I cannot recommend dessert because it was ice cream homemade by my friend Steven and while delicious it is not commercially available.

We ate it with Nutella-stuffed cake(!) his mom had shipped up from LA(!!). It was awesome. Sorry!

Bread Belly

I was blessed to be staying in the same neighborhood as one of the best bakeries in the country, which I would have revisited regardless but was extra hype to after watching this video with their oven master, who I would like to befriend some day.

Bread Belly is best known for pastries that mix East Asian flavors with French technique, but they also have excellent hot food and very Bay creations like a savory Basque cheesecake made with cheese from Marin’s own Cowgirl Creamery. For this lunch, I opted for a cherry almond crumble cake and an egg salad sandwich with fried zucchini and pickled mustard seed ranch. The cake was solid; the sandwich was transcendent, especially when you got everything — including a perfect slice of summer tomato — in one bite.

Four Kings

I thanked my hosts Adam and Jenny by taking them out to Four Kings, which is one of those restaurants where to secure a table you have to be on OpenTable with your trigger finger at the ready the literal second reservations come online. (SF is nearly as brutal with restaurant reservations as New York, while LA has maybe five restaurants it’s actually hard to get in the door of. I’ve never been able to figure out why.)

I’m not sure any meal is ever worth that kind of pain in the ass, but I loved the vibe of this place, whose chefs met working at a fine dining place around the corner yet has a much more casual tone. The food is ostensibly Cantonese-leaning and inspired by Hong Kong, but in practice the dishes dabbled in other regions like Singapore (the showstopping chili crab pictured above) and Sichuan (the mapo spaghetti).

My friends Carman and Michelle had gone recently, insisted we ordered the fried squab and were right to do so. (They serve it rare so it’s incredibly juicy.) The claypot rice took half an hour as we’d been warned it would, but was worth the wait. I’m used to lap cheong and Chinese bacon being pleasantly chewy; these were tender in a way that paired perfectly with the crispy rice bits.

Pearl 1601

My friend Laura also lives in the Richmond, so we stayed local for a catch-up dinner at Pearl 1601, a mostly seafood-focused place that was packed even when we showed up for an early bird special at 5pm. I get it: I’ve been blinded by a scourge of citrus-soaked hamachi to the virtues of raw fish, but this halibut crudo punched through the fatigue. Both Laura and I were astonished how the nuoc cham tasted so salty and umami it verged on Parmesan cheese, while the strawberries and almonds kept the dish from tasting straightforwardly Southeast Asian. No disrespect to a great world cuisine; it’s more that the plate was singular.

Pearl isn’t all pescatarian, and the other standout dish was this mafaldine topped with feta, peppers and gremolata that was served in a super-rich, very fall-coded lamb ragu. I can be somewhat reluctant to order pasta at restaurants because, honestly, a lot of it is mid and I can make a pretty good version at home, but this cleared that bar easily. Besides, it won’t be ragu weather in LA for another three months minimum, so I had to seize the chance.

We finished with my second corn ice cream of the weekend, this one finished with a miso lavender caramel that was kind of overpowering but we both warmed to the more we ate. I’ll just have to go back for the devil’s food cake.

Bake Sum

My last stop before the airport was Bake Sum in Oakland, so I could do a rigorous side-by-side comparison with Bread Belly. Just kidding, this was also great! I got an okonomiyaki danish with perfect lamination and an almond cake; my friend got a pandan milk bun and a ham-and-cheese riff with Spam. Just under the 72-hour mark, I got home and promptly ate vegetables with a side of more vegetables for dinner. A weekend well spent.

The thing I hate most about Spencer’s campaign — besides, well, everything — is how little of it seems to be based in a genuine love for this city. LA has problems, and serious ones, but the Pratt campaign paints a single-shade portrait of this city as a dystopian hellscape overridden by crime and disorder. He never seems to single out what makes this city special, or what’s worth using our city resources to preserve. I find it sad that anyone thinks this man could lead a metropolis he seems to view as a shithole that’s only worth the attention he can milk from its more gullible residents.

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Were I asked to make a list of people, places and things that make LA special, I’d need a few hours, but somewhere near the top would be the street food. So this weekend, I channeled my anxiety first into knocking doors, and then into sampling a few vendors along the city’s latest hub of culinary activity.

The intersection of Sunset and Figueroa — technically, where Sunset turns into Cesar Chavez, though we’ll see how long that name lasts — has slowly metastasized over the last couple years into a sprawling, multi-ethnic quasi-night market. The first place I tried was Baba Kebap, a Turkish stall that caught Hunter’s attention because they use live charcoal. (Though they’re actually on hiatus now while they make some upgrades, so we were sadly unable to revisit.) Some other stands are also purveyors of Middle Eastern grilled meats, but by no means all; the southeastern corner, for instance, is almost entirely Colombian.

Hunter and I met up with our friend Meghan, an esteemed food writer who just published a piece about the mayors’ race through the lens of restaurants (in the New York Times — ever heard of it?!?!), to hit as many stalls as we could in a couple hours, which turned out to be just a small fraction of what’s now available. I really hope the city takes a more responsible approach to managing the crowds than they did with the pandemic-era Ave 26 cluster, but I’m not holding out hope. Unless we elect Nithya! I’ll shut up now.

We started with a lone Kazakh guy slinging a bowl of plov. That’s not an exaggeration: his entire operation was a vaguely wok-like metal bowl of rice, carrots and beef kept over a propane-fueled flame to keep it warm. He was the first of a few vendors who smiled politely and explained they don’t speak English when we tried to ask any questions more in-depth than “can we have a bowl of plov, please?”

The plov was great for a solid, hearty base of carbs, though I appreciated that, for $15, we got the plov, some chopped-up, tender beef, a side salad of cucumbers and tomatoes, and bread. A full meal!

By far the biggest, most popular, and most social media-savvy of the stands on this stretch is the Persian spot Halal Kebab by Farhod, which I’ve definitely seen make the rounds on Instagram and TikTok. But with hype comes a massive line and and even longer wait, so instead we went to Ararat, an Armenian (duh) vendor a few spaces down. Hunter approvingly noted their bread seemed to come from the Glendale bakery K’arsi Lavash, whereas some of their competitors used tortillas. Not that we don’t appreciate fusion!

On the owner’s recommendation, we got a ground chicken wrap and threw in a ground beef for quality control. No complaints here: the meat was juicy, they took the time to really toast the wrap, and the raw onion added a nice bite. As a certified Sauce Fiend, I also appreciated that they had squeeze bottles of white sauce on the folding tables. The ketchup I respectfully left undisturbed.

Our last savory stop was a Chinese vendor for chuar, the cumin-y lamb skewers Hunter ate his weight in while studying abroad in Beijing. The grill master here was working in batches, collecting enough orders to start a round of 10, cooking them all at once, and then hand delivering them to our table on a square of tinfoil, where they were devoured over the brightly colored plastic stools you see everywhere in Asia.

This was my favorite bite of the night: smoky, fatty, tender, a little spicy from the optional pepper. Next time, I’d try some of the big plate chicken (a personal favorite dish) or another large format option, but this was a perfect snack, and the service setup was so fun.

We wrapped with Mrs. Knafeh, a repeat visit for Hunter and I that Meghan rightly had heard good things about and wanted to try. Knafeh is a beautiful combination of melted cheese, crunchy pastry, sweet syrup and pistachios, and a self-evident argument for why non-cream cheese should be more heavily utilized in desserts. It also takes about 10 minutes to make to order, allowing for a much-needed digestive walk. We devoured ours and took some baklava to go, which Hunter polished off the next day.

Something I should mention about this vendor hub is that it’s nestled among some truly awful urbanism. Sunset and Figueroa are massive, pedestrian-unfriendly streets; there’s a freeway overpass bathing diners in car exhaust; and the surrounding apartments are the work of Geoff Palmer, a notorious developer whose signature faux-Italianate style is garish and unappealing. But living in a Palmer building now comes with the perk of some world-class food on your doorstep.

Anyway, to bring things back to the election: this is what’s great about LA — that you can salvage a totally unique, lovably chaotic emblem of America’s melting pot from these cruddy component parts. Angelenos are resourceful, and creative, and can see the potential in a sea of asphalt. I see that every time I go outside, and I hope our next leader does, too.

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Ever since I saw the Jonathan Gold documentary City of Gold on the big screen my first week in town, I’ve used food as a lens to understand the city. I was always going to — I’ve been obsessed with my next meal ever since I learned to read a menu — but as he did for so many others, Gold helped me understand food as the best pathway to understand LA’s otherwise incomprehensibly vast mosaic of cultures and neighborhoods.

With due respect to bacon-wrapped hot dogs and Erewhon smoothies, there’s only one food that represents LA more than any other. To that end, I gathered some friends on Sunday for a taco crawl down a stretch of Olympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights, starting at a Gold favorite: Mariscos Jalisco, the seafood truck famous for its golden-fried tacos de camaron.

Hilariously, Mariscos Jalisco is right next to another Mexican seafood truck, Mariscos 4 Vientos that always has a bigger line despite being (sorry!) not quite as iconic. On this day, the asymmetry was especially outsized, with several dozen people swarming the sidewalk outside 4 Vientos while Jalisco was positively sleepy.

It’s a mystery, because the taco de camaron — which I hadn’t eaten in at least a couple years — is a perfect dish. There are so many contrasts in one $3 bite: the spice and acidity of the salsa against the comforting potato-cheese mixture that surrounds the shrimp; the crunch of the shell against the creamy avocado on top of it; the whole temporal paradox of a fried object doused in sauce that can only exist for a short time before the whole plate becomes an unappetizing mush.

Here, let’s admire them from another angle:

After a failed mission to check out Tacos a Cabron, which wasn’t out that day for whatever reason, the group made our way up to Los Originales Tacos Arabes de Puebla. You may be aware that tacos al pastor, cooked on a revolving spit called a trompo that distinctly resembles the setup used to make gyros, doner, shawarma and other Middle Eastern meats, are the product of immigration to Mexico from the eastern Mediterranean. The taco arabe is even more unmediated: thinly sliced pork (though the protein started off as lamb back in the day), here served in a hefty flour tortilla with finely shredded cheese.

As with Mariscos Jalisco, I’d forgotten just how good this was. (Hunter also ordered a fantastic, barbacoa-esque lamb stew I forgot to capture because I was LIVING IN THE MOMENT.) This entire crawl was a nice reminder not to take the classics for granted. Thank you to Jason, a talented amateur photographer as well as a talented professional podcaster, for the personality pic:

One could argue a 10-year anniversary taco crawl should include 10 tacos, but this was a Sunday; people had places to be and a finite amount of stomach space. We ended up doubling back to the west of Mariscos Jalisco for our final stop at the nearest location of Tacos La Guera. The route was inefficient — this was not rigorously planned, we also forgot to remind everyone to bring cash — but was also an excuse for Hunter to remind everyone the bus was free.99 that whole weekend on account of the newly opened subway. Ride the D!

Tacos La Guera was the most traditional stop on our itinerary. Hunter described it as a slightly elevated version of the stands on any number of LA street corners, which feels right on. We split a plate of al pastor and suadero (aka braised beef belly) tacos that were very generously filled and called it a day, retiring to Verdugo Bar in Glassell Park for a few drinks before crashing.

I love LA, and I love arbitrary reasons to eat a lot of tacos! I’m so glad I stayed.

Over the last few years, the intersection of Melrose and Western Avenues has seen a cluster of gallery, restaurant and other retail openings under the stewardship of developer Zach Lasry, son of billionaire Marc Lasry. These businesses, which range from the Michelin-rated bistro Bar Etoile to an outpost of the mega-gallery David Zwirner, have kicked up some of the usual debates around gentrification, but also a rhetorical proxy fight. Are they located in East Hollywood, the larger neighborhood sandwiched between Hollywood, Silver Lake, and Koreatown? Or are they in…Melrose Hill?

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Eater LA ran a reported feature by Kelly Dobkin a couple years ago that dug into the broader issues around these Lasry-led changes. I’m just here to report from a couple on-the-ground experiences there this past week — one at a restaurant that’s a part of this deliberate upscaling, and one that just happens to be nearby.

In the former camp, there’s Little Fish, the second location of (newly married!) couple Niki Vahle and Anna Sonenshein’s pandemic-era fish sandwich pop-up turned brick-and-mortar restaurant. (Their original outpost in Echo Park will move from a takeout window to the former Sage space in the coming months.) Though the Melrose outpost is open all day, and I’ve heard reports that it’s a lovely place to camp out with a laptop in the afternoons, it’s notably more ambitious, leaning towards composed small plates over casual takeout fare. In lieu of a gussied-up (and delicious) take on a Filet-O-Fish, the sandwich offerings at dinner are limited to the bite-sized confection of soy-cured mussels, mayo and potato chips you see above. I loved this, especially how the ciabatta-ish bread was pillow soft and all the texture came from the crispy spuds.

I loved this whole meal, actually, which we enjoyed on a double date with our friends Shaker and Lani that allowed us to sample about half the menu. (The upside of smaller portions!) The service was irreverent and casual yet attentive — our server hand-wrote a couple specials on the paper table covering, but switched out our place settings several times to break the meal into courses and made sure to tell us they were checking on our dessert. (We hadn’t really noticed any delay.) And while not every dish fully worked, most did while attempting something interesting. Not everyone feels this way, but I value innovation over consistency when I’m eating out. If that’s your bag, too, then so is Little Fish.

The dish above was my favorite of the night: Dungeness crab and asparagus, blanketed in Maltaise — basically Hollandaise plus citrus — and sprinkled with almonds. It was like a fancy Eggs Benedict minus the bread or English muffin, i.e. only the good stuff.

The tartare was one of the misses I alluded to earlier — the muddiness of the nori (amplified by the umami-heavy fried mushrooms) and the sharpness of the wasabi combined to overpower the beef. But I have a feeling that if I came back, there’d be a tweaked and improved version of the dish waiting for me, and the effort was worth the attempt.

How else do you get cabbage rolls stuffed with abalone rice in a tomato beurre blanc, an unholy fusion of Eastern European, Cantonese and Californian traditions? (Turns out I like abalone better chopped up than whole.) Or a pleasingly springy, homemade, deeply un-kosher sausage made with pork and shellfish over a bed of spring vegetables?

But our favorite dish was the seafood-free dessert, a masa cake with lime zest and sour cream ice cream that tasted like an alkaline cornbread or a (slightly) sweet take on a Southwestern chili dinner. A server complimented us on the speed and totality with which we took this down.

Whatever one thinks of the Lasry projects, I think it’s worth noting he’s backed many independent, locally owned small businesses that have a specific vision — as opposed to, say, bringing Shake Shack and Sweetgreen to Silver Lake. Vahle and Sonenshein are doing things here you can’t find anywhere else, including their other restaurants. I’ll happily be back.

A few blocks north of the Melrose Hill epicenter is Roshona Bilash, a relatively new Bangladeshi restaurant run by chef-owner Abul Ibrahim and his family. Roshona Bilash is notably due north and west of the stretch of 3rd Street near Vermont Avenue known as Little Bangladesh; there’s something funny about a business landing outside one cluster and ending up near another that’s more associated with halibut crudo than biryani. But good is good, and that’s what both these restaurants are.

Roshona Bilash is definitely not the kind of place that changes out your silverware. Ibrahim took our order himself, painstakingly writing out every single menu item on the ticket in a process that took several minutes. (No POS system here.) The biryani is served out of a giant rice cooker to the side of the counter. We were frankly informed that several menu items were not in stock and had been swapped out for other ones.

The menu as a whole is almost entirely carbs and meat, with no fish and barely any vegetables. It’s not great for eating light, but it is great for getting stuffed to the gills at a price point of less than $30 a person after tip. We didn’t get a wrap, but from what I saw you could get two full meals out of one for less than $15.

We ordered the chicken biryani, a couple kebabs (chicken tikka and beef seekh), the bone marrow nihari, some fried items from the deli case and a couple house breads. The breads — a puffy naan and a flaky paratha — were the somewhat surprising star, but everything was great; I only regretted that the nihari was the only curry-adjacent item we ordered to pour over the rice, and had my eye on the weekend-only lamb shank for a return visit.

Whether or not “Melrose Hill” makes its way into the popular lexicon — and there is an actual hill to the intersection’s northeast, plus an official sign from the city — it’s one of my favorite places to eat right now. (The Filipino, barbecue-adjacent Kuya Lord is a top 10 restaurant in LA for me, and never seems to be crowded despite getting every writeup possible.) I’m a descriptivist by nature; to me, if enough people agree a particular phrase corresponds with a particular meaning, I’m not going to stand athwart history yelling “stop.” I am, however, going to make a return trip in the near future. I still haven’t been to the cafe version of Chainsaw.

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Before we left, Hunter and I had only a single reservation on the books. All of our destinations — Hong Kong, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore — were famous for their street food, so we didn’t feel the need to book many fancy meals in advance. Besides, we knew the pre-planned meal would be a good one; we even scheduled it for the last day of our vacation to go out with a bang. We were right.

Wing is a Chinese fine dining restaurant by chef-owner Vicky Cheng located on the upper floors of a skyscraper. It’s ranked 11th in the current edition of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, a somewhat flawed organization with a certain set preferences that nonetheless carries real caché. Tables our so in demand our friend Matt (sign up for his newsletter!) had to pull some food media strings to get us in for lunch. Thank you, Matt!

Cheng’s background is in French cuisine; Wing is his effort to combine that experience and training with ingredients and techniques from the full breadth of Chinese cooking. That fusion colors every aspect of the meal, including service. Courses are prix fixe and portions are small, but the appetizers are served communally, with separate sets of chopsticks for serving and eating. There’s a wine pairing available, but the complementary beverage is tea, not water.

This was our menu for the day:

And these were the aforementioned appetizers:

I’m kicking myself for not getting a closer shot of that eggplant, which was cut into the shape of a braid with some of the most impressive knife work I’ve ever seen. The mapo tofu riff, served with a glasslike century egg, was my favorite. (The leftover sauce was later re-served to us tossed with housemade egg noodles, a genius touch.) The razor clam was fresh, zingy and saline from the kelp. We got abalone instead of shrimp, and will transparently say I don’t love the chewy, borderline rubbery texture of that particular gastropod. But that’s just my personal preference!

It would be a mistake for me to just run through the final plated version of every dish, because Wing really embraces the theatricality of a great luxury meal. At that price, you should be getting a meal and a show — like this jaw-dropping tableau of the ingredients used throughout, featuring live shellfish in the middle:

Or a spring roll filled with dried and rehydrated sea cucumber — an extra course, thanks to the Matt connection — sliced tableside with a razor-sharp cleaver. Just think about what it takes to get a cut that clean, as opposed to shattering crumbs everywhere the way I almost certainly would have:

Hunter compared the thick, full-bodied sauce to the seafood version of a demiglace. I loved it.

It says a lot about me that I found the brothy nature of the soup course (give me stewy sludge any day) more of a challenge than the cod sperm sac, aka shirako, served with it, but both aspects of the dish broadened my horizons:

The mains were uniformly excellent, though my favorite was the delicate-yet-meaty crab, cleaved perfectly from its shell and served with tiny, rice-based cheung fun crisped up like gnocchi:

I also adored how this Macau sole — hyperlocal, as the name suggests, to the coastal waters between Hong Kong and the namesake casino hub — recognizably toyed with the steamed fish topped with aromatics and sizzling oil that’s a staple of Cantonese cuisine:

And how this pigeon, flash-smoked tableside, was subsequently served bare on a plate with a pair of plastic gloves so we could devour each half with our hands. The bird itself recalled the roast goose that’s ubiquitous in Hong Kong, and the presentation flew in the face of what’s considered refined enough to be considered “fancy” food.

We finished out the savory with a virtuous vegetable course and an uber-unctuous fish maw in abalone sauce over rice. Maybe I just like abalone more as a condiment?

Dessert began with ice noodles served over a coconut sorbet with sesame seeds that quickly melted into the kind of sweet-ish soup that’s also ubiquitous throughout the city, plus my vote for the prettiest plates in a meal that included some stiff competition:

But I have the postprandial palate of an American five-year-old, where the “not too sweet” praise that’s the epitome of Asian dessert excellence has never once occurred to me as a compliment. I am what I am! I only say this to admit that, while the obligatory fruit plate was a stunner, I barely noticed it in favor of a perfectly fried donut filled with salted egg yolk cream.

Impeccable French pastry craft, with a riff on yolk-y crème pâtissière that takes the European staple in a decidedly Chinese direction. It’s the restaurant’s thesis in a bite, and ensured I’d leave thinking about the meal for a long while to come.

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This year’s cassoulet was going pretty well, and I was excited to walk you all through the process. Then this happened.

What you are looking at is an entire 36-inch oven, toppled over and propped up by a 7-quart Dutch oven (one of two!) still, somehow, filled with cassoulet. But still missing what felt like several quarts of porky liquid, sloshed all over our kitchen floor just three hours before about two dozen guests were due to show up.

It was one of the worst kitchen disasters I have experienced in my entire life. At one point I was slip-and-sliding around our dining table on my hands and knees, trying to get a grip on the fat-slicked wood so I could try to wipe it up. We ran out of paper towels at the most inopportune time possible. Hunter is still on the hook for an apology gift.

And somehow, it all worked out in the end.

Let’s rewind!

The weeklong effort to make cassoulet began by special-ordering five pounds of beans from Rancho Gordo. (Yes, this was in addition to the six pounds we receive every quarter. Our Q2 box is imminent!) Hunter was thankfully convinced to use only four in the end, so we have an extra pack of white legumes kicking around our pantry now.

Hunter works loosely off the recipe in Paul Kahan’s Cheers to the Publican, itself named for an indebted to the French chef David Campigotto, whose orthodoxy includes refusing to use bread crumbs as a cheat code for a crunchy crust. I was lucky enough to have Campigotto’s cassoulet at an LA popup sans Hunter a couple years ago, giving me the delightful ability to lord my firsthand knowledge of how this version is supposed to taste over his head whenever I please.

My main piece of feedback on earlier cassoulets is that they haven’t been well-seasoned enough, which is totally understandable in a dish with so much fat that it can require a lot of salt to not end up, well, kinda bland. This was the first year Hunter used the Kahan sub-recipe for duck confit, which involves marinating leg quarters in copious amounts of black pepper, garlic and herbes de Provence before cooking. (Hunter opted for a countertop sous vide over firing up the oven.) Side note: sourcing quarters of duck meat at sub-Whole Foods prices is very annoying and required trips to three separate Chinese grocery stores, including two different locations of 99 ranch. Cassoulet is not for the weak!

For the purposes of this blog post, the opposite of “weak” is “person who decides to make Toulouse sausage — a simply seasoned blend of garlic, black pepper, white wine, and more herbes de Provence with pork belly, loin and fat — from scratch.”

You can start to understand why this was about a weeklong effort all-in.

Then, after the sausages dried out overnight and a stock was made using trotters sourced from the good people at Peads & Barnetts via the Hollywood Farmers Market, and the spare ribs (also Peads) were sliced into individual servings, it was time to assemble.

Before I get into The Incident, I want to take a moment to admire just how good everything looked before it went into the oven. Were we ever so young!

So, how does an oven end up on the floor? When two extremely full, extremely heavy pots of cassoulet are on a rolling rack directly above a second rolling rack with a 20-pound pizza stone resting on top of it, that’s how. Hunter rolled the top rack forward to check on the cassoulet, gravity did its work, and boom! Disaster.

(Hunter would very much like me to add that the oven was resting on top of a wooden structure his contractor jerry-rigged to have insufficient points of contact with the ground, so it’s not entirely user error. My counterpoint to this is that the oven has never completely tipped over on my watch.)

Thanks to the magic of electric-powered appliances, the ensuing mess was not actively dangerous to our health, just disgusting. I picked individual beans out of our Ikea island with my bare hands. The broom I used for a preliminary sweep-up is probably unusable now. An oven knob went missing, only for us to belatedly discover it inside the cassoulet. (It’s made of metal, not microplastics.) But after an hour, a vigorous mop and a second round with a Swiffer and some wooden floor cleaner, the kitchen was in shockingly good shape. All the cassoulet needed was some more bake time anyway.

I don’t know it was the ensuing delirium, but this really was the best cassoulet Hunter’s ever made. He served it with homemade bread, fancy French butter, and a salad of homegrown sorrel, parmesan and pickled fennel in a Meyer lemon (also homegrown!) dressing. Friends brought reinforcements, like Lani’s butter-enriched “croissant” sourdough. Dessert was a Basque cheesecake and petit fours from the fine folks at Valerie.

What did we learn from this? Mostly the weight limit of our main oven. (The cassoulets were split between the once-again-upright-and-miracoulously-still-functional original and the countertop Anova purchased with our wedding slush fund.) But it was still nice to see that so much labor wasn’t completely derailed by an 11th-hour snafu, and that we were mostly able to laugh about it by the time people showed up — though we still told guests to keep their shoes on inside before taking our plates up to the roof. Thanks to our friend Meghan for the photo below.

And we’re probably still gonna do it again next year.

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But Max and Helen’s isn’t alone. There’s also Hermon’s, the semi-steakhouse from powerhouse restaurant group Last Word Hospitality — also of Found Oyster and Rasarumah, among others — that slings American comfort food to diners in deep, plush booths. I went to Hermon’s this week and had a totally pleasant time. I also didn’t have to deal with the hassle of making a reservation, which a dining companion did for me and proved absolutely necessary. The same friend had tried to walk in, a completely reasonable way to experience an actual neighborhood spot, and ended up waiting hours for an adequate steak frites. I don’t blame him for swearing to never return.

But the toughest table in LA right now, as local readers are surely aware, is Wilde’s, a British-Californian restaurant in Los Feliz co-owned by two high school classmates. Compared to its density of millennials with money to burn, Los Feliz has a real paucity of good restaurants. Combined with the rarity of British food in this city and a pint-sized, 30-seat dining room, Wilde’s instantly became a sensation. There’s almost always a line at opening, and the comical wait times soon prompted the team to take bookings for dinner. (The space operates as a more casual café during the day.) Max and Helen’s should take notes!

My eyes glaze over at the umpteenth wine-bar-with-small-plates or Cal-Ital date spot to start getting reviews on Instagram Reels, but I’m not immune to hype with a concept as specific as the Wilde’s MO of marrying UK classics with the bounty of a local farmers market. Having just been to St. John Bread and Wine, I was also curious to see how Wilde’s would stack up against one of its obvious inspirations. So I went through the hassle of grabbing a table at 10am sharp two weeks ahead, marshaled up a group of four, and showed up hungry. I won’t beat around the bush here: we were disappointed!

I want to preface this by saying what follows is not intended to be a takedown. I do not think the people who run Wilde’s are maliciously and intentionally delivering a subpar experience because demand is high and they know they can get away with it. The staffers we spoke to were hard-working, friendly, and apologetic about the chaos, going so far as to send us a free dessert when our dinner stretched to over two hours. What I’m interested in here is in how hype can work directly counter to a restaurant’s stated purpose. Wilde’s wants to be a casual neighborhood bistro, but it’s been doomed by its own success to be a jam-packed destination that requires advance planning — and sometimes can’t even deliver for the guests who do manage to make it in the door.

Buzz does have some advantages. Christopher Nolan and his wife/producing partner Emma Thomas came in just after we did, and I’m not above feeling a happy jolt of recognition from that kind of celebrity spotting. But the photographer taking pictures on full flash (for a New York Times piece, we heard) was a less welcome, more disruptive presence. And if Wilde’s didn’t necessarily ask for such overwhelming attention, they could’ve turned down the music in the dining room so the noise was slightly less deafening.

All of this could be forgiven, of course, if the food itself came through. We ordered almost the entire menu by telling our server what we didn’t want, eliminating just a handful of dishes from an already compressed menu. I can confidently say we sampled almost everything Wilde’s had to offer, though it may have been on an off night. (Necessary disclaimer I am not a real restaurant critic, who would visit on multiple occasions for quality control. I am just a woman with too many opinions.) And I can regretfully report we didn’t love what we ate.

A house-made Guinness bread was a lovely and promising start. The other appetizers were either unremarkable (a fried disc of trout rillette, a plain wedge of blue cheese) or soaked in olive oil to the point of distraction (a raw celeriac salad, the obligatory crudo). But it’s the entrees that pushed our impressions into the overtly negative. The fried skate arrived as a dramatic, hulking mass, but there’s a reason fish and chips mostly come in smaller components. The edges of ours were nicely fried; the batter in the center was raw. Like, wet. It’s hard to get a perfect fry on a piece that large, which is why most don’t attempt it.

I can’t help but suspect that kind of objective technical error becomes more likely when a kitchen is as slammed as Wilde’s is on a nightly basis. We found the bangers and mash as well as the meat pie to be off-puttingly sweet, which one can chalk up to individual taste. The fish was harder to excuse. And while the interpersonal service was warm and inviting, the complete lack of spoons on the table to distribute sauce-heavy dishes among a group of four was the kind of detail a more dialed-in place would’ve addressed in advance.

The aforementioned free dessert, a warm sticky toffee pudding with a crackly top, was delicious. I still left wondering if Wilde’s could ever escape the curse of its own acclaim. Hermon’s, for example, is a huge space; it’s annoying to get into now, but I expect in six months to a year it’ll settle into something more approachable. Wilde’s is a tiny jewel box easily overwhelmed by a crowd. It’s so hard for restaurants in LA — battered by immigration raids, inflation, the aftershocks of the entertainment strikes and more — to keep their doors open at all that complaining one is simply too popular feels silly. But when a business says they want to be a neighborhood gathering place, I try to take them at their word. For now, the stated mission goes unfulfilled.

Speaking of Gold, his closest analog working in London right now is probably Jonathan Nunn, the proprietor of the Substack-based food publication Vittles. Almost all the selections highlighted here were shamelessly cribbed from Jonathan’s tireless work across London’s incomprehensibly vast urban patchwork. Hunter paid for a premium subscription to Vittles before we left, which came with essential resources like a newcomer’s guide to London food. It was the best money we could’ve spent, and while I’ve already sent Jonathan a thank you note via Instagram DM, I’m professing my enthusiasm publicly here.

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That newcomer’s guide helpfully includes a few suggested food crawls, organized by cuisine and level of distance you’re willing to schlep out from the center. Almost straight off the plane, we dove right into a quickie tour of Whitechapel, the eastern neighborhood quite close to the city’s commercial hub. There are tons of South Asian businesses there, an off-brand weak spot in LA’s typically comprehensive melting pot. We started with fenugreek chicken and mutton curry at Lahore One:

Then devoured a couple plates of biryani at, well, Haji Nanna Biryani:

And while I’m skipping around a bit chronologically here, I would be remiss if I didn’t shoutout the charcoal-grilled kebab medley at Raavi Kebab near Euston Station, the rare non-Nunn recommendation here that came via our friend Hareem:

Something we quickly picked up about eating in London — and specifically designing our tourism around meals, as we are wont to do — is that you have to cover a lot of ground. In American urban planning terms, London combines the geographic breadth of LA with the basic organizing principle of New York: a dense, wealthy center that radiates outward and gets more affordable and therefore ethnic enclave-friendly as you go. That made maximizing our meals a little tricky to balance with sightseeing and meeting up with friends, but we did our best.

Once choice that made things easy was buying tickets to Tottenham Hotspur at the team’s stadium in North London, not too far from a string of Turkish spots on Green Lanes in Haringey. (The match could be a newsletter in itself, but suffice it to say you can really get to know a country by observing its sports fans up close.) We walked the stretch a few times and settled on Gökyüzü, where we ordered an absolute spread.

I am not a brunch person, but this was a hybrid meal I could get on board with: menemen (crudely, shakshuka but the eggs are scrambled) with lahmacun (tomato-y, meaty flatbread) and hummus topped with spiced beef (this version seemingly tahini-less or at least very light on the sesame).

But everyone agreed the real knockout was the sarma beyti — a lavash-wrapped kebab grilled, chopped and served with tomato sauce and yogurt. It’s a lightly remixed version of iskender kebab, which I’ve had before, but insanely juicy and with a nice additional texture.

The East Ham neighborhood wasn’t as convenient to other activities, but for our final dinner, we still managed to wrangle a crew to visit Udaya, a Kerala-style restaurant that specializes in fried seafood. (Having already eaten Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi food, an Indian meal had the perk of completing an accidental quadfecta of South Asian cuisines.) The Vittles-promised effect was to transport us to a seaside snack shack, and this whole crab nailed the brief:

Honestly, we probably overdid it on the fried food — I don’t know if we needed crab, chicken and a seafood medley, even if that medley was maybe our favorite dish of the night. But the most pleasant surprise of the meal to me was the cassava flavored with mustard seed that came with our obligatory curry:

As you can see from the wreckage pictured here, including the aforementioned seafood medley and a whole fish steamed in a banana leaf, we attacked the table with enthusiasm. I was stunned to realize that for once, we did not over-order for our party of six.

And that was London! I left both satisfied with how much we’d squeezed in and itching to go back and explore more, which feels like the sign of a good trip. I’m currently procrastinating on getting ready to host a holiday party by writing this newsletter, so that’ll probably be my next dispatch. Happy nondenominational seasonal celebration to you all, however you mark the occasion.

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I’d been to London a couple times previously, but only in the summer, when the sun sets after 9pm and everyone is in a euphoric mood. I feel like I’d previously seen the city on its best behavior, and this time I got to see the place as it actually is: cold, dark and rainy, of course, but also more cozy and hunkered down. Our sightseeing reflected this. I spent a lot of time in crowded pubs with fogged-up windows. I went to a football match, walked through Christmas markets, and took a day trip to Oxford, emptied out after the end of term. I saw a play on the West End. I had a Sunday roast!

I also ate a lot, in a city that reminded me of LA in many ways — chiefly diversity and sprawl — but is radically different in others. I’m going to split the resulting food diary into a couple parts, starting with the pair of special occasion meals we planned well in advance.

Rambutan

The first was Rambutan, a Sri Lankan restaurant located directly adjacent to the packed and touristy Borough Market on the south shore of the Thames. Rambutan is far from a deep cut; the place has over 45,000 followers on Instagram, required a weeks-out reservation, and couldn’t seat us when we showed up about 20 minutes early.

But! They instantly parked us outside, took our drink order, consistently checked in, and brought us to our table once it was ready without us having to ask. Hyped-up restaurants can be a crapshoot; at a certain point, the demand for limited space can start to seriously affect the staff’s ability to deliver a pleasant experience, and I wish we were more honest about that. Hunter and I just had an extremely disappointing experience at a white-hot place in LA, a direct result of sloppy, inattentive service that made us feel like a number. (DM me if you want a name…or speculate wildly in the comments, your choice.) What a relief that Rambutan steered clear of the quicksand.

After our first round of drinks (I had a gimlet riff with coconut-washed rum and chili oil), we opted for a tasting menu that took some of the guesswork out of assembling an order. Some dishes were more traditional, like the gundu dosas (same fermented lentil batter, but in fried ball rather than pancake form) with cilantro sambal listed below; others made more liberal use of local produce, like a radicchio and roast celeriac salad I did not photograph but has really stuck with me.

Mostly, though, I keep coming back to the service. It’s so hard to create an atmosphere that feels relaxed and casual yet expertly handled, and successfully doing so is part of what you’re paying a premium for. While we were deliberating dessert, Will mentioned he was both stuffed and lactose intolerant before we ordered some toasted milk tea ice cream for everyone else. Our server didn’t say anything, but came back with three spoons instead of four for the full table. It’s the little things that show a real pro is listening while also giving you space.

The food itself also delivered, of course. Of the mains, our favorites were the chicken pongal rice, a kind of congee-khichdi hybrid of rice and lentils cooked in spiced milk to a creamy consistency:

And the kottu roti, or chopped up and stir-fried flatbread, topped with crab:

With all love to Kurrypinch, this is not a meal you can get in LA, and that’s all I want when I’m traveling. (This is why we skipped over London’s modern Thai scene, which is super active right now. Another time!)

St. John Bread and Wine

For place-specific London food, though, you can’t really do better than St. John, the restaurant empire built atop a foundation of nose-to-tail cooking. (Will accurately compared its place in the culinary canon to Chez Panisse with more offal.) While I had visited the more casual offshoot St. John Bread and Wine on my last trip, Hunter is an avid fan of the cookbook, which I can’t recommend as a collection of practical recipes but heartily do as a literary manifesto — my favorite line cautions that a chocolate ice cream “takes a few days to find itself in the freezer.” Our decadent lunch was a return trip for me and a pilgrimage for him.

I can safely say this lived up to expectations. Just look at this salad: whole roasted shallots topped with puntarelle and shatteringly crispy pork skin. The dish used both the leaves and core of the gnarly-looking chicory, famously unwieldy and annoying to break down. It’s cool that the whole-animal philosophy there doesn’t just apply to animals.

Like, note the entire radish and its greens plopped atop this composed toast, a tower of pungent anchovies and cold mutton that was worth the annoyance of splitting four ways:

Or the simplicity of this baked slab made of cheddar and fennel, served with a side salad dressed in some sort of black olive concoction. It was the only purely vegetarian main dish we ordered, and it didn’t feel like an afterthought or a consolation prize.

But meat is still the name of the game here for a reason. The New York Jew in me was delighted by the pastrami-esque finish of this ox tongue, balanced out with some pungent green sauce:

And the chips fried in beef drippings, which we ordered a second plate of to sop up the aforementioned green sauce.

It was all so deceptively simple and plainly presented, an approach that culminated with a dessert whose plating made me laugh out loud:

That is an Eccles cake — basically a currant hand pie — paired not with cream or a sauce, but a giant slab of mild cheese. Eat your heart out, Paul Hollywood!

I’m running out of space. Next time, I’ll talk about our more casual, but no less noteworthy, meals. Before that, I have to make eight dozen(!) cookies for an exchange. Ciao!

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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, if you choose to ignore the colonial origin story and make it your own. It’s all about food, gratitude, hanging out with people you love and more food; eating is so central to the idea that many households do away with any pretense of “dinner” and get to it in the early afternoon. Who are we kidding? The whole day is about one thing, and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise. (We asked guests to arrive around 3pm and were done with dessert by 6.)

Hunter and I divided and conquered. I took on the desserts, green beans and mac and cheese; Hunter did the turkey, stuffing and potatoes, plus a couple starters because the man can’t help himself. It turned out our friend Xanthe thought she was assigned all appetizers, not an appetizer, getting the meal started as it would continue: with way too much food.

Behold, oysters Rockefeller with creamed spinach, breadcrumbs and Gruyere:

Plus rosemary pork loin with avocado tonnato and bread, using a recipe from local chef Jeremy Fox’s new cookbook On Meat:

And crudité with cheddar walnut gougéres and a dip duet via Xanthe, who really outdid herself here. The spread on the right has miso, labneh and caramelized onions (thank you, Samin Nosrat); the right is a classic muhammarra made with red peppers and walnuts and topped with pomegranate seeds. The leftovers are going to be at a Friendsgiving we’re attending later today and I’m already excited about eating the onion dip again.

As for my contributions, I am a longtime devotee of Martha Stewart’s mac and cheese, a dead-simple bechamel that uses only two cheeses (white cheddar and Gruyére) and fairly minimal seasoning (nutmeg, cayenne and black pepper). I keep meaning to experiment with creamier versions that use more complex cheese blends or additional forms of dairy, but why mess with a classic? My only deviation from Martha’s scripture is that I use pre-toasted panko breadcrumbs for my topping instead of actual bread cubes. I find that pre-browning is essential and that putting raw carbs on top for the final bake won’t produce real crunch.

For the green beans, I used Frankie Gaw’s genius recipe, which dry-fries the beans and adds sake, mirin and soy to the cream sauce for an Asian-inflected twist that adds acid and interest while still being recognizably classic. I finished with pantry-stable fried shallots from my local Thai supermarket, because I maintain that frying alliums for garnish at home is for suckers.

For the stuffing, Hunter made two loaves of challah from scratch the day before. When confronted with the resulting fused mega-loaf, which took up an entire sheet pan, he wondered aloud: “I didn’t really need to double that recipe, did I?”

Nevertheless, he persisted in making two batches of stuffing, one with sage sausage in it and one without. Here is a redux of our conversation when he told me this menu plan:

Me: You’re making two stuffings? For eight people?

Hunter: It’s really the same stuffing — one just has sausage in it.

Me: So…two stuffings.

It was delicious, as savory bread pudding inevitably is. We collectively ate a third of one pan.

Hunter also made eight pounds worth — yes, one pound of potato per person — of Joël Robuchon’s famous basically half butter-and-milk mixture mashed potatoes, which I did not get a great picture of because mashed potatoes are not that photogenic. But what really matters is the turkey, of course.

We are a household that enjoys the challenge of making turkey taste good. I respect those who opt out of this annual obligation and choose not to cook their holiday feast on hard mode; I’ve seen coq au vin, chicken pot pie and duck bo ssam on social media, and they all looked delicious. But to me, Thanksgiving is about toying with tradition while still producing a final result that you wouldn’t have the other 364 days of the year.

Anyway, Hunter butterflied the breast, formed a roulade using garlic butter and mushroom powder, and cooked the whole thing in our fancy new Anova steam oven, which can sous vide proteins without the need for a vacuum sealer. A turchetta, if you will. It’s probably the best way to make the white meat well-seasoned, tender and definitely not the kind of thing you find on a mediocre deli sandwich.

Not to be left out, the vacuum sealer and immersion circulator got their day in the sun with the dark meat, which was confited in chicken and turkey fat, thyme, allspice, juniper berries and “a lot of garlic.” It was served shredded, but looked better like this:

I made most of the pies the day before, which is the nice part of handling dessert — you’re mostly done by the time the real stress starts. That said, I did start preheating the oven for the mac and cheese only to learn Hunter had put the sliced challah in there to “keep it warm and dry.” We only lost a few slices and, as previously established, quantity of challah stuffing was ultimately not an issue.

Anyway, my dad brought up his traditional cranberry-apple pie, this time with some tips (like boiling the apples) incorporated from Kenji Lopez-Alt’s master recipe. For my part, I tried something new with the comedian Demi Adejuyigbe’s pumpkin “pudding” pie, which he generously shared on the website formerly known as Twitter. It promised and delivered a denser texture than the sometimes watery custard that puts people off some pumpkin desserts, thickening the custard with flour without getting too bread-on-bready. I also used a gingersnap crust, because I firmly believe cookie crusts for non-fruit pies are both tastier and more painless than the traditional pastry. The pie burned a bit in the oven, but I’m choosing to blame Hunter because he was supposed to keep an eye on it while I was out running an errand. Still tasted good!

And finally, I made an Oreo chocolate chess pie, because while chocolate isn’t necessarily autumnal it is my favorite flavor and this was my house, dammit.

I’m almost at the email limit already, but happy Thanksgiving! What were your menus like?

Real Bean Heads™ probably know about the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. (The New Yorker wrote about it and everything!) For those who don’t, the Club is an ultra exclusive — as in, Hunter was on the waiting list for years — subscription service that sends its members a quarterly shipment of beans. You don’t get to choose the kinds of beans you get; sometimes you might get lentils or rice too, and you always get an extra spice like oregano or chili powder, plus a charming newsletter with recipes and other ideas for how to cook up your beans. It’s like a CSA box for protein- and fiber-maxxing.

But that newsletter, while delightful, isn’t exhaustive in its catalog of bean techniques. Which is where you all come in.

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This latest batch included chickpeas, pintos, black lentils, California coronas (big, pale blobs), buckeyes, and flor de junios (similar to pintos, but allegedly more sought after). We did not manage to cook through our last shipment before this one arrived, so we still have a pound of Good Mother Stallards hanging out in the pantry, plus the better part of a package of red lentils. The thing about lentils is that they cook up a crazy amount, so it’s hard to use them all when a half cup dry can feed a crowd and then some.

Simply put, I gotta figure out how to acquire enough of a bean habit that we don’t run out of cabinet space. My friend Noah (buy his book!) is a big advocate of just cooking up a pot at the beginning of the week and finding ways to use it, but I think I need some more creative ideas to keep up the habit. There are only so many batches of hummus or TikTok-viral dense bean salads a woman can make before she dies of boredom inside (while remaining the picture of health outside, because beans are insanely nutritious).

I kept things simple enough for my first crack at the new box. I spent a morning soaking the pintos, then spent the afternoon — the magic of a work from home day — simmering them in water with an onion, a head of garlic, a couple bay leaves and a boat load of salt. Then I refried them an Anaheim chile, half a red onion and a couple Rancho Gordo spices (chili powder and Mexican oregano).

I was riffing on Kay Chun’s NYT Cooking recipe for bean and cheese burritos, a freezable, handheld meal that proved ideal for work lunches in the coming days. (We got a couple Takenaka bento boxes from our wedding registry and they’ve been put to work.) The refried beans went in a tortilla with a handful of pepper jack cheese we had on hand, then griddled off to seal my terrible folding job and melt the cheese.

To go with, I made a salsa by roasting a few late summer tomatoes that had gone a little soft — Hunter made a sauce with the rest a few days later — with more garlic and onion, then blended them with a chipotle and some of the sauce from the can. Both Super A and our local corner store sell ripe avocados, so I mashed a couple with lime juice, salt and cilantro for a very basic guacamole.

Completing the spread was an esquites-adjacent salad that used up the corn and Anaheims I got from the farmers market with some cotija, lime juice, and more cilantro. Beans themselves are not very photogenic, but this was a nice, colorful plate.

The burrito looked even better in cross-section:

One pound each of beans and cheese made about 12 burritos. Between the two of us, Hunter and I ate nine in three days and froze the last three. The results speak for themselves, but I could also feel the fatigue setting in toward the end — and we still have five pounds of beans to go! Plus infinitely more after that, so long as we remain in the good graces of Rancho Gordo proprietor/bean wizard Steve Sando.

And so I ask you: what do I do with all these beans (and lentils)?? I’m not sure any of the beans from this group work for red beans and rice, though that dish has been on my mind. There’s an Alison Roman pork-and-beans riff with harissa that I’ve been meaning to re-make for years. I could see the California coronas making a good pizza bean bake with all that fresh tomato sauce we have on hand.

Beyond that…I’m all ears. Help me, Substack brain trust. I’m drowning in beans.

Besides supporting DTLA, Sora was already on our radar for a couple of reasons. First, it’s Turkish, which is not nearly as robust a diaspora cuisine in LA as, say, Persian or Armenian. To the extent LA does have Turkish restaurants (I had a very solid iskender kebab at Nuka Cafe in Westwood once), they’re mostly casual and workmanlike — not exactly chef-driven. Second, the chef who does drive Sora, Okay Inak, manages the entire operation on his own, from cooking to bussing plates to wiping down tables. Everything.

Here’s what the place looks like when you walk in:

All the natural light is carefully blocked out by curtains and shades. The effect is transportive, and the whole setup reminded me of Japan, a country that’s structurally a lot more hospitable (low rents, small real estate footprints, etc.) to a single person running an entire business. I don’t know how Chef Inak manages it here in LA, but I’m glad he is.

Because there are no waitstaff, you order via touchscreen when you walk in the door. It’s one of a couple minor trade-offs to the one-man-band ethos; the bread that came with our cold appetizers wasn’t fully warm or all that fresh. But the slightly bumpy entry quickly fades from the memory as soon as the hot dishes start hitting the table.

Addison singled out the shrimp in tarhana butter in his review, and he was right to do it. Tarhana is a dried and fermented mix of yogurt, grain, and spices; it’s a totally distinct, slightly funky taste to the unseasoned palate, but combines with the sweet fullness of dairy fat for a truly addictive dish.

The icli kofte — the Turkish version of kibbeh, the meat-and-bulgur combo that’s common across the Middle East in many different preparations — was also excellent. It’s so beautiful how almost every nation on Earth has their version of a dumpling, some of which include a lovely note of sumac to cut through all the richness.

The kebabs were great, if less photogenic, so I’ll skip straight to dessert.

This is cheese halva, which the internet tells me is also known as peynir hevlasi or hosmerim. It’s neither the sugary sesame candy I know as halva nor cheesy the way knafeh, one of the great Middle Eastern desserts, is. (Side plug: there’s a knafeh truck in the growing food truck row at Figueroa and Sunset that slaps and makes an ideal double bill with Baba Kebap.) Instead, it’s a cake make from fresh cheese and semolina flour, served here with yuzu and black sesame ice cream. It’s light yet rich at the same time, not all that sweet yet sufficiently decadent to close a meal out on a high note.

Closer to home, I’ve been experimenting a lot with Everyone’s Table, the cookbook by Top Chef alum and Kann proprietor Gregory Gourdet I shamelessly requested as a wedding gift from my friend Jane. The book bills itself as “global recipes for modern health”; I’d sell it as “fancy paleo with aggressive seasoning.” It’s heavy on veggies, protein, and complex carbs — which I always crave after less-than-health-centric events like, say, a wedding — but doesn’t feel virtuous, Gourdet centers upmarket ingredients like duck and plays around with influences from Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, among other places.

The serving platter (from our registry!) you see above contains a couple pork chops from my beloved Peads & Barnetts, encrusted with a blend of cumin, coriander, and black pepper and topped by cherries cooked down with garlic, ginger, chipotle, honey, and lime. All the aromatics take the cherries in a more savory direction, and the fresh oregano in the herb topping added a nice zing.

In a highly gendered division of labor, I sent Hunter up to the roof to actually grill the chops, plus some ciabatta from Bub and Grandma’s and some zucchini he used to kill off some homemade Chinese spice rub we had lying around. To round the meal out, I tossed some Weiser potatoes in leftover Caesar dressing with radishes and dill (concept cribbed from Molly Baz) and put out some esquites I’d made the day before.

I do not love summer weather, but I can begrudgingly accept it as the price for summer produce.

Every wedding demands a million decisions, and making those decisions requires a set of priorities. Those priorities might be “looking good in photos” or “an intimate family celebration” or “keeping the budget in line.” There are a lot of potential north stars, and none of them is inherently better than any other! It just depends on who you (and your partner) are and what you (and your partner) want. But it will surprise no one to learn that what Hunter and I wanted was to make sure all our guests ate as well as possible.

If you’ve ever had a meal at a wedding, you know that this is a tall task! Lots of venues oblige couples to use in-house caterers, and no matter what, feeding dozens and dozens of people at the same time is hard to do. I’ve waited 45 minutes for a salad as overworked servers fan out across a crowded room; I’ve eaten room-temperature entrées with vegetables steamed to oblivion while waiting under a cloche. Frankly, it’s a low bar, and we were determined to sail over it.

It helped that we weren’t wedded (ha) to most traditional contours of a marriage celebration, and in fact preferred to avoid a lot of them. When we got engaged, my mom joked to my future mother-in-law that she bet the only traditional thing about this wedding would be that two nice Jewish kids were getting married, a prediction that pretty much panned out.

Like anyone at the center of a 3-day-long attention cyclone, I did not take a lot of pictures. But while I don’t have much photographic evidence, I can talk through our itinerary and the thinking behind it, event by event.

Friday Night, Part 1: Rehearsal Dinner

For their wedding last year, our friends Shaker and Lani hosted a rehearsal dinner at Here’s Looking at You, the now dearly departed restaurant in Koreatown. We shamelessly stole their idea, because other people’s weddings are both a beautiful celebration of love and covert market research for your own.

The number of restaurants in LA that are reliably excellent, appropriately sized and open to buyouts is surprisingly small, so Hunter and I quickly narrowed in on our top choice: Antico Nuovo, an Italian restaurant that I once saw describe its own location as “East Larchmont” but is very much on the north end of K-Town. It’s in a strip mall with a liquor store and a Korean spot with no English-language signage, which is one of many things I love about it.

Antico Nuovo is not some closely held secret; in the days before our dinner there, it was the subject of a Bon Appétit video and included on the LA Times’ list of the best restaurants in California. But it’s a classic for a reason. The food isn’t challenging or esoteric, which made it perfect for a broad audience of family and out-of-towners, but the technique is always spot-on. As an Italian restaurant, the pastas are naturally flawless, and a new-to-me squab dish with crunchy pigeon-chicharron crackling was a highlight. Hunter and I nonetheless maintain the true star of the place is the wood-fired grill in full view of the dining room and the meats that come off it, including fennel-crusted pork ribs and a stellar veal chop.

This was hands-down the most extravagant and over-the-top part of the wedding, and we were extraordinarily privileged to have the chance to do this. We had generous assistance from Hunter’s father and stepmother, who gamely hosted and offered enthusiastic input on wine pairings. We also justified the expense on a couple grounds: we entirely skipped other classic wedding line items like a dress, hair and makeup, and flowers, and the money spent went directly to the guests’ experience. I was frankly too anxious and overwhelmed to fully enjoy the meal in the moment (the memory of my six previous dinners there will simply have to suffice), but everyone else clearly had a great time.

An enormous shoutout to events director Chris Fehlinger, GM Rachel Grisafi, and the entire kitchen team under chef-owner Chad Colby, who provided a truly seamless experience. Everyone got a glass of Lambrusco when they walked in the door, and when Hunter idly mentioned to no one in particular he could use an after-dinner espresso he had one in hand within seconds. Service! It’s an art!

Friday Night, Part 2: The Prince

Hunter and I were greedy and refused to choose between a rehearsal dinner and a welcome drinks. The thinking was to build in as many touch points to the weekend as possible so we could attempt to get quality face time in with as many attendees as we could, and that we’d rather be exhausted for 72 hours straight than not make the most of the occasion.

For the welcome drinks venue, we chose The Prince, arguably the best bar in LA and inarguably the most LA bar in LA. We actually reached out about buying them out for the actual wedding, but were informed that they do not entertain buyout offers more than 40 days in advance to keep their schedule free for filming. (You may recognize it from New Girl, Mad Men, and more.) See what I mean?

For the uninitiated, The Prince was founded in the 1920s and has the red banquettes, old-timey paintings and wooden beams to prove it. When the neighborhood evolved to become what’s now known as Koreatown, new owners put their own spin on bar food (tteokbokki, fried chicken, kimchi pancake, etc.). Then another generation of new owners put a bunch of bougie cocktails on the drinks list. For a lighter drinker like me who loves sitting down and audible conversations, it’s pretty much perfect.

While a full buyout didn’t work out, it’s pretty easy to reserve the spacious back room, and not very expensive to order beer, soju and the aforementioned fried chicken for a crowd. This may have to be my default birthday setup in the future.

Saturday Night: The Airliner

Much like a restaurant buyout for the rehearsal dinner, a bar buyout made a lot of sense for our reception (after a ceremony at Vidiots, which included free popcorn and soda) because bars are already used to entertaining a lot of people at once — no furniture rental or caterer hiring necessary. The Airliner in Lincoln Heights was our specific venue for a few reasons: it’s five minutes from our house, so we could sleep in our own bed (huge!); they fit the size and also-serve-food criteria we were looking for; and we’re friends with Vinh Nguyen, the chef-partner who helped freshen up and reopen the storied bar a couple years ago.

We met Vinh when he hosted a private dinner by the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo in his home way back in 2021 and kept in touch via Instagram. He and his team had hosted a few weddings before ours, were game, and offered helpful advice like “don’t do a buffet, there will be a line out to the street.” The dinner was seated, but Hunter and I refused to do a seating chart, in part out of laziness and in part hoping it would encourage some spontaneous interaction among guests.

You can check out the menu above, courtesy of our wonderful photographer Meg. The general vibe was Asian-inflected bar snacks with fun cocktails, and while all of it was excellent, the wings and ribs suited my very specific need for small bites I could pick up and shove in my mouth while doing laps through the bar, back patio, and upstairs listening space. Much like Antico Nuovo, I personally did not get to enjoy the meal as it deserved to be enjoyed, but know everyone else was well taken care of.

For dessert, we went to someone else we know IRL: Karla Subero Pittol of Chainsaw. Our friend Sean used to live in an Echo Park duplex where Karla was the other tenant and Sean had a front-row seat to her elaborate private dinners, held in the property’s garage, and rigorously taste-tested ice cream pies. I’ve had the honor of enjoying both, and while it took some Tetris to figure out how to transport and store a bunch of frozen desserts, we liked the idea of supporting yet another local business. (Chocolate ice cream is also my favorite dessert of all time; the banana pudding and passionfruit lime flavors were just a begrudging concession to other people’s taste.) Speaking of: Karla is currently fundraising for her first brick-and-mortar via Honeycomb Credit. Looks like her page isn’t live yet, but you should chip in when it is!

Sunday Morning: Birria pa la Cruda

We liked the idea of a day-after event held in our home to show our guests where we live and get some extra time with them. We did not like the idea of a brunch with chalky eggs and mealy fruit salad. Enter Carlos Jaquez of Birria pa la Cruda, a sporadic but long-running pop-up. You may recall Carlos’s work from Teotl, the produce-driven pop-up that was one of the best meals I ate last year. But while he makes an incredible salmon tostada, “pa la cruda” basically means “for your hangover,” making his other business much more suited for the task at hand.

No two bones about it: this cheesy, spicy beef concoction — with a mushroom option for the vegetarians — fed the soul. It also left us with minimal cleanup and several boatloads of salsa that we’ve been living off ever since. (I just had a quesadilla slathered in it for lunch.) And for a wedding meant to serve as a sort of LA food tour in miniature, we couldn’t not have a taco component, you know?

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No matter how much I try to plan things out, leave open room in my schedule and/or send up the bat signal for a larger group hang, every New York trip ends up playing out as a mad dash to see, do, and eat as much as possible. For a city I don’t live in and haven’t for nearly a decade, I pay way too close attention to the New York food scene. It’s a habit that leaves me prepared, but also with an impossibly long to-try list. Upping the level of difficulty are additional constraints like a line-and-reservation culture that makes LA look sedate by comparison.

I waited 25 minutes for the privilege of eating this burrata, basil, and prosciutto sandwich on focaccia at Radio Bakery in Greenpoint. I was told this was on the chiller end of the Radio queue spectrum, but a new location in Prospect Heights has done little to deter the residents of North Brooklyn from stocking up on carbs. That this was my second time braving the crowds should tell you the oily-crispy-salty hit of the focaccia (my favorite bread!) and expertly sparing use of the meat (a light accent to cut through the bland softness of the cheese!) was worth it. So was the brown butter corn cake I got for dessert, which I failed to photograph but had a dense, mochi-esque texture.

Getting a good meal in New York is kind of like trying to get good Chinese food on Christmas, but all the time. You have to lock into the sweet spot of a place that’s known enough to have a good reputation — just not so much that everyone else will have the same idea and get in the way of your plans. Maybe one day I’ll get to try Tatiana, Torrisi, or Le Veau d’Or, but without throwing myself at the mercy of Resy Notify or the walk-in list, I’m not sure when that’ll be.

This may be why I tend to over-index on bakeries, with their lack of seating and brisk pace of service. (That, and my sweet tooth.) The above is a cross-section of a knish from Elbow Bread on the Lower East Side, a homage to — and often, massive upgrade of — Ashkenazi Jewish classics. I love knishes because I love potatoes, but I’ve never had one with such flaky pastry or balanced flavors, courtesy of sauerkraut and dill to leaven all that starch with sour freshness. On the same note, I’m so used to dry and crumbly rugelach I never even realized it could be made tender and chewy, or with high-quality chocolate.

When I do manage to land a tough table, it’s the way I’m pretty sure almost everyone who gets into these places at a decent hour does: by shamelessly working my connections. A friend worked her magic to get us in for a late lunch at Via Carota, and whatever guilt my recovering-teacher’s-pet lizard brain felt about working the system was dissipated by a bite of that iconic, triple-washed green salad.

Hunter once got me the Via Carota cookbook, a well-intentioned gift I (lovingly) exchanged after seeing how many recipes boiled down to “find the best ingredients you can find and don’t do too much to them.” It’s not very useful advice to someone who isn’t on a first-name basis with the vendors of the Union Square Greenmarket, but wildly impressive when put into action. The thing about such simple techniques is that they only work when executed to perfection. And even if I could source the quality of artichokes, fava beans, peas, and other spring vegetables in the stew above on my own, I wouldn’t be able to cook them as deftly: tender but without a hint of mush. Mushroom pasta and fritto misto rounded out the order with some heft. When traveling, however, I always appreciate a veggie-forward meal that’s heavy on the fiber.

Saturday night was the opposite of veggie-forward and the food highlight of our trip. Without a booking, bougie spots were a lost cause, so we defaulted to Hunter’s preferred strip-malls-and-outer-boroughs style of thrill seeking. This led us to Jackson Heights, the Queens neighborhood so awesome Fred Wiseman made a whole movie about it. It’s one of the most diverse ZIP codes on Earth, though the businesses around the 74th Street subway stop are dominated by the South Asian diaspora. After poking our heads into a few options, we went with Kababish on the theory that a restaurant with its own motto is a promising sign.

Hunter let the spirit move him and rattled off an order, which we waited for on some folding chairs a couple storefronts down that passed for the restaurant’s outdoor dining area. Within a few minutes, takeout containers started hitting the table (great for bribing our hosts with leftovers) and we got down to business.

Everything was excellent, including the handmade naan, the biryani, the extremely generous portion of raita — I am, if nothing else, a sauce person — and the haleem. But our two favorite dishes were a goat-and-spinach curry heavily seasoned with mustard oil and an absurdly tender bihari kabab, made by tenderizing beef with papaya paste until it falls apart with the nudge of a fork.

Something I appreciate about Los Angeles is that enclaves like Jackson Heights are often more accessible here, in a weird silver lining to sprawl and car culture. (I often point out that Koreatown, our densest and most diverse neighborhood, is right next to Hancock Park, our wealthiest and most old money. Coherent urban planning doesn’t get you that!) But staying off the G train meant we were in the thick of Queens in just over half an hour, minimal schlepping required. Brooklynites take note!

We did also squeeze into a couple scene-y spots. I’ve heard it said that LA is the better food city on quality-of-produce grounds alone, but New York is the better restaurant city. All that finance money sloshing around and lack of room to entertain in the home creates a demand for expertly curated spaces, which isn’t what I typically value in a dining out experience but I can at least appreciate.

Bangkok Supper Club in the West Village is one of those spaces. LA may be a historic hub for America’s Thai diaspora, but on the higher end, New York has us outnumbered. The interior decor, sound design and service at BSC certainly delivered — but I’ll be honest and say the food, including the spring veggies, grilled chicken and pork jowl you see above, was competent enough without being mind-blowing. (The flavors on the unpictured beef cheek massaman curry, for instance, felt oddly muted, though we easily polished off the whole thing. There was, however, one exception.

That is a scallop ceviche buried beneath a watermelon granita that faded into sweet-and-spicy aftertaste. It was addictive; it was surprising; it’s exactly the level of fussy I want from a splurge-y dinner. Even if I wish more of the meal was at the same caliber, it’s dish that redeems an entire order.

Our final dinner was at Golden HOF in Midtown, a slightly higher-minded take on Korean drinking food. Readers, I must be honest here: every restaurant exists in the context of all in which we live, and I fully grade this one on a curve because of its location. We didn’t see any theater this trip, but anyone who ever has knows the pre-show dinner options are dire. Are the Szechuan-spiced wings below the best fried chicken I’ve ever had? I wouldn’t say so. Are they exponentially better than any other dinner I’ve had in a 20-block radius? Absolutely. Before I saw Stereophonic last year, I pregamed by shoving two slices of pepperoni in my face while speed-walking up Broadway. It got the job done, but it’s nice to know there are more civilized options.

I am also a sucker for a dramatically staged crudité, an appetizer that made me think “I should really eat more crudité!” just in time for LA to hit 95 degrees. I’m currently writing this from the refuge of my AC-blasted living room and getting dangerously close to Substack’s email limit. Until next time!

The Costco run was not exclusively for sausage supplies (there was also a fire extinguisher and a quantity of cod fit for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), nor were all the materials acquired at Costco. The fatback came from Peads & Barnetts, the same lovely folks who supply the pig for Hunter’s annual birthday roast; the grinder is a new toy Hunter acquired when I refused to let him put it on our wedding registry; the casings have been taking up space in the fridge since the last time Hunter did this. But if you need 15 pounds of pork shoulder and 10 pounds of belly to turn into meat sludge, there’s no better place to go.

I helped with elements of the process — mainly the stuffing, which is very much a two-person job even with the help of automation, and label writing, which required penmanship more legible and hands less meat-greased than Hunter’s. Mostly, though, I just observed the making of a food product that is not associated with home cooking for good reason, but feels miraculous when you acquire the specialized equipment to manage it anyway. It reminds me of ice cream making in that way.

Hunter ran most of the mixture through the grinder twice, apart from one blend that was meant to have a looser, grainier feel. Then it was time for seasoning.

Hunter had previously gotten a bag of pre-peeled garlic cloves to make the industrial quantity of purée you can see in the back. They are not to be confused with the dreaded jarlic, which is pre-minced and prone to bitterness, and a lifesaving shortcut when making toum or garlic confit.

There were four varieties on the sausage agenda: British-style bangers, flavored with oats, beer, herbs (thyme and sage) and warm spices like nutmeg; Chicago-style Italian, which is heavier on the fennel and lighter on the spice than the traditional mix; loukaniko, a Greek sausage flavored with orange zest and oregano (Hunter also used red wine) and the aforementioned rougher mix; and Toulouse, a garlic-forward flavor profile Hunter wanted for another big cooking project that will likely be the subject of my next email.

These blends are then fed into an extruder, which stuffs the casing in an action that looks distinctly…scatological. Hunter opted for natural casing made of sheep intestines, which you’re never quite able to forget were the original condoms.

That leaves you with a perfect, uninterrupted coil we learned the hard way should be tied off into links before you wander off to enjoy a multi-hour lunch with family. Learn from our mistakes! But also, look at that beautiful spiral:

After an overnight cure in our comically overstuffed refrigerator, the sausage mostly lives in the garage freezer now. It’s a lot of upfront work, but for a few hours of weekend labor, you get an instant building block for quick and easy weeknight meals like the creamy pasta pictured below. There’s also summer grilling on the horizon soon, but without being too gender normative about it, that’s Hunter’s job.

The most notable recent development in my culinary life was a trip up to the Bay Area for some friends’ baby shower. The Bay is, in my experience, a perfect place to visit for 72 hours and not a moment longer, before you can get dragged into too many conversations about generative AI. This trip bore that out: we crashed with lovely and generous hosts, hit up the excellent Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMoMA, and got on a plane to Burbank just in time to catch a Passover seder.

With Oakland, my preferred port of entry, just a 48 minute flight away, I’ve had many opportunities to eat my way around the Bay over the years. That means I have many old favorites to return to, not just new spots to try out; between those competing prerogatives and lots of friends to catch up with, it’s a lot to squeeze into one itinerary. That said, I never regret a trip to Beit Rima, the Palestinian restaurant that’s been rapturously acclaimed for good reason. Logistically, it’s my favorite kind of spot — reliable and beloved, but easy to stroll into for a Friday lunch.

We had the ful, which was a bit thicker and more pastelike in texture than I generally prefer my fava beans (I’ve gotten hooked on the version at House of Mandi here in LA) but a tasty and filling meal base, and the musakhan. I loved the fun-sized riff on the iconic dish: just a single chicken thigh over a single round of pita in lieu of a massive platter. So cute!

On our first night in town, we met the baby shower-ers for a double date at Wojia Hunan Cuisine in Albany, just north of Berkeley. Compared to the massive stateside popularity of Sichuan food in the last decade, Hunan is somewhat underrated as the other Chinese regional cuisine for spice enthusiasts. Wojia was a case in point as to why that’s a mistake.

One of our dining companions doesn’t eat meat, so our order skewed heavily towards veggie dishes like this eggplant, pictured in its more presentable state before we pounded it into a saucy, gooey, pepper-laden paste, and a sneaky-good stir fry of chives and dried bean curd.

We did smuggle in this extremely not-vegetarian pork stir fry, studded with chilies and absolutely slicked with oil. But half the peppers were green, so this was basically health food.

Our final notable meal of the trip — not counting sugar infusions at local standbys Humphry Slocombe and Starter Bakery, where we picked up pastries on the way to hang out with some friends and their 5-month-old — was at Prubechu, a Guamanian restaurant in the Mission District. Don’t know much about Guamanian food? Me either! Hence why it piqued my interest when the Chronicle claimed there’s “no other restaurant like it in the continental United States” in a master restaurant list conveniently published mere days before our flight. I should be more specific: Prubechu serves Chamorro food, an Indigenous culture from the Mariana Islands in the Pacific.

In practice, I wouldn’t say the food felt novel, per se — it’s heavy on seafood, coconut and other ingredients one would expect of a coastal, tropical locale, plus some Hawaiian-adjacent elements like barbecue skewers with a sweet, caramelized finish. Out of our 10-dish order, the whole fried fish pictured above was the most visually impressive, while a humble (so humble I forgot to photograph it!) stewed greens situation wildly overperformed expectations. Serving a ceviche-like dish called kelaguen (derived from the Filipino kilawin) with soft flatbreads called titiyas (derived from, well, tortillas) was a nice touch. It reminded me a bit of our recent trip to Okinawa and Taipei, also islands whose food is deeply influenced by all the other nations that stopped by on their trading routes.

We were eating with some high school friends of mine, one of whom had been there before recommended the coconut-braised (I said there was a lot of coconut!) beef and egg noodles above that became a crowd favorite. I went to high school in San Diego, but a lot of people ended up in the Bay — more than in LA, weirdly. Because our 10-year reunion got lost in a fog of COVID-related delays, it was nice to have a smaller meetup.

Since we got back, we’ve been eating unglamorous, fridge-scouring meals to buy time until our next big shop tomorrow. But we have a big Home Cooking Project planned for next weekend, so stay tuned for that.

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In all seriousness, it’s humbling to be reminded you’re playing a form of Russian roulette every time you take care of a basic biological need. As someone who typically prides herself on an iron stomach — spice has never messed me up in that way, and I may be the only Ashkenazi Jew alive who can tolerate lactose — the experience renewed my empathy for friends with allergies and other dietary restrictions. Even a couple days’ time under the weather really scrambles your relationship with food. Sustenance becomes something to be suspicious or even afraid of, but your body never stops demanding it to survive. It’s a mindfuck.

Before I started puking my guts out or waxing poetic about it, I helped Hunter roll out the pasta sheets for a highly labor-intensive green lasagna, to welcome spring and also host a few family members. (One of our guests was pescatarian, and carbs seemed like a more cost — if not time — efficient way to feed a crowd than fish. Better leftovers, too.) I should’ve taken more photos of that process, but here’s the finished product.

Hunter was riffing off a recipe from Italian American, a cookbook I’ve sung the praises of in this space before. You layer homemade pasta (extra egg-y, rolled ultra-thin for nice crispy edges) with bechamel (I like this cookbook’s version because it amps up the flour and milk with lots of aromatics) and a green pesto (the most riff-friendly part of the recipe — if it’s green, chuck it in). We added home-grown chard and dill to the prescribed base of basil, parsley, chives and pistachios, then put the mozzarella on top instead of inside. I wish I could pretend that was an intentional choice, but the truth is that Hunter just forgot the brick in the fridge until it was almost too late.

We served it with a simple side salad of lettuce (also home-grown!) with feta and snap peas (not home-grown, but sourced from the good folks at the Hollywood Farmers Market). The salad is my current prime suspect for what happened next, although no one else at the table got sick.

But before that unpleasantness, I made my own contribution to the spread. When hosting, Hunter and I tend to default to a somewhat gendered division of labor — he takes savory, I take dessert. Because I’m the one of us with a sweet tooth and we’ve learned the hard way that cooking in the same kitchen at the same time is not a good idea, it makes sense, even if I’d like to get better at cooking savory food for company as well.

Anyway! A little over a year ago, Hunter gifted me a Cuisinart ice cream maker in conjunction with David Lebovitz’s seminal frozen dessert book The Perfect Scoop. Even though I’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of both — one perk of having a chest freezer in the garage is that you can keep the drum perma-frozen and ready to churn — I’d somehow never made a plain Jane vanilla ice cream. (I’m just a chocoholic at heart, I guess.) This presented the perfect opportunity.

Just like any good brownie recipe gets its chocolate flavor from multiple sources, usually chocolate and cocoa powder, Lebovitz calls for both vanilla extract and the actual seeds from a vanilla bean, which get steeped in warm milk along with the pods. What I love about making ice cream is that it’s shockingly easy once you get the hang of it, but you never stop feeling like a magician for producing a foodstuff I used to assume had to be obtained outside of the house. The craziest part is that homemade ice cream is usually better than commercial, because even the bougiest boutique creamery probably doesn’t use egg yolks at scale and yolks = silky, hefty custard.

I served it with what NYT Cooking calls “Microwave Chocolate Pudding Cake,” except I don’t own a microwave and I’ve watched enough GBBO to recognize a self-saucing cake when I see one. These recipes combine regular cake batter with sugar, hot water and other flavor agents that turn into a “sauce” in the oven and sink to the bottom of the pan as the rest of the cake rises. I’m not sure why they aren’t more popular in America, but they should be.

Because I was converting microwave instructions into oven bake times, I overdid this a bit and ended up with more cake and less sauce than I’d like. But as the last non-buttered toast food I could stomach for the next 36 hours, it was a good note to go out on. And almost a week later, I’m fully recovered. Bring on the noodles.

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Sala de Despiece, Madrid

We had our first dinner at this extremely well-known restaurant, which is to a typical tapas bar what Pujol is to our local tapas spot. In lieu of a traditional menu, we were given a spreadsheet with columns for primary ingredient, secondary ingredients, region of origin and other metadata. Miraculously, we managed to assemble a solid dinner from this wall of text despite our crippling jet lag.

The dish above is a whole fried artichoke with avocado cream that, thanks to some flavored salt, tasted exactly like a Hint of Lime Tostito and hit the same addictive nexus of crispy, tangy and oily. I also ate the first of many, many octopi on the trip, this one with a smooth, emulsified riff on muhammara, the Middle Eastern red pepper spread.

I respect the intelligence of our many-tentacled friends, but not as much as I respect the craft of Spanish chefs who can cook them to a perfect consistency: charred on one end, tender on the other, not rubbery. Rule number one of cooking protein is to keep the size as regular as possible so it cooks evenly, and that’s literally impossible with octopus. I wouldn’t try this at home.

Finally, there were these mussels smothered in a funky, fudgy black garlic sauce. This I might try at home, because I impulse bought a bulb of the stuff from the farmers market and might as well chase the dragon. Shoutout to the langoustines making eye contact with us from behind the bar.

The next morning, we woke up before dawn to catch our train to Granada, because we forgot that 7:45am counts as “before dawn” in that part of the world. Putting his country in the same time zone as Poland so he could sync his watch with Hitler’s: an underrated reason to hate Francisco Franco! It also explains why everyone eats dinner at 9pm, because it feels like and should be 7pm. But I digress.

La Barra de Cañabota, Seville

With all due respect to Granada, the food there — even the free tapas it’s famous for! — was somewhat overshadowed by the Alhambra. That said, we had some insane croquettes with a subtle beef flavor; the thing about eating endless variations on a national staple is that you start to pick up on the tiny differences between them.

Our next stop was Seville, where we snagged a couple of walk-in seats at the more casual bar offshoot of a Michelin-starred seafood spot. (Having an American internal clock is its own kind of superpower — showing up at 8:30pm is like doing a 5pm drive-by back home.) We once again sat by the raw bar, where our server pointed to various fish that made up the day’s specials and explained how they were being prepared. That ended up being most of our order.

An exception was the tomato-bread stew with egg yolk and cockles above, which a couple more days in Andalusia taught me to recognize as a spin on salmorejo, which is like a thicker version of gazpacho typically served with grated hard-boiled egg (hence the yolk) and jamón (hence the briny shellfish, which offered an analogous hit of salt.) It was awesome, as was every bowl of regular salmorejo we had. And we weren’t even there during tomato season!

As two Jews with roots in the New York City area, Hunter and I were powerless to resist this plate of smoked whitefish with slivers of pan con tomate — basically a deconstructed version of a classic bagel sandwich, minus the cream cheese, caper and onions. The better to concentrate on the fish itself, I suppose.

The grand finale was this ultra-fatty fish collar slathered in roasted garlic and red peppers. You gotta get your vegetables where you can in Europe.

La Castela, Madrid

Having already recapped the most noteworthy part of our time in Córdoba, we can loop back around to Madrid, where we met up with friends and had a relatively chill weekend after a whirlwind sprint through three cities in four days. (Still clocked 20k+ steps a day, though.) For our final day of the trip, we had just one goal: a long, languorous, boozy Spanish lunch. The kind that’s technically illegal in the United States.

The problem is that Madrid is such a big city with such a thriving street life it’s a little hard to do anything spontaneously as a group of five. After our Plan A was fully booked, Hunter turned to the Guía Repsol. It’s like the Spanish version of the Michelin Guide, in that they both started as loss leaders for automotive companies (Michelin does tires, Repsol oil and gas) to get people on the roads. There’s no English language version of the app, but Google Translate and visual aids like maps make it usable enough — and it’s a reliable way to find places whose spots aren’t already blown up by Anglophone media.

La Castela was a two-minute walk away, and let us hang out at the bar before they crammed us around a tiny table. Our ultra-friendly bartender kept refilling our drinks the second we finished them, which only encouraged us to keep ordering a steady stream of small plates in sets of two or three. It was a perfect farewell meal; where else on Earth would I be served multiple forms of anchovy on the same tiny sliver of toast?

The oxtails were ridiculously rich, but somehow overshadowed by the rosemary-inflected potatoes next to them. The octopus and squid risotto with squid ink was on nearly every table in the place, for good reason. But the dish that pushed us all over the edge into dumbfounded, laughing-at-our-luck elation was this un-photogenic bowl of chickpeas with chorizo and fall-apart tender tripe.

And the whole meal was 40 Euros to boot! Somehow, we still had dinner that night, because Hunter refused to leave the continent without having a drunken street kebab.

I could continue ranting about how good this was, but I think our friend Eric’s expression while gazing adoringly at the oxtail says it all.

I’ve been back home for a couple weeks and there’s a lot of eating to catch up on, but that’ll have to wait.

We flew into and out of Madrid, where we spent the last few days of the trip with friends. But before that, we did a speed run through the major cities of Andalusia, the country’s southernmost region that spent much of the Middle Ages under Muslim rule, a legacy that survives in everything from the architecture to the music to, of course, the food.

For our fancy meal of the trip — we usually do one per — we settled on Noor, a fine dining restaurant located in Córdoba, formerly the capital of what was then known as al-Andalus. Noor also has the distinction of earning three stars from the Michelin guide, the highest honor bestowed by the tire company turned tourism board extortion racket. (Due to said scheme, I’m dubious of Michelin ratings in California but trust it in places like Europe or Japan where it’s been operating for a long time.) Here’s what the guide has to say about the place:

Meaning “light” in Arabic, Noor is so much more than a fine-dining restaurant. Behind every detail there is a multi-faceted team that contributes its knowledge to bring to the fore the essence of the cultured and magical city of Córdoba, which has been a beacon of light since the reign of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III. In the restaurant's bright interior, with its open kitchen and incredible interior design, chef Paco Morales (ably supported by second in command Paola Gualandi) revives the spirit of Andalusian cuisine using modern ideas and techniques.

I’d never actually been to a three-star restaurant before. To be honest, ultra-fine dining is not the kind of experience I seek out every day, week, or month, and doubt I would even if I could afford it. It’s simply not a relaxed environment in which to enjoy a meal — nor should it be, because an armada of staff have been trained and paid to oversee every painstakingly planned detail of your experience. For me, it’s more about appreciating the craft and labor on display, which I have just enough experience and knowledge to do.

On that front, Noor certainly delivered. Before you even enter the dining room, a windowless space towered over by a swoopily ornate wooden sculpture, you wash your hands with orange blossom water in a custom sink made out of rocks. And before you eat a single bite, you’re treated to a bit of show-and-tell: a diorama of the ingredients on display in that night’s menu, plus a timeline of the restaurant. When Noor opened, it used only medieval ingredients from before the Columbian exchange. It’s since progressed forward through the eras; our menu was inspired by the 18th century, working in new world produce like pineapple. (Thank God, honestly — between tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and all the violent, racist resource extraction, Europe got the better end of that deal in more ways than one.)

The theatricality was A Lot, of course, but that’s part of what you’re paying for: dinner and a show. I honestly wish we got a bit more, because while every staffer we interacted with spoke English, there was just enough of a language gap that I don’t think we got the full rundown of how each dish reflected Andalusian history and traditions.

I won’t bore you by breaking down every dish in detail, but this was the menu, signed by the chef and sent home with us as a keepsake:

The food was, overall, very good — although, to do my best impression of a character from “The Menu,” a place like this sort of defies a binary like good vs. bad, or at least renders it irrelevant. I’m looking more for interesting or technically impressive, because frankly, even if I taste the most addictive and straightforwardly tasty dish of my life in that sort of atmosphere, I’ll never be in a position to go back and order it over and over again the way I would at a local burrito joint. (Love you, Sonoratown.) I want something that will stay with me as I look back over the years on a singular event. And while I frankly have no desire to taste the flavor combination of grapefruit, impeccably cooked shrimp and “blue cheese snow” ever again, I was surprised enough by the combination of bitter, fresh and funky to remember it clearly several weeks later.

That sounds backhanded, or at least like throat-clearing. But I don’t need any qualifiers for what was probably the plate of the night: a pair of silky-but-firm oysters in an earthy, ferrous spinach sauce. The menu promised “pine nuts”; those tan, geometric molds studded around the plate are actually dots of savory pine nut ice cream. In a million years, I could neither conceive of that dish nor pull it off. And if I could, I wouldn’t have the work ethic to assemble each individual component over at least 24 hours.

As you can tell from that photo, the stoneware and other accessories felt just as important to the overall effect as the food. We were sitting next to the silverware station, and as each course saw a completely new table setting for each of the 25-ish diners, it was fun to watch it gradually depopulate over the course of the night. I’m sure the ceramics were local — there’s an entire museum dedicated to the industry in Seville — and the placemat above as well as various other doo-dads appeared to be custom 3D-printed. Just look at this amuse bouche trio, or more specifically, what it’s served on.

I find that with tasting menus, the smaller bites at the beginning tend to be more innovative than the entree-ish stuff at the end, which gives into the pressure to deliver a big piece of fancy protein with some garnish around the edges. That proved to be the case here, leading to some bizarre choices like covering some extraordinary braised lamb shoulder with a piece of seared wagyu that, while good, tasted like every other piece of seared wagyu served at a nice restaurant. Yes, in this case the afterthought garnish to the protein was another protein.

On the other hand, there was this quasi-raviolo made of razor-thin tuna belly draped over tuna stew (DOUBLE TUNA) with a green peppercorn sauce. It’s the work of a madman, and it made my eyes bulge when I tasted it.

I’m enough of a freak about these things to enjoy a meal that makes me think — where I sit up straight when each new course arrives, eagerly awaiting the explanatory spiel. It’s worth the money in the way a fancy degree is worth the money: sure, there’s homework, but you’re also paying to be educated. I learned, for instance, that carob is more than just a hippie substitute for chocolate, because this tart is the first time I’ve had it in any form since elementary school.

And I learned that a dessert flight tastes better when it’s presented to you in the form of a ziggurat.

Noor is located in a working class district of Córdoba where Morales grew up. It’s a cool 40-minute walk from the city center, which Hunter and I broke up by getting a drink in a plaza where the most popular business sold buckets of snails with beer. Noor feels a world away from both its immediate surroundings and the way we typically ate in Spain, noshing on a reliable roster of national staples in open-air plazas with warmly neglectful service.

That distance is both a selling point and a signal that this isn’t and shouldn’t be an everyday outing. We actually have a second three-star meal booked in 2025, and while it’s over six months away, it still feels indulgent to have multiple such plans in one calendar year. The immersion is so total, the succession of new stimuli so close to overwhelming, that it’s enough to last you a good long while.

And yeah, it’s a little ridiculous. The chef sent us home with a postcard of his face! I never want to lose sight of how hilarious that is.