Escape to L.A., rev. ed.

fig. a: L.A. by night

It took about 18 hours, but, suddenly, there I was, in Downtown L.A.

fig. b: continental divide

I'd had a particularly scenic transcontinental flight, one that provided stunning views of the Rockies, and an equally stunning sunset descent over L.A. county and into LAX.

fig. c: Standing Rib, 1962

I didn't fully realize it at the time, but a print by Roy Lichtenstein that I saw in the Museum of Contemporary Art's 30-year retrospective on my first day in L.A. proved to be emblematic, as you'll see.

fig. d: Cole's by night

For my very first meal, I walked from my hotel on South Grand to Cole's on 6th to have my very first authentic L.A. French Dip sandwich. Cole's is one of the two Downtown L.A. establishments that claims to have invented the French Dip sandwich over a century ago now, back in 1908.

fig. e: Cole's by Cole's

Cole's is definitely the hipper of the two, and the joint was jumping when I arrived: the stereo was cranked up, the drinks were flowing, and the crowd was young and happening. Despite their insistence that the City of Los Angeles authenticated their claim to being the "originators of the French dip" back in the 1970s, Cole's definitely comes across as the challenger at the moment. This isn't a bad thing. It's made them hungrier to assert themselves. So the place was given a loving restoration a few years ago. And they also picked up an executive chef. But, more importantly, it's made them very assertive with their menu. Their house mustard is a potent, horseradish-laced, "Atomic" concoction. Their pickles are homemade, half-sour, and chili-laced--not for the faint of heart. They, too, have been given the (well-deserved) "Atomic" moniker. Their beef French dip sandwich is a hefty, freshly carved number that comes with the jus served demurely on the side. In other words, here you dip the sandwich yourself, according to your whims. Beer selection is good, with three Germans (Bitburger, Spaten, and Franziskaner) and Anchor Steam (on tap) being among the highlights. The bar is an early-20th-century classic and it's fully loaded to boot.

fig. f: neon market

The Grand Central Market has been a Downtown L.A. institution for roughly 90 years now. My camera might have been attracted to the China Cafe and its iconic, Edward Hopper-esque

CHOP SUEY
CHOW MEIN

sign, but I was on the prowl for tacos--fish tacos, quite specifically--so I made a beeline to Maria's Fresh Seafood. The majority of my compadres were having seafood caldos, and they looked and smelled delicious, but I went with the fish taco special: two fish tacos, salad, salsa, crema, beans, and rice, all for a fiver. So simple, so satisfying, so good.

fig. g: all aboard!

Later that day was the splurge of the trip: dinner for three at the Pacific Dining Car. At 89 years old, the Pacific Dining Car is another venerable L.A. institution. The Pacific Dining Car has a reputation for being one of the city's finest steakhouses, but it's also known for its main dining room, which simulates the interior of an early-20th-century railway dining car, as well as its associations with the writer James Ellroy. The Pacific Dining Car is something of an anomaly among high-class restaurants: it's open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it has a special late-night menu that's made it popular with the city's nighthawks. Dinner consisting of a 16-ounce ribeye (cooked a perfect medium-rare), creamed spinach, a salad, a nice bottle of wine, and some impeccable service was pricey, but, man, did it ever hit the spot. The only disappointment: no sign of the "demon dog of American crime fiction."

fig. h: the big and the small 1

Bottega Louie is an oddly named restaurant with a choice Downtown location, a fancy Italian pizza oven, a full-size, open-format kitchen, an open-format pastry kitchen, a bar/café area, a massive, sprawling floor plan, towering 50-foot ceilings, and a veritable army of waitstaff. How they've managed to survive the Great Recession, I have no idea. Must have something to do with their appealing menu, because Bottega Louie is packing 'em in. I was so overwhelmed by the immensity of the operation, that the only photograph I took was of the miniature Tabasco sauce bottle that came with my brunch.

The brunch menu had so many tantalizing options that I actually had a hard time making a selection. I ended up settling on the scrambled eggs with burrata, pancetta, caramelized cippolini onions, and oyster mushrooms, and I was happy I did.

fig. i: étude en jaune

Bottega Louie's pastry division specializes in macarons. Our favorite was the lemon, which also made for a good photograph.

fig. j: Park's by Park's

Between Saveur's Los Angeles issue and my friend MS's 411, I had more Koreatown tips than I knew what to do with. Never did get around for going for KFC (Korean fried chicken), but I did make it out for Korean BBQ with a gang of fellow travelers. We could see and smell all kinds of delicacies as we waited to be seated. (Actually, the wonderful aromas began from the moment we got out of our taxi.) But Park's marbled short ribs looked particularly tantalizing and came highly recommended. In addition to the short ribs, we ordered marinated shrimp and bulgogi. Later, I was kicking myself for not ordering the pork belly, which got raves in Saveur. There was a moment there, right after we ordered, when we panicked, thinking we needed to order some vegetables to go along with all that meat. Then I realized, this is a Korean BBQ restaurant--the condiments are coming. In fact, the folks at Park's covered our table with more condiments than I've ever seen. And seconds later the first of our mains--the short ribs--were sizzling away on our tables built-in grill. From the moment we wrapped our first lettuce leaves and rice wrappers around those tender morsels of meat smothered in Korean pickles of all sorts, we were hooked.

fig. k: orange, bowl

Coming from the relative deprivation of Canada in late-winter, the Hollywood Farmers' Market was a vision of plenitude that I found a bit overwhelming. Just the citrus alone was more than I could handle. All those varieties of oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, and lemons, all ripe and sweet and bursting with flavor. The daisy tangerines, in particular, tasted like nectar. Then there were the nuts--pistachios and almonds, in particular. And the dried fruit, including Mission figs the likes of which I'd never had before. And then there was all the stuff I couldn't even bear to look at--fruits, vegetables, herbs, cheeses, etc.--seeing as I was going to be back on a plane 12 hours later. What I did take advantage of were the tamales with green chiles, ricotta, and queso, and a rich, expertly made macchiato from Cafécito Organico, who have a shop in Silver Lake, but who go to the trouble of setting up an espresso machine on wheels, as it were, at the market. Ah, California!

fig. l: showtime!

Buzzing with vitamin C and high on caffeine, I made my way into Hollywood. The L.A. Marathon was on and the tail end of the pack was making its way down Hollywood Boulevard, so the streets were closed off to anything but pedestrian traffic.

fig. m: transference

I checked out a few Hollywood pilgrimage points, like the Egyptian/American Cinémathèque and Musso & Frank's Grill, and when I got to Grauman's Chinese Theater I witnessed a peculiar act of transference: a man was posing for a photograph in the Forecourt of the Stars, his hand placed carefully in Al Pacino's handprint.

fig. n: burger by Umami Burger

A couple of hours later, I'd made my way back to Space 15Twenty, adjacent to the Hollywood Farmer's Market, so that I could experience my very first Umami Burger. I considered having the signature Umami Burger, with its famed "umami x 6" flavor explosion, and I contemplated the SoCal Burger, with butter lettuce, oven-dried tomato spread, house-made American cheese, and caramelized, but ultimately I went with the Hatch Burger, which marries 4 different types of roasted green chiles with UB's house cheese. I'm happy to say that Umami Burger's Hatch Burger lived up to all expectations (and with all the hype surrounding UB these days, expectations were high). The patty was gigantic, tender, barely holding together, nice and rare, and juicy as all get-out. The bun was simple, but fresh, toasted, and tasty, and perfectly capable of holding the contents together. The toppings were dreamy. I ate the whole thing in about 32.3 seconds, and that was only because I made a conscious effort to "take my time." I had to restrain myself from ordering a second burger for dessert.

fig. o: the big and the small 2

Just when you thought I couldn't possibly eat any more beef on a 3-day furlough, I closed out my all-too-brief culinary tour of Los Angeles with a trip to Philippe's to try out their interpretation of the French Dip sandwich. Yes, Philippe's is the other Downtown L.A. establishment that claims to have invented the French Dip or French-dipped sandwich back in 1908, the place the folks at Cole's refer to as "that other downtown sandwich shop." Philippe's functions counter-style, they have sawdust on the floor, they house a satellite exhibit of the Los Angeles Railroad Heritage Foundation in their back room, and they serve their sandwiches pre-dipped (to order). The vibe is both more family-friendly and more old-school than Cole's; it's not nearly as hip. Philippe's mustard may not be "atomic," but, by God, it too is "hot... but good!" And their French-dipped beef sandwich was delicious--a little messier than their competitor's, perhaps, but it didn't last long enough to become an issue. I'm not one to waffle when it comes to these kinds of debates--I tend to have strong opinions about such things--but, I have to say: I liked them both, they both had their charms. And, to be honest, I don't really care who the true originator is. I'm not an Angeleno, so I'm not all that invested in the issue. I'm just glad they're both still around, still a vital part of L.A.'s downtown dining scene over 100 years after they first opened their doors.

I really didn't intend for my Escape to L.A. to turn into a 3-day beef binge (with just a couple brief interludes), but sometimes you just gotta go with the flow. Plus, maybe this is could be the beginning of a themed series on L.A. Here's hoping. Think of the possibilities: L.A. Pork, L.A. Fish, L.A. Vegetables, L.A. Bread...

Addendum:

fig. p: chocoholics, report!

If you're in Los Angeles in the next little while, do make a point of visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art's phenomenally rich and varied "Collection: MOCA's First 30 Years." Not only will you get to see Lichtenstein's Standing Rib, alongside works by Warhol, Arbus, Frank, Stella, Levitt, Rauschenberg, Matta-Clark, Goldin, Judd, Smithson, Baltz, Berman, and many, many others, but you'll have the opportunity to immerse yourself in the considerable sensorial pleasures of Ed Ruscha's Chocolate Room (yes, that's actual chocolate lining the walls).

fig. q: the gang's all here!

And if you're already Downtown, and you're something of a film buff, you might want to pop in to the Biltmore Hotel to visit their gallery of photographs documenting the many Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards ceremonies that were held there between the early 1930s and the early 1940s.

Cole's, 118 East 6th Street, Los Angeles (Downtown), (213) 622-4090

Maria's Fresh Seafood, Grand Central Market, 317 S. Broadway, Los Angeles (Downtown), (213) 624-2378

Pacific Dining Car, 1310 West 6th Street, Los Angeles (Downtown), (213) 483-6000

Bottega Louie, 700 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles (Downtown), (213) 802-1470

Park's BBQ, 955 South Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles (Koreatown), (213) 380-1717

Hollywood Farmers' Market, Ivar & Selma Avenue, Los Angeles (Hollywood), (323) 463-3171

Umami Burger, 1520 North Cahuenga Blvd., Los Angeles (Hollywood), (323) 469-3100 [with other locations on South LaBrea and on Hollywood Blvd.]

Philippe's, a.k.a. Philippe The Original, 1001 North Alameda St., Los Angeles (Downtown), (213) 628-3781

aj

Toronto 10-Stop Program, pt. 1

fig. a: Soma

72 hours. 1 wedding. 10 stops.

stop #1: Randy's Take-Out

I spotted Randy's on my last two visits to Toronto. I'm generally so starved for good West Indian food that I can't help noticing each and every patty shop, roti joint, and West Indian grocery every time I go to T.O.--it's not that you can't get good West Indian in Montreal, but there's just so much more of it in Toronto it boggles the mind. So many of Toronto's West Indian eateries are really, truly excellent too, and, anyway, I'm a complete sucker for Jamaican patties and jerk dishes, Trinidadian rotis and rum cakes, and ginger beers of all persuasions. Randy's stood out because it had a queue out the front door. Always a good sign. So this time around when we pulled into town we took the Allen down to Eglinton and made a beeline to Randy's. How can you argue with a place that sells patties by the dozen to its devoted regulars? How can you argue with a place that advertises, "Patties for the people since 1979." Answer: you can't. Randy's makes a top-notch patty: fresh, hot, flaky, delicate, and stuffed with spicy, tasty goodness. And they sell 'em for a song.

stop #2: Chinese Traditional Buns

This was a place grabbed our attention when we read last year's Now Magazine feature on Toronto's best Chinese. It seemed right up our alley and completely unlike anything we know of in Montreal. We'd just eaten at Randy's and we were just hours away from eating at the wedding we were going to in the Distillery District, but we were still a little peckish and we're just about always ready for good Chinese, so... Step downstairs into this underground haunt and you'll find a brightly lit (fluorescently so) yet welcoming little restaurant with a tantalizing northeastern Chinese menu composed of buns, dumplings, noodle dishes, and a whole host of house specialties we'd never seen on a menu anywhere else. We were awestruck. "Luckily," we'd just eaten and we had a wedding dinner looming, so we kept things simple, made a couple of quick decisions, and settled on some Tianjin-style buns and some shrimp and pork dumplings. The verdict: we're definitely coming back, and next time we're bringing a full appetite. Look out.

stop #3: Soma

We'd read about Soma in the pages of Sam's fantastic sweet pleasure : plaisir sucré a while ago but didn't realize it was located in the Distillery District just doors from Café Balzac and the wedding we were attending. Halfway during the wedding festivities we slipped out to take a look around the area before the sun set and just chanced upon Soma. We stepped into chef David Castellan's sparklingly modern premises and were instantly impressed. It was hard not to be impressed by the massive cacao bean roaster Soma had just acquired and which they had on display in their chocolatemaking room (you can see it there in the picture above, off to the left), not to mention their plans to start roasting cacao beans according to their own specifications. Unfortunately, we weren't really in a position to purchase a lot of chocolate at the time--it was very humid out that night, and we were going to be at a wedding for another 4 hours or so--but we did take a close look at their offerings, including their beautiful selection of chocolate bars, filled chocolates, and gelati, and when we couldn't it take any longer, we ordered their signature Mayan hot chocolate,

fig. b: Mayan hot chocolate

sat at the counter, and savored it. Not to be missed.

stop #4: Carousel Bakery

The next day we headed to the grand, old St. Lawrence Market on bikes for lunch. Our friend Pierre had been talking up the market's legendary peameal bacon sandwiches, and, frankly, we were curious. For those of you who don't know, peameal bacon is the true "Canadian bacon," and it bears no resemblance to those round slices of bacon that show up in Eggs Benedict and on "Hawaiian" pizza south of the border. Peameal bacon is lean, not fatty, it's cured but not smoked, and though it used to be dusted with peameal, it's cornmeal that has long since given this boneless pork loin its trademark yellow hue. Probably the most famous of the peameal bacon sandwich-selling outfits in St. Lawrence Market's south annex is Carousel Bakery, and it's also Pierre's preferred peameal vendor, so that's where we went. What exactly is a peameal bacon sandwich?, you ask. A couple of thin slices of fried peameal bacon served on a plain bun. End of story. Michelle and I split a peameal bacon special after I took it over to their fixins bar and dressed it. Most people just give their peameal bacon sandwiches a squirt of French's and leave it at that. I gave it a healthy dose of Dijon mustard and Kozlik's Hot Horseradish and turned it into a mindbomb. Highly recommended.

stop #5: Anton Kozlik's Canadian Mustard

We were so impressed by their three-alarm horseradish we marched right over to Kozlik's booth, ate about a 1/2 lb of Kozlik's free peameal bacon samples as we tested out their exotic mustards, and bought ourselves a jar of Hot Horseradish to bring back to Montreal with us.

Randy's Take-Out, 1569 Eglinton Avenue West, (416) 781-5313
Chinese Traditional Buns, 536 Dundas West, (416) 299-9011
Soma, Distillery District, 55 Mill St., (416) 815-7662
Carousel Bakery, St. Lawrence Market, 93 Front St. E., upper level 42, (416) 363-4247 or (416) 863-6764
Anton Kozlik's Canadian Mustard, St. Lawrence Market, 93 Front St. E., (416) 361-9788

aj

On Mostarda, Mustard, and Mustard Oil

Michelle and I first experienced real Italian mostarda a few years ago when we picked up a strikingly beautiful jar of mostarda di pera at Les Petits Plaisirs d'Andrea (5235 Boul. St-Laurent) back when their location was on Laurier. We really had little idea what mostarda was at the time, but the slices of pear were perfectly suspended in the syrup and it sounded intriguing so we went ahead and splurged. When we got home and tried it we were glad we'd given mostarda a chance. The fruit flavors were so delicate, and the gentle warmth of the mustard gave the blend real depth. We were instantly seduced, and we found ourselves trying to stretch out les petits plaisirs of that jar of mostarda for months.

We’ve since tried a couple of different types of mostarda, including the most famous version, the version you’re most likely to find on the shelves of your better specialty stores (especially Italian ones), Mostarda di Cremona. We’d never tried to make any though. Then a wonderful confluence occurred this weekend. On the one hand, my continued adventures with Edward Behr’s The Artful Eater had led me to his rather fascinating chapter “On English and French Mustards,” which ends with a discussion of the work of Rosamond Man and Robin Weir on mustard and its effect on the flavors of foods of all kinds. There, amidst a brief overview of Man and Weir’s obsession which mustard (“The problem was not, as so many had asked, whether there was enough to write a book about mustard,” they're quoted as writing, “but to know how, and when, to stop.”), which involved everything from uncooked fruit to chocolate (whose flavor was “especially heightened,” apparently), Behr pauses to mention the Italian fruit-mustard combinations that have come to be known as mostarda, which stand out as being among the only dishes in the modern Italian repertoire to use mustard in any form, and which Behr speculates “must almost certainly [be] medieval survivals.” On the other hand, my continued adventures with Mario Batali’s The Babbo Cookbook had led me to his recipe for Bollito misto (an Italian “mixed boil” consisting of beef brisket, capon, sausages, and vegetables)—which Batali describes as being the most satisfying of dishes “during cold weather”—and the Cranberry mostarda recipe that accompanied it. Behr’s chapter inspired me to hustle on up to Olives et Épices to pick up the finest mustard seeds I could find so that I could start mixing my own mustards at home; Batali’s recipe inspired me to make yet another accompaniment for our regular cheese courses and to lay the groundwork for a future Bollito misto dinner.

I knew if I went to Olives et Épices that I'd most likely be getting the newest crop of mustard seeds—both yellow mustard seeds, most of which now come from Saskatchewan, which is by far and away the world's largest producer, and brown mustard seeds, which originated in the Himalayan region. But, as it turns out, I needed to go to Jean-Talon Market so that I could get another specialty required for the recipe from Olives et Épices' sister store, La Dépense: mustard oil. I’d tried a couple of local gourmet shops and a few local Italian specialty shops thinking that there must be some Italian mostarda makers in town who need their mustard oil, but all I got in return were puzzled looks, so I called La Dépense. Bingo. However, when I asked how much a bottle of mustard oil cost over the phone, I was surprised to hear that they were selling them for $2.00. I’d been figuring that something that was this difficult to track down had to come with a real price tag. When I got to La Dépense the next day I found out exactly why the price was right. Closer inspection of the bottle revealed a label that read “FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY.” I'm not sure I actually would have gone ahead and made the purchase given this warning, but luckily for me, Mr. Philippe de Vienne himself was in house to field my questions. When I asked him what this warning meant, he wasn’t too specific, but he mentioned that some claimed that mustard oil had a toxicity to it that sometimes made people sick and that a few years ago there’d been an incident involving mustard oil whereby numerous people had gotten sick and died from having ingested mustard oil. Ever since, countries like Canada (and the United Kingdom, apparently, because that’s where the brand of mustard oil that I was holding in my hands came from) had placed a ban on food grade mustard oil. The Indian community, however, continued to claim that there is nothing dangerous about mustard oil, he assured me, and they continue to use it in their cuisine. He added that anyone with any lingering doubts had only to heat the oil to the smoking point before use to guarantee that the oil would be perfectly safe for consumption. So I went ahead and bought that bottle of mustard oil, and I followed Mr. De Vienne’s advice, and, as you’ll soon see, everything turned out fine. What I learned later, though, was that the incident Mr. De Vienne referred to in passing was an absolutely massive controversy in India, where mustard oil has been held in very high esteem for hundreds and hundreds of years. Yes, there was an incident involving tainted mustard oil, and, yes, dozens of people actually died as a result, but the specifics of the case involve a struggle between local, homegrown, and inexpensive products (in this case, mustard oil), and their genetically modified, North American-grown, multinational-produced, and relatively expensive counterparts (in this case, soy bean oil), documented evidence of sabotage, and charges of corruption and corporate conspiracy. Given multinational capital's ever-increasingly rapacious outlook towards India, as well as its absolutely appalling record of corporate misconduct there in particular, these charges not only seemed credible, they seemed likely. If you need convincing, you might find Vandana Shiva's 2001 article from The Ecologist illuminating. I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time I purchased my little bottle of mustard oil, I had no idea that mustard oil had become a rallying cry for a larger struggle in India, but in retrospect this seemed like an oil actually worth fighting for (even if mine was bottled in England and probably had very little or nothing to do with India).

Anyway, I raced my bike home from the market and got to work on my mostarda. The execution was very straightforward and the jam that resulted turned out perfectly, with a brilliant red hue to it and just the right amount of gel. Better yet, it tasted great—decidedly North American (cranberries are known as mirtillo Americano in Italy, after all), perhaps, but otherwise it had all the qualities one might have expected from a true artisanal mostarda: nice complexity of flavor, not overly sweet, excellent with meats, ideal with cheeses [such as the pecorino pepato pictured above]. Hell, it even made for an outstanding grilled cheese sandwich today for lunch.

Cranberry Mostarda

2 cups water
2 cups granulated sugar
1 lb fresh cranberries (I used 12 oz and the recipe turned out just fine)
3 tbsp Colman’s dry mustard
1 tsp mustard oil (as mentioned above, you may want to heat the oil till the smoking point, then allow it to cool, before using it)
2 tbsp black mustard seeds
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the sugar and 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Add the cranberries and cook over high heat for 10 minutes, or until the cranberries begin to burst.

While the cranberries are cooking, place the mustard in a small bowl and add just enough water to form a thin paste. Add the mustard oil, black mustard seeds, and salt and pepper. Stir this mixture into the berries and cook over high heat until the mixture is thick and syrupy, 10-20 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. The mostarda can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week. It can also be canned, if you like.

Prep time: well under an hour.

Yield: 3 cups.

Is the mustard oil absolutely necessary? Probably not. You could probably compensate for its omission by adding a bit more dry mustard. Is it dangerous? No. Is the resultant mostarda delicious? Yes.

aj

Thanks once again to Edward, Mario, and Philippe.