Lunching at Luna

Gastroblog's Jackie Danicki and I went to lunch at Luna Park yesterday. I've been lunching there since they opened, and although the prices seem to have risen a bit, the service was actually slightly faster than some of the other nail-bitingly slow lunches I've had there, so I guess it evens out. Jackie suggested starting with the goat cheese fondue appetizer, which would be a perfect snack with a beer or cocktail in the evening. I liked my cobb salad, which had good ingredients in nice large hunks, not that yucky chopped up kind of cobb salad, but could have used just a touch more dressing. Jackie's Chinese chicken salad was not as successful, but Luna Park gets it right most of the time, especially with their salmon, which I'm still remembering fondly from my last lunch there. Jackie had lots of fascinating things to say about building marketing blogs for companies, local bloggers, living in London, and Arianna Huffington's new blog project with Tina Brown, David Geffen, Larry David, Tom Freston et al.

goat cheese fondue
I like Luna Park just fine, but it's too bad that it's basically L.A.'s ONLY restaurant which could be said to be reasonably priced and lively, with reliably good food and nice cocktails. If you disagree, please let me know of another restaurant which fits these qualifications, because that's what people seem to want, and it's pitifully lacking in this town.
Luna Park
672 S. La Brea
(323) 934-2110

What's the big deal about cupcakes?

We were discussing this at dinner the other night, and then someone posed this very pertinent question on a long Chowhound thread . When we were in New York recently, the line at Magnolia bakery was way out the door. I'm no cupcake fanatic, so I didn't try Magnolia. But I can attest that the cupcakes from Clementine, particularly the coconut, are quite wonderful.
Update: I tried Auntie Em's cupcakes today. I had high hopes for the red velvet, but I was a bit skeptical when I dropped it three times on the way into the house and it remained completely intact. The cream cheese frosting was nice, but the cake was indeed overly dense and a bit dry. I prefer Doughboys red velvet, which is lighter and comes in more of a cupcake-on-steroids size. Auntie Em's coconut cupcake was quite nice, slightly moister with a subtly coconutty flavor.

Auntie Em's coconut and red velvet cupcakes
According to the Chowhound posters, here's the reasons cupcakes have become so popular in the last few years:
1) they're a decadent splurge which are nonetheless portion-controlled;
2) Everyone is looking for comfort and joy, which cupcakes seem to provide, but most people don't have time to bake;
3) they tap into the whole inner-child "I'm going to lick off all the frosting first" thing;
4) it's a fad, which like every other, will soon peak and die.

Archived comments:

Anonymous said...

You totally ROCK!!! I found your blog by searching for a review about Alcove Cafe, and now i think i've been on ur site for about 2 hours.

j gold said...

When I lived a couple of blocks from Magnolia in the Village, I was puzzled by the existence of huge lines while other, much better local bakeries wanted for business. (The fact that Magnolia was actively nasty to neighborhood children didn't help - the local third-graders all called the place Mongoloid Bakery.)
I finally figured out that what the regulars were hungry for were not the best cupcakes in the neighborhood, but the cupcakes most like the ones that their mothers used to make from a boxed mix. Add plastic-like buttercream frosting vividly tinted with food coloring and flavored with an artifical vanilla reek you could sniff from a block away, and you have the stuff of every six-year-old's red-state birthday party, festivity in the style of Duncan Hines.

Anonymous said...

The cupcakes at Auntie Em's have, indeed, gone a bit downhill in recent weeks. I didn't get it at first, but read on chowhound board that the one owner that used to do all the baking has officially left the building. Auntie Em's still has some respectable qualities, but sweets ain't one of 'em...
As for Magnolia's cupcakes---I've never understood the long lines. The cupcakes are dry as dirt and (as j gold says) the fake vanilla is a stench to be reckoned with. I'm all for the tapping into the cupcake memories from my youth---problem is, i had a mom who could actually bake!

Anonymous said...

i beg to disagree. the desserts at auntie em's are great. the cupcakes, cobblers, cookies, brownies, and the food. they have always had a baking team at night, and the woman who left was a half partner. i think with a place that does seasonal and different things all of the time there will be things people like and don't like. it is the nature of that type of place.

Anonymous said...

i was at auntie em's for lunch today. we stopped by because of the kcrw interveiw. (thanks) we had a cobb salad and a roasted vegetable torte with goat cheese, a piece of black berry pie and a red velvet cupcake. wow! great food, great desserts. what a find.

H.M.S. Pinafore said...

.. the regulars were hungry for the cupcakes most like the ones that their mothers used to make from a boxed mix. Add plastic-like buttercream frosting vividly tinted with food coloring and flavored with an artifical vanilla reek you could sniff from a block away

ABSOLUTELY! They bear the same relationship to gourmet baking as McDonalds does to gourmet beef

Taste test: New Concept

We tried to get to New Concept for dim sum several weeks ago, before the Chowhounds and the L.A. Times tried it. But circumstances intervened, and it didn't happen until this weekend. At noon Saturday, the wait turned out to be well over an hour, so I was about ready to pass out when we finally sat down. A waiter passing by with a plate of small fried fish asked if we wanted some, and I fell upon them voraciously in hopes of stabilizing my blood sugar enough to parse the menu. The fish could have been a bit hotter, but were nicely fried, exactly like an Italian fritto misto, with a sprinkling of fresh chiles.

Among the dishes we sampled were abalone mushroom dumplings -- earthy and pleasantly chewy, but we pressed the vinegar from the Shanghai dumplings into service as a dipping sauce. The Shanghai dumplings -- the ones with the soup inside -- were very gingery. Pan fried turnip cake with spicy x.o. sauce didn't excite me too much; we were happier with shark's fin dumpling, in which a beautifully green rice dough wrapper enclosed a filling of shrimp topped with a small piece of shark's fin and some red roe.

The hollow vegetable with fermented bean curd sauce was Chinese spinach with a really flavorful sauce which tasted like a combination of tahini, mayonaise and chilis, definitely a hit. The traditional bbq pork bao were light and fresh. One of my favorites was the panfried scallops and taro cake, which was a flat, square cake of peanuts and scallops held together with taro root and fried until crispy. Very nice flavor, but again, even better with a dab of the fermented bean paste sauce. For dessert, the green tea flavored dumplings didn't taste that much of green tea, but the black sesame paste filling kind of grew on me; and the egg custard tarts were flaky and eggy in the best possible way.

The verdict: I didn't find New Concept quite as delicate and imaginative as Sea Harbour, but it's certainly a cut above the rolling cart dim sum places. A certain tolerance for long waits and less than solicitous service is helpful. Although I had heard it was somewhat expensive, our huge lunch came to only $15 each. The dinner menu seems to be much higher, but with dishes like pan-fried prawns with toasted oatmeal and steamed shark's fin with cream, it might be worth a splurge.
New Concept Restaurant
700 S. Atlantic Blvd.
Monterey Park
(626) 282-6800

Nate 'n Al's: You CAN go home again

It's hard to believe that it's been over 25 years since I last set foot in Nate 'n Al's. When my parents were still married, my mom would take me to Sunday school at Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church with Jimmy Stewart's kids, and then afterwards, we'd go to Nate 'n Al's for French toast or blintzes or lox, eggs and onions. When I was older, my dad took me for lunch there with his girlfriend of the moment, and around the age of eight, I fixated on the brisket sandwiches and never ordered anything else again.

Here's a poem about Nate n' Als I wrote several years ago. I must have been missing it.

corned beef? no, brisket
scrambled eggs and onions
chocolate milk with a rusty screw
french toast after sunday school
orange chocolate gels
scary yellow sturgeon's eye

When Kathy and Evy proposed having lunch there the other day, I slid into the booth, quickly noting that the room seemed to be identical to the last time I ate there, circa 1980 or so. I waved away the menu while munching on the complimentary pickles, ordering a brisket on rye as if I had just been in the other day. The waitresses seemed to be of equally venerable vintage.

The brisket was flavorful, although certainly drier than a Langer's pastrami. A schmear of brown mustard quickly remedied that problem. The pillowy, warm rye bread was soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside. The coleslaw was a fine accompaniment, not too sweet or saucy.
I had to buy a Joya raspberry joy bar at the checkstand, just to complete the experience. I felt instantly reduced to three feet tall, begging for a candy while my dad charged the bill to his account.
They're all wrong. You can definitely go home again, if home was Nate 'n Al's.

Nate 'n Al Deli
414 N. Beverly Dr.
Beverly Hills
(310) 274-0101

Are Whole Foods' hamburgers really all that?

Several Chowhound posters recently mentioned the deliciousness of Whole Foods' hamburgers, made fresh at the grill. I wanted to pick up some Ess-a-bagels from New York, so I decided to see for myself at the 3rd and Fairfax branch. I ordered my burger with cheddar cheese, medium rare, grilled onions. Turkey and vegeburgers are also available, of course. The Chowhounds specified to instruct the counterperson not to press down on the burger with the spatula and to make sure he took it off the grill at the right time. Sure enough, the guy disappeared right around the time my internal timer started thinking "medium rare." I implored two other counterpeople to remove it; after much skepticism and donning of rubber gloves, the patty was finally placed on its whole wheat bun with Russian dressing and lettuce. After being wrapped up, the burger had to wait in the checkout line with the rest of my stuff (I forgot the bagels with all the burger drama) and then get fished out of my grocery bag. By the time I settled at a table and unwrapped it, the bun had nearly disintegrated.

The meat was indeed excellent, with a large, juicy and flavorful patty. It needed just a touch more salt to bring out the flavor. It's true, they make a good burger -- undoubtedly with some kind of special beef -- but it's hard to say if it's worth it, between babysitting the cooks and the insufficiently hefty bun, which led to a huge mess when eating it.

Bloggers party down

Thanks to Jackie and Brian for hosting a great L.A. bloggers party. Jackie, a blog consultant visiting from London, must be missing good American hamburgers. She said the burgers she's had at the Farm at the Grove and at Chaya Brasserie were both quite good. She also enjoyed Raffi's in Glendale, which I need to try since I've already been to Elena's, which seems to be a similar kebab parlor. Bloggers seem to subsist mainly on booze and potato chips, but I do have one culinary observation from the evening -- believe it or not, the venerable Damiano's Mr. Pizza has a damn good crust, possibly the closest to a New York-tasting crust I've had lately. Take that, Nicky D's.

My cheatin' heart: Chicken Al-Wazir

I cheated on my chicken last night. Zankou was my regular bird. You can always count on it, and you always know exactly how everything's going to taste. It's been a 20-year relationship -- certainly longer than any real-life one -- and sometimes after 20 years, you start to get just a teensy bit bored of the same mutabal foreplay and the climax of creamy garlic sauce perfectly combined with crispy skin, moist chicken and warm pita bread.
So I strayed to Chicken Al-Wazir. I admit it, I was seduced by the novelty factor of a different chicken. The unfamiliar salads stacked in the display case, the presence of lamb tongue sandwiches on the menu -- it was like dating a guy with a sexy foreign accent. I ordered up a whole chicken, an eggplant salad and a beef shwarma sandwich. Instead of being shaved off a large spit, the beef shwarma was first grilled on a skewer, then chopped into bite-sized pieces. It was enclosed in a large flatbread instead of a pita bread, with no sauce to speak of. It would probably have tasted good if you had never had a Zankou tarna or shwarma sandwich. Like the scent of an unfamiliar lover, the rest of the meal was about the tang.

shwarma sandwich, chicken al-wazir, eggplant salad
The chicken had a sourish, lemony tang to the garlic marinade -- quite pleasant, actually. The garlic sauce was discernably more sour than Zankou's -- again, an interesting departure. The eggplant salad, chopped up with tomatoes, lacked seasoning, although the eggplants had been nicely roasted to a char. It was fun while it lasted, but I felt slightly guilty afterwards. A perfectly fine chicken, but the whole just didn't exceed its combined parts. I don't think I'll need that illicit thrill again anytime soon -- there's something comforting about a reliable chicken who always comes through for you.
Chicken Al-Wazir
1219 S. Glendale Ave.
Glendale
(818)500-1578
Archived comments:
Anonymous said...
You should've known better than to cheat on Zankou. Nothing beats their chicken with garlic sauce. Shame on you for straying.
Anonymous said...
What about Elena's on Glendale Blvd @ Acacia? That's my favorite chicken.
Anonymous said...
Every couple of years I hope Al-Waziz gets better, but it never does. Crap falafel, undercooked chicken, every time. They must be a front for something since no one's ever in there.

Vodka-licious: Cinnabar tasting menu and seven new flavored vodkas

Modern Spirit's Litty Mathew writes, "Did we mention that Cinnabar in Glendale is pairing five of our vodkas in a 5-course tasting menu? It's Tuesday, March 29, $65 a person. Call the restaurant and RSVP, 818-551-1155. I can't wait to see what Chef Damon comes up with. I love his cooking."
Cinnabar's creative pan-Asian food seems like it would be an excellent complement to Modern Spirit's new flavor palette, which includes black truffle, candied ginger, celery peppercorn, grapefruit honey, pear lavender, rose petal and tea. Modern Spirits vodkas are great for sipping on their own, or can be combined for unusual cocktails. A number of restaurants have recently added Modern Spirits to their bars, including Beechwood, Luna Park, Grace and Falcon.

The week's news

Fun article on nouveau cocktails in the San Francisco Weekly. Most of the examples are in Houston, of all places, which seems to be pretty innovative on the cocktail front. For example, "Saffron, the new Moroccan spot on Lexington, is serving an incredible almond milk martini and a delicate pomegranate-and-pear drink they call a pompar." Count me in.

I'm not sure Jonathan Gold's Vietnamese sampler was that comprehensive, but then I'm kind of new to Vietnamese food. I've heard mixed things about the Blue Hen, and I think Pho Cafe is completely tasteless. I might have gone with Brodard, Lee Kam Lee, Baguette Express, KP's Vietnamese Deli and Gingergrass.

Taste test: Newport Seafood

China has a vast amount of regions and styles of cooking, and a good number of them can be sampled in L.A.'s San Gabriel Valley. A year or so ago, I realized that my knowledge of Chinese food mainly consisted of "Szechwan, spicy, good!" and "dim sun, fun, like har gow the best." And in fact, if you never ventured east of Chinatown, you could go your whole life not knowing much more than that. So I decided to right this shameful wrong, felicitously aided by the appearance of the extremely helpful Finding Chinese Food in Los Angeles by Carl Chu. Now out of print, it's been replaced with the updated Chinese Food Finder: Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.
With the help of the book, a group of us has ventured out to the San Gabriel Valley on a semi-regular basis, trying real Szechwan at Chung King (really spicy, really good), Islamic at China Islamic (very filling), designer dim sum at Sea Harbour (delicately lovely), Shanghai at Green Village and Hunan at Shiang Garden. Some folks on Chowhound suggested dumplings or hand-cut noodles for our next experience, but that seemed too informal for a group dinner, so I decided to go with Newport Seafood, a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant featuring Chaozhou food.
It was packed on Sunday evening, but after about a half hour of gawking at platters piled high with crabs and lobsters being delivered to every table, we were finally seated. I tried to order the specialties of the region, but instead of Vietnamese style seafood soup, we ended up with a very typical Chinese hot and sour soup, with shrimp and scallops. Although it was a standard dish, I certainly wouldn't complain if it was available somewhere near Silverlake. We also had beef loc lac, the savory "shaking beef" dish available at every Vietnamese restaurant; sauteed bright green pea sprouts; Newport special crab; a whole steamed seabass; and wide rice noodles with chicken. The crab had an excellent spicy garlicky sauce, and was certainly the messiest thing we've eaten in a long time.

The verdict: Everything was good, although other than the crab and the beef, nothing was really that distinctive. But the seafood was good quality, and the lobster looked amazing, so it would be worth another trip to try it. The bill came out to $20 each for the five of us, including tip, with just tea to drink -- not bad for very satisfying six course dinner.
Newport Seafood
835 W. Las Tunas Dr.
San Gabriel
(626) 289-5998
Archived comments:
chickenbuttz said...
The garlic sauce, more like fried garlic bits to my recollection, is also very good with the asparagus.
typefiend said...
I beg you to try the lobster next time you return. If you're lucky, it will have the extra decadent bonus of lobster eggs inside. A group of 12 of us once ordered an $85 lobster, and it was the first time ever in which there was more lobster than people could handle (most of my friends were too squeamish to try the eggs, but they missed out on a delicacy). Oh the garlic...the garlic!

This week's food news

The San Francisco Chronicle did a nice job on a local bloggers article. Offhand, I would say food bloggers in the Bay Area are about a year ahead of L.A. food bloggers. Eating L.A. was one of the first devoted specifically to restaurants in the Los Angeles area. A few more have sprung up, although some explore other areas besides restaurants and some are more oriented towards cooking. Jessica Ritz' L.A. Ritz has dual preoccupations of food and architecture; Professor Salt's Ya Gonna Eat That concentrates on Orange County; Low End Theory offers reviews of L.A. ethnic restaurants; Steve Doggie Dogg's Hot Dog Spot specializes in guess what; Lemon Chicken/L.A. Dining and Sarah's TheDeliciousLife both have a wide range of reviews.

The N.Y. Times delved into chaat, the Indian snack food, in great detail. Plus they referenced Chowpatty Beach several times, which I appreciated since Chowpatty is my Chowhound screen name. Chowpatty Beach in Mumbai is apparently ground zero for delectable Indian snack foods.
Where to get a good chaat in L.A.? I know they have all the ingredients at India's Sweets and Spices, but I think they expect you to mix it up yourself. Urmi emailed and said he thinks you can find several chaats at Surati Farsan in the Pioneer Blvd of Artesia. Something to investigate...

I also loved the Time's graphic on their article about annoyingly complex restaurant menus.

Taste test: Indo Cafe

Top, corn fritters and soybean tempeh; center, chicken coconut curry; bottom, Chowhounds at Indo Cafe
L.A. Chowhounds convened March 6 for rijstaffel at West L.A's Indo Cafe. Rijstaffel means rice table, which is a feast of a dozen or so Indonesian dishes and of course, rice. The Indo Cafe staff was very friendly and our group of 35 or so completely filled the small, Indonesian-decor restaurant.
We started with large, artisanal style shrimp chips and rolled squiggly shrimp chips, both more flavorful than the typical pre-fried shrimp chips. The dishes started coming out fast at that point: first, a tasty chicken curryish soup with glass noodles and fried betel nut slices on top (!). Then, a nicely fried corn and beansprout fritter -- perkedel jagung, yum! -- served with a slightly dry tempeh soybean cake, both for dipping in sweet chili sauce. This was followed by a traditional gado gado salad with potatoes, egg, tofu and other veggies in peanut sauce, and another fritter, this time mashed potatoes with corned beef.
The courses became meatier at this point: some nicely charred beef and chicken satay; excellent, fruity beef rendang; fried chicken with deep-fried garlic bits and a medium spicy chicken/tofu coconut curry -- similar to a Thai coconut curry, but with slightly different flavor notes.
My impressions: We liked almost everything except the rather dry soybean cake. The biggest hits were the corn fritter, beef rendang and chicken curry. The peanut sauce does get a bit repetitive, however. Another vegetable dish would have rounded out the selection nicely. Indonesian food is even heavier on the potatoes than I had remembered. Although we asked for some spiciness, most of us could have taken even more. I would also liked to have tried the avocado milkshake and other unusual fruity Jello drinks.
Indo Cafe
10428 1/2 National Blvd.
West L.A.
(310) 815-1290
(Indo Cafe is open for lunch and dinner but serves rijstaffel only on certain nights to groups larger than four, so call ahead.)

Have fun, get a Yucatan: Mercado La Paloma

In junior high, "Have fun, get a tan" was the default yearbook inscription...oh never mind. It's too rainy for a tan, but these days it's more fun to find an excellent new place to eat, anyway. Mercado La Paloma is a community development project just south of Downtown, just east of USC. An old factory remodeled into a multiculti food court, it's a terrific place for a quick gastronomic tour of Mexico. At Chichen Itza, I sampled the Yucatan dishes including a tangy, spicy orange/jicama salad, a moist chicken tamale and a meltingly rich cochinita pibil (stewed pork) taco.

Left, tamale; right, pibil taco
These three dishes came to a grand total of $5.75. For another $1.50, I had two scoops of homemade Oaxacan ice cream: smoked milk and tuna (cactus fruit) at a stand which also offers smoothies and traditional Oaxacan dishes. Another stand offers huevos rancheros at breakfast and huge, tempting looking shrimp cocktails as well as several types of tamales, tacos and seafood dishes. There's also a Thai stand, a burger grill and a Mexican bakery, but Chichen Itza's Yucatan fare seems the most imaginative of the bunch. Highly recommended, and cheap too. The Mercado is open every day from 8 am to 6:30 pm. and it has a free parking lot.
Mercado La Paloma
3655 S. Grand Ave.
Downtown
(231) 748-1963

Heavy bageling

The collective knowledge of Chowhound L.A., or at least a few opinionated posters, holds that the best bagels in L.A. are to be had at the Bagel Broker on Beverly at Fairfax. I've always been partial to Brooklyn Bagel, myself. But after my recent trip to New York, where I paid pilgrimage to both Ess-a-bagel and H & H, I finally see what people mean when they say we don't have "real" bagels in L.A. It's true, they're different. New York bagels have more tooth, a finer, yeastier crumb and are chewy, yet not tough. I grew up on the bagels at Nate 'n Al's, and while I'm not sure where they get them from, they taste just like Brooklyn Bagel to me, and thus "right."

rye, everything, pumpernickel bagels from the Bagel Broker
Anyway, initial tastes of the Bagel Broker bagels find that they are no better than Brooklyn Bagel. In fact, I like the little blackened onion shreds on Brooklyn's onion bagels to be even better than the New York specimens. Bagel Broker does make a solid, traditional, L.A.-style bagel. Matt liked the cinnamon raisin quite a bit, but I'm sorry, nothing with raisins in it deserves the name bagel. Also nice for a change once in a while are the bialys from Back East Bialy, at 8562 W. Pico.