No, Giles Clark won’t be making the watermelon cake during his time as chef-in-residence at Lulu inside the Hammer Museum.
Many of us plugged into L.A. dining obsessions last summer won’t forget this summertime darling of the algorithm during Clark’s brief time as the creative force behind Cafe 2001, housed in the back of Yess in the Arts District. A recipe adapted from Toshio Tanabe and his French restaurant in Tokyo, Ne Quittez Pas, a wedge sandwiched candy-red fruit between thin layers of simple sponge cake, covered in smooth whipped cream frosting. Its genius touches: a splotch of watermelon boiled down to jam and, in a nod to Clark’s English origins, Fox’s Glacier Mints grated over top for an invisible menthol coolness.
Typing these words, I really miss the watermelon cake, and in general the serious, wonderful peculiarities of Clark’s cooking — the mishmash of pork tenderloin katsu sandwiches, terrines, salads that might combine bitter melon and corn, and afternoon yeasted doughnuts — at Cafe 2001, which too abruptly closed in late January along with Yess.
A maverick chef returns to an icon’s fold
A few months later, word came that Clark had taken a temporary position leading the kitchen at Lulu, a fascinating detour however finite the arrangement. Time blurs: It’s been nearly five years since Chez Panisse luminary Alice Waters and accomplished writer-chef David Tanis, who held leadership roles in Waters’ legendary Berkeley restaurant on and off for 25 years, formed a partnership to oversee dining on the Hammer’s courtyard patio.
“I’ve never wanted to have another restaurant — and I don’t have another restaurant,” Waters told my colleague Stephanie Breijo when Lulu opened in November 2021. “I am cheerleading for a restaurant that I think is very important to have at the Hammer Museum.” Tanis, up for a new project as the world emerged from the pandemic, agreed to relocate to Los Angeles.
Lulu restaurant resides in the center courtyard of the Hammer Museum in Westwood.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
However its keepers might want things defined, the Westwood menu hews strategically close to the ethos refined in the Cafe at Chez Panisse upstairs from the main restaurant. Waters’ involvement ensures relationships with the finest farmers in the state. The menu — mostly a la carte but also including a daily three-course prix fixe — changes unrelentingly with the markets, often fine-tuned even between lunch and dinner services. Dishes pull from the Italian, French and Californian-Mediterranean repertoires: gently dressed salads with painterly lettuces, pastas with seafood and tomato ragús, chicken Milanese in lemon-caper sauce, rillettes and caponata and granitas for dessert.
Simple is the golden rule. Tanis is a kitchen poet. At Lulu, I’ve found the cooking can veer between profound (a carrot soup that peers all the way down into the essence of the vegetable, a Zen carrot enlightenment) to a pleasant collection of pristine ingredients that reminds me I’m eating in a museum cafe.
Tanis continues to guide the restaurant but no longer oversees the team on site. Waters offers frequent input. So does general manager Jesse McBride, previously a director at Chateau Marmont. His service style brings a sly bit of rock ’n’ roll energy to Lulu if you’re looking for it.
Jesse McBride, director of operations at Lulu restaurant, gives a visitor a cup of coffee during Lulu’s early days in November 2021.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The challenge — the understanding — of any chef stepping in to lead Lulu is that the culinary edifice is firmly in place. The charge is to uphold it, not remake it in your image.
Briefly, beginning late last year, the restaurant employed Rob Newton, a chef from the South who began to subtly weave that region’s flavors into the mix. He made a special dinner for the Hammer in February to frame a viewing of two vintage Les Blank documentaries filmed in New Orleans. Lobster and scallop bisque over rice; barbecued shrimp gripped by lemon and Worcestershire sauce; Creole-style rabbit fragrant with bay leaf among tomatoes and peppers; bread pudding glazed with vanilla-rum caramel. It was the most close-to-the-source Louisiana-inspired cooking I’ve had in Los Angeles.
Newton left the restaurant not long afterward, and Clark stepped in mid-spring. Years ago, Clark apprenticed at the Chez Panisse cafe. I asked him in a recent interview how he would describe Tanis’ cuisine model.
“David is on the side of restraint,” he said. “He brings a little sparkle and a hook to the dishes. There’s a sense of clarity but also a bit of mischief here and there. It’s great when we’re together and we’re all watching his hands as he cooks.”
Omelet crespéus, based on a recipe by winemaker Lulu Peyraud, the namesake of Lulu restaurant inside the Hammer Museum in Westwood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
He’s clear on the assignment.
But also this: The food at Lulu is quietly the most exciting it’s ever been.
I knew it while tasting the baked Sonoma goat cheese with lettuces two weeks ago. It’s been a Cafe at Chez Panisse staple for decades: I had it first almost 30 years ago as an earnest pastry cook in his 20s, traveling to the temple of California cuisine to eat and learn. The dish is simplicity itself, a modest round of soft, fresh cheese flecked with breadcrumbs and herbs.
I order this old saw out of pure nostalgia every time, but it was Clark’s salting that brought the dish back to the moment for me — a transformation as undetectable to the eye as the grated mint candy on the watermelon cake. With a hair more aggressive seasoning, the light shone onto the hidden, grassy flavors of the chevre. The years between my initial encounter collapsed in joy.
Summertime is the best time at Lulu
I single out the menu’s crespéus (great word), a direct homage to Lucie “Lulu” Peyraud, the celebrated winemaker, cook and matriarch after whom the restaurant is named; she died in 2020 at 102. The recipe for the flat, round, silky omelet appears in the 1994 cookbook “Lulu’s Provençal Table,” written by the great Richard Olney. A cookbook author and American expat who made Provence his home (and who died in 1999), he was one of Waters’ great muses. The book contains summery suggestions for crespéus using tomato or chard or zucchini. Spinach, melty blotches of feta and feathery dill dot the variation on Clark’s watch. It’s an elegantly, exactingly prepared lunch omelet.
Fusili al pesto Genovese with potatoes and string beans, a summertime pasta at Lulu.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Did I still look for hints of Clark’s distinct personality to burst through on the menu? I couldn’t help it. Were there allusions to a Sunday English roast in the lamb saddle chop at brunch? It was sidled up to a potato and onion tian, an absolutely Chez Panisse-coded term that traditionally refers to a Provençal vegetable dish and the oval earthenware vessel in which it’s baked. Did the pillowy French toast, drenched in blackberries and whipped ricotta, channel the doughnuts Clark learned to make at St. John in London?
Lamb saddle chop with potato, onion and olive tian at Lulu.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
There was one menu dish that looked a little out of place: barracuda filleted into chunks and fried in batter as light as tempura, served with fat wedges of tomato, cabbage salad and an herbaceous tartar sauce.
Deputy Food editor Betty Hallock, a frequenter of Yess and Cafe 2001, had joined me for this meal. She took a bite of fish and looked up from her plate.
“This is Giles,” she said. I grinned and nodded.
But any such glimpses into his individualist’s soul are mere flashes (and I hope Clark doesn’t get in trouble for me mentioning this one).
Summertime, when the produce is sublime to the point of slapstick, is always the best time at Lulu. But it’s absolutely worth a fresh consideration while Clark remains. For how long? Unknown. Post-Cafe 2001, he was asked to join teams in London and Tokyo. Instead, he’s working to open his own place here.
“I decided to stay in L.A. for one more try at something crazy and personal,” he said. “I’m not naïve about how hard it is to run a restaurant here right now, but I have just enough recklessness left in me that I think I have to.”
In other words, we still have a shot at the watermelon cake next summer.
Lulu at the Hammer Museum: 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (424) 999-4870, lulu.restaurant
Brioche French toast with blackberry compote and whipped ricotta at Lulu.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
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