The Dine LA effect when prices drop, plus the city’s hottest new bar, farmers market therapy for our cooking editor and a new documentary about the staff of the World Trade Center restaurant Windows on the World, which was destroyed on 9/11. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with Tasting Notes.
When price matters
Passion fruit parfait with coconut sorbet, tapioca pearls and lemongrass milk, the dessert offered at Citrin in Santa Monica during Dine LA Restaurant Week.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
During what is normally one of the slowest times of the year for restaurants — a late August weeknight — I walked into the Santa Monica restaurant Citrin and found every table and booth packed. Even the bar seats were filled with diners.
It was Dine LA Restaurant Week — expanded to 15 days in recent years — and the mood was exuberant. Many were excited to try the $99 three-course tasting menu in a Michelin one-star restaurant that normally charges $165 for a four-course menu.
From the start of its existence, approachability has been one of Citrin’s underlying tenets. Without giving up on the super-seasonal local ingredients, French-based techniques and California spirit at the heart of its fancy-pants big brother, Mélisse, chefs Josiah Citrin and Ken Takayama wanted to create a more accessible alternative to the $399 tasting menu at their Michelin two-star restaurant. They called it California progressive cuisine when Food’s Jenn Harris reported on Citrin’s opening in 2019.
Still, with a la carte dishes ranging from $15 to $226 (for Hida Japanese A5 Wagyu sirloin), dinner at Citrin is not a cheap date. So the $99 Dine LA menu was a terrific reintroduction to the excellent cooking taking place under the watch of Citrin, Takayama and chef de cuisine Jose Suarez. Among the standouts, a sunshine burst of color and flavor in a gorgeous golden heirloom tomato soup with a strawberry sorbet center; vermilion rockfish, harvested in the lower-stress shinkei-jime manner and sauced with shellfish sabayon; and a passion fruit parfait with coconut sorbet, tapioca pearls and lemongrass milk.
Around me, I heard some customers say it had been a few years since they’d eaten at the restaurant. Others said it was their first time in and that they’d be back. This is the way Dine LA, a Los Angeles Tourism initiative, is supposed to work.
And though the reduced-price menu has come to an end for now (Dine LA will return early next year), Citrin offers a way to experience its cuisine at happy hour pricing all year long, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (reserve at the bar, not the dining room). The so-called Citrin Glass Off menu not only includes a $15 Mélisse burger but a bar-size portion of lobster Bolognese with truffled brown butter froth for $19 instead of $49 for the full-size dish, and a single Santa Barbara spot prawn with bok choy and verbena prawn broth for $18 instead of the dining room’s more expansive $56 preparation. With an eye to addressing the restaurant affordability divide, no menu item on the Glass Off menu is more than $25 and there are $9 beers, $11 wines by the glass and $13 cocktails. It seems like a good addition to senior Food editor Danielle Dorsey’s recent guide to adult happy meals.
Of course, Citrin was just one of more than 400 businesses participating in Dine LA Restaurant Week, and experiences can vary according to the restaurant. I had to specifically ask for the Dine LA menu at one restaurant after only the regular menu was presented, and there are times you have to tamp down the worry you will be seen as a Dine LA cheapskate if you ask for regular tap water instead of paying for bottled water. But servers and restaurateurs across town were overwhelmingly welcoming to their new and returning customers and I ate some wonderful food during Dine LA’s two weeks.
Weiser melon and surf clam salad with Meyer lemon vinaigrette and Castelvetrano olives plus a Negroni at Rossoblu.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m happy every time I eat here,” my partner, John, said halfway through our Dine LA meal at Steve and Dina Samson‘s Rossoblu near downtown L.A.’s Arts District.
When I saw that beef tongue salmistrata with anchovy toast was on the Dine LA menu, I knew we had to make a reservation. Served with a citrus marmalade and aged balsamic vinegar, it was a lovely start to a meal that also included a salad of Weiser melon, surf clams, Castelvetrano olives and Meyer lemon vinaigrette; pork belly with charred peaches, caramelized milk curd and Jimmy Nardello peppers; pappardelle with summer squash, and a basil gelato sundae with mixed berry jam, toasted nuts and focaccia crumble. Plus, there were Negronis on tap formulated by the restaurant’s longtime bartender Noe Garcia.
Chef Steve Samson in his kitchen at Rossoblu, not long after its June 2017 opening. The restaurant will close in November.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
But in this case, the Dine LA effect wasn’t enough to save Rossoblu. Last week, we received news that the Samsons have decided to close their restaurant after nearly 10 years as a downtown L.A. fixture.
“The Samsons cited a range of reasons for the closure,” wrote reporter Stephanie Breijo in her story about the couple’s decision, “including the end of their lease coinciding with a difficult environment for independent restaurants that involves the rising cost of goods and services and inconsistent patronage. It proved harrowing for years, they said, resulting in declines to their physical and mental health.”
With nearly two months before Rossoblu’s Nov. 1 closing, I encourage you to try Samson’s vision of Bolognese as well as other regional Italian specialties made with a seasonal California perspective.
Finally, here’s one more restaurant to put on your list, this one at the beginning of its journey. After Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn saw the overwhelmingly positive response to the $175 six-course Dine LA menu at their Melrose Avenue restaurant Jacaranda, they decided to keep it going for $185.
Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn their restaurant Jacaranda.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
They opened the restaurant earlier this year with a 12-course $295 tasting menu after a trial run serving just 12 to 14 guests in their own home. Many diners have been loving the full blow-out experience at the restaurant, but the couple have also sensed a restlessness among some of their customers, who say they would come to Jacaranda more often if it didn’t require such a large time and financial investment.
“When we agreed to participate in Dine LA,” the couple wrote in an Instagram post last week, “we wanted to use it as an opportunity to try a shorter menu format. The response was amazing! … It is a less expensive menu, but also an experience that takes under two hours.”
It’s also an experience that includes one of Patterson’s most popular dishes at the new restaurant: grilled and raw vegetables in a green juice of nopales, yerba santa and lime, a kind of vegetable aguachile that feels completely inspired by the culture of Los Angeles.
Beyond cool
Cucumber cocktail with gin, Sichuan pepper, sesame and citrus from Los Feliz bar and restaurant Vandell.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
Why did restaurant critic Bill Addison devote his latest review to a bar instead of a restaurant?
“This isn’t just a fresh, cool bar,” he wrote. “It’s an exceptional one, an L.A.-specific one, built for the long run on a bedrock of talent and vision and experience.”
Shawn Lickliter and Vay Su‘s Loz Feliz bar Vandell is, Addison declares, the hottest L.A. bar of the year. Yes, mini-martinis, which we are seeing in so many restaurants these days, appear but also seasonal cocktails.
“In a moment when the newsy narrative is that no one’s drinking anymore,” writes Addison, “Vandell pushes forward our drinking culture.”
More on Southern California bar culture: Columnist Todd Martens writes about the Alex Lamb and Max Well documentary “The Donn of Tiki” about the life and legacy of Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, better known as Donn the Beachcomber.
A versatile bean
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Writer Margy Rochlin has been obsessed with Peruano beans, the pale yellow Mexican legume by way of Peru that even Pizzana chef Daniele Uditi favors over more traditional Italian cannellini beans for his famed pasta e fagioli. He shared the recipe with Rochlin, who tells the story of the bean and also gets cookbook author and TV host Pati Jinich to share her chile de arbol refried bean recipe, which uses Peruanos. And when Rochlin’s friend and movie publicist Chris Libby accidentally overcooked his Peruano beans, he improvised and came up with a terrific dinner party recipe: ‘Oops, I Overcooked the Beans’ Emergency Bean Soup.
Also …
- Media reporter Steven Battaglio talks with Julie Cohen, co-filmmaker with Betsy West of “Top of the World,” the new CNN documentary from the “RGB” directors about the restaurant workers of Windows on the World, which was destroyed when the World Trade Center was attacked 25 years ago on 9/11. “There was a lot of beautiful stuff in the Twin Towers,” Cohen told Battaglio. “We shouldn’t let that disappear just because it ended so painfully.”
- Ena Bakery‘s Sasha Piligian administers some farmers market therapy to our cooking editor, Cody Reiss, who confesses that until very recently he’s found the crowds and weekly scrimmage for produce “hellish.”
- And Food reporter Nava Rawls digs into her Atlanta roots to write a guide to eight places in L.A. to find great lemon pepper wings.
