We’re back from the holiday weekend with news of restaurant openings, closings and a rediscovery of the cornmeal crust pizza that helped make L.A.’s thriving pizzeria landscape. Plus, a new viral ice cream pop-up. … I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with Tasting Notes.
Dinner with an old friend
Zelo’s version of zuccotto cake with a whipped chocolate filling, a layer of whipped cream and crushed biscotti and a ladyfinger crust.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Just as we can lose touch with good friends over time, we can also lose touch with favorite restaurants.
Although it’s thrilling to explore where Los Angeles’ cuisine and culture is headed through its newest restaurants — read Stephanie Breijo on Daniel Patterson‘s return to high-end dining at Jacaranda — we shouldn’t forget the places that don’t get a lot of attention once the initial reviews are in. These are restaurants that year after year serve excellent food to loyal customers.
One of these places is Zelo Gourmet Pizza.
Back in 2005, Jonathan Gold called Zelo “the great undiscovered Los Angeles pizza restaurant” with an unusual cornmeal crust pie that is “beyond crisp, a crackling, luscious, tooth-shattering crispness with the staying power of a Hendrix chord.”
Deep-dish pizza pans are used to bake Zelo pies at the 24-year-old restaurant, but their inspiration came from San Francisco, not Chicago. (If you’re seeking a pizza rabbit hole, look up whether a true Chicago deep-dish pizza crust can be made with cornmeal.)
Owner Mike Freeman picked up his cornmeal-crust affection while working at Patty Unterman and Richard Sanders’ San Francisco pizzeria Vicolo. (It closed in 2005, but a company started by a former chef and manager at the restaurant now sells Vicolo frozen cornmeal crust pizza in supermarkets, including Whole Foods and Sprouts.)
At Zelo, Freeman brought his own touches to the cornmeal crust pizza. His most popular pie, for instance, is one of his most unconventional — topped with corn, smoked mozzarella and onions stained purple from a balsamic vinegar marinade. In the 2015 cookbook “The United States of Pizza,” Craig Priebe and Dianne Jacob included a corn pizza recipe modeled on Zelo’s.
Up in Portland, Delane and Gavin Blackstock use Freeman’s dough recipe — with his blessing — for the cornmeal crust pizzas they make at their restaurant Dove Vivi. (They worked for Freeman at Zelo.)
Yet cornmeal crust pizzas, in the way Freeman makes them, are still a rarity. They shouldn’t be.
As current Times restaurant critic Bill Addison has noted many times, Los Angeles is one of the country’s great pizza cities with even one of the country’s most acclaimed pizzaioli, Chris Bianco, establishing a base here. In 2009, former critic S. Irene Virbila took note of the change that was happening, with Gjelina and Pizzeria Mozza among the places that were picking up the conversation that Wolfgang Puck began in the 1980s at Spago. Ten years later, Addison was extolling the virtues of Daniel Cutler‘s Ronan, Justin De Leon‘s Apollonia’s, Daniele Uditi‘s Pizzana and other places that impressed him soon after he moved to Los Angeles full time.
By 2022, Addison was declaring a “golden moment” for L.A. pizza, with so many places to consider he did a ranked guide to 10 great places that could still be called new that year, including Pizzeria Sei, Quarter Sheets and Secret Pizza. The following year, his pizza list expanded to 21 places. And six months ago, restaurant critic Jenn Harris had seven more new places for pizza aficionados to note, including Zach Pollack‘s Cosetta, Erik Vose‘s Redwood Pie and Andy Kadin‘s Bub and Grandma’s Pizza.
And what about Zelo? With so many new pizzas in town, does it still measure up?
Not long ago, I stopped in at Freeman’s restaurant and found that things hadn’t changed much since I’d last been in. Music posters still line the walls and good local beer is on tap. I put in my usual order: half corn pizza, half four-cheese pizza (mozzarella, fontina, provolone and Parmesan dotted with tomato) along with a blue cheese-and-walnut-topped beet salad (one of the best in Southern California) plus a slice of Freeman’s take on a zuccotto cake with a whipped chocolate filling and a layer of whipped cream and crushed biscotti under a ladyfinger crust.
A close-up view of Zelo’s beet salad with roasted walnuts, blue cheese and balsamic-shallot vinaigrette.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
I worried that after so much time Zelo wouldn’t taste as good as I remembered. But just one bite of the cornmeal crust was enough to rekindle my old love. In a great pizza town like ours, there’s always room for one more.
Two half pizzas to make a whole at Zelo. One side has a four-cheese topping, the other has corn and balsamic onions, all on a cornmeal crust.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Cal-Brit? It’s just Wilde’s
No ordinary fish and chips: At Wilde’s, battered skate wing comes with a side of salt-and-vinegar chips.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
It’s tempting, says restaurant critic Bill Addison in his review of Wilde’s in Los Feliz, to attach a British or Cal-Brit label on the cooking of chef Natasha Price, who indeed was born in England. After all, he says, “toasty” Welsh rarebit and “crackly topped” sausage rolls appear on the menu, along with a “stretch-of-the-imagination play on traditional fish and chips” with “malt vinegar aioli blitzed with herbs … and spices.” But there are many culinary influences on the food at Wilde’s, opened by Price with Tatiana Ettensberger, who put together the morning-to-night restaurant’s “concise, affordable, French-leaning wine list.” Consider, Addison says, Wilde’s marrow beans, which “erase borders in its rustic goodness. I taste the English countryside, sure, but also France and Italy and the American South. … The closer Price moves toward a fluid definition of her culinary heritage, the greater the kitchen achieves consistent, delicious precision.” And, yes, there are scones.
SoCal’s Puerto Rican expansion
Popular Puerto Rican dishes at Tainos L.A. in Woodland Hills include mofongo with shrimp (mashed plantains with garlic and crisp pork cracklings), fried red snapper and guava-glazed chicken with rice and stewed beans.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
New York and Miami, writes reporter Angela Osorio, are “veritable hubs for Puerto Rican cuisine, but “the food community here in Los Angeles — more than 3,000 miles away from the island — still remains relatively small.”
“And yet, demand for Boricua cuisine,” she adds, “is on the rise locally.”
Osorio talked with several Puerto Rican chefs and restaurateurs about the evolving landscape, which includes the occasional pop-up Capicúa. Then Osorio and Food’s senior editor Danielle Dorsey came up with a guide to four of the L.A. area’s best Puerto Rican restaurants: the pioneering Señor Big Ed in Cypress, Mofongos in North Hollywood, La Casa de Iris in Long Beach and Tainos L.A. in Woodland Hills.
Closing and opening
A 2020 view of Connie & Ted’s, when the restaurant’s dining area expanded to the parking lot during the pandemic.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Michael Cimarusti with his wife and restaurant partner Crisi Echiverri talked with Food’s Stephanie Breijo about the impending July 1 closure of Connie & Ted’s. They opened the West Hollywood restaurant in 2013, “eight years after [they] opened Providence, which earned its third Michelin star last year … with the idea of offering Los Angeles an easy and more affordable way to taste his cooking and seafood sourcing.”
“It operated very successfully for quite a long while,” Cimarusti said of Connie & Ted’s. “We just didn’t have a choice anymore.”
At the same time, Providence, with its higher-priced, tasting-menu focus is doing very well. But the economic landscape is harder, he says, for “middle restaurants,” which, as Breijo writes, have to “make up for the slimmer margins with volume.”
“People dine differently now,” Echiverri added. “Now, instead of going to a mid-priced restaurant like Connie & Ted’s, they’ll just order in.”
Husband-and-wife team Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn in their fine-dining restaurant, Jacaranda.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)
Another restaurant couple, Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn, are just beginning their journey at Jacaranda, which they opened earlier this month. Breijo talked with the two about their hopes for the restaurant, which marks “Patterson’s first return in 10 years to cooking in a fine-dining kitchen.” It evolved from the couple’s Jaca Social Club, a dinner series they began in their home. (I wrote about the experience in November.)
At Jacaranda, Breijo writes, “the [$295] price is formal, but the more casual service reflects the evolution of Patterson’s cooking as well as where he thinks fine dining might be headed. With more socializing and a less-stuffy environment, Jacaranda, he says, is tailored to the way he thinks L.A. wants to enjoy high-level dining: That mix of high-low, he says, has proved ‘a revelation.’”
Also …
- Carolynn Carreño shares five “stir and dump” quickbread recipes that are terrific for summertime baking.
- And if you’re looking for a way to cool off after the May gray lifts, restaurant critic Jenn Harris says the ice cream she craves most right now is the Harry’s Berries-packed strawberry ice cream from Antico Nuovo alum Bradley Ray. His weekly pop-up, Henry’s Secret Ice Cream, is in West Hollywood’s former Hall Pass ice cream parlor. The premium ingredients for his seasonal ice creams mean he has to charge $18 to $23 a pint. So far, that hasn’t stopped his customers. “Right now,” Harris writes, “the weekly drops are selling out in as little as 23 minutes.”
