Los Angeles

Hungry!  Need.  Food.  Now.  There are times when eating becomes the thing I have to do before anything else.  Knowing of close-to-home restaurants is of paramount importance to me.  Luckily, there’s a plethora of places in my Atwater Village-Silver Lake neighborhood to choose from.  Gingergrass is one.  I know that I can drive over and if it’s early enough, get a table and have food in front of me within forty minutes.  If it’s later and the place is full, I can call an order in and pick it up.  There’s value in both of these.

The sign in front of Gingergrass, and the menu itself, has these words: “Fresh Vietnamese Cuisine,” and in my experience this is absolutely true.  I’ve been eating at Gingergrass for years now and have never had a bad meal.  The food always tastes fresh and clean.  The dishes are full of interesting, bright flavors.  The menu is varied enough to never get boring.  Executive Chef Mikel Mark Kim knows his way around a Vietnamese menu while also using local, sustainable, organic, and free-range ingredients: very good things that up the quality and flavor of his food.

I really needed a night out. Life has been conspiring against us lately, but it could be worse. Tired of being homebound and cooking three meals a day, I was desperate for a a little culinary magic. When a friend called with an invite to the opening night of Little Beast, I jumped at the chance like a drowning person needing a life raft.

This new restaurant was one of her clients, so I figured it had to be good. She's a produce broker and has never steered me wrong. All I knew about the place was that the chef, Sean Lowenthal, was, until he opened this place, the sous chef at Chateau Marmont for a couple of years. It was good enough for me.

Their goal in converting the old Larkin space, a quaint, early 1900s Craftsman house, was to create a dining spot in Eagle Rock to rival the foodie joints found in the more tony neighborhoods to their west like Silverlake and Los Feliz. Their mantra: seasonal, modern, progressive. I don't really know what that means when it comes to food, but after sampling the menu, I know that whatever you call it, Little Beast has raised the bar on this section of Colorado.  

Merrick and I had the honor of attending a costume jewelry auction at Decades hosted by the original Zoebot herself—Rachel Zoe. I die! Events don’t get much better than that. The people watching was on another level. Dresses from every decade, necklaces bigger than my head; heels for which the word “high” doesn’t even begin to describe it; and Hermes bracelets on every wrist in the house.

As amaazing as the outfits were, the hors d’oeuvres were offensively wafer sized and even at that scale, the pin thin socialites were turning their noses up at them. The server looked shocked that I even took one and, god forbid, ate it! It was tuna tartar with wasabi caviar by the way and it was delicious (despite its miniscule size). Merrick had a vision of throwing a Sprinkles cupcake into the crowd and watching the emaciated socialites knock each other out with their Chanel handbags as they fought for the red velvet treat.

Don’t get us wrong. Merrick and I love skinny as much as the next Angelenos. Merrick practically coined the term manorexia and I may or may not be responsible for the offensively amoral www.thisiswhyyoureskinny.com blog. But even we had to pig out after that event.

One for the Table has never engaged in deliberate snarkiness. I’ve certainly avoided it as I scrupulously adhered to the motto “if you can’t say anything nice…” But, in this economy, I find myself being a bit cranky when certain chefs hold themselves to a particular standard and humiliate others on national television, when they themselves have a restaurant that is pitiful. Gordon Ramsay has set himself up as the arbiter of quality, but after eating at The London twice now, I can tell you The Emperor has no clothes on.

The first time I went there, I was really excited to have the English Breakfast. I loves me sausages. What I got were these dry, jerky-like, lukewarm salt tubes accompanied by a roasted tomato whose flavor was incomprehensibly bad. How can you mess that up?

The second time I went was because my daughter’s admissions counselor for the college she’ll be attending in the fall was staying at the Bel Age hotel where The London is located. Looking over the menu, I felt like a pinball being battered around from bad choice to bad choice.