First Bites

Illustration by J.T. Steiny

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Electric Lotus

4656 Franklin Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Category: Restaurant > Indian

Region: Los Feliz

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Fu Shing

2960 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91107

Category: Restaurant > Chinese

Region: Pasadena and vicinity

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• Fu Shing
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• Eating Out
• Meat

CYRANO

8840 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood

(310) 271-4193

Remember Pane Caldo on Beverly Boulevard, upstairs from the Antiquarian Guild? Its sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills gave the simple dining room a marvelous sense of luxury. Cyrano has inherited that room and the view. It is one of the restaurant’s best features. This isn’t to say the food from Cyrano’s French-Mediterranean kitchen is entirely lackluster. There’s a collection of high-end comfort foods familiar to anyone who’s sampled the Top 10 (or even 5) restaurants on the Zagat Survey. What could be blah about ahi steak au poivre, chilled oysters, rack of lamb, rare roast duck breast and a caesar salad of tender romaine hearts? Intriguing accompaniments vary with every plate: a crisp slab of sweet potato wrapped around a tower of lime-roasted sweet potato with the duck breast, or potato gratin with the salmon. When you open the menu, it seems full of familiar possibilities. Unfortunately, many dishes still need refining. Tough braised lamb, overseared foie gras, steamed vegetables in a pasta that were advertised as roasted, and a wonderful-tasting but overcooked chocolate soufflé all indicate a kitchen not quite in control of its ambitions. Service was kindly but harried. The vote at our table: a restaurant with all the right ingredients that now needs to perfect the recipe. Open Mon.–Fri. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. and Tues.–Sat. 5:30–11 p.m. (LB)

ELECTRIC LOTUS

4656 Franklin Ave., Los Feliz

(323) 953-0040

Too many Indian restaurants — particularly neighborhood Indian restaurants catering to Americans — still feature the sort of musty bong-hit exoticism, bedspreads on the walls and Ravi Shankar on the stereo, that was pretty much played out by 1969. But next door to a Los Feliz 7-Eleven, the brand-new Electric Lotus is the kind of countercultural neighborhood restaurant post-Beck Los Angeles has always needed, a curry shop self-aware enough to groove on its customers’ fixed ideas about curry shops: mellow vibes of the East replaced by the jangling dissonances of Bollywood; dusty hippie palette transmuted into colors bright enough to sear afterimages into eyeballs. The proprietor blasts — and has apparently even produced — bhangraCDs and quwaalimusic; the staff is hip to healing herbs. And the fairly orthodox Pakistani and northern Indian food — stewed eggplant, bright-yellow chickpea curry, cauliflower with toasted cumin — is cooked in olive oil instead of the usual ghee, which means that most of the vegetarian dishes are completely without animal residue. Open daily from 11 a.m. to 3 a.m.(JG)

FU SHING

2960 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

(626) 792-8898

The hottest Thai curry in Los Angeles? It’s hard to say. But the soupy Szechuan beef at Fu Shing may be the most incendiary single Chinese dish in Southern California, a brothy, brick-colored thing — gritty with ground dried chiles, thick with garlic, leeks, slices of cow — that sometimes resembles a hard-fought set of tennis in its uncanny ability to soak your shirt in sweat. Fu-Shing’s soupy beef — ask for it extra-hot — is an endorphin surfer’s Waimea. Started nearly two decades ago in a former House of Pies in San Gabriel, then abutting an East Pasadena motel, Fu Shing has always been renowned in the Chinese community for the sharpest Szechuan food in town, kung pao squid and Chinese squash with crab eggs, crisp taro duck and cold tripe with chile oil. Its new location, a two-story building a couple of blocks west of the last one, is an intimate place, all nooks and corners, hallways and cozy dining rooms, and, it seems, a rebuke to the mammoth gastrodomes of Monterey Park, just a few miles south. Open daily from 11:30 a.m. until 10 p.m.(JG)

FUZIO

11750 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood

(310) 820-5499

"Oh, it’s the home of the Last Supper," quipped a friend as he joined our table at Fuzio, adding, "Be sure not to forget your eyeglasses." I knew it — inevitably, someone would feel compelled to remind us, tastelessly I might add, of O.J. and Nicole, and the fact that Mezzaluna used to be in Fuzio’s location. My advice is to ignore the site’s troubled past and explore Fuzio’s "Universal Pasta." The conceit of this San Francisco chain is the matching of global flavor combinations with compatible noodle styles. Firecracker Pork Fusilli, for instance, has a topping of succulent slow-cooked pork simmering with the raging heat of ginger and habañero that’s been mellowed with sour cream. That dish and the Barbwire Chicken with chipotle cream, Anaheim chiles and corn are the most "out of character" pastas in a list that includes Japanese udon bowl, vegetable pad Thai and good ol’ linguine and meatballs. After six of us tried half a dozen pastas, shared three large salads, split an order of focaccia topped with Cambozola, bacon and caramelized onion, and drank two bottles of Niebaum Coppola Rosso wine, the bill came to about $100. Total. One purist at the table said he preferred "authentic" pastas to the unconventional ones, but me, I’m a slave to any noodle that’s perfectly cooked and beautifully seasoned, a noodle I found at Fuzio. Open Sun.–Thurs. 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.(LB)