White Space

Photo by Anne FishbeinMy first meal at Angeli on Melrose was in the mid-’80s and consisted largely of culture shock. I was living in the southern Sierra at the time, and had come to Los Angeles to do work for a magazine and visit friends. Early on a summer evening, three of us met for dinner at Evan Kleiman’s new but already famous café on Melrose. The place was packed. We squeezed through a maze of seats to an undersize table. The chairs were uncomfortable, the room unbelievably noisy. I ordered a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine. Conversation was impossible, but I do remember one friend repeatedly yelling over the din, “I love it here. I come here every day!”

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Mishima

8474 W. Third St.
Los Angeles, CA 90048

Category: Restaurant > Japanese

Region: West Hollywood

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More About

• Beverly Hills (California)
• Celestino Drago
• Evan Kleiman
• Japanese Food and Cooking
• Foods

I failed to understand why.

The room was architecturally attractive, but harsh; the other customers, intimidating in L.A. Eyeworks eyewear and outfits from Ecru, had apparently been peeled from the pages of style magazines. My pasta was austerely sauced — a few mushrooms, some olive oil. My part of the bill came to a whopping $17.

It all made me want to flee back to my rural neighborhood, where the fanciest steak ã in town cost $12.95, and came with soup and salad and a scoop of cobbler for dessert. When we finally paid up and squeezed our way back toward the exit, I felt a distinct sense of injury.

It didn’t take long, however, before I learned to appreciate upscale pasta and its trappings. I still don’t like noisy restaurants and uncomfortable chairs, but the beauty and intelligence of Evan Kleiman’s cooking became clear to me and, from there, the pleasures of Italian pasta beyond the tired standbys of marinara and cream sauces.

Some time after my first visit to Angelion Melrose, an editor took me out to lunch to the second Angeli, a larger, brighter, and even more architecturally inventive space on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles (may it rest in peace). The editor ordered spaghetti sauced with — get this — nothing but butter and Parmesan cheese. And it cost $8! I was outraged again, until I tasted it: This was one of the simplest, most delicious things I’d ever eaten. Sweet butter, good Reggiano Parmesan and a noodle so pleasurable to chew it was as if my teeth had developed an addiction all their own. After that, I ordered it at every opportunity. It made me happy, and happiness, at $8, is a true bargain.

Thank goodness for my change of heart, because by 1987, I’d begun reviewing restaurants regularly, and the great food boom that had made Los Angeles briefly the national center of culinary invention was already giving way to recession — and to a deluge of dough that would succor us for the next six or seven years. From the late ’80s until the mid-’90s, almost every new restaurant was a mid-priced Italian pasta joint: a cucina, a caffe, a trattoria, bistro, ristorante. Suddenly all anybody wanted to eat — or could afford to — was a bowl of pasta and a slab of boozy tiramisù.

Countless restaurateurs rode out the recession on this tide of noodles. Rarely has there been a commodity with a higher profit margin andsuch creative possibilities. I mean, think about it: Just how much does a bowl of pasta, any pasta, cost to make? Yet a basic pasta amatriciana (tomato, chili flakes, a few bacon bits) sold for around $10. Add a $5 bottle of Pelegrino and a couple of $5 cappuccinos, and both wolf and landlord stay at bay.

Pasta proliferated for years. It became what we ate when we ate out, replacing such staples as fried chicken, roast beef, steak and chops. And it wasn’t long before it had wormed its way onto menus in coffee shops, diners, delicatessens. Some pasta dishes, cappellini alla checca, for example, became a must on every menu. Many chefs sold only the basics — arrabiata, amatriciana, vongole, marinara, Bolognese — while others set out to find or create their own distinctive dishes. Some scoured the backwaters of Italy for great products and little-known preparations. Others invented shamelessly, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, from Cajun seasonings to seaweed. (The pasta craze did begin, after all, at the height of culinary eclecticism and experimentation.) The apex of strange pairings was probably at the short-lived Matrix restaurant in the Hotel Nicco, where the menu consisted of a grid with sauces on one axis, pastas on the other, making it theoretically possible to have soba amatriciana or spinach linguini with peanut sauce.

Over time, the public’s hunger for noodles has expanded to include a wide variety of Asian noodles and various hybridizations. Pasta is, after all, a blank page, a piece of clay, an idea waiting to happen. It can take any number of shapes and sizes, from the teensiest pastina to fat cannelloni. There are delicate homemade pastas and trusty dried versions. Some are scored, scalloped, pinched, folded or stuffed. Some are extruded — a desirable brand sends the dough through ancient machines so the surface is irregular and porous. A pasta must simultaneously hold its sauce and its own integrity.