Fajita pitas, Octopus Tacos, and the Birth of California Cuisine

7 At the elegant beach restaurant 72 Market Street, Leonard Schwartz not only puts Bowl of Kick Ass Chili on the menu, but figures out a way to make meat loaf taste great. This is credited by many with setting off a boom in expensive-restaurant comfort food that sweeps over America like a viral infection. If you have ever been offered chicken-in-a-pot or mashed potatoes in a $75-a-person restaurant lately, Schwartz deserves the credit — or blame.

8 Nuova cucina finds its American home not in midtown Manhattan, but at Rex, a converted haberdashery in downtown Los Angeles with perhaps more Art Deco Lalique glass per square inch than anywhere on Earth. A plane ticket to Italy may cost about the same as dinner for two at the restaurant, but at the moment, the food at Rex may be as good as anything in Rome.

9 A tasting menu at Le Petite Chaya includes six separate dishes sauced with beurre blanc, then a chestnut mousse. Japanese-French fusion is looking more distant all the time.

10 Roy Yamaguchi, chef of 385 North, invents the new-wave gyoza, stuffed with smoked duck, diced kiwi, seared scallops, what have you. Nobody thinks much of it at the time, until Yamaguchi splits town for Honolulu and becomes the unchallenged warrior king of Hawaiian cuisine.

11 The City Café may have been the prototypical restaurant of the Melrose boom, two impossibly hip young women cooking Modern Food elbow to elbow in a kitchen only somewhat larger than the galley in a Cessna. But Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s subsequent City Restaurant, a huge, swell place in a converted auto showroom on La Brea, represents the emerging culture of ’80s Los Angeles better than any restaurant has before or since — the strands of Korean, Indian and Thai cooking twisting from their neighborhoods up to La Brea, the respect for vegetarian traditions, the careful attention to everything from the plates to the waitresses’ jackets, the idea that Los Angeles is a real place.

12 Fennel sounds like one of those ideas certain people come up with at 3 in the morning over their fourth bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape: an ambitious seaside bistro in Santa Monica featuring the cooking of four famous French chefs, each of whom flies in every couple of months for a two-week stint behind the stoves. The experiment, the brainchild of Rex proprietor Mauro Vincenti, is doomed to fail. But on the other hand, Fennel launches the career of supervising chef Laurent Manrique, the guy who actually does the cooking, and somehow morphs into the wonderful La Cienega Italian restaurant Alto Palato. And for a few weeks at least, Angelenos get to eat the food of Guy Savoy without hopping on a plane. What’s so bad about that?

13 Max au Triangle, Joachim Splichal’s attempt at an ultimate restaurant, collapses under its own weight, although its spectacular interior is still used to illustrate books about postmodern design, and the exquisite, expensive, labor-intensive Mediterranean cuisine in the tradition of Jacques Maximin is arguably as fine as any Los Angeles chef has ever produced: elaborate all-lobster menus; salads garnished with rosy rare rabbit livers; and a bisque containing macaroni individually stuffed with crawfish mousse. Splichal’s next restaurant, Patina, will serve delicious, if less ambitious, French cooking and vault into the first rank almost at once; and he will go on to build a vast, profitable fine-dining empire.

Fred Eric’s Fred 62(Photo by Jack Gould) 14 Fred Eric and Octavio Becerra, veterans of Max, serve their baroque concoctions on glass bricks, hubcaps, roofing tiles and even actual plates at the nightclub Flaming Colossus, a restaurant located in an old Knights of Columbus hall near MacArthur Park. This is not the first restaurant of L.A.’s velvet-rope era — Eric will go on to be chef at the Olive, often thought of as L.A.’s most important club restaurant, as well as Vida, Fred 62 and the Airstream Diner; Becerra will become chef of the Pinot restaurants — but the snooty, creative, Euro-intensive Flaming Colossus contains the DNA that informs the rest of the beast.

15 In a county with almost 3 million Mexicans and essentially no serious Mexican restaurants, the redevelopment agency TELACU expects its Tamayo to be the Eastside’s answer to Spago, with a Michelin-starred French chef, acres of oil paintings (both real and facsimile) from the namesake Mexican artist, and a rotisserie big enough to roast whole sheep, suckling pigs and kids. The concept never quite pans out — the people willing to drive from Bel Air for expensive Mexican food seem to end up eating fish at La Serenata de Garibaldi instead — and Tamayo quickly turns into a rather ordinary Mexican restaurant in an extraordinary setting, the swankiest bar scene on the entire Eastside.

16 In a double-blind tasting, the San Francisco Chronicleinexplicably votes La Brea Bakery’s shiny, chewy, naturally risen baguette the best sourdough bread in the Bay Area, even though it is shipped to the city’s supermarkets frozen. Positive they’ve made a mistake, the editors repeat the tasting . . . and choose the La Brea bread again. In bread circles, this is the equivalent of the famous 1976 tasting in Paris where Stag’s Leap from the Napa Valley bested all the first-growth Bordeaux. Baker Nancy Silverton cements her position as the queen of all bread.