Quest for Fire: Out of the Flames

Sword Play

Fogo de chão is the Brazilian term for campfire, more or less, overlaid with strong connotations of nostalgia and cuisine. In the window of the Beverly Hills restaurant of that name, a sort of fogo de chão smolders on a platform, slowly cooking a few racks of beef ribs, scenting the enormous dining room with its lazy smoke. Fogo de Chão, the expensive local outlet of a São Paolo–based chain, is less a restaurant than a sizzling theme park of meat — a quarter-acre of sword-wielding gauchos, crackling logs, batallions of military-grade knives, and all the dripping, smoking flesh you can eat for about what you’d pay for an afternoon at Disney’s California Adventure. The oily cut of beef rump called picanha may be cooked over mesquite charcoal instead of a campfire here, but it is like that caramelized strip of crusted steak fat devoured alone in your kitchen — oily and crunchy and salty and seasoned with flame, the crack cocaine of the meat world. 133 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 289-7755.

Olympic games: Torching the al pastor at one of East L.A.’s rogue taco wagons

Pulling pork: Gino Angelini at La Terza

Location Info

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Alcazar

17239 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, CA 91316

Category: Restaurant > Lebanese

Region: San Fernando Valley

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Antica Pizzeria

13455 Maxella Ave.
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Category: Restaurant > Italian

Region: Out of Town

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More About

• Hiro Urasawa
• Gardena
• Foster Phillips
• Main Dish Recipes
• Bread

Precision Short Ribs

In automobiles, technology is usually a good thing, making cars easier to drive, more pleasant and safer. In cuisine, this isn’t necessarily the case: Wood-burning ovens are capable of tastier bread than the most advanced electric model, and even the most expensive computerized steamers are less capable of perfect rice than a simple heavy pot on a stove. Live-fire Korean barbecue, although it tends to cook your clothing as efficiently as it does your meat, is delicious. But live-fire Japanese tabletop barbecue, sometimes called yakiniku, is pretty good too — the Korean experience re-engineered into sleek ritual, the meat and the smoke and the companionship without the stink, most of the garlic, or the funk. The Gyu-Kaku chain, which extends to 800 restaurants in Japan (and with the opening of the Pasadena restaurant later this month to four restaurants in the Los Angeles area), is the user-friendly Lexus of yakiniku restaurants, miso-marinated skirt steak, basil-flavored chicken, and pricey Kobe-style short ribs, sweet potatoes and broccoli, shrimp and chicken, small plates stretching on to the inevitable grill-your-own s’mores. 10925 Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 234-8641. Also at 163 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 659-5760; 24631 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance, (310) 325-1437; 70 W. Green St., Pasadena; 14457 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 501-5400.

Corporate Firing Squad

California cooking as it was defined in 1982 is a species mostly extinct; the expensive but democratic restaurant featuring big flavors, buttery sauces and grilled everything mostly superseded by velvet ropes and the charismatic power of raw fish. Even nods to ethnic cuisines may have become too rarefied — does anyone but a specialist know what to do with romesco sauce, what espelette pepper is supposed to taste like, or the composition of chibouste? Houston’s may have a sushi counter too, but the megachain is where the 1980s went to die: open kitchens and gigantic dining rooms that at least smack of capital-A architecture; composed salads and flavored oils; and a menu turbocharged by the grill. Many locations, citywide.

Island Cuisine

Jay-Bee’s House of Fine Bar-B-Que would seem to have everything going for it: an epic pork-shoulder sandwich, decent ribs, super-hot barbecue sauce, and a location on a traffic island equally convenient to the Japanese commercial district of Gardena and the part of Compton that N.W.A made famous. And it goes without saying — the dining room is the front seat of your car. 15911 S. Avalon Blvd., Gardena, (310) 532-1064.

Q Rating

Barbecue stands tend to be basic in their amenities, but J&J Burger & Bar B Que is probably the closest thing you are going to find to a country-road shack within the confines of Los Angeles, a ramshackle structure, a couple of blocks from the Santa Monica Freeway, that looks as if it is being held up by woodsmoke and prayers — unless somebody has tipped you off to the place, you could drive by the restaurant 300 times without ever being tempted to stop. (It is the only restaurant I have ever been to where the televised Lakers game is aimed inward, at the cooks rather than at the dining room.) The beans at J&J are pretty wonderful, a sticky, complex glop dense enough to hold a spoon upright, and the thick hot sauce, lashed with a couple different kinds of chile, reminds me of the superb sauce at the long-deceased Carl’s down on Pico. But it is the spareribs — blackened, saturated with hickory and profoundly spicy even without the sauce — that make J&J so compelling. 5754 Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 934-5390.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Robata

What sort of barbecue is compatible with Pilates, $300 Tracy Cunningham highlights (honey-blonde) and the kind of size-zero clothes that you find at Kitson’s? The robata-yaki at Katana, apparently: exquisite skewers of meat, vegetables and fowl seared over imported bincho charcoal and meted out in portions that should probably be measured in milligrams. 8439 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 650-8585.

Fowl Intent

O, sing of grilled chicken parts, of skin carefully pleated onto skewers, of hearts smeared with hot mustard, of unborn eggs, coiled intestines and wisps of chicken breast wrapped around okra. Dream of muscly slabs of breast meat textured like tuna sashimi, grilled over hardwood charcoal just until the center begins to film with heat, and double-strength chicken consomme served instead of miso soup, and chicken meatballs loosely packed as proper balls of pie dough. The word yakitori may mean “grilled chicken,” but it carries strong intimations of well-being, companionship and having enough to drink, and Kokekokko, whose menu is practically a thesaurus of what a talented Japanese kitchen can do with everything but the squawk, is as convivial as your best friend’s living room.  203 S. Central Ave., Little Tokyo, (213) 687-0690.