Quest for Fire: Out of the Flames

Rotisserie League

Just look at those spit-roasted meats, bursting with juice, caressed by flame, kissed with sweet wood heat: glistening slabs of pork belly stuffed with fennel and dill; drippingly rich duck with orange; mahogany-skinned squab enveloping a rich stuffing of shiitake mushrooms flavored with strong herbs. What Gino Angelini is attempting at La Terza may be no less than re-imagining California food through the prism of his advanced Italian technique, and even the simplicity of his thick, smoky grilled rib steak is a revelation. 8384 W. Third St., Los Angeles, (323) 782-8384.

The Lodge challenge: Yuri Samano and his 20-ounce, bone-in ribeye

Fuel for the fire at Pollo a la Brasa

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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

It’s the Bacon
Do I love The Lodge for its double-fisted martinis or for the bowls of bacon chunks put out like peanuts at the bar? For the Thousand Island dressing on the twin-wedge salad, or for the onion rings as golden as the bangles on a Brahmin woman’s arm? For the dripping-rare New York steak or for the bone-in ribeye as big as some models of compact cars? For the banana-scaled crustaceans in the shrimp cocktail or for the Madiran on the wine list? When this dining room was Tiny Naylor’s, my parents used to take me here for patty melts. When it was reborn as an upscale coffee shop, the waitresses used to slip me after-hours beer in teacups. And now that it has been reinvented as a wood-paneled Googie-style ski lodge, I find it pretty hard to get a reservation. It must have something to do with the bacon. 14 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 854-0024.

Afternoon Delight
Around three o’ clock at Musso & Frank Grill, an ashtray smell of cold, burnt things comes off the grill behind the counter’s middle, and a man in a white chef’s jacket pokes among the dead ashes. Within a couple of minutes, he coaxes the grill into crackling life. The warm scent of woodsmoke spreads across the room. A red-jacketed waiter comes over and pours a clear, cold martini from a pony into a tiny, frosted glass. It may be impossible to describe Musso & Frank as a restaurant, rather than one’s relationship to Musso & Frank, and the menu’s eccentricities and inconsistencies have been well discussed. But in the late afternoon, when you’re working on a Caesar salad and a cook flips a fat lamb chop onto the grill just for you, it is hard to avoid feeling that everything is pretty all right in the world. 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 467-5123.

Old Hickory
The line outside the original Phillips’ Barbecue bastes in hickory smoke, breathes it in like purest oxygen, soaks it into its pores to the extent that I always suspect that after a couple of hours even Luke Walton would glow with the dark, complex chiaroscuro of an unrestored Renaissance painting. At Phillips’, supper sometimes takes more dedication than some people think is strictly necessary. And if the atmosphere outside Phillips’ seems almost edible, the coarsely ground hot links, the lean, sinewy pork ribs and the shillelagh-size beef ribs are manifestly so. Foster Phillips has had his run-ins with the AQMD, sure, but to the barbecue connoisseur, requiring Mr. Phillips’ to comply with air-pollution controls is nearly as nonsensical as it would be for OSHA to make Jasper Johns stop using cadmium red. 4307 Leimert Blvd., Leimert Park, (323) 292-7613. Also other locations in Los Angeles.

Pizza Inferno
From the nearby municipal parking lot, Pitfire smells like a barbecue pit, a Girl Scout campsite, a hamburger stand — anything but what it is, which is a franchise-ready pizzeria. But the pies, given a slow, two-day rise and fired on the floor of a ceramic oven, are superb examples of the breed, puffy in the Neapolitan manner and tinged with smoke, fresh mozzarella browned at its top like a toasted marshmallow, fennel sausage and roast pumpkin and other high-quality ingredients blackened and sizzlng and crisp. You have had better pizza than this — Casa Bianca comes to mind — and the guy who came up with the recipes probably didn’t apprentice in Naples. I have heard that the crust was racier in the beginning, when it was grilled in the manner of Rhode Island’s Il Forno instead of baked. Still, this is the kind of neighborhood pizzeria we should all have in our neighborhoods, a testament to the goodness of flame. 108 W. Second St., Los Angeles, (213) 808-1200; 5211 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 980-2949.

Brasaville
The tiny patch of asphalt behind Pollo a la Brasa seems more like a lumberyard than it does like a parking lot most of the time, great stacks of cured oak, the smell of fresh sawdust in the air, muscled men cutting logs down into firewood. The savory fumes billowing from the smokestack perfume the noodle shops and brasseries across the street into Koreatown. Inside, spitted birds twirl on the restaurant’s creaking old rotisserie, chorus lines of pale, raw, skewered chickens alternating with their juicy, well-bronzed brethren, whose marinade of garlic and peppers is so intense that you can practically see the Hanna-Barbera smell lines rising off their crunchy skin. Does the Peruvian-style pollo taste like a shotgun marriage between a chicken and a smoldering log? It does indeed. Many aficionados consider this to be among the finest roasted chickens in town. 764 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 382-4090.