The wine list is the kind of thing wine geeks drool over — a New York friend I took to Palate texted me for two weeks straight about an old Geantet-Pansiot she was upset we didn’t get to try, and she was outraged when I told her that the restaurant had sold out of it. Because of the shop, the restaurant’s wine prices tend to be reasonable, basically retail plus $18, which means you can drink well even in the $30-to-$40 range. And several-dozen wines are available by the half-glass, the glass and the quarter-liter, occasionally including things that would ordinarily set you back several hundred dollars a bottle if you could find them — which you couldn’t.
Still, a certain kind of person, usually one looking for a square meal instead of a series of tastes, tends to hate Palate, from the parade of small plates that don’t always add up to a main course and the menu that seems to change every five minutes to the rock & roll that blasts after 10 p.m.Some people consider a dish of roasted beets with leeks to be amusing, an exact expression of the moment where late summer slumps into fall. Other people would rather have a steak or a burger, which Palate doesn’t tend to serve (though a Wagu rib eye was added to the menu recently). Customers proud of their post-Sideways drinking habits probably won’t get much love if they happen to order a perfectly good bottle of Hitching Post Pinot Noir — Steve Goldun is a startlingly inventive sommelier, but he can definitely be a little like that dude behind the counter in the indie record store who can’t believe you’re actually spending money for an Arctic Monkeys CD. Where some people are charmed by the papillote — vegetables steamed with herbs and olive oil in a bag — others find the conceit too precious, even though the process displays the sweet freshness of baby carrots, asparagus, onions, peppers, whatever’s in season, in a fairly spectacular way.
Anne Fishbein
Becerra, the Sancho Panza to Joachim Splichal's Quixote, goes solo.
Anne Fishbein
Wholly mackerel: The fish of the moment
Location Info
Related Content
More About
But I have rarely seen a chef as deft at getting out of the way of great ingredients as Becerra seems to be, and his best dishes are almost deceptively simple, arranged around an array of precisely seasonal produce: browned fennel with roasted grapes, for example, served with a small heap of simmered farro; or a summer preparation of scallops with corn, which brought out the subtle sweetness in both components. Shell beans of all sorts — cranberry beans, cannellini beans, lavender beans, scarlet runner beans — are simmered with a little marjoram and may show up with pork belly, duck, scallops or fish. Grits — not the fancy organic kind you get from the freezer case at gourmet stores, but honest stone-ground grits from Georgia — might be cooked with porcini and garlic, or placed beneath a fish soup to amplify the broth. Rare slices of rib steak or veal, for example, are coaxed to impossible juiciness, probably through the French vacuum-cooking method sous vide. A chicken breast, cooked for many hours at ultralow temperatures, still firm but bursting with flavor, is served under a sheet of what amounts to chicken-skin chicharrones — this may be the first chicken breast in history that I have preferred to pork belly, and the crisp, meltingly rich pork belly is always damned good.
I know Palate must have some good desserts — I’ve had a good chocolate pudding and a buttermilk panna cotta I think — but I’ve never been able to get past the cheese plate, which is among the most carefully composed in town.
Palate, 933 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale, (818) 662-9463 or www.palatefoodwine.com. Mon.- Sat., 5-10 p.m. Full bar. Valet (and plentiful street) parking. AE, MC, V. Recommended dishes: porkfolio; potted poulet; salmon rillettes; pickled stone fruit; vegetable papillote; mackerel with pistachio; pork belly with grits, shell beans and Asian apples; cheese plate.
