Nobu Los Angeles
Nobu Matsuhisa is the most influential Japanese chef in the United States, the father of a strange, original cuisine equally rooted in the sushi kitchen, the informal izakaya, and the seafood preparations of cosmopolitan Lima. Without him, half the new restaurants in L.A. and New York might still be selling California rolls and salmon-skin salad. But there is a steep learning curve to the restaurant Matsuhisa, with hundreds of dishes on the menu, and waiters who are perfectly happy to serve nonregulars the same omakase meal the kitchen has been pumping out for almost 20 years. But the West Hollywood Nobu, a David Rockwell–designed restaurant in the former l’Orangerie space, has been reverse-engineered for user-friendliness, the menu stripped of mystery, the walls ricocheting electronica, and the banquettes stuffed with black microdresses and $400 hoodies. The streamlined menu resembles that of New York’s Nobu Next Door, including things like whole black snapper roasted in a wood oven, steamed Chilean sea bass and even the occasional steak. If you are hungry for the now-classic hamachi with jalapeño or toro tartare with caviar, you can be assured of finding them here. And there’s roasted banana with soy caramel for dessert. 903 N. La Cienega Blvd., W. Hlywd., (310) 657-5711. Mon.-Thurs., 6-11:15 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 6 p.m.-mid., Sun., 6-10:15 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V.
Robert Rodriguez
Anne Fishbein
Riva
Related Content
More About
Oinkster
If Oinkster weren’t a diner, it could probably be the premise of a reality show: a fancy-restaurant chef converting an old burger stand to gleaming midcentury-modern loveliness, and serving chefly takes on the burgers, pastrami and chicken already emblazoned on the sign. “Slow fast food,” proclaims the sign outside: smoky Carolina-style pulled-pork sandwiches, chopped salad, and fast food–style Angus-beef hamburgers with sweet house-made ketchup. Andre Guerrero roasts chickens on a creaky rotisserie and smokes his own pastrami. Would you be willing to pay a couple dollars extra to experience artisanal soda pop, purplish Fosselman’s-based ube milkshakes and other fast food with a chefly edge? Guerrero bets you are. With all of the above, of course, it is necessary to have an order of Belgian fries — fried twice to leave them light and hot, their fluffy potato essence encased in a stiff, perfectly golden capsule of crunch. 2005 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, (323) 255-OINK, oinkster.com. Mon.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-11 p.m., Sun., 11 a.m.-9 p.m. No alcohol. Takeout. AE, D, MC, V.
Palate Food + Wine
Often compared to the Slow Club from Twin Peaks — although usually by people whose view of the dining room’s giant bunches of plastic grapes has been inflected by a bottle or two of Auxey-Duresses — Octavio Becerra’s relaxed, butter-yellow space is an opium dream of a restaurant, a dining room sprawling into a cocktail lounge, a wine bar, laboratories for curing meats and aging cheeses, and a well-curated wine shop and retail cheese operation. If you bring in some vinyl to the afternoon Sunday Sessions, you can even take a turn as DJ while your friends drink well-cellared Riesling and snack on $12 one-dish dinners. Palate, which occupies the ground floor of a huge wine-storage building, is an intensely personal restaurant, and an evening there can feel a lot like the culinary equivalent of an evening flipping through albums in your coolest friend’s living room: lamb from the eccentric Sonoma farmer Don Watson or goat from Bill Niman; butter churned from scratch; whatever gnarled roots or obscure shelling beans have been floating through the farmers market; or a “porkfolio” plank that might include Iowa prosciutto, a scrap of house-made lardo, or some salame from a secret California source. The menu is even tinier than it looks — most of the text on the slender document is devoted to charcuterie, house-made pickles and cheese — but changes at least once a week, to the rhythms of the farmers market. Becerra puts up a lot of things in Mason jars, stiff, unctuous pastes of pork or salmon enhanced with house-churned butter or pure lard. But mostly, he is deft at getting out of the way of great ingredients, and his best dishes — mackerel with dates and pistachios, grits with porcini, vegetables roasted in parchment — are almost deceptively simple, built around an array of precisely seasonal produce. 933 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale, (818) 662-9463, palatefoodwine.com. Mon.-Sat., 5-10 p.m. Full bar. Valet (and plentiful street) parking. AE, MC, V.
Park’s Barbecue
Koreatown is flush with restaurants serving barbecue, easily 200 or more, and at certain times of the evening you can float from one end of the neighborhood to the other on what blue, continuous cloud of sweet, blue smoke. While everybody has their favorite spots, the restaurant everybody agrees on is Park’s Barbecue, Koreatown’s palace of meat, all steel and glass, where the waiters resemble members of a martial-arts team more than they do restaurant workers, and the chefs source the meat as obsessively as they do at Spago.
