The Tasting Kitchen: Catch It If You Can

Some of the best new places to eat in L.A. are less restaurants than notes toward a restaurant, intricate sketches that may or may not end up as permanent establishments with fixed addresses, walk-in refrigerators and menus that don’t necessarily change because it’s Tuesday and the chef is feeling radishes. So in a way, Tasting Kitchen, which crawled into the handsome AK space on Abbot Kinney the way a hermit crab might wriggle into an empty cowrie shell, is at once both strange and familiar, a restaurant with an expiration date, at which point its principals will presumably move, settle in, or flee from whence they came, to Oregon. (Chef Casey Lane arrives from Portland’s clarklewis, a restaurant itself famous for shape shifting.) Does this make it more of a summer crush than a permanent destination? It kind of seems that way.

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The Tasting Kitchen

1633 Abbot Kinney Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

Category: Restaurant > New American

Region: Out of Town

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More About

• Abbot Kinney
• Portland (Oregon)
• Alan Davidson
• Food and Cooking
• Eating Out

Everything about Tasting Kitchen is quirky, oddly rumpled and lovable, from the crisply fried chicken wings to the slug of bacon in the succotash accompanying the grouper; from the G&Ts made with extra-potent, homemade tonic water to the tiny, mostly Italian wine list offering choices between frappato and grillo, Longanesi and niederra — grape varieties that probably don’t even show up on masters of wine exams. Organic, sustainable everything you’d expect, as well as the usual Northwest-chef hazelnut fixation, but there is also an emphasis on dishes dependent on grilled bread, including spreadable white cheese with balsamic-roasted figs; thin filets of arato, a mildly oily Mediterranean fish obscure enough to have escaped Alan Davidson’s definitive books on European seafood; and a cool heap of juicy, intensely porky rillettes that were by far the best I have ever tasted outside the Languedoc. The menus are encrusted with a thickly painted number indicating the day of service — which reminded me of a convict counting the days left until his parole. If this sounds like your kind of place, I’d probably make a reservation now. (Bring money — it’s expensive.) And do it by phone — the Web sites indicate that Tasting Kitchen is open nightly for dinner, but if the surf’s up, your Open Table reservation may lead you to a shuttered dining room and a date with the food trucks that park up the street.

Tasting Kitchen: 1633 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-6644, thetastingkitchen.com.