The Best Dishes of 2009

Pig's ears and cocktails and tacos that tweet

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Wednesday, Dec 30 2009

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In this year devoted to the odd parts of animals, Laurent Quenioux of Bistro LQ is the most devoted of all, flinging gizzards and duck hearts around the way other chefs use parsley, wrapping fish in caul fat, leaving no lamb organ unturned. Like any good Frenchman, when the weather turns cold, his fancy turns toward game, and Quenioux may be at his best with game: boar, partridge and grouse, but especially the strong, dark meat of wild boar, with its divine stink of the woods in fall. When it’s on the menu, his stewed hare is spectacular, adulterated with maple syrup and cotton candy perhaps but tar-black and reeking of autumn, laced with thin, slippery lozenges of jelled blood, a dish with swirling, mysterious depth. 8009 Beverly Blvd., L.A. (323) 951-1088.

Ludovic Lefebvre is a chef without a kitchen, a restaurateur without a restaurant, an auteur of cuisine who pops up for a month or two in a bakery or a gallery space before disappearing back into the obscurity of his Twitter feed. What he serves at LudoBites is accomplished haute cuisine at popular prices; what he demands from his customers is a sense of adventure. He does not tend to repeat a dish. Still, it is hard to forget a soup served last July — a cool cream flavored with funky, smoky Spanish chorizo, bathing cubes of juicy, ripe melon and splinters of tart ice — ice that expressed the essence of cornichons and pickled onions, with a texture as jagged as its taste. A soup like that is worth the wait. ludobites.com.

Anne Fishbein

Satoshi Kiyokawa at Kiyokawa restaurant

Location Info

Map

The Varnish

118 E. 6th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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The Varnish, a tiny bar hidden behind an unmarked door at the back of Cole’s, is the cocktail bar L.A. has long dreamed of, a civilized temple of spirits where bliss is measured out by the dram. It is a good place to contemplate the unknowable, the terrible moment of clarity that is often found toward the bottom of a glass. The menu lists a half dozen or so cocktails, both originals and drinks taken from ancient bar manuals, but my first drink of the evening is always an Aviation, a concoction of gin, fresh lemon juice and a dash or two of violet, a flickering, elusive fragrance that vanished from the bartender’s palette more than 40 years ago, a fragrance both antique and unmistakably new. “If you catch a whiff of violets from the darkness of the shadow of man,’’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, “it will be spring in the world.’’ Make mine a double. 118 E. Sixth St., dwntwn. (213) 662-9999.

You are probably weary of reading about the brilliance of Kogi by now, about the Twitter feed, about the fleet of trucks, about the 3.0 transformation of Roy Choi from hotel chef to savant. By the end of next year, when the freeways are choked with Calbis and Bullkogis and Komodos and Bools and FuXions, you may wish that Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice had never left grad school. But the fact of the galbi taco remains: sweet, marinated short ribs tucked into freshly griddled corn tortillas with shredded cabbage and a supertart Korean relish of scallions, soy, sesame seeds and citrus, lashed with chile — perhaps the first taco innovation since the Poblano taco arabe worthy of standing beside the sainted trinity of asada, cabeza and al pastor. Will the cute someone shivering at midnight punch your digits into his or her phone? That’s up to you. But the Kogi short-rib taco is forever. kogibbq.com.