The Hungry Cat
Hollywood, you would imagine, is thick with places to drop into after a movie at the Arclight, slightly edgy places with delicious cocktails, amusing light suppers and music that doesn't make you want to toss the manager's iPod into a trash compactor. And you would be right — Delphine, Café Was and Cleo, not to mention Delancey and Bowery, are all a few steps away. So why is it that nine times out of 10 I end up at the Hungry Cat, sucking back a Greyhound and contemplating the next dozen clams? The Pug Burger — sure, there's the Pug Burger, which is to say a wad of loosely packed organic cow, bleeding profusely through blue cheese into a La Brea Bakery roll. Suzanne Goin and David Lentz's odd restaurant is a fishy, fishy place, home to oysters, chowder, pan-roasted skate, peel-and-eat shrimp, and marinated yellowtail with plums; also to the lobster roll, a buttery, abstracted version of the New England beach-shack standard transformed into a split, crisp, $20-plus sandwich that enrages parsimonious Red Sox fans as much as it delights everybody else. Lentz is from Maryland, which means his fetish object of choice is fried crab cakes, which Hungry Cat not coincidentally serves. 1535 N. Vine St., Hlywd. (323) 462-2155, thehungrycat.com. Mon.-Wed., noon-11 p.m., Thurs.-Sat., noon-mid.; Sunday 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Full bar. Validated parking. AE, MC, V.Location map here.
Jar
If we had anything to do with the revised DSM IV, we would add a significant new disorder: the compulsion to write about Jon Hamm on one's blog every Sunday night. Really — I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Mad Men, etc. It makes me miss the simpler days when everybody wrote about their cats on their livejournals instead. But if you're going to plant your subconscious in the early '60s, you might as well eat there, too. And Suzanne Tracht's snazzy steakhouse Jar reads like a blast from the era: Hollywood Regency plus the Birth of the Cool, chefly riffs on the strip steak and the porterhouse, the hash brown and the french fry that occasionally incorporate every last pea tendril and star-anise infusion in the Asian-fusion playbook. Some people we know have never even tried the steak here — the braised pork belly, the glorious pot roast and the duck-fried rice are just too compelling. But the steak is about as good as it gets. 8225 Beverly Blvd., L.A. (323) 655-6566, thejar.com. Dinner daily 5:30-11 p.m., brunch Sun. 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, D, MC, V. Entrées $21-$42. Location map here.
PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN
Campanile's sauteed trenne
PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN
Leo Bulgarini, gelato impresario
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Jinya
God bless the ramen freaks, the guys whose life is measured in noodle tensility and the fineness of minced naganegi and the number of hours required to boil a bone. And God bless Jinya, a sleekly modern noodle shop, hidden behind a Studio City department store, just a few weeks out of Japan. The ramen? Big, earthen bowls of the house ramen with strong chicken stock and seed-studded chicken meatballs; of greenery-rich vegetable ramen; and of tonkotsu ramen, made from long-boiled pork bones and fortified with generous spoonfuls of pork oil that transform the dish into a flavor bomb. The noodles are long and springy, soaking up broth yet retaining a wheaty integrity. Best of all is an odd, strong-smelling tonkotsu ramen whose pork broth is pumped up with industrial quantities of dashi and dried fish, umami to the power of 10. Can tongues pant? After a few bites, you may feel as if yours had just run a half-marathon without bothering to notify the rest of your head. 11239 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 980-3977, jinya-la.com/ramen. Open Mon.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. MC, V. No alcohol. Underground lot parking.
JiRaffe
JiRaffe is a pleasant space in a bright corner of Santa Monica, all neo-Palladian windows, white tablecloths and rustic Gallic décor. Raphael Lunetta's food tends to be elegant, almost ladylike, with the sort of seasonality you might expect from a serious restaurant located a few hundred yards from the best farmers market in Southern California, and careful, restrained presentations that tend to be inflected with powerful herbs. JiRaffe is a real California bistro, the kind of casual yet slightly formal place the Ivy only pretends to be, and with much better food. In restaurants as in architecture, sometimes less is more. 502 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 917-6671, jirafferestaurant.com. Mon., 6-9 p.m., Tues.-Sat., 6-10:30 p.m., closed Sun. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. $24-$38.Location map here.
Jitlada
We know a woman who has made it her life's project to work through the typewritten addendum at the back of Jitlada's menu, 208 Southern Thai dishes almost mythical in their obscurity and their fierce chile heat. We wish her well: We can think of nothing more pleasant than revisiting Suthiporn Sungkamee's delicious, foul-smelling yellow curries of fermented bamboo shoots; delicate lemon curries; wild tea leaves cooked down like creamed spinach with bits of gluey-skinned catfish; and beef simmered with pickled buds of Asian cinnamon, even if the curried fish kidneys, which we love, aren't necessarily something you want to eat every day. Jitlada is that rare thing, a Thai restaurant frequented mostly by non-Thais who come not in spite of but specifically because of the difficult, thorny regional dishes. Sungkamee — call him Tui — and his sister Jazz Singsanong introduced Hollywood to the Songkhia-style rice salad; the fried sea bass with homegrown turmeric; and the infamous endorphin bomb khua kling Phat Tha Lung,a beef curry that in its purest form is spicy enough to strip the bark off a log. This is, after all, a restaurant whose walls bear not one but two photographs of the tree that produces sataw, a Southeast Asian vegetable sometimes translated as "stink bean." Will we usually go for the acacia-blossom curry served with a hard-fried Thai omelet over the lard na; and the fried morning-glory salad over the chicken satay? Of course. When you need to show visitors the diversity and wonder still possible in Los Angeles restaurants in 2010, Jitlada is Exhibit A. 5233½ Sunset Blvd., Hlywd. (323) 663-3104, jitladala.com. Mon., 5-10:30 p.m., Tues.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-10:30 p.m., Fri.-Sun., 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Beer and wine. Difficult lot parking. AE, MC, V. Location map here.
