Red Medicine

View more photos in Anne Fishbein's slideshow, "Red Medicine: Jordan Kahn's Vietnamese Canteen."

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Red Medicine's cured amberjack is as beautiful to look at as it is tasty.

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Red Medicine

8400 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Category: Restaurant > Vietnamese

Region: Beverly Hills

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More About

• Jordan Kahn
• Copenhagen
• Anne Fishbein
• Food and Cooking
• Eating Out

If you were to have stumbled into Red Medicine this winter, maybe late after a movie, maybe with a reservation you booked two weeks early on OpenTable, you might have encountered a dish called "early season roots and legumes," unpromisingly enough, an appetizer that sounds like something more often served at a Tarzana vegan café than at an advanced fleshpot of cuisine. When the waitress suggests it, your shrug speaks less of pleasure than of resignation, the way it does when you realize an izakaya waiter is going to bring you edamame whether you care for boiled soybeans or not. But then the dish arrives — a large white bowl, mostly empty, holding ... what? An avant-garde flower arrangement? A miniature bonsai? A garnish for soup that is yet to come?

A bouquet of Vietnamese herbs — sawtooth, rau ram, Vietnamese basil, fuzzy white cilantro flowers, acrid fish mint — erupts from a fluffy soil probably made from dehydrated walnuts, anchored by a splotch of emulsified walnut oil and curled around a roasted purple parsnip, maybe a carrot or two, no larger than Q-tips. There is a tart, yellow wood-sorrel blossom, a few tight, pink curls of ham, and a single baby pea pod split and splayed like a detail from a Arcimboldo painting. The bowl is placed in the middle of the table — pretty much everything at Red Medicine is served communally — but it takes long seconds before anybody dares to disturb the composition with a chopstick. It is a dish as easily comprehended by its beauty, or by its surprisingly sharp scent, as by its taste.

Yet when you do breach the picture plane, picking apart the vegetables one by one, the flavors are green, fresh and complex, roasted sugariness intertwining with delicate nuttiness, leaves playing in and around one another, until a single, plangent note arises: the sweetness of earliest spring miraculously in the middle of winter. Most of the components are Vietnamese, or can at least be found somewhere in Vietnamese cooking, but the effect has nothing to do with either the earthy, rowdy preparations you might taste in Vietnam or even Vietnam in the popular imagination, any more than Monet's paintings of water lilies relate to actual China. What chef Jordan Kahn is doing here, the way he is approaching what he calls a Vietnamese canteen, is new, less an interpretation of the cuisine than an artist finding new paints to work with, new brushes to use.

Red Medicine, most famous for unmasking and ejecting the L.A. Times restaurant critic in its earliest weeks, is still more discussed in gossip columns than it is in food circles, and a lot of people who couldn't pick Wolfgang Puck out of a police lineup have strongly held opinions about the place. I suspect Kahn was expecting a big surge of chefs coming in after their shifts (the bar is open until 2 a.m.), which seems not yet to have materialized. The restaurant — its location on what has been a cursed restaurant corner, an early logo that included a portrait of despot Ho Chi Minh, a name drawn from that of the least listenable Fugazi album, a level of appropriation that tends to piss off local Vietnamese — quickly became a figure of fun.

But Red Medicine deserves to be known for unusual cocktails; for its list of obscure high-acid wines that go perfectly with the sweetish, herbacious cuisine; and for its food — Kahn's cooking is probably the most modern in Los Angeles at the moment. And if you pick your way through the menu, and ignore what the dishes happen to be called, you will find that most of them are stunning. When you order the chaud-froid, a rich French-style pâté similar to rillettes, you are served not a quivering pinky-gray blob but a tiny cast-iron cocotte filled with an arrangement of frilly mustard leaves and wood sorrel flowers that looks like the prettiest four square inches of the forest floor. The pâté, hiding underneath, is excellent. If you try the cured amberjack, filets of the mackerel relative come rolled into tiny turbans in a bowl glazed with tart, chilled broth scented with pine and surrounded by baby root vegetables, tops sliced off and hairy tails in the air, that look like a garden out of Dr. Seuss.

"Chicken dumplings" turn out to be airy, Vietnamese-spiced nem, meatballs, glazed with caramelized sugar, to be folded into leaves of butter lettuce with fried shallots and Vietnamese pickles, then dipped into house-made sriracha chile sauce. Bánh mì are basically crisp foie gras canapes that resemble the namesake sandwich only in their garnish of hot peppers and vinegared carrot shreds, but are pretty spectacular nonetheless. Bay scallops share a bowl with minuscule braised turnips, a lemony beurre blanc and dabs of sea buckthorn jelly, a dish closer to Copenhagen than to Hanoi.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you about the constructions that don't quite work, and there are more than a few of them. The fried brick of sweet potato strands could pass for the Vietnamese equivalent of the Bloomin' Onion, and the tart kohlrabi rolls with grapefruit are notable mostly for the unpleasant connotations of dribbling tofu cream. The green papaya salad and crisp crab spring roll are pretty close to standard Thai takeout.