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PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN
Red Medicine's chef Jordan Kahn
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Roast marrowbones with prawn sambal
In a year when Los Angeles cooking came together with a coherence it probably hasn't seen since the mid-1980s, this dish at Spice Table seemed to express everything important about local cuisine. The roast marrowbone is a touchstone of the nose-to-tail movement. Its garnish of scarlet pickled onions hints at the Yucatán. Chef Bryant Ng, a Singaporean who also cooked at Pizzeria Mozza, roasts his bones in the wood fire that perfumes his downtown restaurant and glazes the marrow with a Southeast Asian paste of fermented shrimp and ground chiles that chars and crisps in the smoky heat. When you spoon the trembling marrow onto a bit of sliced baguette, garnishing it with the rau ram and a sliver of pickled onion, the taste of the leaf is sharp, almost metallic; the funk of the shrimp paste gives way to a low, throbbing chile heat; and the marrow melts on your tongue, meat yet beyond meat; a mellow, liquid bass line that makes the other flavors dance. 114 S. Central Ave., Little Tokyo. (213) 620-1840, thespicetable.com.
Ganjang goreng
If you have eaten extensively in Koreatown, you undoubtedly have run into ganjang gejang, raw marinated crab, as a giveaway in an assortment of banchan. And you probably haven't much enjoyed it: The crabs are too small, they're too gooey or they have been too long from the sea — probably all of the above. At Soban, ganjang gejang, at the princely price of $29.95, is a way of life, even though the dish is properly drinking food and a sign on the wall indicates that alcohol is neither permitted nor condoned. One look at the plate and you will forgive: two neatly bisected blue crabs, not transformed by rice wine, as is the norm, but by what seemed to be a clean, soy-tinged distillation of the animal's own juices, mellow yet crabbier than the crab itself. When you suck at a leg, the flesh pulls cleanly out from the shell, firm but not cooked, briny and sweet, and nearly glazed with big clumps of roe. 4001 W. Olympic Blvd., Koreatown. (323) 936-9106.
Stuffed Monterey squid
At Lukshon, Sang Yoon of Father's Office fame has focused his perfectionism on the street food of Southeast Asia, and the cocoa-dusted foie gras ganache, lamb-belly roti canai and Spanish mackerel with coconut vinegar are almost jewel-like in their precision, if not their fidelity to the dishes on which they are riffing. I've never had anything quite like his tiny bulbs of California squid stuffed with Northern Thai fermented ground-pork sausage, although I've stared at recipes for similar dishes in Vietnamese cookbooks. The sauce, a kind of pesto made with the pungent Vietnamese herb rau ram and Malaysian candlenuts, is from a fantasyland where Liguria meets Kuala Lumpur. Could this be the year of rau ram? 3639 Helms Ave., Culver City. (310) 202-6808, lukshon.com.
Bäco
The bäco, Joseph Centeno's elusive creation, was for years the focus of a Where's Waldo of L.A. food — a kind of flatbread sandwich, vaguely resembling either a pita wrap or a steroidal taco, that Centeno has flirted with at most of the restaurants he has cooked at since he was at Opus in the mid-aughts, but never officially put on a menu because he was afraid he would never be able to serve anything else. (Bäcos are awfully good.) Now, at his new tavern/small-plates joint Bäco Mercat, it's all bäcos, all the time. A bäco may taste a little like a falafel, or a crisp shrimp bánh mì, or a chicken salad sandwich by way of Algeria. But it is mostly a gooey thing with the Catalan pepper-almond sauce salbitxada; bits of pork belly; crunchy, porous cubes of what Centeno calls beef carnitas; scallions; and a kind of smoky olive oil thing that binds, flavors and oozes into your lap. 408 S. Main St., dwntwn. (213) 687-8808, bacomercat.com.
Tsukemen
A year ago, Los Angeles had barely heard of tsukemen, pronounced skeh-men, a Tokyo-born dish of bare, cooled noodles served with a dipping sauce of superconcentrated pork broth flavored with dried fish. Now tsukemen has gone viral — I half-expect to see it pop up at Jack-in-the-Box. The local grail of tsukemen may be found lunchtimes only at Tsujita, a branch of one of the best-regarded ramen shops in Tokyo. The thick, burly, slippery noodles are pure chew, with the tensile strength of suspension-bridge cables, served with a sauce of long-boiled Kurobuta bones, the syrup-dense essence of pig. You are instructed to eat one-third of the noodles with the dipping broth, the second third with a shake of powdered chiles and the final portion with a squeeze of lime. When you are finished, the waitress takes your thickened sauce and tops it up with hot water. It has become soup. 2057 Sawtelle Blvd., W.L.A. (310) 231-7373, tsujita-la.com.
Rice porridge
There is, perhaps, no dish homelier than congee, a loose, bland porridge made with last night's rice, occasionally enriched with a splash of broth. Yet in the right hands, the soothing blandness can serve as a canvas on which intriguing, even violently clashing flavors may be splashed. At Red Medicine, Jordan Kahn spikes his congee, made from "heritage" rice, with ginseng, toasted hazelnuts, raw egg yolk and fresh sea urchin gonads, whose various levels of nuttiness circle one another like sharks in a clear sea. 8400 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. (323) 651-5500, redmedicinela.com.
