Will Forage for Food? Chefs at Eva Take Weeding to a New Level

Back in the car, Gold pulls out a dog-eared copy of Miles Irving's The Forager Handbook: A Guide to the Edible Plants of Britain ("same weeds, more or less"). Kear and Schlosser debate the merits of pickling the pods of the mustard greens now wrapped in paper and nestled next to the nasturtiums and tiny fennel plants.

They head south along PCH to a pit-stop lunch at Savory, Paul Shoemaker's Point Dume restaurant, and a detour to the beach so Kear can look near the sand for sea beans ("goes really well with seafood"). Kear brakes for elderflower bushes, then details a recipe for the syrup on the ride back to West Hollywood.

PHOTO BY AMY SCATTERGOOD

Nasturtium leaves get the Eva treatment.

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Eva Restaurant

7458 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: Out of Town

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The next night, as diners pull up chairs and scan the menu by candlelight in the gathering dusk, they might look through the window into the semi-open kitchen: The chefs are movements of flashing white, and you can see arugula flowers, in buckets on the counter, against the glass.

Kear plates a dish of wild halibut, wrapped in cabbage leaves and topped with lemon verbena foam. He pulls off leaves from the box of nasturtiums that sits on the pass, the greenery like an oddly placed window box. Gold readies a bowlful of fennel soup: a small mound of diced raw spot prawn; a sprig or two of fennel leaves; toasted buckwheat scattered in the luxurious cream of the soup.

A minute later it's poured tableside, the lace of the fennel rising as the soup falls, like leaves atop a miniature pond. You lift your spoon. The nasturtium leaves sway in the pass. You feel as if you're in a garden that hasn't stopped growing.