Superba-Califragilistic Snack Bar

Jason Neroni's new Venice restaurant, is, yes, superb

Comments (0) By Besha Rodell Thursday, Sep 27 2012

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There's a wild streak to Neroni's cooking, which is where some of the real magic happens. A recent special of sweetbreads with quince paste and olive powder was bizarre in all the right ways, the extreme sweetness of the quince and rich creaminess of the sweetbreads reined in by the contrasting musk of the olive.

The guy obviously has an olive fascination — a watermelon salad came with candied olives, which worked in the sense that they showed that olives could potentially be treated like raisins, but not in the sense that you'd actually want to eat more than one. In fact, the entire watermelon salad suffered from scattered-plate syndrome — a condition in which the ingredients are strewn about artfully (a cube of melon here, a slick of burrata there) in a manner that's pretty to look at but totally discordant as food.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Porchetta di testa pastrami on rye with dill pickles

Location Info

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Superba Snack Bar

533 Rose Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90291

Category: Restaurant > New American

Region: Venice/ Marina del Rey

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There are other things that don't quite work: Pheasant rillettes were fantastic on bite one, too salty and fatty by bite three. The spaghettini nero, a squid-ink pasta with sea urchin and squid puttanesca, veers from sweet seafood goodness and into overload — capers, squid, squid ink, etc. It's not a bad dish by any stretch, but in its quest for punch-you-in-the-face umami, it misses the opportunity to be transcendent.

But the missteps are small, and insignificant compared with what Superba achieves. Like genuinely friendly service without the shtick or script. Like the short, smart wine list that those servers are happy to discuss intelligently.

Here is a restaurant with big flavors, big heart and an exuberant staff; it's a restaurant you just want to move in with after the first date. I hope Jason Neroni agrees that perhaps this place, finally, is worth settling down for.

See more of Anne Fishbein's photography of Superba Snack Bar.