Anne Fishbein
Red Herring opened in August, and it appears to be trying to walk a somewhat precarious tightrope. Is it a neighborhood spot? A destination? A family restaurant? A venue for sophisticated, high-cost special occasions? It might be trying to be all of these things. The two-story restaurant looks and feels much more appropriate for a date night than as a place to take your passel of toddlers. The restaurant is the project of a husband-and-wife team, Dave and Alexis Woodall. Alexis Woodall is a TV producer, and Dave Woodall is a chef who's worked at Mélisse in Santa Monica and Blair's in Silver Lake. Those are two restaurants with very different styles and purposes, on opposite ends of the destination-versus-neighborhood spectrum. But they share a classicism, a penchant for doing things the old-school way, and Woodall brings that same penchant to Red Herring. This is a New American restaurant as they used to be 10 or 15 years ago. That is to say, there are crabcakes on the menu. They're big and made with lump blue crab and served with basil aioli, and they're kind of surprisingly good, better, perhaps, than they need to be. That's true for a lot of the food here — many items are made with the kind of care and skill you don't normally find at a neighborhood restaurant. Read the L.A. Weekly review here.
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