“Reservations to LudoBites are the summer's must-have accessory in this restaurant-mad city,” writes restaurant critic Sam Sifton in today's New York Times, “written about on Twitter and blogs and heralded in the pages of LA Weekly, where the critic Jonathan Gold has lavished praise on it. But they are not totally impossible to get. I joined the crowds twice last week, an anonymous East Coast interloper interested in all the fuss.”

Thus if you had the good fortune to be at Gram & Papa's last week and happened to see an anonymous East Coast interloper happily eating cheese cupcakes frosted with chicken-liver mousse or “Basque Jell-O” or “(pace yourself!), a deconstructed goat-cheese salad… reconstructed as soup,” absent the wig and sunglasses once favored by incognito restaurant critics, you now know it was Sifton, preparatory to reviewing Ludovic Lefebvre's LudoBites 5.0 for those folks on the opposite coast. (Read the complete review.)

“Didn't know he was here,” Kristine Lefebvre, Ludo's wife and business partner, emailed us when we asked last night. “Shocked when we got an email that they were sending a photographer to shoot. Crazy.” Well, not so crazy really. We can't be the only ones having all the fun.

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