Best Girl is Cimarusti’s Ace up sleeve
BY JENN HARRIS >>> It was midafternoon at L.A. Chapter restaurant inside the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, and the dining room looked like a scene out of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” A woman carrying two tiny terriers, one with its hair died pink and another with its hair died Dodgers blue, breezed through the restaurant on her way up to the rooftop bar, her entourage in tow. A slight man with dark shoulder-length hair sauntered in like a rock star. And a couple of women seated near the window toasted full glasses of rosé. ¶ “Everyone here is just so cool,” said Michael Cimarusti, sitting at a table in the middle of the dining room.
The chef, known for helming the kitchen at Providence, one of the most lauded restaurants in the nation (it was No. 1 on Jonathan Gold’s Best Restaurants list four years in a row), was about to take over the almost 4-year-old L.A. Chapter.
When the restaurant opened Halloween morning, it had a new name, Best Girl, and a new menu by Cimarusti and chef de cuisine Adam Walker (formerly of Del Posto and Spice Market). The name comes from “My Best Girl,” the first film shown in the adjacent Theatre at Ace Hotel, which opened on Halloween, 1927.
It’s a departure for the chef, known for seafood-centric tasting menus at his Melrose Avenue fine-dining restaurant, as well as the upscale seafood shack Connie and Ted’s in West Hollywood.
“The whole vibe is very different, obviously, than Providence and Connie and Ted’s, but it offers an opportunity to do something that’s just different than what I’ve been doing the last 13 years,” Cimarusti said.
He and Walker are responsible for breakfast, lunch and dinner at the restaurant adjacent to the hotel lobby, as well as room service for hotel guests. Room service from one of the best chefs in the country? Indeed.
“The food that we’re going to be serving here is very much like the kind of food you’d have if you came to dinner at my house, including pastries from my wife, who is a former pastry chef,” Cimarusti said. His wife is Crisi Echiverri, who is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., like her husband, and who worked in the kitchens of Wolfgang Puck and Pierre Hermé. She’s making all of the restaurant’s desserts. “There are a lot of influences from everything that we’ve experienced in our lives. We eat in the San Gabriel Valley more than anything else. It reflects L.A.”
For breakfast, there’s chilaquiles, overnight oats, plus buckwheat pancakes that Cimarusti insists are unintentionally gluten-free. He’s making a burger with Cabot cheddar, caramelized onion and umeboshi mayonnaise served on a potato bun that Clark Street Bread’s Zack Hall is making for him. Larger entrées include calamarata pasta with Calabrian pork ragù, Duroc pork chop with turnip and apple and grilled hanger steak with squash, cipollini onions and horseradish.
Cimarusti is serving oysters and clams, but don’t expect the full spectrum of seafood the chef is known for at his other restaurants, as well as his Fairfax seafood market, Cape Seafood and Provisions.
All the wine, beer and cocktails on the menu were designed by partner and Providence co-owner and general manager Donato Poto and beverage director Mary Bartlett (formerly of Honeycut) to be the “best version of the things you already want.” Exhibit A: Bartlett’s version of a pisco sour, called Lucky Girl, and made with pisco, a hibiscusinfused vermouth, grapefruit and lime.
Cimarusti’s return to downtown is part opportunism and part kismet. Before opening Providence, the chef worked at the Water Grill downtown for seven years. He and Poto, who runs front of the house operations for all of Cimarusti’s restaurants, looked at 10 or so properties downtown in the 13 years since he left Water Grill.
And although the restaurant is in a hotel, Cimarusti insists it’s not a “hotel restaurant.”
“The idea of doing a hotel restaurant, everyone thinks that the food has to be safe, it has to be approachable,” Cimarusti said. “We haven’t dumbed anything down. It’s a distinctive restaurant that people can come back to because the dishes draw them back; it just happens to be in a hotel.”
When the new signage went up Tuesday morning, nothing physical in the dining room changed. The clientele is still cool. The celebrity illustrations (a distraught Britney Spears on one wall, a young Michael Jackson on another) on the walls still stare back at you. The soundtrack in the dining room is still one of the best around. But you can now order a burger made by one of the best chefs in the country.