L.A. CUISINE IS CREATIVE, BUT COMES AT A COST
I once interviewed cookbook author Curtis Stone in the newsroom. Female heads swivelled in unison, watching the tall, handsome chef walk to the interview room. Today, he's got more than a cookbook and kitchen tools going on.
When I was in Los Angeles recently, I went to one of his one-Michelin star restaurants. He operates two and both are named after his grandmothers — Gwen is a steak house and Maude, the one I visited, is all about California's bounty.
Let me begin with this. It's easy to kvetch about the high price of dining in Vancouver these days, but we've got nothing on U.S. cities. I'd compare Maude to the one-star Published on Main in Vancouver for out-of-box thinking and showcasing local ingredients. At Published, the tasting menu, with 11 courses, mignardise, and take-home chocolates from Beta 5, costs $165 per person. My nine-course dinner at Maude was CDN$292 and it is one of the more affordable of 18 one-Michelin star restaurants in Los Angeles. There are five twostar and no three-star restaurants in Los Angeles. Vancouver has nine one-star restaurants.
But no regrets — dinner at Maude was a superlative experience with beautiful food and meticulous, laborious technique. Even the three one-bite snacks that started the meal showed surgical precision. They included pai tee shells, filled with avocado purée, blue corn, fermented Fresno pepper and trout roe; and yellowfin tuna tostada with blue corn, passion fruit chile gelée, tomatillo and coriander flowers — they express chef de cuisine Osiel Gastelum's DNA, with roots in Mexico and haute experience at the three-Michelin Atelier Crenn in San Francisco and the two-Michelin Somni in L.A. The menu is very much Gastelum's, with final approvals from Stone, who's busy running several other businesses.
The second course at Maude was a lovely still life tribute to Santa Barbara spiny lobster. A lobster tartare crowned with sliced Persian cucumber and purple flowers, popped against a bright aguachile rojo. On the side, a lobster-shaped tuile, topped with smoked lobster-head aioli.
Purple sea urchins — an invasive “zombie” species that is damaging local sea kelp crucial to marine life — was served in its shell, atop sea lettuce sabayon, white sturgeon caviar and Page mandarin. Zombies can be dainty and tantalizing.
Next, local beets glinted in the prism of cut-glass stemware — smoked beets, Golden Kaluga caviar, and beet vinegar were layered over toasted buckwheat chawanmushi.
Farmed red abalone and cabbage looked like edible jewelry framed against a seaweed-like plate. Grilled abalone and cabbage, each thinly sliced, were rolled and cut to form yin-yang half circles. Oaxacan mole and abalone liver sauce were brushed on the abalone; tiny flowers winked against the silky cabbage.
House-made buns and cultured butter was served next. I wondered why, in the middle of a tasting menu.
“It has a purpose,” Gastelum said in an interview. “
The next course has a sauce and I really want you to clean the plate with that bread.”
Live-caught black cod — commonly called sablefish in Vancouver — was served with a beautiful morita chile ash sauce, deep, smoky and blackened, and the bread did squeegee every bit of it into me. That plate was rimmed with cocao beans and clams.
The next course separated the gourmands from the gourmets — a whole quail, deboned, and stuffed with a farce of its tenders and coal-smoked black trumpet mushroom.
And then another dish, too enticing for a no thank-you: a bowl of luxurious local triple cream cheese, cream, and milk, shot through a C02 canister and served with black truffle and celery root at the bottom and black truffle atop. Too decadently delicious to snub.
For dessert, guests move upstairs to the wine cellar. Surrounded by 3,000 labels, we were treated to desserts — three in all. A camomile and makrut lime honey gelato with candied kumquats over olive oil soil; a white chocolate and lemon grass namelaka ravioli filled with pistachio cremeux served with buttermilk gelato; and the showstopper, a clear sugar sphere filled with whipped vanilla yogurt, rhubarb hibiscus compote with microwaved tarragon sponge cake.
Making the glassy sphere requires glass-blowing skill.
“You have to do it fast and at the right temperature,” says Gastelum.
We finished our desserts, but asked that the mignardise be boxed for a midnight snack.
The spectacular wine list at Maude focuses on France, California and Italy. The cellar is especially deep with Burgundy, Sangiovese, Chardonnay and sparkling wines, including an impressive number of vintage Champagnes. It may seem surprising that wines from Australia are so well represented — here's your chance to choose between various vintages of Penfolds Grange if you have deep enough pockets — until you remember that it's Stone's home country.
Kali, in Hollywood, is another good value, one-star restaurant I visited. A nine-course tasting menu runs about CDN$340 per person, but we opted to order à la carte.
Less was more after dining at Maude the evening before. Mains cost $43 to $68, but dishes with meat and poultry from the dryaged fridge run $65 and up. This, in a casual, spare room with servers in jeans and relaxed guests in T-shirts and sneakers.
The farmers market salad hollers their stance on local and hyper-seasonal farmers market ingredients. Ingredients from the Santa Monica farmers market, alive and floatingly fresh, included blackberries, peas, baby greens, as well as nuts and seeds.
Leek and potato soup, velvety smooth, had grated fried potatoes lying in wait at the bottom of the bowl and dots of crème fraîche and herbed oil on top. My main, a sea urchin pasta with housemade spaghetti, was another use for those zombies. A delicious dish, with uni mixed in the creamy sauce and a whole one on top of the pasta, tucked under a foamy ricotta whey.
Local duck breast was presented simply with marmalade and carrots. It was beautifully tender and ducky.
Dessert was a meringue gelato with sugar-cured egg yolks grated over it. I asked how meringue factored into the gelato, but was given an offhand: “It's only eggs, cream and sugar.” Did the server mean whipped egg whites? But he was gone.
Wines are focused on California and France, with a strong selection of Burgundies. There are also many German wines, including a great choice of Rieslings.