A taste of this, a taste of that
BY JONATHAN GOLD RESTAURANT CRITIC >>> You can call it a tasting menu. You can call it omakase. You can call it dégustation, a banquet menu or modern kaiseki. What it tends to be is a meal made up of dozens of small tastes, served in exquisite rhythm, where the courses, their order and their precise composition has been determined for you the second you walk in the door so that your only choice is really whether you want to gut it out with a bottle of Lodi Verdelho or submit to a relentless wine pairing. The chef is the artist, and your belly is her canvas. And when a tasting menu is done well, it can be the summit of cuisine. Here are a few selections around the area:
n/naka
The ideal of Japanese kaiseki, multi-course feasts designed to express the mood of a season, has quietly supplanted the more conventional French model in ambitious California restaurants. N/naka may be as close as we come to kaiseki in Los Angeles, and the tiny Westside bungalow is reserved three months in advance. Niki Nakayama, whose background includes both local sushi bars and Japanese ryokan, has become a food-world celebrity in the last couple of years, as famous for the herbs and vegetables she grows in her own backyard as she is for the classical rigor with which she might address a classic dobin mushi or a sashimi arrangement. She is not strictly tied to tradition — she may serve foie gras with eel, or spaghettini with abalone, pickled cod roe and truffles where a Kyoto chef would serve soba. There is always the option of a vegetarian, though not a vegan, kaiseki meal. $185 for 13 courses. $160 for the vegetarian menu.
3455 S. Overland Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 836-6252, n-naka.com
Grand Harbor
The first thing you should probably know about Grand Harbor in Temple City, the Hong Kong-style palace from Joe Liang, is that its top-tier tasting menu costs $9,388, which is a pretty good price for a used Sentra but an awful lot of money for a meal for 10. You aren’t going to get that particular dinner — there is a perfectly opulent banquet menu for $418 — but its existence is a statement of purpose, an indication that a meal there might be worth that kind of money, as well as a hint that you may be out of your league. When the menus come, you are flabbergasted by choice — there is a family menu offering things like calamari fried with spicy salt, diced string beans stir-fried with bits of pork, and noodles sautéed with seaweed. The next menu lists seasonal specialties at a somewhat higher price. You really do want the “signature roast pork entrée,” which is a small plate of beautifully crisp roast suckling pig flanked by marinated slivers of cucumber and a crunchy heap of sliced jellyfish curls dressed with sesame oil. Then you get to the varsity menu: big, glossy photographs and half a dozen ways to have your crab prepared, all of which are good. So you take a leap — even if some dishes are expensive, they tend to feed a lot of people. Tasting menu prices vary based on dishes.
5733 Rosemead Blvd., Temple City, (626) 280-2998
Le Comptoir
There are just 10 seats at the tiny counter in the Hotel Normandie. And after you are led to your place at the counter — everybody in the restaurant sits at once — you will register no open flames, bubbling pots or cooking smells. Your dinner begins not with bread and butter but with a short lecture from chef Gary Menes on the structure of the menu. And when the meal finally begins, the wavelike rhythm of everyone being served the same course at the same time can be soothing, aggravate your OCD, or both. But Menes’ austere California-French cooking is mesmerizing, mostly based around vegetables from his Long Beach garden. Your meal will probably include an elaborate “veggie and fruit plate” that includes up to 30 different, separately prepared plants; a poached egg served with profoundly sour bread; roasted squash; and a sourdough fritter with preserves. And you will get to know the taste of that small plot of land as intimately as you have known any patch of dirt, ever. $89 for the eight-course tasting menu.
3606 W. 6th St., Los Angeles (in the Hotel Normandie), (213) 290-0750, lecomptoirla.com
Saam
Saam and Bazaar make up the local playground of José Andrés, the most famous Spanish chef in America. Like his Minibar in Washington and his é in Las Vegas, Saam is a restaurant within a restaurant — the couture inner sanctum of Bazaar — serving luxurious tasting menus that both expand and improve on the pleasures of the larger dining room outside. Last year chef Aitor Zabala, a longtime veteran of the late elBulli on the Catalan coast, pushed the restaurant into a whimsical version of the culinary present — fewer encapsulations, less liquid nitrogen. And the execution was stunning, from baskets woven from strips of ripe avocado, to bright tropical fish fashioned from Spanish mackerel and flower blossoms, to soft asparagus spears impaled on whittled rosemary twigs. $100 for the 14- to 22-course tasting menu.
465 S. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 246-5545,
thebazaar.com
Q Sushi
The most transformative sushi meals I have had in L.A. have come from Hiroyuki Naruke at the omakase-only Q Sushi downtown, who seems to have the ability to distill all the wonders of nature into careful mouthfuls of rice, vinegar and fish. Naruke practices the deceptively plain tradition of 19th century-style edomae sushi, in which a lovely piece of fresh seafood is only the beginning. His universe of pickling and curing and aging edges closer to a great charcuterie counter than to a raw-fish floor show, but subtly enough to be invisible to diners who may not be looking for it. Naruke shut his tiny, well-regarded Roppongi sushi bar when partners at a local law firm offered to set him up with this elegant downtown restaurant, and Los Angeles is the better for it. Q is not inexpensive, but the cost of its fixedprice omakase, the only meal served, is comparable to that of the other first-rate sushi restaurants in town. $75 to $125 for lunch omakase, $125 to $165 for dinner omakase and $250 for premium menu.
521 W. 7th St., Los Angeles, (213) 225-6285, qsushila.com
Taco María
Taco María may be the most unlikely great restaurant in Southern California: a mall restaurant descended from a food truck. It would be easy to mistake Taco María for a genteel enchilada place instead of a restaurant with a $75 prix-fixe tasting menu and a young chef, Carlos Salgado, esteemed by some of the finest culinary minds in both California and Mexico. Salgado prepares what he calls “Chicano cuisine” — the food of a second-generation chef who cooked at fine-dining restaurants like Commis and Coi and returned home to reinterpret the flavors he’d grown up with. The aguachile, fine fat shrimp cured in a sharp broth of citrus and kombu seaweed, could pass for a course at Providence were it not for the chile heat; a scallop in its shell, briefly broiled under a sprinkling of buttery bread crumbs saturated in squid ink, is lovely. And if you do happen to run into a taco at dinner, it is likely to be made with almond-wood-smoked sturgeon and a tortilla made with an heirloom blue corn Salgado brings up from Atlacomulco, Mexico. $75 for the four-course tasting menu.
3313 Hyland Ave., Costa Mesa, (714) 538-8444, tacomaria.com
jonathan.gold@latimes.com