L.A. restaurant Damian offers the quality you’d expect from chef Enrique Olvera, with one flaw
Mexican master Enrique Olvera’s California outpost is a bit too California but otherwise splendid
The name Enrique Olvera might not ring a bell for everyone. But anyone who closely follows restaurant news beyond our own ZIP codes will likely perk up at the mention of Pujol, Olvera’s beautiful flagship in Mexico City. The chef is arguably the most famous culinary figure in Latin America, renowned for modernizing Mexican cuisine by mining his country’s rich but often forgotten heritage.
Olvera’s profile has been rising in the U.S. over the decade since he’s opened very successful restaurants in New York. I have often referred to Olvera as the Thomas Keller of Mexico, but in the latest ranking of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Olvera’s Pujol now ranks 12th — the highest-rated restaurant in North America — while his swanky New York outpost, Cosme, follows at 23. Keller’s French Laundry and Per Se have slipped out of the Top 50 altogether. The tables have turned.
Now, after years of delays that were exacerbated further by the pandemic, Olvera has quietly opened his first West Coast restaurant, Damian, in Los Angeles. It’s on a dead-end alleyway in the Arts District on the eastern fringe of downtown. The alley might be familiar to many. It’s where the wildly popular Italian restaurant Bestia is located.
When I arrive for dinner, there’s a short queue at the door, eager guests spaced at least 10 feet, ever mindful of the still-smoldering pandemic. At the entrance, a hostess asks for our wrists, at which she points an infrared thermometer to check our temperatures. She then quickly escorts us through the dining room (occupied by a lone couple) and out the back of the building to a charming, plantfilled courtyard hidden between two old warehouses. Jingly Mexican pop songs from the ’70s make me smile.
A few minutes in, I’m savoring an expensive tequila paired with a house-pressed tomato water called sangrita — a common way of sipping tequila in Mexico, especially among the affluent.
A complimentary basket of chips arrives. These are not ordinary chips, of course. These are whole tortillas, some blueish, some yellowish, that look as if they’ve been roasted in a wood-fired oven until they’ve begun to burn. They are brittle and intensely flavorful, made even more so when I spread the tortillas with thick, velvety pipian rojo made from dried red chiles.
I keep waiting for someone to mention Olvera’s name. I noticed no nameplate at the front door letting me know I’d just entered a celebrity chef’s restaurant. There are no signed cookbooks screaming for my attention at the hostess stand. Servers come and go, discussing ingredients and explaining various cocktails or mezcals, but never a word about Olvera. The menu mentions no chef’s name, not even the young chef tasked with running the kitchen, Jesus “Chuy” Cervantes, whose name I know only from Instagram. If I weren’t already aware that one of the world’s most celebrated chefs was involved with Damian before I arrived, I’d be just as oblivious upon departure.
After a relaxing, leisurely meal in this uniquely urban courtyard, pampered by first-rate hospitality, it becomes clear that no matter who might be in charge, this is not a restaurant driven by egos.
The restaurant’s website says
Damian is rooted in Mexican culture while celebrating seasonal Californian produce and ingredients, which translates to an infiltration of kimchi, soy sauce and other Asian staples. The first kimchi makes its appearance as an accompaniment to a habaneroinfused martini. The martini is great, but I struggle to see how it needs the kimchi.
Later in the meal, when a whole grilled pompano is presented, it comes with typical accoutrements for fish tacos: tortillas, cilantro, limes, onions and salsa. But also, oddly, more kimchi — distinctly Korean kimchi, not some Mexican sleight-of-hand kimchi.
The fish is extraordinary. It’s one of those rare dishes that’ll make you want to cry, it’s so good. This is exemplary Mexican cooking, a quintessential zarandeado-style grilled fish, beautifully seasoned and heavily charred yet unimaginably supple. Even on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of this regional charcoal-fired delicacy. I can’t put my fork down. Everything else on the table grows cold while I lose myself in this fish. Bite after bite, I can’t speak. But in the back of my mind I hear myself asking, “Does it really need the kimchi?”
I bring myself to finally taste the intensely garlicky cabbage, and the answer is a resounding no. I mean, I like kimchi as much as the next guy. But I don’t need it or want it with such a quintessential Mexican-style fish, this caliber of which is so hard to find around here in the first place. I push it to the side, hoping to be so obvious that the busboy will quietly whisk it away.
He does.
By the end of the meal we’ve tasted classic arrachera paired with a tabbouleh-stuffed chile. We’ve inhaled pristinely fresh clams from Baja, subtly smoked and splashed with a watery, ponzulike salsa flecked with chile seeds. We’ve eaten a tlayuda topped with zucchini flowers and fried shrimp shells — not shrimp, just the shells, which gives the dish a novel texture and an added layer of umami. It’s not my favorite dish but I don’t hate it.
Something else I do like a lot is the gordita: a very traditional masa bun, smaller than an English muffin, stuffed with California Dungeness crab and a generous squeeze of local Meyer lemon, served with a creamy avocado salsa whose gentle punch is interrupted by the unexpected sting of shiso, that bitter Japanese mint. This time the fusion works.
I struggle with my feelings for this place. I love the aesthetic study in browns, grays and cement. I love that the restaurant is elegant and casually sophisticated — unique without calling attention to itself. I love that the service is surprisingly polished for such a young operation. And the food is mostly delicious. I love it. I’m just not fully in love with it — a slight but important nuance.
The cuisine is undeniably interesting. There is a lightness and joy to the cooking here that I haven’t seen in other Mexican restaurants locally, contemporary or otherwise. I just believe it would be even better without the Asian undertones. I guess I was hoping for something more unapologetically Mexican.
But I realize there can ever only be one Pujol, and I’ll always cherish those meals in Mexico City. Besides, Damian likely hasn’t set its own expectations on a 12th-place ranking worldwide, at least not yet. Most restaurants don’t, with or without someone like Olvera behind the scenes.