It’s midnight and more than a hundred twentysomethings, most in jeans and T-shirts, some in high heels and party clothes, queue in the parking lot at the Brig, a nightclub/bar in Los Angeles’s trendy Venice district. They’ve been lining up patiently for more than an hour on a chilly winter night and they’re not waiting for a hot new band or a famous DJ. They’re waiting for LA’s current food sensation.
Kogi is a Korean barbecue catering truck – a gourmet version of the old British hot dog vans or California taco trucks. It tours LA by night, keeping in touch with its customers via Twitter, serving an unlikely but perfect combination of four kinds of Korean barbecue wrapped in miniature Mexican tacos and sold dirt-cheap (a taco costs $2, a burrito $5). The black-clad cooks toil inside the truck like culinary ninjas – I count 11 of them in the cramped space – while those in the queue flash their iPhones and flirt.
Not all of the local chefs are willing to go as far as Roy Choi, Kogi’s creator, who abandoned a career running kitchens at New York’s Le Bernardin and at LA’s Beverly Hilton hotel to cook in the back of a van but Kogi is the extreme example of the change in LA’s dining scene. In the 1980s, when LA emerged as a food capital, the restaurants’ template featured Hollywood glitz, private reservation lines, A-list clients, and prices to match. Now a second generation of chef-owners has very different attitudes, offering instead back-to-basics, simplicity, sustainability and hands-on craft.
Ben Ford, who as the son of Harrison comes with his own Hollywood pedigree, represents this new breed. His first restaurant, Chadwick in Beverly Hills, was packed with celebrity guests. Three years ago, Ford, 39, closed it and opened Ford’s Filling Station in the gritty blue-collar suburb of Culver City, something his predecessors would have considered social, and commercial, suicide.
“When I first came down here some of my old customers followed me and they were a little bit at a loss. There were no valets outside, there are no tablecloths,” says Ford, who calls the Filling Station “the first gastropub west of the Mississippi”.
The Filling Station is a neighbourhood-style, down-home kind of place – but with a serious chef at the helm. The open-plan kitchen turns out dishes such as savoury split pea soup, eggplant sandwich with burrata cheese, leeks, peppers and pesto, and plump burgers with the Ford signature topping of blue cheese and caramelised onions.
The Filling Station is now at the heart of LA’s hottest Restaurant Row, flanked by Fraiche, Los Angeles Magazine’s 2008 Restaurant of the Year, and the high-concept wine bar BottleRock where staff will open any bottle, no matter the cost, to sell you wine by the glass.
A few miles to the east, on Beverly Boulevard, Ford’s childhood friend Neal Fraser has kept his own fine-dining restaurant, Grace, but added a cheaper and simpler adjunct, BLD (for Breakfast Lunch Dinner). At Grace, Fraser wears cook’s whites and a faded baseball cap. At BLD, a big, airy, modern space with a central bar, bare tables and racks with gourmet products for sale, he’s likely to appear in polo shirt and shorts.
As I lunched on BLD’s Cuban sandwich made of pork cooked in two different ways, then shredded and piled high on a toasted ciabatta with pickles and melted Gruyère, Fraser exults about “how lucky we are in California because we can get everything local, the fishermen, the wineries, the extended growing season. We are able to let the food speak for itself in a way that’s much more difficult in New York.”
Just as Fraser is bringing the LA coffee shop/diner into the 21st century, so, too, are Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali, who have rethought the pizza at their Osteria Mozza.
West Third Street, together with Beverly Boulevard, has become a new shopping and food focus for LA, based around the Grove shopping mall and the city’s original farmers market. Here, Joan’s on Third combines a top-quality grocery with an informal restaurant where teams of cooks make up a short daily menu of sandwiches, soups and salads from the food on sale. There are also breakfast eggs and fine coffee at communal tables shoehorned between the produce racks or lined up outside on the pavement.
Fifteen minutes drive east on Hollywood Boulevard, beside one of the city’s oldest and most beloved restaurants, Musso & Frank, is one of the newest, Loteria.
In LA Mexican food has had downmarket connotations, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it’s taken so long to rescue it from the Americanised cheap-and-cheerful category and attempt a more authentic version. Enter Jimmy Shaw, who started Loteria as a stall in the farmers market in 2002. The locals loved Shaw’s champiñones con epazote (mushroom stew), nopalitos (fresh cactus salad) and simmering meat dishes so much that he’s opened the Hollywood restaurant, a tall concrete box with cool white walls.
Loteria epitomises the LA trend towards “stripping the bullshit out of restaurants”, in Ford’s phrase. As Choi told the LA Weekly’s food critic, “I’m a chef. I got tired of running big kitchens where I never got to touch the food.”
With the recession tightening, it will be interesting to see how many other chefs abandon the pursuit of show-business fame and fortune to go back to basics – or even, like Kogi, take their show on the road.
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Details
Kogi’s www.kogibbq.com; twitter.com/kogibbq
Ford’s Filling Station, 9531 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, tel: +1 310202 1470; www.fordsfillingstation.net
Grace, 7360 Beverly Blvd, LA, tel: +1 323-934 4400; www.gracerestaurant.com
BLD, 7450 Beverly Blvd, tel: +1 323-930 9744; www.bldrestaurant.com
BottleRock, 3847 Main Street, Culver City, tel: +1 310-836 9463; www.bottlerock.net
Joan’s on Third, 8350 W Third Street, LA, tel: +1 323 655 2285; www.joansonthird.com
Loteria, 6627 Hollywood Blvd, LA, tel: +1 323-465 2500; www.loteriagrill.com
