For this month, it was TRUFFLES. I’ve never eaten a full blown truffle set meal. At $250 a pop and 600 consecutive phone calls over a span of 2 hours, I was able to get this reservation. Coupled with wine pairing, the meal was superbly awesome.
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For this month, it was TRUFFLES. I’ve never eaten a full blown truffle set meal. At $250 a pop and 600 consecutive phone calls over a span of 2 hours, I was able to get this reservation. Coupled with wine pairing, the meal was superbly awesome.
This is my 5th visit to Maude in 6 months. I guess I have the pleasure of doing this because I don’t have many financial responsibilities. This month’s tasting features pears, and again it did not disappoint me. I love pears, and I was curious in seeing how the chef uses it in his dishes.
Lombardi’s or Grimaldi’s? That’s the age old question when it comes to pizza in New York City. Grimaldi’s is the other gourmet pizza place that often rivals Lombardi’s (see my post of it here). Grimaldi’s opened up another new location in Los Angeles (El Segundo), and I went to try it out.
This is restaurant #8 on my 2014 LA food expedition.
We ordered half and half. The first half was your typical margherita style pizza, and the second half was pepperoni and sun dried tomatoes. The crust came out kind of thin than what I was thinking for a “gourmet” pizza. In fact, the crust was rather too crispy in such a way that it tormented parts of my mouth like when you eat overly toasted bread. The margherita half was quite good sans the crust. The cheese was very good. It could’ve been great had it not been too hard. On the other half, the pepperoni was disappointing. I was hoping for larger pieces, but they came out with little mini pepperonis. Between the two halves, I prefer the margherita.
Now let’s talk about that crust. We have a chain here called Blaze Pizza, where they throw your pizza into an oven and bake it in less than 5 minutes. Blaze’s crust is very similar to this in that it’s between thin and regular. The only exception is that Blaze Pizza is significantly cheaper, and their crust doesn’t tear up your mouth.
Because of the crust, I personally prefer Lombardi’s over Grimaldi’s. As for how it compares to other pizza pies in LA, I don’t think it really stands out, and there are quite a few other pizza joints I would take over Grimaldi’s.
Visit: Grimaldi’s Pizza, El Segundo, Los Angeles
#8 of 52 2014 LA food expedition
I’ve been craving for seafood the last few weeks or months, and I didn’t feel like driving to Whittier to go to Portsmouth. I looked up Eater LA, and I found L&E Oyster Bar on their list of 2014 essential LA restaurants at #26.
This is restaurant #1 for my 2014 LA food expedition.
This post is quite late. Work has tied me up like crazy the last few months, and I have no responsibilities at all other than taking care of myself (which I already do abysmally). So what better way than to go balls out this year trying a lot of LA restaurants?
My goal is to do 52 different LA restaurants to reflect the 52 weeks of 2014. OBVIOUSLY, this is darn near impossible as I plan to take trips outside of LA to various parts of the country throughout the year, but it would make my 2014 year slightly more interesting.
I will be using lists posted on Eater LA as well as other people’s suggestions.
The lists include the following:
– 38 Essential Los Angeles Restaurants
– Best LA Korean Spots
– Best Sushi Spots
For this coming week, I will be visiting the Silverlake hipster neighborhood to try some nice oysters and seafood @ L&E Oyster Bar. Stay tune for a recap soon.
Marc Forgione is one of the Iron Chefs on Iron Chef America. This is his first restaurant and has 1 Michelin Star. Like Michael Voltaggio, this restaurant is one of his babies, so he periodically is cooking in the kitchen. Unfortunately he didn’t cook today, but I just want to preface this by saying this is definitely one of my favorite restaurants ever that I’ve tried so far.
On Yelp, this ramen place Ippudo got a crazy number of reviews. Since I’m in New York for a short week, I decided to check this out during lunch to avoid the lines for dinner. I ordered the “Akamaru Modern” ramen which has pork flavored broth, their own miso paste, pork chashu, cabbage, scallions, and garlic oil. I told them to not put sesame kikurage mushrooms because I am not a fan of non-psychadelic mushrooms. In addition, I made this into a set combo for 3 extra dollars, so it came with a small salad and fried chicken on top of cabbage and rice.
The salad had a ponzu type vinaigrette that you typically find in most Japanese places. There’s some citrus and wasabi flavors in it. The rice had some cabbage on top that was doused with some type of mayo mix. On top of that is the fried chicken which is similar to “chicken karage”. The chicken breading was ok. It was breaded very thin, so it definitely lacked the crisp associated with fried chicken.
The ramen noodles are very similar to Shinsengumi in Gardena. If you have read my preferences for ramen, you would know I’m only a fan of thick noodles, so I wasn’t that thrilled with these noodles. Other than that, the broth itself was flavorful, but definitely not as rich as some of the other places in Los Angeles. Like most ramen places, this one has quite a bit of sodium in the broth, but luckily this place was very quick on refilling your cups with water.
All in all, I’m not sure what NYC’s ramen scene is like, but this one is mostly a glorified Shinsengumi to me.
Visit: http://www.ippudony.com
Sage is a popular American contemporary restaurant located in the Aria hotel on the Las Vegas strip. The head chef, Shawn McClain, won a few chef awards in the past decade. His executive chef, Richard Camarota, beat Iron Chef Marc Forgione on the the Food Network. There’s a lot of name dropping here and there, so since my party was staying here, we decided to try this restaurant out based on the rave reviews on Yelp.
I made a visit to the bay area to visit some friends, and we stopped by this place Naglee Park Garage. This restaurant was featured on Guy Frieri’s Diners Drive Ins and Dives TV show. They ordered the angus burger and baked salt cod for their main entree. For my entree, I ordered the mussels with white wine. We also ordered brussel sprouts and bacon and macaroni and cheese for sides.
I have to say the mussels were surprisingly fresh. There was no fishy taste to it, and it wasn’t overcooked such that it was mushy. The meat was pretty big and plump. Typically this stuff has some type of broth to it. The broth had a little garlic, onions, stock, and white wine. It was also garnished with spinach on top as well as a few slices of bread. I found the broth to be a little too watery and needed to be thickened a little. It also didn’t taste like the mussels was stewed in the broth, so there really wasn’t much mussel flavor in it. Despite the downfalls, it met my expectations since price and value seems to have placed it just right. My friends have been to this restaurant before, and they said it was worse than they have remembered it.
In a nutshell, I think this place was ok, not terrible and not great.
Earlier this week, I reviewed the Ink tasting menu that appeared approximately 2 months after open. Today I went to Ink again to sample his food again. I will be blunt and say tonight was by far the BEST LA expensive food that I’ve had. Let’s get straight to what was on the menu.