Three amigos getting pizza….before going to Euro Cafe. (at Frankie & Johnnie’s Pizza)
I’m seriously thinking of checking this place out this afternoon. Anyone else want to come? :)
South Hospitality: Abbot Kinney Pizza from a Mozza Vet
You’re in Venice. The LA one.
Thinking about Venice. The Italian one.
And how there’s a lot of pizza there, but none from a Mozza vet…
(And incidentally, the Florida Venice never crossed your mind.)
Meet South End, an intimate wine bar with pizza from the man who was recently running the kitchen at Pizzeria Mozza, now soft-open on Abbot Kinney.
The keyword above was “Mozza.” Which means next time you feel like getting close to someone who appreciates the significance of said keyword, you’ll squeeze into this dark little box of wood slats. It’s got a giant mural of some girl’s face, and that’s about it, decor-wise.
READ MORESouth End
2805 Abbot Kinney Blvd
Venice, CA 90291
424-228-4736
official website
It’s fascinating where the world and business of food is colliding these days. Have you experienced a meal with EatWith?
Breaking Bread: The Growing Economy of Food Sharing Communities
When traveling in a foreign country and hungry for something really authentic, I’ve always had the desire to eat with locals. After Guy Michin had a magical home cooked meal while visiting Crete with his family a couple of years ago, the formerly Silicon Valley-based lawyer and MBA-trained Michin decided to leave his job in the Israeli solar power industry to create a system to replicate that eating experience anywhere in the world. Soon after, he launched EatWith, essentially Airbnb for foodies, where users sign up to either be hosts or guests—and a home-cooked meal and a pancake brunch in Barcelona or a North African dinner in Brooklyn is just a click away.
I just love looking at these pictures…..
Best Napa Valley Wineries to Visit
The best Napa Valley wineries to visit feature a tasting room in a cave, artisanal cheese pairings, on-site sommeliers and more.
Lovin’ this….oysters on the westside!
A downtown institution for seafood comes to Santa Monica
Long before a fascination with retro seafood dishes rolled over the city like a salty wave, Downtown’s Water Grill was the hands-down favorite for elegant surf-and-turf: chilled shrimp Louie salad ($26), bowls of garlicky cioppino ($32) brimming with shellfish and an impeccably fried plate of fish and chips ($26).
It’s no coincidence that L.A.’s two most prominent seafood chefs, Michael Cimarusti and David LeFevre, both spent time running Water Grill’s kitchen over the years before opening their own projects (Damon Gordon is currently at the helm).
Twenty-four years after its original debut, Water Grill has added a ritzy second location along Santa Monica’s Ocean Avenue, complete with panoramic seaside views, a burnished copper raw bar, puffy leather booths and schooner-inspired wall hangings.
I loved this interview in Tasting Table….
Mangia Meets Memphis: Cook a culinary mashup from the the Hog & Hominy guys
Some kids dream of gridiron greatness. Others wanna be rockstars. Memphis schoolmates Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman had different aspirations.
“We started talking about opening a restaurant together in eighth grade,” Ticer says. “Freshman year, between classes, we’d sketch out floor plans.”
Inspired by the home cooking of their Italian grandmothers, the two figured they’d improve the food of their hometown by bringing in the flavors of the old country.
But formative enthusiasms don’t always lead to solid business plans. “We were gonna name it Inizio, which is Italian for ‘the beginning,’” says Hudman with a chuckle.
Ticer: “The bar was going to be in the shape of the boot of Italy, with white neon running around it. How awful is that?”
Frank Bruni is sooo good and soooo right! There is nothing better than being welcomed at your favorite “spot”. And nothing better than bringing the people you love there too. This is Eat+Drink’s entire goal - to show you the places we love.
Frank Bruni, Former Restaurant Critic, on the Joys of Repeat Visits
What a cad I used to be, constantly ditching the bistro that had opened only four months ago for the week-old trattoria with an even dewier complexion, callously trading in the yellowtail sashimi that had been so good to me for a hot tamale of unproven charms.
Then, a few years back, the restaurant Barbuto and I settled down.
It’s bliss. She knows my heart, knows my drill: a gin martini to begin, a seasonal salad for my appetizer, the roasted chicken after.
And I know her. If the weather’s nice, a breeze will blow in from the West Village streets that her retractable walls open onto. The kale that she serves me will be sparingly dressed. And the breast meat? As plump and tender as it was the last time around and the dozen times before that.
We don’t have fireworks, not this late in the game. But we have a rhythm. Sometimes that’s better.
What I’m saying is that I’m a regular there, as I am at the Breslin, whose lamb burger is as true to me as I am to it; at Empellón Taqueria, where I never stray from the fish tempura tacos, which never let me down; at Szechuan Gourmet, where I don’t glance at a menu. I don’t have to.
I’m no monogamist, that’s clear. More of a polygamist, but I dote on my sister wives. I’ve come to see that the broccolini isn’t always greener on the other side of Houston Street, and I’m here to sing what’s too seldom sung: the joys of familiarity. The pleasures of intimacy. The virtues of staying put.
What you have with a restaurant that you visit once or twice is a transaction. What you have with a restaurant that you visit over and over is a relationship.
The fashionable script for today’s food maven doesn’t encourage that sort of bonding, especially not in a city with New York’s ambition and inexhaustible variety. Here you’re supposed to dash to the new Andrew Carmellini brasserie before anybody else gets there; be the first to taste ABC Cocina’s guacamole; advertise an opinion about the Massaman curry at Uncle Boons while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe. Snap a photo. Tweet it. Then move on. There’s always something else. Always virgin ground.
For years, I was dedicated to exploring it, by dint of my duty as The Times’s restaurant critic. I was a paid philanderer. It was exhilarating. It was exhausting.
I wrote about Wolvesmouth over 6 months ago when Craig Thornton was featured in the New Yorker and Tasting Table. Well now Craig is at it again and created a two week artist residency called CUT YOUR TEETH with Matthew Bone at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. After reading about Wolvesmouth, I dreamed up the Eat+Drink Supper Club - we will hold our 5th dinner next month! I wonder what this will make me come up with?
Animal Instinct: A Secret Dinner in a Forest. (In a Museum.)
You’re deep inside a dark forest.
You stumble across some animals. They appear to be stuffed.
You look up to see a dangling chandelier—weird. Also, it appears to be made out of teeth.
Behind you, something clatters.
You’re either at an astoundingly mysterious new dinner party inside a museum, or something pretty bad is about to happen…
Prepare your game face for Cut Your Teeth, in which LA’s hottest underground dinner party, Wolvesmouth, steps into a museum exhibit that’s basically a full-on creepy forest—tickets go on sale Friday at 9am.
Cut Your Teeth
at Santa Monica Museum of Art
2525 Michigan Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90404
310-586-6488
official website
Love!
Latino Winemakers Rise in California, Through the Ranks
SONOMA, Calif. — It is harvest season in wine country, the time of year when the scent of crushed grapes infuses the air and flatbed trucks heavy with fruit cargo come lurching down narrow back roads.
For the winemaker Everardo Robledo — who grew up working in the fields alongside his father, Reynaldo, on weekends and after school — the harvest has a particular emotional resonance: a measure of how far the family has come since his Mexican immigrant grandfather drifted from one migrant labor camp to another and his father toiled in the vineyards for $1.10 an hour.
Mr. Robledo, 30, and his family are part of a tiny but growing fraternity of Mexican-American winemakers, many of them farmworkers’ children who now pursue wine business degrees or study viticulture and oenology at the University of California, Davis. “It’s what we have been doing all our lives,” the younger Mr. Robledo said of picking, pruning, trellising, planting and “suckering,” or removing unwanted shoots from vines. “The land is in our DNA.”
For tourists here and in other wine-producing regions, the harvest is an opportunity to swirl, sniff and sip wine, stomp grapes and revel in dinners by master chefs. In Sonoma, visitors can experience an annual “grape camp” whose Web site advertises “three blissful days” picking grapes.
Tacos @mercadosantamonica! #eatplusdrink #foodwizard (at Mercado)
I’m sure every pizza joint on this list is amazing but I do think it’s a little lame that the only good pizza in LA is supposedly Mozza. It’s good pizza but we all know the attitude isn’t worth going back after attempt 3 or 4. I’ve even learned how to MAKE pizza there but don’t need to go back. Although I will say that I was incredibly impressed with CHI SPACCA last week (review coming soon). Stella Barra is amazing and so are a number of other joints around town!
The 38 Essential Pizzas Across the Country
The appeal of the pizza seems to know no bounds. While New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are all packing a number of absurdly great pizzerias, an excellent pie can be had just about anywhere in the country. And in just about any style: thin-crust, New York, deep dish, Detroit, bar, New Haven, Chicago, grilled, California, tomato pies, and Neapolitan among them. This last style seems to have taken particular root over the last decade with pizza-makers across the country importing ovens from Naples and churning out margherita pies topped with San Marzano tomatoes and mozzarella di bufala.
The question, of course, is which of these restaurants qualify as absolute must-stop pizzerias for the novice as well as the pizza snob. Earlier this year, Eater unveiled the Eater National Burger 38 in the grand tradition of the lists local sites have been putting out for years. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time to present the Eater National Pizza 38, the 38 essential pizzerias (and restaurant pizzas) across the country.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re doing this tipping thing all wrong.
Leaving a Tip: A Custom in Need of Changing?
Try one of these techniques if you want better service in restaurants:
1. Become very famous;
2. Spend $1,000 or more on wine every time you go out;
3. Keep going to the same restaurant until you get V.I.P. treatment; if that doesn’t work, pick another place.
Now, here is a technique that is guaranteed to have no effect on your service: leave a generous tip.
I’ve tipped slightly above the average for years, generally leaving 20 percent of the total, no matter what. According to one study, lots of people are just like me, sticking with a reasonable percentage through good nights and bad. And it doesn’t do us any good, because servers have no way of telling that we aren’t the hated type that leaves 10 percent of the pretax total, beverages excluded.
Some servers do try to sniff out stingy tippers, engaging in customer profiling based on national origin, age, race, gender and other traits. (The profiling appears to run both ways: another study showed that customers tended to leave smaller tips for black servers.)
I could go on against tipping, but let’s leave it at this: it is irrational, outdated, ineffective, confusing, prone to abuse and sometimes discriminatory. The people who take care of us in restaurants deserve a better system, and so do we.
Fascinating….
Georgia Olive Farms Oil, A Must-Have in Sean Brock’s Pantry
This Georgia state olive oil is distinctly Southern
Sean Brock takes the idea of local very seriously. He gets his truffles from Tennessee and sources his cured country hams from Kentucky. Now, for his Husk restaurants in Charleston and Nashville, the chef doesn’t have to look very far for olive oil, either.
Georgia Olive Farms released their incredibly smooth, clean-tasting oil ($32 for 500 ml) in 2011.
Brock likes what’s being pressed from Peach State olives.
“We treat it like gold,” the chef says. “The flavor of this oil is very fruity and has little to no spice, which makes it much more versatile.”
Georgia’s actually no newcomer to homegrown oil.
“Spanish settlers were growing olives on the coast as late as the 1860s,” says Georgia Olive Farms owner Jason Shaw. “We don’t know why it stopped.”
Unbelievable! If you haven’t already signed up for one (or five!) of these for when they start shipping in the spring - you’re going to miss out! :)
Get Nymi!
How fun is this sung by kids!
I’m off to Chi Spacca for dinner tonight. Have you been?
Our next to last Eat+Drink Supper Club was last weekend and we had a blast! The steak was perfect, the wine was flowing and everyone was all smiles. Don’t miss our last event next Saturday - October 5th before we take the winter off!
A Year of San Francisco Foursquare check-ins. This is pretty damn fun to watch. When are they doing one for Los Angeles?!?!?!?!?
This was one of our favorite little secrets in Hollywood when we lived over there. It’s a solid Italian restaurant tucked away in a strip mall on Sunset Blvd. And they are now celebrating 10 years of business! If you’re over that way, definitely check it out!
I’m sure many of you here in Los Angeles saw last week that the first LA Diner en Blanc took place on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. 1300 people showed up dressed in white for dinner. It looked amazing!
The Eat+Drink Supper Club had our own mini diner en blanc a couple weeks ago with our french David Feau dinner. It WAS amazing!
Well now there is a documentary about this phenomenon called “Diner en Blanc: The World’s Largest Dinner Party”. I don’t know what it is about this trailer but it made me cry. Maybe it’s the collective goal of everyone coming together to have an amazing dinner. Maybe it’s that my lovely friend from France, Jacqueline, told me about this months and months ago. I don’t know. But I love it.