Tommy Ngan and Joseph Lifschutz run Ice Cream Lab. (
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Get your Macallan fix at Ten Pound. (
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Vast, diverse, confident, carefree and full of contradictions, Los Angeles is a delightful surprise even when it bewilders you. This metropolis — with an evolving, playful, no-rules, no-limits dining and nightlife scene to rival any other city’s — is full of hot spots that seem to make little sense. And really, what’s better than a place that feels both fully formed and unexpected?
Consider hip, happy 20-somethings Joseph Lifschutz and Tommy Ngan’s new Ice Cream Lab (icecreamlab.com), which serves liquid-nitrogen concoctions. With its cool street art, tight social media game (the board urging you to tweet, Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare looks like graffiti art), organic/local/seasonal sourcing and winning flavor combos like the Salt Lick Crunch with pretzels, caramel sauce and sea salt, this is the type of shop that would fit right into a scenester Silverlake block. Instead, it’s in Beverly Hills, down the block from Rodeo Drive’s ultra-luxe shopping, and it’s jammed day and night.
This isn’t far from Ten Pound, the reservations-only Macallan bar/hideaway quietly operating above Scarpetta in the celebrity-laden Montage Beverly Hills (montagebeverlyhills.com), where the idea of mixing 15-year Scotch in a cocktail isn’t blasphemy — and the drink in question (really smooth!) costs $55. Can a bar be both understated and decadent at the same time? Ten Pound, which uses imported Scottish spring water for one of its four ice-cube options, threads that needle.
Over at the Century, the much buzzed-about Related Companies tower with Candy Spelling’s $35 million penthouse, the building’s newly opened restaurant isn’t the Time Warner Center-like fussy fine-dining experience you might be imagining. Instead, chef David Myers, of Comme Ca fame, and chef Kuniko Yagi are collaborating on Hinoki & the Bird (hinokiandthebird.com), a relaxed-chic destination that merges modern California/American cuisine with Asian flavors in a menu full of crowd-pleasers for both the Spago and Tokyo izakaya set. (Myers also has restaurants in Japan, which he visits often.)
The clam chowder with celery leaf resembles Singapore laksa as much as it does anything you’ll find in New England. There’s a fantastic chili crab toast. The lobster roll has green curry and Thai basil. The hearty meats include a standout Vietnam-inspired caramel-braised kurobuta pork belly with radish and mustard greens. The mochi ice-cream choices include a miso/butterscotch that’s something like a Japanese version of salted caramel. And while this is a surefire entertainment-industry power-dining spot (Robert Downey Jr. and Stacy Keibler were there Saturday) with a gorgeous room, go ahead and sit outside, order signature cocktails and linger like you have no place to go and nothing to prove.
Over at a truly unlikely Marina Del Rey location, near a Courtyard by Marriott, beloved LA chef Ricardo Zarate (Mo-Chica, Picca) is officially opening Paiche (facebook.com/paicherestaurant), a Peruvian-Japanese restaurant this month. He and partner Stephane Bombet have already held successful, packed-to-the-gills dinners there featuring other fellow Food & Wine magazine Best New Chefs alumni including Boston/soon-to-be New York star Jamie Bissonnette. Expect Paiche to single-handedly turn its neighborhood into a dining destination.
In Texas, you might get killed for trying to make a fancy version of queso dip or using a ribeye for chicken-fried steak, but at downtown LA’s Bar Ama (barama.com), chef Josef Centeno, who’s also still rocking it nearby at Baco Mercat, has no fear. Forget Tex-Mex vs. Cal-Mex. This is Next-Mex, from a chef who just bends quality ingredients to his will.
Also downtown: an emerging but still really funky Arts District (think Gowanus Canal minus the toxic water), where so-sizzling-right-now Italian restaurant Bestia (bestiala.com) dominates, and you can find exotic $8 sausage sandwiches (rattlesnake and rabbit, anyone?) at Wurstküche (wurstkuche.com) and $6 slices of pie at the Pie Hole (thepieholela.com). These are prices that seem to exist in a different mathematical world than the $5 meals in Little Tokyo nearby.
And while Kogi slinger Roy Choi might admittedly be a little nervous about relocating Chego to Chinatown, where locals are used to paying next to nothing for meat over colossal mounds of rice, his flavors are still all swagger and spice. Choi just kicked off outdoor brunch season at Sunny Spot (sunnyspotvenice.com) in Venice, where mofongo, jerk potatoes and diablo shrimp and grits are just a few ways to get started.
LA nightlife is just as charmingly unpredictable, especially in Hollywood. There are escape artists, avuncular card tricksters and concealed areas at the old-school Magic Castle (magiccastle.com), where the formal dress code is tougher than even the steak. And at David Arquette’s Bootsy Bellows (bootsybellows.com), club queen Allison Melnick’s Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays bring in fun-loving A-listers who enjoy oddball puppet shows performed by a crew including Arquette himself. A spy recently saw Sean Penn playfully interacting with a Mick Jagger puppet. The actual Jagger has also popped by. We bet he was pleasantly confused.