Jonathan Gold 02/28/2010
 Musso & Frank's Welsh Rarebit Los Angeles, we are often told, is a city that refuses to recognize its past — as if, as in Sunset Boulevard, it weren't the most obsessively memorialized city in the world. And there is no restaurant anywhere, not Keens Steakhouse, Simpsons-in-the-Strand or Bofinger, as immersed in its past as Musso & Frank Grill, which is almost a museum of the American lunchroom menu of 1918: avocado cocktail, finnan haddie, chicken potpie, lamb kidneys Turbigo and diplomat pudding. Not least among these nursery-food classics is the Welsh rarebit, a concoction of cheese melted with ale, dusted with paprika and poured over toast. Think of it as ballast for your second martini.  Sapp Coffee Shop's Boat Noodles The lunchtime dish is the standard stuff of any roadside stall in Thailand, but Sapp's version is brilliant, a murky, organ-rich beef soup amplified with shrieking chile heat, thickened with blood, the tartness of lime juice locked in muscular poise with the brawny muskiness of the broth, to which the slippery, flash-boiled rice noodles seem to bring at least as much texture as substance. If you enjoy wrestling with great, reeking mounds of offal, you're in exactly the right spot; if not, you can order the boat noodles with ordinary beef.  Oki Dog The signature object — a couple wieners, some chili, a scrap of pastrami and fried cabbage wrapped up in a tortilla — may be Mexican-Jewish-Chinese food prepared by Okinawans for a largely African-American clientele, but nobody who lived through the early years of the Hollywood punk-rock scene will ever think of it as anything but a continuation of the West Hollywood stand everybody used to haunt after Germs shows. Okinawans are famous in scientific circles for their longevity — could Oki Dogs be the key?  Anisette's Pain au Chocolat I have tasted way more than my share of these, both in Los Angeles and in systematic paths through the bakeries of Paris, but it was not until I tasted Alain Giraud's compact beauties that I finally realized the crisply intense breakfast pastry's ultimate purpose: not as a mere accompaniment to a café au lait and not just to showcase the chocolate, but as the ultimate expression of the gamy, slightly tart roundness of cultured butter. At such times is one's soul exposed to God. CommentsLeave a Reply |