Eli "minativism" G.'s Profile

Michelin Star #16

For my birthday this year, my wonderful woman took me here for dinner. We weren't feeling like the tasting menu, so we opted for ordering a la carte. We ordered the mozzarella  sampler, grilled octopus salad, calf brain ravioli, sweetbreads, two desserts, and some pino nero. Once we relinquished our menus, we were brought an amuse bouche of bruschetta topped with mozzarella, basil, and olive spread. It was simple and very tasty.
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Next up was the mozzarella; three oil soaked lumps of creamy goodness. One was smoked, one was from a buffalo, and one was seemingly normal. The cheese was served with some very good toasted bread that had a very healthy dose of oil. The buffalo cheese was by far my favorite, super soft and packed with flavor. Next time I come here, I will order a plate of just the buffalo mozzarella. The other two varieties were good, but not as special as the buffalo.
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While we were eating the cheese, the octopus salad was served. It didn't look like much, but it was one of the tastiest grilled octopi I've ever eaten. The skin was almost crispy and had a wonderful smoky aroma, and yet somehow the flesh was incredibly tender and supple. I would have been happy eating just a giant plate of that all night.
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When I was planning our order, one thing kept popping up at me, calf brain ravioli. How could I not be curious!? I've only ever had brain a handful of times in my life, mostly from taco trucks, but never from a fancy place. The order came split on two plates for us so it looks smaller than it was. It came with a very nice lemon butter sauce and some crispy sage. The filling though was nondescript, very creamy and mild, no hint of offal. But the best part was the pasta itself! So good! The texture of the ravioli pasta was so nice! At this point I almost regretted not getting the pasta course meal! This was a very nice treat.
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Keeping up with the offal trend, our sweetbreads came out next. Piled high atop bitter greens and a very lemony sauce, the sweetbreads themselves were great! Nice crispy exterior and a velvety tender interior. The thing that lowered my euphoria with this dish was the sauce. It was a lemon overload! So much tart was happening all at once between the veggies and the sauce. Instead of lip smacking, it was lip puckering!
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Finally came dessert time. The girl got some bombolini, fancy word for doughnut hole, and I got a chocolate cake. The doughnuts were really good! They came with some fruit spread underneath them and some ice cream atop lemon curd and a lemon flavored whipped cream, so good!
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My dessert was a super rich and decadent chocolate cake, one of the richest I've had in recent memory. But the real highlight of the cake were the Perugian chocolates that came on the plate, each one was awesome! I wish they sold boxes of those at the door.
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Great meal, but not mind blowing. I have yet to be truly "wowed" by Italian food. I will be back one day to try the pasta course meal.

Sure, it may be the best deep dish pizza I've had outside of Chicago, but it still wasn't good enough to be great.

Like everyone says, it will take over 40 minutes to get your pizza, so call ahead if you don't want to wait. Another thing to note; they will tell you that a small serves two people, yes two HUGE people! A small could feed a hungry family for days. We ordered a large because I wanted leftovers and I ended up eating pizza for the rest of the week (not a terrible thing). So we ordered a large with tomatoes, whole roasted garlic, and mortadella.
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It was huge and really good. The sauce was the best part by far, not too sweet and with a nice simple flavor. The faults lay in the crust and the garlic. The crust lacked that indescribable, impossible to quantify quality that real Chicago pizza has. But the real let down was the par cooked garlic cloves. When I think whole roasted cloves, I think mushy, sweet lumps of mild garlic. This was semi-firm and quite pungent.
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My last complaint was on their sausage pizza, which some friends ordered. The sausage came on top of all the sauce and cheese, not under like at my favorite deep dish spots, and the wheel of overly sweet meat, covered only 70% of the pie. The best part of most of the deep dish spot in Chicago is the wall to wall sausage that goes directly on top of the crust, giving you meat in every bite.

Regardless, this was a damn fine pizza and I'm only nit picking at the few minor faults. I would come back here in a heartbeat.

Burger #145: What Was I Thinking?!

I realize a Hawaiian place might not be the best place for a burger, but when you're Hawaiian food craving takes a sharp turn into Burgerville, what are you going to do?

So we ordered some spam musubi, a teriyaki burger (medium rare), and some nachos for the girl. Spam came out first and I was a little let down by the portion size and rice to "meat" proportions. But it's hard to mess up spam and rice, it was okay.
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The girl's nachos were a bit of a letdown. I know I know, why order nachos in a Hawaiian restaurant. Well they server beer and have TVs with sports on, so any logical person would think that nachos would be okay. Saying the nachos were sub-par would be a slight improvement over what we got. The cheese was bland as can be and the chips were oddly sweet or maybe it was the cheese. In any case, these nachos did not satisfy either of us.
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Lastly was my teriyaki burger, but where was the teriyaki sauce?! The burger came dry as a bone with no teriyaki glaze to speak of. After a bite or two I decided it wasn't worth it to complain. The frozen patty had a pretty awful texture and zero flavor. No amount of sauce would have saved this tragesty.
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The burger I would rate a 1, the rest of the food a 2. So I'll be nice and round up to a 2 for the overall experience. And don't worry, I'll go back one day and have an actual Hawaiian meal and update appropriately.

Another day another Asian meal.

Whole deep fired fish looked great on another table, but it was lacking in seasoning and flavor. The server told us we couldn't eat the bones, but we were able to strip it down to just the central spine and head. The rest of the bones were nice and crunchy.
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We ordered some yakitori, heart and gizzard I think. It was okay, but not nearly as good as shin sen gumi or shin.
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Of course this place is known chicken so we ordered some wings, medium spicy. The skin was very nice and the meat was good enough, but it was nothing special. The medium spicy was closer to a mild. A solid meh-plus for the chicken alone.
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To round out the meats, we ordered some asparagus and ground chicken rice bowl. The asparagus was asparagus and the ground chicken was okay.
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Overall the meal was a bit below meh, nothing special and nothing that cried out for me to come back. So far, Pho So 1 is my favorite place in this shopping center.

I didn't think I would ever eat food from Pazzo again, but the girl wanted delivery and it was either Pazzo or sub-par Chinese. Scanning the menu, one pizza in particular caught my eye, the Mexican Pizza. Topped with meatballs, cilantro, jalapenos, avocados, and tomatoes, it didn't sound that Mexican but it did sound good.

After what seemed like an eternity (an hour, they said it would be 40min), our pizza arrived. As far as pizza goes, it was really good! The meatballs worked much better on the pizza than in a sandwich. The cilantro added a hint of Mexican flare and the avocados cooled of the bite of the jalapenos.

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I brought some to work the next day and those lucky enough to have tried it loved it. I will definitely be getting this pizza again.

I was not impressed.

Who cares if he beat Bobby Flay. Any mediocre sushi chef should be able to beat a southwestern TV chef. But the work crew wanted to try it and I'm always up for new places.

So we go and most of us get the lunch omakase (which they misspell as omakaze on their yelp ad). It was okay, but for the price it wasn't nearly as good as other sushi spots around LA. Half the pieces served came drenched in sauce and all of the nigiri was on the very small side for both rice and fish. A couple of the pieces were wrapped in very stale nori, which is not fun to chew long after the fish is gone from my mouth.

Just another sub-par sushi shop in a vast sea of better options. Move along people, nothing to see here.

We found $8 parking right on Sunset less than a block away.

I saw a few girls literally filling their purses to the brim with all the good candy half way through the night, leaving me with zero peanut butter cups to munch on on the way home.

Drinks were weak, but what did you expect, they were free?! We did remember to get a free black taco on the way home, making it a good night.

I'm glad I didn't have the absolute worst costume.

I normally shy away from DineLA or Restaurant Week in general, under the assumption that the food that is being put out is a lackluster misrepresentation of the typical fare that would be served any other week. But this was not the case at all when Yuko took me by surprise to Petrossian for DineLA.

At $44 per person for dinner, I am still bewildered at the quality and quantity of food we got to eat. We each selected different items and also added two other dishes to have a well rounded meal. First up was one of our extras; a blini sampler topped with caviar, trout roe and salmon roe. It was so close to perfection that it hurt. The caviar and crème fraîche were amazing but the blinis were served cooler than luke warm. Such a trajesty.
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Next was the treat of the night, seared foie gras. It simply never gets old. Served on light and crisp bread with peaches and a hibiscus reduction, it was cooked perfectly. I hate that I had to share.
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Now we began our DineLA courses, the first being an incredibly generous portion of some of the best smoked salmon I've ever had. I'm a huge lover of lox, but this blew it out of the water. Not being that salty at all, it was easy to eat the full plate of salmon in no time. The toast points and crème fraîche were a perfect accompaniment.
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Our second appetizer was some amazingly lip smacking mac and cheese that was over flowing with chunks of black truffles. The pasta was cooked well and the cheese was super rich and creamy, simply divine.
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As our main courses came out, our eyes lit up and grins widened. It was easy to see caviar pouring out of the layered steak tartar, so decadent! It came with more toast points and some greens. The steak was perfectly cooked to a nice raw, and the salty caviar went so well with the meat! It really was a nice treat.
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Just look at this!
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Our other main was two large chunks of super tender short ribs over creamy mashed potatoes. Welcome to Flavortown I thought as I ate this. No knife needed to eat this, it had been braised into oblivion.
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While I loved our meal to death, the desserts were just run of the mill, good. The chocolate lava cake needed a bit more lava, but it was still rich and delicious.
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And lastly, the girl's panna cotta was light and refreshing, but not my thing.
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If I was nice, I would have wrote this while DineLA was still going on, but I'm not. For DineLA, this was an amazing deal, and even if I had to pay 25% more, I still would have praised this place.

Burger #144: The Best Cheese Ever

After day two of work in Portland, I only had time for one last meal. Well, one last meal after stopping by Voodoo Doughnut again. The night before, my Portland buddy gave me a local magazine featuring the top 30 burgers in Portland. After scouring the pages and cross referencing everything against everything, I settled on Victory Bar. Not for their venison burger, but for the nice amount of tasty sounding small plates.

We started off with the meat and cheese plate, featuring a house made pork pâté. All the meats were great! The pâté was top notch, but then there was the cheese, this one cheese out of the three that was light years ahead of its time. It was firm, crumbly, garlicky, super rich and buttery, and despite its crumbling nature, melted so divinely in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to cheese heaven. (it's the white cheese at 12 o'clock)
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When the chef came to check on us, we asked about this magical cheese. He told us it was a rare Swiss-German cheese called Belper Knolle. I didn't believe him on how rare it was until I started calling every cheese shop in LA and none had it or even heard of it. But believe me, it was THE BEST cheese I've ever had. I would die for that cheese. http://www.youtube.com...

Next were some very large hush puppies, filled with jalapenos and cheddar cheese. Good but not mouth watering delicious.
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Then came the best mac and cheese I've ever had, but it wasn't even mac and cheese! It was a baked spaetzle with gruyere and hot damn it was rich, creamy, and so good I could have eaten it all night. It was at this point, while eating meat and cheese and the spaetzle that I noticed my friend's and I conversation turned from words to series of "Mmmmmm..... Mmmmmmm!" (sorry Yuko) But it was all just so good!
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Lastly came the venison burger. At this point I doubted anything could ever top the cheese and the spaetzle and I was right. The half pound venison patty was dense and super rich. I was pretty full at this point but I knew I had a few hours to digest in the airport. The patty reminded me of a gamey sausage, which it almost was. Good, but not great. I must say that the home made potato chips that came with it were phenomenal.
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This place was a true gem! All I have been able to think about since then is how to get some of that Belper Knolle cheese! If anyone can get me that cheese, I promise you 1,000 Rubles.

Swanky:

adjective

1. Being or in accordance with the current fashion: à la mode, chic, dashing, fashionable, mod,modish, posh, smart, stylish, swank, trig. Informal classy, in, sharp, snappy, swish, tony,trendy. Slang with-it. Idioms: all the rage, up to the minute.

I would say that the Nines meets that definition. A very "L.A." hotel in the middle of hippy-ville. My room was nice, mini-bar was stocked, TV and its content were nice and HD, and my bed was super comfortable. I didn't quite understand the ottoman for the toilet, it was a very tricky pairing to use right.

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And the floor where my conference was, was hip and modern. All you need for a successful Region 6 meeting. I'd come back, if I had a say in it.