Hillary Eaton


Originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal

Inside Mei Lin’s anticipated new project, Daybird

If there is one thing Mei Lin and Francis Miranda didn’t envision for 2020, it was how their Los Angeles restaurant, Daybird, would come to life. Hot off the success of their first project, Nightshade, chef Lin and her partner Miranda originally planned to open their new Silver Lake spot in early May. It was meant to be a small, chef-driven fast-casual place inspired by Nightshade’s crispy-skinned Szechuan hot quail dish. Lin would also use it as a test kitchen of sorts, to play around with new recipes.

But as the months went by and the pandemic set in, Lin and Miranda found themselves confronting the challenges of a new kind of dining scene. They were forced to close Nightshade on March 15, and they chose not to reopen at limited capacity. With Daybird, the pair have ended up focusing much more on to-go and delivery. “Pre-Covid, I never wanted to do a takeout model,” Lin says, “but we have to think of the customers, and it will take some time to come to our new normal.”

But as the months went by and the pandemic set in, Lin and Miranda found themselves confronting the challenges of a new kind of dining scene. They were forced to close Nightshade on March 15, and they chose not to reopen at limited capacity. With Daybird, the pair have ended up focusing much more on to-go and delivery. “Pre-Covid, I never wanted to do a takeout model,” Lin says, “but we have to think of the customers, and it will take some time to come to our new normal.”

So when Daybird opens July 22, diners won’t be sliding into its birch booths. Instead, customers will be enjoying Lin’s dishes—the crispy chicken thigh sandwich on Japanese milk bread, for example, or chicken tenders with hot honey and cornbread—off-site. Yet Lin and Miranda are excited to feed their neighbors and Nightshade supporters in the weeks to come. They’ve carefully sourced key ingredients, like umami-rich porcini powder or fiery Thai bird’s eye chili, from expert supplier Le Sanctuaire. To temper the three levels of heat, Lin will serve her signature milk tea and other original drinks. And she will still be using the space to have fun with food, so playful dishes like her Instagram-famous scallion pancakes may start to pop up on the menu.

“Covid-19 has highlighted a lot of things for us and others,” Miranda says. “Fine dining is going to suffer, and things will move in a different direction. Is the future having a $2 million dining room or having something that can open? What’s important?” daybirdla.com. —

Originally appeared on MUNCHIES (VICE)

This Chef Is Making Civil War-Era Cuisine to Uncover American Food’s Real Roots

“The fascinating thing about our history is that it’s very dark,” Brian Dunsmoor tells me, hunched over hand-scrawled menu notes for Fuss & Feathers, the supper club out of his Southern-American inflected restaurant, Hatchet Hall, that takes a deep dive into what we mean historically when we talk about American food. It also happens to be one of the most exciting tasting menus in Los Angeles.

“In almost every direction you look, it’s very dark. If you look at George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or anyone that was of influence at that time [of America’s origins] you can’t find a clean slate. That’s why we’re so fascinated with American food. And why so few people know or talk about it. I think because it’s all tied to some really horrible things. Our history is carnage. It’s carnage. A lot of that can be seen in the food. It’s food as carnage.”

Originally appeared on Los Angeles Times

Burt Bakman transfers his precision barbecuing from Trudy’s to his first restaurant, Slab

“I was always really surprised that people would come to a complete stranger’s house from the internet for food,” says Burt Bakman.

The real estate agent / barbecue aficionado behind Trudy’s Underground Barbecue is known for slinging Texas-style brisket from his San Fernando Valley backyard. But he said the above while seated in the dining room of his soon-to-open barbecue restaurant Slab in West Hollywood, contemplating the unconventional route he took to get here. He’s staring closely at the fat lining a thick slice of glistening brisket hanging from his fork, as he mercilessly inspects a sheet pan of half chicken, spareribs, pulled pork and brisket that will be Slab’s signature combo when the restaurant opens later this month.

Bakman draws fans from as far as the Bay Area for his Texas-style barbecue, the carnivorous spoils of his signature copper-green smoker, and an 18-plus-hour exercise in patience and temperature control. The meat is covered in a rich yet rudimentary dark bark of salt, pepper and mustard, which encases deep pink to pale taupe flesh that weeps warm, clear fat with each slice of the blade or poke of the finger.

A work trip to Austin for a real estate conference solidified Bakman’s obsession with perfecting Texas-style barbecue. He ended up skipping the conference entirely in favor of bouncing around the city to try as much barbecue as he possibly could. Bakman learned by trial and error, making brisket and giving it away to friends, honing his craft and reaching out to another self-taught pit master, Texas’ Leonard Botello of Truth Barbecue — No. 10 on Texas Monthly’s Top 50 Barbecue Joints list — for guidance and insight. “He’s my smoker brother No. 1!” Bakman says now.

Originally appeared on Los Angeles Times

The cocktails at this new bar in the Arts District may be the most ambitious tipples in Los Angeles

To make the umami oil used in the Naked Maja cocktail at the new Duello bar in downtown L.A., heaps of sun-dried tomatoes are macerated and poured into avocado oil before being vacuum-packed and left to meld and leech for five days. All that work for just five drops on top of the cocktail, necessary for what bar director Iain McPherson calls “mouthfeel.”

McPherson, known best for opening the award-winning Panda & Sons cocktail bar in Edinburgh, Scotland, is on a mission to make Duello, the bar inside chef Jessica Largey’s new Simone restaurant in the Arts District downtown, more than just a waiting area for your dinner table. And to do so, he looked to the Arts District’s rich history and perpetual reinvention.

“I easily spent over 100 hours researching the history of the area,” said McPherson, referring to the area, which in another era, was home to hundreds of acres of leafy French Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc vines. . “For a new world country, what I found is that the Arts District had a very concentrated history over a very small space of time.”

 

Originally appeared on Food & Wine

Daniel Humm Reinvents Eleven Madison Park with New L.A. Pop-Up

While Eleven Madison Park has long been considered one of the pinnacles of fine dining (and the best restaurant in the world), this new pop-up might actually offer Daniel Humm’s most unique food experience yet.

Restaurant 1683 is a three-night-long, invite-only pop-up coming to L.A. on May 21. In partnership with the luxury appliance brand Gaggenau, 1683 takes its name from the year that Gaggenau was founded, featuring a menu that spans the brand’s three centuries of existence.

Originally launched in New York in 2016 as an interactive dining experience complete with tableside cooking, models dressed in Black Forest folk clothes performing live interpretations of a cuckoo clock’s automata and even blacksmiths forging nails, this award winning pop-up transports diners to the mountainous southwest region of Germany. 

Originally appeared on Los Angeles Times

Best female chef award? ‘That’s complete nonsense,’ says latest winner, in appeal for gender parity

“For the last 10 years of my career, I’ve been asked, ‘What is it like to be a female chef?’” said chef Clare Smyth while accepting the award for best female chef at last week’s the World’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony in Bilbao, Spain. “To which I reply: ‘I’m not sure what you mean, because I’ve never been a male chef.’”

Smyth is the chef at Core restaurant in London, the first kitchen run by a woman to earn three Michelin stars. Although she used her acceptance speech to address the need for chefs of all backgrounds to experience equality and opportunity in the kitchen, her opening remarks highlight the issue of the best female chef award’s very existence.

Originally appeared on Food & Wine

The Best Pastry Chef in the World Has Plans to ‘Replace the Macaron’

In the restaurant world, there are very few awards dedicated solely to the art of pastry, making that recognition all the more coveted for the chefs who’ve chosen sugar as their medium. The most coveted award, perhaps, is the Best Pastry Chef  from the World’s 50 Best, a title snagged yesterday by French pastry mastermind, Cédric Grolet

From an edible Rubik’s cubes to lifelike fruits sculpted with paper thin chocolate, Grolet’s creations prove his singular vision. We caught up with the pastry chef (and Instagram legend) following his big win at The World’s 50 Best ceremony in Bilbao to get some insight into the next big trends in pastry and his buzzing new pâtisserie, Le Meurice Cédric Grolet

(For background on the longstanding gender inbalances in the pastry world, please read this piece on the marginalization of female pastry chefs, and this piece on the World’s 50 Best’s problems with inclusion.)

Originally appeared on Food & Wine

L.A.’s Newest Filipino Spot May Be Its Most Ambitious Yet

When I think of Charles Olalia I think of halo-halo. Let me explain: Upon a recent visit to the Philippines I found myself in the backyard of Olalia’s childhood home. “You can’t go to the Philippines and not come to my house for dinner,” Olalia had said. At the end of the meal, he opened an ice chest filled with halo-halo in plastic takeaway cups. “It’s from Razon’s; it’s a two-hour drive from here, but we went to get it today because you had to try it. It’s the best in Manila.”

This is just how the chef operates, with an effortless hospitality and enthusiasm. Olalia has applied this same ethos to define and even name Ma’am Sir, the chef’s newest expression of Filipino cuisine, opening this week in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. 

Originally appeared on Food & Wine

Bestia’s Ori Menashe Opens Long-Awaited Middle Eastern Concept

If there’s one thing you should know going into the highly anticipated new Arts District restaurant, Bavel, it’s that you won’t be eating Israeli food. Nor will you be eating Turkish, Moroccan, or Georgian food, strictly speaking. Instead, you’ll be eating Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis’ food.

The second restaurant from the husband-and-wife team behind L.A.’s perpetually buzzing Bestia, Bavel is the loosely defined as Middle Eastern concept named for the Hebrew word for “Babel.” The Judeao-Christian tale referencing a unified Middle East torn apart through the confusion of language, Bavel is a cuisine unified by the heritages and experiences of its two creators.

Influenced equally by Menashe’s Moroccan, Turkish, Georgian, and Israeli roots as it is by Gergis’ memories of her father’s Egyptian food and her mother’s Ukrainian pierogis, Bavel is the sort of chef-reflective cuisine that leaves a singular definition lacking. 

Originally appeared on Food & Wine

Nas Opens Sweet Chick in the Queens Neighborhood Where He Grew Up

On the eve of the April 9 opening of a Sweet Chick in his hometown, Long Island City, Nas recounts the origins of the dish his and partner John Seymour’s restaurant is famous for: chicken and waffles. “If Billie Holiday or Duke Ellington sang all night in Harlem, the whole city would drive into upper Manhattan and party ‘til the wee hours of the night and eventually, they’d get hungry,” he tells Food and Wine.

“Do they want breakfast; do they want dinner? It’s five, six in the morning and they’ve been partying all night, they think: let’s have both.’ The kitchen’s been going all night and they’ve been partying all night and somebody mixed their chicken with a waffle, and there you have it. That’s the whole thing.”

The hip hop-saturated chicken and waffle restaurants in New York and Los Angeles started by Seymour (the new location is the fifth) is the rapper and entrepreneur’s first foray into the food world. And while it may seem like his love of good fried chicken got the rapper to finally dip his toes into the restaurant world (he does have an entire track dedicated to the stuff), it was just as much about the restaurant’s musical soul.

“The first time I walked into Sweet Chick, they were playing original samples from some of the greatest hip hop songs ever made,” he says. “Samples that were just as hot as the rap record that they were later turned into. The vibe was just … it was for today’s guys.”