Gastromical

WITH THE surfeit of steakhouses in L.A. right now, I find myself wishing my grandfather, a Nebraska cattleman, were still alive. It would be great fun to take this die-hard meat ‘n’ potatoes guy around and get his reaction to L.A.’s new breed of steakhouse. I’m pretty sure he’d approve of the prime steaks at the latest entry, BLT Steak in West Hollywood, from New York’s Laurent Tourondel.

OK, I’d have to do some explaining as to why one of New York’s top French chefs was doing a steakhouse, but that’s a story that can be boiled down to three words: Steakhouses make money.

I’m thinking the massive rib-eye would be just right for my grandfather. But when he caught sight of the price — $45 — he’d probably be too shocked to enjoy his beef.

While he would have no trouble understanding anything on the menus at the classically inclined Palm or Arnie Morton’s, or even the modish Mastro’s for that matter, I can hear him now, puzzling over some of the first courses at BLT. Tuna tartare with soy lime dressing? Roasted beets with Gorgonzola? (The men in our family could never be considered adventurous eaters.) His desires would surely run more toward the jumbo shrimp cocktail vein, a perfectly good choice here.

What’s great about BLT Steak is that the menu accommodates pretty much everybody’s tastes. My grandfather could enjoy the most traditional of steakhouse meals (with the exception of a massive baked potato with all the fixings) while his granddaughters could opt for something more contemporary. Or even fish.

The whole place might seem a little, well, bright and wholesome to this erstwhile cowboy who had a tendency to disappear for a couple of days into dark back rooms to play poker and smoke cigars. But I think he’d fit right in with the old Le Dome crowd if he gave it a chance. He liked the ladies and wasn’t averse to a little outré glamour or the allure of bright lights, big city.

And BLT Steak, the sixth in Tourondel’s stable — which includes half a dozen other restaurants (BLT Fish, BLT Burger and so on) in New York, with more to come in other cities — surely does exude a high-energy big city vibe.

At the curb, the head valet wears a suit and tie (name tag too). Walk in, and the phalanx of managers and junior managers at the door assures that no VIP goes unnoticed or unacknowledged. Or has to wait too long on one of the comfy sofas and chairs that make up the informal waiting area. They’ll be seated promptly and presented with the VIP amuse — a hardwood tray with neatly sliced salame, bresaola (air-dried beef) and chorizo, along with the non-VIP amuse, a French canning jar of warm chicken liver mousse pâté. It’s not mousse exactly, more like a freshly made chicken liver crostini topping, earthy and delicious.

Raw ambition

NEXT, WHY not order a little something from the raw bar? The shrimp cocktail is a classic, each shrimp meaty and very fresh, laid out on ice and served with a sharply focused scarlet cocktail sauce. Little neck clams on the half shell arrive snuggled in a platter of ice with lemon wedges and micro-bottles of Tabasco sauce tucked between. The clams are chilled and briny, just the way they are in Cape Cod. There’s also an extravagant seafood platter that includes some clams but adds oysters, crab claws, half a lobster and more to the mix.

But most people seem to be going for the more elaborate appetizers, which include updated, up-market sashimi. Matchbook-sized slices of bluefin toro on creamy avocado slices are garnished with slivered celery, the pale celery leaves and sliced hearts of palm in a whole-grain mustard sauce. A little of that intensely flavored sauce goes a long way. Kampachi is paired to interesting effect with baby farmers market artichokes and embellished with a piquant kumquat confit. Onion rings are listed as a side: Order them as an appetizer instead. And don’t be afraid: Tall as bracelets, they’re beautiful and just greasy enough to be truly delicious.

Ladies who lunch should find favor with the fresh salads, though for some oddball reason, they’re served in bowls so small it’s like conducting an excavation to get at all the ingredients. Lobster Cobb salad looks less than spectacular crammed into that bowl, but as you polish off the layers, encountering first the lobster claws, then a spiral of crisp pancetta, the avocado and the greens, it loosens up and gets prettier. Still, it’s a better lunch dish than a prelude to steak.

And here the beef comes in all its carnivorous glory. The BLT cut is a 32-ounce bone-in double sirloin, presumably for two. (That’s what the menu says.) And though it is very good, I think the Porterhouse outshines it. The latter, again for two, weighs in at 40 ounces, and at $79, i.e., under $40 a person, is priced lower than some others around town.

The cooking from chef de cuisine Noah Rosen, a veteran of Wilshire and Mélisse, is spot-on. Order your steak charred, medium rare, and it comes out exactly that. The thick 16-ounce New York strip is excellent too. But the real bargain is the hanger steak, 10 ounces of flavorful beef for a modest $24. That’s without sides, of course.

There’s not much to say about the rack of lamb, chicken or veal chop other than good quality products, nicely prepared, but nothing memorable. A double Berkshire pork chop, though, with red wine sauce, a special one night, stands out for its flavor and texture. Fish lovers should go straight for the Dover sole, which is firm and very fresh, sautéed in butter with lemon and capers and as simple and satisfying a piece of fish as you’re likely to find anywhere for $45. What about that fried red snapper “Cantonese style” the waiter is showing off to the table across the room? Standing on edge, crisp as anything, it looks irresistible. Resist: The fish itself gets dried out in the process of getting it crisp.

Besides, who has room after devouring one or more of the giant cheese popovers that are BLT’s signature? I’m telling you, go easy there or you’ll be leaving with a well-filled take-home bag, and at the very least won’t make it to dessert.

Sides more or less follow the format laid down by Craft (which opened in New York before BLT Steak). Items are divided into categories such as potatoes, vegetables, mushrooms — in all, a dozen and a half choices. Grilled asparagus and especially the hash browns, served in a small cast-iron skillet, are first-rate.

The wine list is a comprehensive list of bottles that makes sense with the menu, yet all in all, given the mostly safe choices, is not as thrilling to explore as it could be.

Sweet polish

BUT THIS latest BLT Steak takes an original tack with the desserts. Here’s one steakhouse where the sweets truly deserve a place at the table. The sundae one night is so beautifully crafted we have to ask who the pastry chef is. It turns out she’s Danielle Keane, late of Wilshire in Santa Monica, where she initiated an ice cream social evening. Here, her desserts seem more polished and inventive.

That sundae is particularly refreshing after a heavy meal, layering soft-as-down orange and raspberry ice creams with raspberries and nougat kisses. It comes with a raft of warm madeleines. Keane’s buttermilk panna cotta is as fine-spun as silk, and the malted ice cream pie is like a deconstructed ice cream sandwich with a fresh-baked chocolate brownie at the bottom and a drift of malted ice cream on top.

Strange, but after a few meals at BLT Steak, what sticks in my mind is not the appetizers or steaks or sides. They’re well executed — the letters BLT, after all, stand for Bistro Laurent Tourondel — but not that distinctive. That’s B for business too.

In the end, the restaurant is a well-oiled machine with professional but relaxed service, a sophisticated urban look and food that’s quite good across the board, but lacks any frisson of excitement except for those giant popovers and the fine all-American desserts.

The first thing Gordon Ramsay does when he sits down for our interview is tell me how much he likes my jacket. The next thing he does is feel me up. Or rather, he runs his hand over my velvet arm. The world’s most outrageous celebrity chef wants to know where the jacket’s from. When I tell him it’s a three-year-old Ralph Lauren he raises an eyebrow and suggests it would also look good with a pair of jeans.

We’re at the Conrad Tokyo hotel, where Ramsay has an eponymous restaurant. It’s Sunday morning and the joint is buzzing with immaculately dressed Tokyo locals attending one of the four weddings booked in today. Despite the super-cook’s fashionista commentary, Ramsay is sporting his ubiquitous white chef’s top, which, along with his 188cm frame, blond, tousled hair and booming voice, means that he is hard to ignore.

Pretty soon I’m into duck-and-cover mode against a fusillade of f-words, embarrassed at his language in such a decorous setting. No surprises here. Ramsay is at least as well known for being coarse as he is for his courses. He virtually invented the stereotype of the angry chef who gives everyone in the kitchen a hard time.

I figure it’s as good an opportunity as any to ask him about the recent kerfuffle in Australia over his swearing and the fact that it has sparked an inquiry into the television code of conduct. He is, of course, unrepentant. If anyone is to blame, it’s the network executives who decide when to screen his shows, he says.

“I mean, f..k me. It’s an industry language and I’m not exactly proud of it and it’s not purposely done to create attention. Like I said to (CEO) David Gyngell at Channel Nine (which airs two of Ramsay’s food shows), ‘You’re the f..king broadcaster, you put it out at 8.30pm and if a chef calls me a c..t that’s not my issue. And secondly, if you’re not happy with it, switch the f..king thing over.’

“The British press got hold of it (the controversy) and said, ‘Ramsay banned in Australia’ and I thought, ‘What the f..k?’ I’m not going to change my ways because I’ve upset anybody.”

Ramsay can afford to be candid with Nine’s boss. He’s the network’s hottest property at the moment, even when he’s shown in repeat. His shows Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares can be seen three times a week on Nine and he’s on pay television almost in perpetuity. His appearance on Nine’s ailing current affairs program 60 Minutes last month drew an audience of more than two million. A repeat of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on Nine that same week was the network’s highest-rating show with 1.6 million viewers nationally. In fact, he is so of-the-moment that he couldn’t care less if he appears on the ABC’s Enough Rope program when he visits Australia next month, in part to inspect locations in Sydney and Melbourne for a potential signature restaurant.

“I got all this shit from Andrew Denton. He said, ‘Look, if you go on 60 Minutes you can’t come on the show.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a f..k. I’m not from Australia, I’m coming down there and if you think I’m going to beat around the bush because I’ve got to tread carefully to get on the show, mate, I don’t give two shits, trust me.’”

* * *

WE LIVE AT A TIME when it is expected that a successful chef will have a media career as well. A critically acclaimed and commercially successful restaurant isn’t enough any more. And if you are really successful you will have your own magazine, a line of kitchen products bearing your name and maybe even a deal with an airline to “design” its menu. But all of those trimmings are really just a by-product of good television ratings. Would Ramsay have almost 20 restaurants in cities all over the world without his TV profile? Would he be visiting here next month to look at sites for a Ramsay restaurant if it were not for his amazing popularity with local TV audiences? Unlikely and unlikelier.

Ramsay, however, seems highly suspicious of the industry that has made him a household name. Ask him how he feels about being a celebrity chef and he barks: “I f..king hate that term. There’s a big difference between a serious chef and a TV chef, and now that television has caught up with the reality of the excitement behind a real chef as opposed to a TV chef it’s really weird, it’s kind of full circle.

“Cooking on television is easy,” he insists. “From a long shot to a wide shot to the editing suite it’s a f..king doddle. So when I get chefs who want to come in with their names embroidered and they’ve got a medal in the jelly Olympics I get them the f..k out the door straight away. Mention anything to do with TV (in a job interview) and just forget it.”

He may hate the phrase but Ramsay holds a unique position among celebrity chefs. You won’t catch him concocting things like bacon-flavoured ice cream or dabbling in molecular cuisine, the style of the moment. And he’s a long way from the DIY queens Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith: there’s not really a lot of cooking on his shows. Even the professionally trained Jamie Oliver looks a little homespun in comparison. What’s unusual about Ramsay is that, through television, he’s taken haute cuisine to the masses.

Ramsay was born in Scotland and grew up in the tourist town of Stratford-upon-Avon after his parents moved to England. Ramsay, however, lived in a part of town off the tourist trail on a council estate. Food when he was growing up, he told The New Yorker last year, was not about culture; it was just something to eat, usually cheap and often fried or out of a tin. His father, he wrote in his 2006 autobiography Humble Pie, was an abusive drunkard. In the same book he revealed that not only was his younger brother Ronald a heroin addict, but that Ramsay gave him money to buy heroin so that he would attend their father’s funeral. In September last year Ronald Ramsay was jailed in Indonesia for 10 months for possession of heroin.

At 15 Gordon Ramsay was signed to the Glasgow Rangers football team, but after three years as a professional soccer player a knee injury forced him to quit and to find another vocation, so he studied hotel management.

In 1988 he persuaded chef Marco Pierre White – the Ramsay of the 1980s – to take him on in his two-Michelin-starred restaurant, Harvey’s in Wandsworth. He credits White with his success. After three years with White, Ramsay went to work for Albert Roux at Le Gavroche in Mayfair. Roux encouraged his young protégé to spend time in France and invited him to work at his restaurant at a ski resort in the French Alps. Ramsay later moved to Paris and worked alongside Guy Savoy and Joël Robuchon, both Michelin-starred chefs.

Back in London in 1993 and keen to open his own restaurant, it was White who put him in touch with A to Z Restaurants Limited, owned by a group of Italian bankers who had just bought a failing restaurant business in Chelsea. A to Z hired Ramsay and Aubergine opened in October 1993 with a French menu. By 1995 it had won a Michelin star and by 1998 had earned a second.

With the backing of the Italians, Ramsay opened another restaurant in 1998, L’Oranger on St James Street. The Italians wanted Ramsay to sign a multi-year contract, but he was itching to do his own thing so later that year he jumped ship to open his first wholly owned restaurant, Gordon Ramsay, in Chelsea. A year later he opened his second, Pétrus in St James. By 2001 Restaurant Gordon Ramsay had been awarded three Michelin stars (the maximum), so he opened a third, Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s.

Today his restaurant empire has earned him 10 Michelin stars and countless awards. He has restaurants in Tokyo, Dubai, Dublin, Prague, New York and Paris. His Paris restaurant, which is actually in Versailles, got what Ramsay calls a spiteful review from Le Figaro when it opened in March. But negative reviews don’t seem to bother him. The New York Times declared his Manhattan restaurant lacked excitement after it opened early last year, but it has been awarded two Michelin stars and Ramsay reckons it’ll go to three stars in November.

One reason bad reviews don’t bother him is that he knows they can be just as useful in getting customers in the door as a glowing one, perhaps more. But he was irked when Le Figaro critic François Simon gave his opinion on the restaurant, Gordon Ramsay au Trianon, before it had officially launched. Ramsay felt, too, that the attack was largely personal rather than culinary. In New York, however, reviewer Frank Bruni visited the restaurant Gordon Ramsay at the London several times before he pronounced it to be lacklustre, and Ramsay gives him credit.

“He’s a very talented man, Frank Bruni. And one thing I’ve always said is (The New York Times) come in five times before they review it, which is a godsend to any restaurant. We got two stars out of four. Was it justified? I’m not a critic, but more importantly I’m f..king busy. The place is turning over $US400,000 a week and we’re going to hit $US25 million in our first year.”

Other food critics – especially the British ones – don’t get quite the same level of respect. “Food critics are very powerful people and we’ve got celebrity food critics in the UK now who are more interested in talking about their girlfriend’s bikini line than the decor of the restaurant – the A.A. Gills and the like. They’ve become so sort of farcical that they’re now a parody of themselves and so people aren’t taking them as seriously as they were 10 years ago.”

* * *

ONE OF THE SURPRISES this Sunday morning is that Ramsay up close is utterly charming. He may litter his conversation with swear words but he is far from the obnoxious, aggressive character he is on TV. And he’s surprisingly candid for someone with a large empire resting on his name and reputation. He’s never watched his own shows (“F..k that”) and confesses that he has a bit of an ego (“Chefs are selfish … I’ve been a very selfish, determined f..ker to get where I am today”). Selfish, but focused. “You’re selfish because you know that’s the way you are when you’re faced with an ingredient … you’ve got the basic ingredient, but you’ve got to turn it into something quite magical, charge for it, serve it and be successful on the back of it. Oh, and by the way, that same ingredient is in 20,000 restaurants on your doorstep every day.”

Ramsay says the key to a successful restaurant is to instil confidence and have a long-term vision. “Very few people get that right,” he says. “Chefs don’t cook for customers today, chefs are more interested in cooking for themselves. A good chef needs to have one eye on the dining room and listen in a very articulate manner to what’s needed from the customers because it can’t just be purely chef-driven. Of course you’re focused and you’re involved, but you’ve got to know what your customers want. Customers vote with their feet, they don’t ring you up and say they had a mediocre lunch and they’re not coming back; they just don’t come back.”

Matt Moran of Sydney restaurant Aria and the Nine Network’s show The Chopping Block has known Ramsay since 1994. The pair met through a mutual friend who shared a flat with Moran in London and have since become close friends. Moran says Ramsay is “incredibly charismatic and incredibly passionate about what he does, about everything in life in fact. He’s actually a very caring sort of person. The first thing he’ll ask me when he calls is how’s my wife and kids. He’s also very genuine. When you’re his mate you’re his mate for life.” And he says Ramsay behaves on television as he does in real life.

Despite the phenomenal success of the restaurant makeover show Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay says he’s ready to wind it up. “Kitchen Nightmares is something that means a lot to me because I put that restaurant in my hands and I work my arse off to turn it around. But unfortunately they take me on as opposed to taking the advice on,” he says. “I think I’m going to draw that one to an end. I want to move on now.”

Considering he’s now had three hit TV shows (The F Word, a topical food show produced by Channel 4 in the UK; Hell’s Kitchen, a US reality TV cooking competition; and Kitchen Nightmares, produced by Channel 4 and later by Fox in the US), might Ramsay be cooking up yet another television concept?

“I dunno,” he says. “Nightmares is much sought-after in 117 countries and I don’t want to see it become mundane … I suppose I want to quit while I’m ahead and move on.” He insists he hasn’t committed himself to a TV show based on the rumoured opening of a restaurant in Melbourne’s Crown complex and says he is still considering several options.

Despite his high profile, Ramsay says he is not concerned with his appearance: “With my wrinkles I’m hardly a f..king male cover of Vogue am I?” But that messy blond hair appears to have been produced with considerable effort and the colour is just a little too perfect. Then there’s his obsession with running. He says he runs like a donkey because he used to be fat and if he didn’t run he’d be even fatter. “I don’t think chefs should be fat. Why? Because it’s not a good advertisement for your customers.”

And he’s astute about the power of TV. The industry is brutal, he says, when it comes to deciding who is going to make it and who is not. “You don’t use the television, but at the same time you can’t ignore it. It’s a fine line, isn’t it? Where does the television become more important than the restaurant?”

RAMSAY says he runs his business, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, in partnership with his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson, and intends to keep it that way. “We had a huge interest from a Russian party last year to take 35 per cent of the group, but I don’t want to be shackled,” he says.

Yet at the same time, if the money and the timing are right he won’t rule out selling up. “I’m 41, how long can I go at this pace? Minimum another 10 years? Then I’ll f..k off to Australia and retire, then I’ll do the opposite of what I’ve done in my career. Open a restaurant in Queensland and open the f..king thing one day a week and close six days and just open for the fun of it.”

A jest perhaps, but it illustrates the immense pressure he is under – he travels constantly and is rarely at home with his wife, Cayetana (known as Tana), whom he married in 1996, and their four children. Unlike some famous chefs who open restaurants around the world under licensing arrangements, Ramsay takes a hands-on approach to the eateries that bear his name and invests his own money in them. He recently opened Gordon Ramsay Plane Food in Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in London, as well as Maze by Gordon Ramsay at the Hilton Old Town in Prague. Later this year he will open in Los Angeles and Amsterdam and, if all goes to plan, in Australia.

Stretched too thinly? Le Figaro branded his Versailles restaurant “karaoke cuisine”, suggesting that without Ramsay’s personal presence diners would not be getting the real thing. Ramsay is angry: “I find it extraordinary that (Le Figaro) have got the gall … that’s my profile being judged as opposed to the food.”

Still, it is a fair question: how does he keep his eye on it all? The answer is the oldest trick in a restaurateur’s book: mystery diners. “We spend up to $US200,000 per year on a pool of 16 to 17 individuals who are all incognito and have all been with us for the last six or seven years and they give us a breakdown, so we’re on to it instantly.”

No one in his empire knows the identities of these mystery customers who file blow-by-blow accounts of their dining experience (including what went on at other tables) directly to him via email. “I could put that money in my pocket or get myself a new car, but I’m not interested. And I don’t want smoke blown up my arse either. Just give me the negatives. Pure negatives, that’s what we thrive on.”

There’s one major “negative” in the Australian restaurant industry that Ramsay considers a challenge – our culture of BYO restaurants. And it will be especially difficult here for him as Ramsay plans to ditch haute cuisine in favour of bistro-style food. “I wouldn’t be that stupid (to open a fine dining restaurant) because to be honest fine dining exists when you’re there five nights a week busting your arse and you’ve got the power of the people supporting you,” he says. “I look at the number of restaurants in Australia that are successful and they don’t have wine lists.

“That’s a true testament to the success of the restaurant: 99 per cent of restaurants in Britain would never survive if they had no alcohol. To make a restaurant work, to pay your fixed costs, to return the capex (capital expenditure), to make sure you’ve got a healthy bottom line, pay staff, make money and stand out with a reputation – oh and you can’t charge money for wine! F..k me, that’s a tall order.”

CSI: The Complete Seventh Season

Fry Daddy: Well-Oiled at the Thousand Cranes Tempura Bar

Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood has often been considered the cradle of real Japanese cooking in America — birthplace of the California roll, base to century-old confectionery shops, the nurturer of sushi restaurants during decades when the eating of raw fish was considered odder than gnawing on roasted bear. Connoisseurs may send you to Torrance now, and well-heeled Japanese tourists tend to stay in Beverly Hills these days, but Little Tokyo is still home to an enormous variety of Japanese cuisine: shabu shabu parlors and ramen shops, kushikatsu joints and elegant kaiseki rooms; izakayas, snack shops and yakitori counters; pork specialists and chicken specialists; coffee shops and hostess bars. Legend has it that the developer of the old New Otani hotel built the place with profits eked out from a lifetime of selling the bean-filled hockey pucks called imagawayaki. You can still buy hot, freshly made imagawayaki at Mitsuru Café in the Japanese Village Plaza mall.

These days the New Otani, under new owners, is called the Kyoto Grand Hotel, but it is still home to the most serious tempura bar in Little Tokyo, the best place — probably the only place — north of Torrance to eat a full-course tempura meal, presented with the sensuous care of kaiseki, a multicourse feast prepared with a lightness and aesthetic purity you might not associate with deep-fried vegetables.

Around from the Japanese garden atop the hotel, into the restaurant, past the salaryman-choked sushi bar and back in the deepest recess of the dining room, the Tempura Bar at Thousand Cranes looks less like a shrine of Japanese cuisine than a room-service sushi bar, a tiny, generic-looking counter with 12 chairs, a refrigerated glass case and a stiff-backed chef, stuck into a far corner of the vast complex like an afterthought. A small metal cabinet conceals chef Hiroyuki Shiono’s wire baskets and cooking apparatus; except for a faint whiff of clean oil, a slight crackling, a bare hint of the sea, you would never guess that you were sitting mere inches from a hidden cauldron of oil.

At the Tempura Bar, there is an element of the artisan in everything Mr. Shiono does. He notches shiitake mushroom caps so that they resemble big designer buttons, then plunges them in oil just long enough for them to take on the appearance of patinaed brass. He carves thick asparagus spears into beveled batons and snatches them from the bubbling pot the moment they assume the emerald translucency of jade. When he fries a big oyster, the shellfish takes on the aspect of a crisp-edged custard, still trembling at the center and barely cooked through, concentrating its oceanic essence. Fried Dover sole is latticed with crunch, yet the fish is steamier, more delicate than a Frenchman could hope to achieve with sautéing sole meunière, barely needing even a touch of the coarse Okinawan sea salt you are instructed to dip it in as a garnish. There is art even in the way Shiono surreptitiously lays down slips of paper on the service counter every couple of dishes, so that you never need to be bothered by the sight of a grease stain.

Except for the list of wine and cold sake, you won’t see a menu at the Tempura Bar: You are in the hands of Shiono for as long as it takes to nibble a dozen courses, morsel after morsel swished through gauzy batter and plunged into a pot of boiling rice oil, fished out at the exact moment the food is at its steamiest and the batter has hardened into a lacy scrim. It’s you and the fry daddy, you and the seething oil, and the bowl of tempura sauce lightened with grated daikon, and maybe a small plate of sashimi. You will start with a handful of tiny Japanese smelt, unbattered, served still sizzling from the pot of hot oil.

There are prawns, huge as bananas, that come out of the oil as straight as rulers, crackle-crusted and spurting sweet juice when you violate them with your teeth. You may taste big sea scallops tamed to a luxurious softness by the oil, Japanese pumpkin and gleaming shishito peppers. Lotus root turns into the densest, sweetest substance on Earth in the hands of Shiono, and okra pods lose the gooeyness of their centers. You are glad that the restaurant exits into the still of the Japanese garden, because the shock of the downtown streets might be too much after this meal.

Service is attentive and unrushed — even the tiny sake cups are refilled before you manage to finish them — but there is discord even in this paradise. The same song, six minutes of artificially sweetened aural molasses, repeats over and over until you start looking for speaker wires to yank out of the wall. I mentioned it to the waiter, who responded: “If it bothers you, how do you think we feel?” I wanted to squeeze his shoulder in solidarity and lend him a Bix Beiderbecke CD.

The Twilight Zone: Volume 20

While the expense-account crowd spent most of this year awaiting overblown East Coast imports, the Thai-food cognoscenti paced anxiously outside a gentrifying Norwalk minimall instead, worrying as the crumbling surfaces were rebuilt in stuccoed pastels and the structure rose to resemble a series of potential GameStops. The ancient dive bar was even replaced by a drive-thru Starbucks. But finally, after many larb-less months of anticipation, the Rosecrans Avenue strip mall is again home to Renu Nakorn, the restaurant that inspired the first wave of regional Thai restaurants almost 20 years ago, and which for years had been the go-to place for spicy jackfruit salad or an order of the crispy rice salad nam kao tod. The new Renu Nakorn is modern and spacious, at least twice the size of the first one, and is accented by a big flagstone wall that wouldn’t look out of place in Sahara-vintage Vegas. The booths and long tables are filled with Breck girls from the local Bible college, as well as Thai folk happy to be reacquainted with the restaurant’s minced-shrimp larb and sour Isaan rice sausage.

If you ever went to the original Renu Nakorn (or to the fabulous Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas, which is run by the previous 1990s owners), you probably know the tripartite nature of the menu, the roster of the usual Thai specialties supplemented by the barbecue and spicy grilled-meat salads of the Isaan region — the transcendent papaya salad with dried shrimp, the pork salad nam sod, charbroiled-catfish salad, the tamarind beef salad called nua sao renu and the fiery beef salad nua nam tok. It’s all back, along with the almost-hidden list of specialties from the Chiang Mai area, which may be the kitchen’s real strength, and which include pounded roast-chile dips to scoop up with freshly fried pork rinds, sweet pork curries influenced by Burma and coconut-enhanced khao soi noodles that in these early days of the reopening were a little clumpy and overthick. Have an extra helping of papaya salad instead. After dinner, you can wander next door to the last working dairy in Norwalk and pick up a load of free cow manure, or better, a quart of the excellent housemade chocolate milk.

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ONE of the reassuring wonders of the New York dining scene is the speed with which word about some unassuming new restaurants gets out. Take the Little Owl, which opened in late May with little fanfare, a little menu and little space: 30 seats, including the four barstools.

FULL-FLAVORED ENTHUSIASM The Little Owl in the West Village has an earnest staff and a menu to match.

By Week 3, it was full. By Week 6, people stood behind the barstools and just inside the door.

And by Week 8, when I arrived after 9 p.m. to meet a friend for dinner, there were so many supplicants at the gates that the co-owner and manager, Gabriel Stulman, had created an impromptu sidewalk cafe for the overflow, serving people wine and complimentary canapés out there.

“It’s the Little Owl way,” he said as he tended to all of us. “We’re just trying to put the love back in dining.”

Hokey? No doubt. But when Mr. Stulman says things like that — and he says things like that with disarming frequency — he does so in a slightly mischievous voice, acknowledging the hyperbole and turning it into a kind of joke.

More important, he backs up his bromides, his enthusiasm speaking as loudly as his words. Every time I left the Little Owl, having watched servers’ sunny demeanors become diners’ bright smiles, I thought, “What a nice place.” Every time friends who had been there talked to me about it, they said, “What a nice place.” It has an irresistible earnestness and exuberance that explain its instant, well-deserved popularity.

The earnestness links the front of the house with the kitchen, which turns out food without much pretension. The star of the menu, a dish that seemingly every third diner orders, is the grilled pork chop, which is no more — or less — than a glorious hunk of flesh.

Perhaps its most serious competition for affection are the “meatball sliders,” made with beef, veal and pork on tiny, bouncy garlic rolls. Forget the overcute overuse of the term sliders in New York restaurants these days and just concentrate on the pleasure of these miniature sandwiches, arrayed in a row of four that officially constitutes an appetizer but also works as a side. They were moist and meaty, with a pivotal kick from pecorino in the mix.

Pork pops up repeatedly, not just in the centers of dishes but also on the peripheries. It pops up when it’s essential and even when it’s not, which makes its popping-up no less appreciated. There’s crunchy pancetta atop a very fine grilled strip steak. A side of butter beans is flavored with smoked ham hocks. First-rate housemade cavatelli wrap around a tomato sauce, fava beans, ricotta and, yes, bacon.

The person calling these porky shots is Joey Campanaro, who worked as the executive chef at two Jimmy Bradley-Danny Abrams restaurants, the Harrison and then Pace. At the Little Owl, which he owns with Mr. Stulman, he embraces and repudiates his past.

This restaurant is in some senses a shrunken version of the Harrison and the original Bradley-Abrams hit, the Red Cat. The cooking has a similarly straightforward, full-flavored style. But the Little Owl is the opposite of Pace, which closed last year.

At Pace the menu reached in so many trendy directions that the kitchen couldn’t do justice to everything and the ratio of hits to misses wasn’t impressive.

The Little Owl manages a much, much better one. Mr. Campanaro has pared down his menu to what he obviously feels complete confidence in preparing: about nine appetizers, including that cavatelli and a wedge of seared hamachi with an uncommonly nuanced coleslaw; seven entrees, including the steak and a “crispy chicken” that lived up to its billing; and a handful of sides.

That conciseness didn’t ward off disappointments, like a starter of slightly gluey, mostly bland spinach and lobster risotto beneath grilled scallops. It didn’t prevent the appearance of a timid salad of bibb lettuce, hearts of palm and fennel.

But the bolder, wiser successes came one after another, starting with that superthick pork chop, skirted by an ideally measured strip of fat; seasoned alliteratively with cayenne, curry, coriander and cumin, and cooked medium-rare. I had it twice, and twice marveled at its juiciness, so often absent from such an oversize pork chop. If I could have justified a third evaluation (consistency must be monitored!), I would have. But even a critic’s rationalizations have their bounds.

So I stopped as well at two inspections of the Chatham cod, the next-best entree. Before broiling it, Mr. Campanaro coated it with a pesto aioli, which was transformed into a rich, salty second skin. He then lay the fish atop a big, colorful bed of roasted corn, English peas and red onion — typical of the bountiful way he constructs and rounds out plates. The cod’s flesh was beautifully cooked, as was a fillet of roasted halibut, which rested on a cushion of mashed potatoes. In dish after dish the kitchen demonstrated remarkable care.

The Little Owl’s reach is modest and its limitations real. Its wine list isn’t hugely exciting, although there are interesting selections in a considerate assortment of half bottles. Only one dessert — an oversize brownie with a praline coffee sauce — rocked my world. And apart from blueberry pancakes made with cornmeal and served with mascarpone in place of butter, brunch was merely pleasant.

Because of its size, the restaurant has little wiggle room if diners linger. My companions and I had to wait a half-hour past the time of our reservation one night.

But there’s more space between tables than at Prune or the Spotted Pig, two downtown restaurants that the Little Owl brings to mind. While it shares their homey emphasis and hip clientele, its extra inches make it crucially more comfortable. It’s also prettier, with a gorgeous pressed-tin ceiling and two walls of enormous paned windows that take in an archetypal West Village street corner.

I don’t know if it puts the love back in dining. But it puts the focus of dining where it belongs — on real hospitality and disciplined cooking — and it’s a welcome antidote to so much of the razzmatazz around town.

No gourmet? No biggie. L.A.’s ex-mayor can run a restaurant. The owner of the Original Pantry and Gladstone’s in Malibu has added Riordan’s Tavern, the Oak Room and Village Pantry to his lineup.

RICHARD Riordan is no gourmet. That’s one of the first things he wants you to know. But he is a restaurateur, and a very successful one.

In fact, though the 78-year-old Riordan is best known as the multimillionaire former mayor of Los Angeles, he also owns two of the busiest restaurants in Southern California, the Original Pantry and Gladstone’s Malibu.

And in the last year he’s opened three more, Riordan’s Tavern, next door to the Original Pantry in downtown Los Angeles, and the Oak Room and its adjoining Village Pantry in the Pacific Palisades.

None of those restaurants is what you might expect, though. Usually, when a really rich guy opens a new place, it’s loaded with swank — a symbol of his success where he can wow his friends and business associates.

Instead, Riordan’s restaurant empire is built around a beloved, if somewhat scruffy, downtown landmark and a seaside cash machine, neither of which comes within a couple of miles of gourmet while doing spectacular business.

Indeed, the Original Pantry is probably Riordan’s dream restaurant — an 84-year-old diner where nothing costs more than $20 and where a waiter once kicked him out for not eating fast enough. He liked it so much he bought it.

“When I fell in love with the Pantry, I was at breakfast, drinking coffee and I had a book I was reading,” he says. “I was very relaxed and the waiter came over and said, ‘If you want to read, the library’s at 5th and Hope.’ I fell in love with it right then.”

The story’s funny, but it’s also telling. Riordan’s restaurant appreciation runs more to businesslike efficiency than fine-dining glamour.

“The bottom line is: I’m an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist,” Riordan says. “I’ve been investing in companies since 1962 or so, and I’ve invested a lot of capital, and I’ve done very, very well.

“When it comes to restaurants, I would say I can’t paint a painting, but I can tell when it’s good. I can walk the restaurant, and I can feel when things aren’t going right. I may not be able to design it from the first, but when it’s done, I know what’s not working and what is working, and I know it when I see customers are not happy.”

What seems to attract Riordan to a restaurant more than anything else — besides a chance to make money — is a sense of connection to a community. The Original Pantry and Gladstone’s have longtime devoted customers, and his most recent acquisitions were originally Mort’s Deli, a Palisades institution for more than 30 years.

In fact, he’s played with the idea of putting together a group of landmark Los Angeles restaurants for a special co-operative marketing push. Besides the Pantry, he’d include Philippe, Musso and Frank, the Apple Pan, Pacific Dining Car and maybe Nate’n Al, “but their food is terrible. I guess I’d probably pick Langer’s before Nate’n Al’s.”

At dinner with him at his newest restaurant, the Oak Room, a clubby bar and grill, Riordan comes across as a restaurateur version of an inveterate tinkerer — one of those guys who can’t stop himself from taking things apart and trying to improve them. Except rather than mess with machinery, his métier is businesses.

Lose the bacon?

NO DETAIL is too small. At one point, he calls over Oak Room chef Douglas Silberberg — a talented cook who is a veteran of both Michael’s in Santa Monica and Water Grill downtown — and suggests cutting costs by trimming the bacon from some of the sandwiches.

Silberberg ponders the suggestion, then points out that there are only three sandwiches with bacon — a BLT, a pork sandwich and a hamburger.

“Well, I’m not sure you need the bacon with the hamburger,” Riordan says. “What do you think?”

“I do think [we need it],” Silberberg counters. “We get more compliments on our hamburger than almost anything else.”

“Oh, OK, then,” Riordan says, returning to his conversation.

And, in fact, a few minutes later he digs into his entrée — it’s “The Mayor’s Burger” and there’s bacon, along with caramelized onions, blue cheese and wild arugula.

“This is a really good burger,” Riordan says. “Of course, maybe that’s because I didn’t order it well-done like I usually do.”

Riordan has been in the public eye for so long, it’s sometimes hard to separate the substance from the shtick. When he called Silberberg over, was he doing it because he really thinks he could save some money by cutting bacon, or was it to provide an anecdote for this article?

He is certainly a born entertainer. Periodically, he’ll interrupt a conversation in midstream to tell a joke — it’s usually of the “stop me if you’ve heard this one” variety and it’s usually mildly politically incorrect.

However, Riordan is all business when it comes to restaurants. “I’m not a connoisseur. I can’t tell you what the best things in a restaurant are,” he says. “To me, a great restaurant is a busy restaurant.

“That’s what my dad taught me. He was in the retail business, and when we were on vacation, he’d go to every store in the area, and he could tell you within 20 seconds of walking in whether they were making money or not. You can just sense the electricity.”

Riordan’s restaurants so far have accomplished that. He bought the Pantry in 1981 as part of a larger real estate deal and then couldn’t bear to part with it. It now grosses about $5 million a year and has been so busy for so long you can see something like seven layers of linoleum where it’s worn through in front of the cash register.

And Restaurants and Institutions magazine recently ranked Gladstone’s Malibu, of which Riordan is the largest shareholder, as the highest-grossing restaurant in Southern California, estimating an annual take of about $14.4 million. (There is a second, separately owned, Gladstone’s in Long Beach.)

Riordan is not afraid to take the credit for the turnaround. When he bought Gladstone’s in the mid-’90s along with other shareholders, including fellow millionaire power-brokers Eli Broad and John Cushman, the restaurant was “desperate financially,” he says.

“So what do you do — close the restaurant, or what? I had meetings with them and being a competent fixer of bad financial situations, I came up with some ideas how we could handle it. It turned out extremely well . . . more than extremely well.”

‘A penny here’ and there

THE FIRST thing he did was financial, renegotiating leases and bank loans. “I was able to take about $600,000 a year off their overhead in the first month,” he says. Then with the help of his restaurant right hand, Jean Hagan, he pared the menu by two-thirds. “They had a long menu, and there were things on there that people barely ordered.”

The rest of it, he says, was “a penny here and a penny there — keeping costs down a percent or 2. In the restaurant world, it’s the cream on top where you make all the money. You make half of your profit in that last 5%.”

So far, Riordan’s three new spots are works in progress. The Oak Room and the Village Pantry, which he bought in 2007, are on a side street in the Pacific Palisades. The first, which opened last month, is a California cuisine-style restaurant for grown-ups. The Pantry, connected to the Oak Room by a glass door, has been open since early this year and is a family-style breakfast-and-lunch place.

Riordan’s Tavern, which opened in 2007, is downtown in what used to be an annex for spillover diners at the Pantry, and its motto is “Stiff Drinks and Great Steaks.”

Having two pairs of restaurants that share kitchens is only partly a matter of efficiency. In the case of the Palisades restaurants, Riordan sensed a demand for both a place where families could eat every day and a spot where locals could get a drink and a nice dinner after work.

Creating a buzz

IN THE case of the Original Pantry and Riordan’s Tavern, the reasoning was more prosaic.

“The motivating thing was we weren’t doing quite as much business at the Pantry as we had in previous years, and the best marketing tool we had was that line of customers that was always outside,” Riordan says. Closing the annex and putting in the Tavern reduced the number of available seats at the Pantry, “and we’ve had lines outside ever since.

“It also makes for more efficiency,” he says. “We figure the turnover for a table at breakfast is down from 29 minutes to something like 26 minutes, which is a lot.”

“These are frozen elder flowers,” he said, reaching into the canister with a small scoop and sprinkling tiny white nuggets into my dessert bowl. “They have been chilled in liquid nitrogen.”

The frozen petals fell like hail onto the small mound of red elderberry jelly, vanilla ice cream and chocolate foam. Everyone in the restaurant, a fast-rising newcomer called Geranium turned to look at this impressively futuristic concoction.

Was this really Denmark?

Because my father and Danish stepmother live in Denmark, I’ve been visiting the small seafaring nation of Carlsberg beer and Lego for almost two decades. With very few exceptions, dining out has mostly been a banal, underwhelming experience. For years, the country’s staples — pork, potatoes, herring — were predictably reshuffled from restaurant to restaurant in a culinary three-card monte. In a country famous for avant-garde furnishings and sci-fi housewares, there was no food halfway worthy of gracing them.

But the last five years have seen a sea change in Copenhagen kitchens. Young Danish chefs, many of whom have apprenticed in celebrated kitchens abroad, have returned to Denmark with fancy ideas and hopes of elevating their country’s cuisine.

The efforts are paying off. In the 2008 Michelin guide to Europe, 11 restaurants in and around Copenhagen captured a total of 12 stars, more than Norway and Finland combined. The excellent crop of new gastronomic destinations all but guarantees Copenhagen’s continued ascent.

NOMA

Claus Meyer, the co-owner of this vanguard Copenhagen restaurant (Strandgade 93, 45-3296-3297; www.noma.dk), writes in “Noma: Nordic Cuisine” what could be called the rallying cry of the city’s new restaurants: “It was crystal clear to us that somebody had to face up to the challenge of dusting off and updating traditional Danish cuisine, so that it could be lifted out from the nationalistic stench that fills the air in bodegas and inns, so that it could be resurrected in a modernized rendition.”

Barely four years old, Noma already has two Michelin stars, the most in town. Along with Mr. Meyer, the head chef, co-owner René Redzepi — a veteran of top international restaurants like El Bulli in Spain and the French Laundry in California — has scouted out unusual, distinctive regional ingredients from the forests and fjords of the remotest North Sea countries. (Many of the best new Copenhagen restaurants have enthusiastically followed suit.)

It’s not uncommon to find Greenland cold-water shrimp, Faroe Island langoustines or Icelandic seaweed in their frequently changing menus. No wine is used in soups or sauces; sweet and sour flavors often involve sugar beets or herbs like wood sorrel. Food preparation, too, hearkens back to time-honored Nordic traditions like smoking, salting and pickling.

The afternoon I ate there, the harborside space — a low-slung 18th-century brick warehouse with raw plank floors and exposed beams — was a tranquil hum of businessmen and couples. The four-course lunch menu (495 kroner, about $100 at 4.78 kroner to the dollar) began with not one but three successive amuse-bouches, including a peeled, pickled and poached quail egg. The preparation created an unexpected woody-toasty lushness.

The first course underscored both the inventiveness and wit of Noma’s kitchen. A small plate arrived bearing a greenish gelatin tube — made from parsley — topped in a cold, white, snowlike powder made from horseradish. The verdant patch under the white powder was clearly an allusion to the winter season outside.

But this was much more than a visual gimmick. Invisible inside the parsley gelatin tube were razor clams, which would have been too unsightly if placed directly on the plate. Biting into all three components at once produced the salty flavors of cold North Sea (the clams), a taste of chilly fields (the parsley) and a pleasing bite of winter frost (the horseradish snow). This culinary metaphor of the December landscape was also proof that a near-frozen dish need not be flavorless.

In between bites of warm bread and some intriguing jazzed-up butter (one made with pork lard, giving it a bacon-y taste) came a bowl of smoked liquid egg yolk in a mushroom-birch sauce. To balance the heartiness of the main course, reindeer, each cut was topped with an ultra-thin slice of apple (for an iota of acidity) and dime-sized disk of jellied woodruff (for a very delicate herbal sweetness). It was excellent.

Dessert again invoked the Christmas season. This time the green on the plate was an ice cream made from tarragon that was sprinkled with crumbly wood-like pellets composed of malt, nuts and a small amount of beer. A heated sugary sauce of beets and tapioca added warmth and completed the red and green color scheme: mistletoe in a bowl.

ALBERTO K

Another strategy to elevate a humble cuisine like Denmark’s is to wed it to a world-renowned and widely respected one — a bit like marrying one of your children into an aristocratic family.

At Alberto K, on the 20th floor of the Radisson SAS Royal Denmark hotel (Hammerichsgade 1, 45-3342-6161; www.alberto-k.com), “fine Scandinavian raw materials are united with all that is best from the new Italian kitchen” to create “an untraditional Scandinavian-Italian symbiosis,” according to its Web site. But don’t expect herring primavera or ham alfredo. Alberto K’s creations are subtle and delicate — though sometimes too much so.

Molded like petits fours, small chunks of North Sea cod and oysters arrived with tiny spheres of apple. Both were drizzled lightly in prosecco. I was hoping the dish would be able to match the sublimity of the restaurant’s panoramic view and the crispness of the Arne Jacobsen furnishings. Alas, it wasn’t. The cod and oysters overwhelmed the apple taste, and the prosecco was undetectable. It was a nice bit of seafood, but hardly revolutionary.

Flashier and more successful was the second course of the four-course dinner (555 kroner), the veal sweetbreads. Pan-fried, they were placed on slices of red beets and topped with shaved truffles. The creamy veal nuggets got sweetness and backbone from the crunchy beet slices and pleasant earthiness from the truffles. The main course — deer — was even better, though the ingredients were pretty much all Danish. The small, thick filets of deer, cooked medium-rare and red, were served with tart-sweet gooseberries that nicely cut the meat’s robustness.

The real revelation was the cheese course, which paired a firm Danish cow’s milk cheese from Jutland and a soft Danish blue alongside an Italian goat cheese and a creamy Italian goat-sheep-cow hybrid. The Danish blue, from Holm, was like a more refined Roquefort, while the cow’s milk cheese was supple, smooth and mild. It was more hope that this Italian-Danish marriage might have staying power.

GERANIUM

The chefs Rasmus Kofoed and Soren Ledet, the award-draped owners of this elegant year-old restaurant, must really like smoke. Long before the presentation of my smoldering dessert, a roaring fire blazed in the restaurant’s backyard, casting a warm orange glow inside and sending up ashy clouds. Meanwhile, within the all-white rustic-chic dining room, Mr. Ledet was delivering the first haze-emitting laboratory experiment of the four-course lunch (548 kroner): smoked salmon topped with quail egg and salmon roe.

“In fact we are smoking the salmon right in front of you,” he explained, setting down a plate topped with a small bell jar.

He lifted the glass and a puff of fragrant white smoke billowed into the dining room. The chunk of bright pink newly smoked salmon meat was ringed with different types of garnishes, offering myriad ways to embellish the flavor of the fish: delicate horseradish mayonnaise for zest; sliced cucumber for freshness; and sliced apple and rye crisp for crunchy sweetness.

For gastronomes who still think that pig is a base animal and pork unworthy of haute cuisine, Geranium (Kronprinsessegade 13; 45-3311-1304; www.restaurantgeranium.dk) offers a bucket of cold Nordic water to the face. My cut looked unassuming at first: a small roll of white-pink tenderloin meat coated with an ultra thin layer of cooked bread, more like a foil. But from the first bite it was clear that the preparation keeps the pork remarkably tender and juicy. As flavorful as a prime rib, it may be the best pig meat I’ve ever tasted. Served with slow-cooked marinated mushrooms, a few red berries and some green sprigs (Christmas colors again), the dish was a swineherd’s ambrosia.

With the presentation of the nitrogen-treated elder flowers — a Scandinavian blossom transformed into a high-tech dessert — it was clear that Noma’s two Michelin stars would be getting a healthy challenge from Geranium, which won its first Michelin star in March.

I piled the red jelly, white ice cream, black chocolate and frozen white nuggets into my mouth, half expecting the mass to burn through my body and downward toward China. Instead they burst on my tongue and crackled like Pop Rocks. Thoroughly Danish, impressively innovative and potentially explosive, they seemed apt symbols of the new Copenhagen dining scene.

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Ok I’m updating my Azteca review, because the last one was too short and because we went there again last night.

First thing you notice when you enter Azteca is the plethora of Elvis memorabilia that adorns the walls inside. One would wonder where the connection of Elvis comes with Mexican food, but honestly who cares, it’s the King and Mexican food; two of the greatest things ever wrapped into one! Elvis music plays throughout which an Elvis movie plays on one TV, along with sporting events on their other flat screen HDTVs. This place scores a 5 on atmosphere alone, but it’s a restaurant so let’s leave the overall score up to the food.

In my previous review I mentioned that the Carnitas plate was terrific. In fact I believe their carnitas is probably the tastiest carnitas I’ve ever ordered. It was cooked to the point that it was juicy, but also had some crisp on the edges. But I didn’t order carnitas last night, no my friends I ordered Arroz con Pollo (Rice with Chicken), which is quickly becoming my favorite Mexican meal.

Our meal started with the typical Mexican fare of Chips and Salsa. The chips were unsalted, so I had to add some salt to taste. The salsa was a little bland, it needed something added to it, but it wasn’t bad, just bland.

Now on to our main course…

I must admit the only other Arroz con Pollo I’ve ever had before was from El Faralito in Placentia, which is to die for, so I had a good litmus test to gauge Azteca’s on. I was not let down on Azteca’s version of Arroz con Pollo. It was slightly different then what I’ve had in the past; it basically was just a bed of Mexican style rice along with some of their mouth-watering chicken, that’s it, nothing else; no sour cream, no cheese, and not even tortillas to eat it with. But that’s OK! It’s only like $4.75, you can order tortillas, and you have yourself a pretty good size meal, I even had enough to eat today as leftovers! Since I wasn’t sure of the size of my main dish I also decided to try one of the Garlic Tacos with shredded beef, they are the typical shredded beef taco topped with a good helping of their special garlic sauce. It’s a hit or miss depending on how fond one is with high levels of garlic, personally I enjoyed it and was happy to know that if I encountered a vampire I would be able to fend him off just by breathing in his general direction! My wife ordered a Chicken Azteca Burrito, with lettuce, tomatoes, and beans inside. It was a good size burrito with lots of melted cheese on top (I stole some of it to use with my Arroz con Pollo). She loved the burrito, probably her favorite burrito at a restaurant. Kelly is very picky with the way chicken is prepared at Mexican Restaurants because normally the chicken has very little seasoning, it’s the same problem she runs into with ground beef tacos, she likes seasoned meat, but that isn’t always typical with Mexican food.

Along with our drinks our meal was just barely over 20 bucks, not bad considering the amount of delectable food we were able to consume. Service was good, with our waiter getting my wife’s order right (she had produce added to her burrito), and also checking on us from time to time.

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Zuma Sushi

Jew here-

After enjoying the beautiful weather at the 420 fest in Candler Park, we scooted to a sushi restaurant that we’ve wanted to try for a while. We ended up at Zuma in Inman Park for an early dinner. Zuma is located in a fairly new condo complex on Highland Avenue down the street from one of my favorites – Fritti.

Since, we were the only ones in the restaurant, we were able to sit anywhere. We both ordered a beer (Kirin Light) that costs an outrageous $4.50. The trend continues with the food.

At first look of the paper menu, it appeared one-sided. Thank goodness we realized there were two sides because the first side was “plain jane” at extraordinary prices. We ended up ordering an order of edamame (small and nothing special), a Trust Me Roll (spicy tuna, yellow tail, “special” zuma hot sauce, and wasabi sauce - $14.50) and a Caterpillar roll (BBQ eel, cucumber, avocado and tobiko – $12.50). Instead of bringing us a caterpillar roll we received a Zuma roll instead which is similar except it included crab which I couldn’t eat at the time because of Passover. Needless to say, I had to pluck out every hair of the crab which did not make it very enjoyable. The Trust Me Roll would’ve have been decent if the “special” hot sauce wasn’t so heavily dumped all over the sushi. All I tasted was the sauce which reminded me of the stuff McDonalds puts on Big Macs. We also had a couple of a couple of pieces of salmon which were decent, but nothing special.

Another thing that bothered me was that when another couple arrived, where do you think they were seated? Yep-right next to us! The place isn’t small, but it sure felt like it. The service was nothing special – there may have been a slight language barrier.

As a result, I have a new appreciation for Sushi Avenue. It’s not very expensive and the sushi has improved and is cut larger than prior visits. Zuma, on the other hand, is quite the opposite – it’s VERY expensive and the sushi is not very good – it’s mostly rice. I guess we are paying their condo rent. Spending the kind of money that we did, we could’ve gone to MF Sushi or had 2 dining experiences at Sushi Avenue.

ZERO menorahs

If your immediate reaction to seeing lron Man (or maybe, given Robert Downey, Jr., they should have called it Ironic Man) was anything like mine was this past weekend, you’ve been desperately craving cheeseburgers — along with those misplaced Black Sabbath CD’s and your own personal ICBM — ever since walking out the theatre doors.

The marketing plug of the movie has Downey’s character, newly escaped from months of desert-cave imprisonment, celebrating his liberation by gobbling good old American fast food cheeseburgers. I don’t know about you, but if I’d just forged (literally) my own super hero suit, blasted myself out of the terrorist-occupied desert and finally made it back to my gazillions, I’d go for something a little more upscale.

Iron Man after a Night Out! :P 

Sang Yoon’s blissful burger (pictured above) at Father’s Office, say, with its caramelized onions, gooey mix of Gruyere and Maytag Blue and thatch of arugula (which is what I got for my post-movie fix, the new FO being right up my street). Or the Hungry Cat’s Pug Burger, loaded with bacon and bleu and so massive that it should have nascent action heroes as its target audience. Downey’s character should have sent out for the burger from 25 Degrees, or Chris Kidder’s burger at Literati II. Or, better yet, considering Tony Stark’s tax bracket, Michael Mina’s truffled-cheese-Kobe-burger from the Stonehill Tavern at Dana Point. Come on, he’s a billionaire arms dealer with his own quadrant of Malibu, wouldn’t he skip the drive-thru — Thomas Keller’s obsession with In-N-Out notwithstanding — and get LA’s best? Did I miss some burgers? Comment below. A girl can’t live on popcorn alone.

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Ladies and gentlemen, find your cellphones: The reservation line for Gordon Ramsay’s new L.A. restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at the London West Hollywood, is open — even if the doors aren’t. Ramsay’s first West Coast restaurant, which is in the former Bel Age location, officially opens for dinner on May 27 (lunch to start the following day). This follows the opening, in 2006, of the Gordon Ramsay at the London New York, Ramsay’s American debut.

A menu just faxed over lists dishes such as California spiny lobster with white port sauce, rack of Sonoma lamb with olive-crusted fingerling potatoes and West Coast halibut with Kumamoto oysters and Champagne velouté. (Notice all the nice regional tags.) What we can also expect is some stunt staffing, as the winner of this year’s “Hell’s Kitchen” (Ramsay’s American reality show, the finale of which is set to air July will be installed as “senior sous chef,” according to Ramsay’s publicist. Ramsay may like publicity, but he’s unlikely to want a surprise “Kitchen Nightmares” (Ramsay’s other American reality show) episode either. Therefore, said senior sous chef will be under the watchful eyes of executive chef Josh Emmett (who will oversee from Ramsay’s New York restaurant) and chef de cuisine Andy Cook. And, one hopes, Ramsay himself, in all his high-volume, obscenity-laced glory. Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll cook too.

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“THE Waverly Inn,” said one of my friends, as she took in the scene at the new restaurant Commerce. I think she was focusing on the oil mural painted on one of the walls and on the way the restaurant’s Art Deco flourishes and situation in a 1911 building give it the feel of old New York.

“Balthazar,” said someone else, responding to different cues: the lemony light of a brasserie, the cramped seating and the merry commotion. The memo apparently went out, and those New Yorkers versed in showing up at the right new places right when they’re supposed to have descended on Commerce in style and in droves. That makes it either exhilarating or enervating, depending on your age, your mood and the strength of your eardrums.

Both friends were right. Commerce in one sense evokes the Waverly Inn and in another emulates Balthazar. But in the end it isn’t like either of them, which becomes clear when the menu arrives and, in its wake, the food.

There are oysters, as there must be, but not presented the usual way, with a mignonette nearby. You can have them with a green-apple gelée on top or smothered in a sauce of Champagne, potatoes, leeks and glittering orange salmon roe.

There is roasted chicken, in accordance with the commandments, but it’s a bird of a different, more decadent feather. Stuffing is scattered around it, and that stuffing is redolent not only of the bacon and onions in which the hefty cubes of bread have been sautéed but also of the foie gras with which they’ve been coated. It’s a bruising wallop to the gut.

Although the visual and auditory signals that Commerce sends out create certain expectations, the chef, Harold Moore, one of its owners, doesn’t feel the least bit bound by them.

He bows only somewhat to classics and bends only partway to comfort foods, coming up with a polyglot menu and intricately wrought dishes that let him strut his stuff in a way that a more archetypal bill of fare might not. In doing so he creates a rankling dissonance, his dishes beseeching a closeness of attention that the frenzied atmosphere doesn’t easily permit.

And he errs. While there’s some wonderful food that reflects the talent he showed and the experience he received at Montrachet and then March, there’s also some food that’s not cooked or seasoned as it should be, and there’s food that’s too fussy, not just for the ambience but also for its own good.

You spot a porterhouse for two on a menu and you prime yourself for the raptures of thick, charred bone-in beef that you can really sink your teeth into. But at Commerce the meat comes without the bone, trimmed of too much gristle and fat and sliced nearly as thinly as London broil. Those slices snuggle up to a red wine and shallot steak sauce that’s already on the plate, whether you want it or not, and that’s sweetened — too much so — by a raisin purée.

Refined? I suppose. Satisfying? Not completely.

That’s not to say Commerce doesn’t have its pleasures, beginning with its location. It’s tucked into one of those patches of the Village with an unusually intimate scale, and it occupies a building with palpable history.

Back during Prohibition, this space was a speakeasy. Then it was the Blue Mill Tavern, then Grange Hall and then Blue Mill again, briefly. It takes its newest name from its street.

It’s more pretty than comfortable, and its menu is more interesting than trustworthy, though no evening is likely to be a bust. Mr. Moore produces just enough winners to guard against that, and if all else fails there’s the bread basket, which is some bread basket, a throwback to the days when carb wasn’t a four-letter word.

In it you’ll find at least six kinds of bread, most made in house: buttery bread and salty bread, crunchy bread and spongy bread, irresistible bread and even more irresistible bread. I always vowed not to polish it all off, and I always ended up staring at crumbs.

The carbs get less reliable after that. Among the half dozen appetizer or entree-size pasta dishes, several were letdowns. Both times I tried the spaghetti carbonara it lacked the peppery charge that the menu promised, and the second time the spaghetti was overcooked. So were the noodles under a “ragu of odd things,” the welcome oddities being oxtail, trotters and tripe.

The kitchen did right, however, by sweet potato tortelloni, which were showered with hazelnuts and pomegranate seeds, and mushroom and Fontina ravioli, which were bathed in a Parmesan emulsion.

With those nimble, elegant dishes Mr. Moore paid homage to Italy. With another nimble, elegant dish he honored Thailand.

Beautifully cooked red snapper was placed in a gorgeous broth in which lemon grass, curry, coconut milk and saffron all wafted in and out of the picture, lending their beguiling nuances.

That was one of my two favorite entrees. The other underscored what a broad spectrum of sensibilities Mr. Moore works: it was a fatty veal breast stuffed with pork shoulder and speck, and it had the homey appeal of pot roast, though its ingredients were more exalted.

Commerce doesn’t add up neatly. It doesn’t always add up sensibly, either. Having four entrees, including the porterhouse and the chicken, that require the participation of more than one diner is too much, especially when one of those entrees, braised beef shank, requires the participation of at least three. In a city as fiercely individualistic as this one, that’s a culinary quorum that’s unlikely to happen.

Like much else about the restaurant, desserts are ambitious and unpredictable. They include a chocolate and peanut butter marquise with a scoop of celery sorbet, which is a cute touch, inasmuch as it brings to mind celery stalks slathered with peanut butter. The sorbet does nothing, though, to burnish the appeal of the marquise, and thus illustrates Commerce’s occasional failure to strike the right balance between pleasing diners and flattering its lofty sense of itself.

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IN the ambitious menu for Gordon Ramsay Plane Food, a restaurant that opened last month in the new Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport, Mr. Ramsay, the celebrity chef, has made few obvious concessions to the locale. A diner might start with a pea, leek and goat-cheese tart, followed by braised lamb with honey and cloves or steamed wild sea bass with lemongrass and white asparagus. And if the prospect of a belt-straining flight isn’t too alarming, there’s a Valrhona chocolate fondue with bananas, marshmallows and waffles for dessert. Three courses cost about £32 — or $64 — before wine or tip.

Mr. Ramsay is not the only chef with an “airside” outpost. This summer, the French chef Nicolas Le Bec, who has received two Michelin stars, will bring Lyonnais cooking to Espace Le Bec, a restaurant overlooking the tarmac of the Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport in France. And at Altitude, opening in October at Geneva International Airport, the menu will be overseen by Gilles Dupont, an internationally recognized chef at Auberge du Lion d’Or on Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

Todd English, the American chef and television host, has opened his Bonfire Steakhouse at Kennedy International Airport in New York and at Logan International Airport in Boston. Locations in Las Vegas and Chicago are under development.

Mangia!

“I’ve been traveling a lot and starving along the way,” said Mr. English, whose steakhouse includes specialties like lobster tacos and one-pound Kobe beef burgers. “So I realized that there was certainly a need for decent food in airports.”

Until recently, fine dining at airports was available only in airline lounges, and travelers without elite frequent-flier status were relegated to food courts or other casual settings. But luxury dining is arriving at airports around the world, and the ideal, say restaurateurs, is to offer a refined establishment where you will not miss your final boarding call because the waiter ignored your gestures for the bill.

With their promise of privacy, comfort and efficiency, these restaurants can be a powerful lure for business travelers, who can also use them for preflight meetings. At Plane Food, bookings for tables of 12 or 14 businesspeople are not uncommon, said Stuart Gillies, who works with Mr. Ramsay and oversees the restaurant. For smaller groups or pairs of travelers setting off on a business trip, a corner table in a wine bar or steakhouse is a more practical place to spread out papers and discuss strategies than the departure lounge or the plane itself.

“From personal experience, when I’m taking a trip late in the afternoon, it’s made a difference knowing that the airport I’m going to has some pretty fine dining,” said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group for corporate buyers of business travel services. “Instead of eating some God-forsaken meal on the airplane, you can actually have a decent meal, a glass of wine and comfortably get on the aircraft and go.” After all, he added, “you’re going to get there early anyway.”

Of course, airport environments can be a challenge. At Plane Food, where the menu and pricing are similar to those at other Ramsay restaurants, some differences are inevitable. One early reviewer bemoaned Plane Food’s undersize cutlery (the size is used throughout the terminal so the steak knives cannot be turned into weapons) and meat searing methods, relying on electric rather than gas stoves, which are not allowed for safety reasons.

Timing is everything. Passengers who clear check-in and security may have 90 minutes or more for a three-course meal; others will need to get in and out more quickly. To thrive, Mr. Gillies said, an airport restaurant must train its staff members to pace themselves to customers’ needs. “As soon as they get the menu, we ask, Is there anything you’d like straight away?” he said. “Our target is to have the order in the kitchen in five minutes.”

Diners in a rush might be steered toward items that are quick to make and eat — like a salad of beet-root and blue cheese with a sprinkling of hazelnuts, or a smoked salmon and caviar croque monsieur. If desired, Mr. Gillies said, “they could have two courses and the bill within 20 minutes.”

Wine bars are also appearing in airports. Vino Volo, a growing chain of wine-tasting lounges, is often mentioned in online reviews and travel blogs with the kind of delighted surprise you might expect from desert-island castaways stumbling on a Target superstore.

Vino Volo opened its first location at Washington Dulles International Airport in 2005 and has since expanded to airports in Seattle, Sacramento, Baltimore and New York (at Kennedy), with sites in Philadelphia, Detroit and Newark opening later this year.

Thad Westhusing, a technology executive in Seattle who writes a blog about Pacific Northwest wine, usually avoids the dubious vintages that are often offered at airport restaurants. But last summer, while waiting at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for a flight to Burbank, Calif., he encountered Vino Volo.

“You knew immediately that this was a place that was inviting you to stop, slow down and literally help you forget that you were in an airport,” he said, adding that he was impressed by the Oregon pinot noirs he had tasted and the notes explaining each wine’s provenance. “I was lucky I made my flight because I was ready to hang out and spend the afternoon there.”

The ham is sliced thick and piled high on sandwiches at Mike’s Famous Ham Place in Detroit.

The California Club at Steve’s Deli in Bloomfield Township is made with turkey bacon, turkey breast, avocado and red-pepper mayo.

The Yardbird sandwich at Slows Bar BQ in Detroit features applewood smoked pulled chicken, mushrooms, cheddar and bacon with Slows Mustard Sauce.

The Grubwich from Dunleavy’s Pub & Grub in Farmington is a true tavern treat, made with slices of hot, grilled ham, melting Swiss cheese and a layer of slightly sweet coleslaw on a long sesame-seeded roll.

Victor Ventimiglia, 32, adds extra giardiniera (pickled vegetables) to Our Italian Sub, the most popular sandwich at Ventimiglia’s Italian Foods in Sterling Heights.

The hot corned beef sandwich on house-baked bread, with Swiss cheese, stars at Noah’s Deli in Dearborn.

The long-popular Jumbo Lump Crab Melt sandwich at the Beverly Hills Grill in Beverly Hills is on the lunch and brunch menus only.

The grilled vegetable sandwich at the Russell Street Cafe in Detroit’s Eastern Market.

The Lobster Reuben at Northern Lakes Seafood Company restaurant in Bloomfield Hills has become a signature dish.

The chicken salad at Modern Food & Spirits in Keego Harbor has chopped apples, dried cranberries and tarragon and is served on croissants.

The Madill is a turkey, bacon and avocado open-faced sub at Mudgie’s on Porter Street in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.

Ernest Connors of Detroit is a sandwich maker at Star Deli in Southfield. In the foreground is the deli’s corned beef special on rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing.

The Dublin Garden Sandwich can be found at Eph’s Downtown in Detroit.

The Panini Insalata from Insalata in Troy is flavor-intensive.

The delicious grilled three-cheese sandwich at Cafe Muse in Royal Oak is one of the sandwiches featured in the March 2008 issue of Esquire as one of America’s best sandwiches. Sliced tomatoes, fresh basil and a little honey give it added flavor and complexity.

Mediterranean Tofu Sandwich is from the Sprout House in Grosse Pointe Park.

The California Cluck sandwich at Pronto! restaurant in Royal Oak (No. 12) includes smoked turkey breast, chipotle black bean paste, lettuce, sour cream, avocado and salsa on an oven-toasted sub roll.

Gabriel’s Cheese Steak Hoagie, with peppers and extra cheese, is at Gabriel’s Hoagies in Westland.

Vinnies 5/2 Italian submarine sandwich, with five layers of meat, two layers of cheese, loaded with the works and Vin’s spicy sauce, is prepared at Vinnie’s Italian Submarines in Romulus.

The Grilled Chicken and Vegetable Wrap at Kruse and Muer on Main, located in downtown Rochester.

Chargrilled Chicken Portabella Mushroom Sandwich at Your Mother’s Food & Spirits in Mt. Clemens.

The Vegetarian Roulade sandwich, a signature of Pronto! restaurant in Royal Oak, encloses hummus, avocado, tomato, red onion, lettuce and sunflower seeds in a whole-wheat pita.

The California Veggie sandwich at La Penguina Deli in Dearborn.

Grilled vegetarian sandwich at Steve’s Deli in Bloomfield Township.

The Smoked Salmon Pastrami Reuben on marble rye at Lily’s Seafood restaurant in Royal Oak.

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