Halve it your way with smoked fish and more at Smögen.
Playful, unfettered, confident, free-spirited chefs continue to keep the surprises coming in Los Angeles.
At Koreatown’s Red Room, the Thursday-through-Saturday evening transformation of Coffee MCO into a wine bar, chef Yoon Sung is serving umami-rich and tomato-forward Spanish sardine jorim and other crowd-pleasers like mushroom bourguignon and bulgogi sliders. Sung, who’s also a practicing physician and whose bona fides include working the line at Baltimore’s pioneering Woodberry Kitchen, excels at desserts like matcha tres leches too.
At Smögen Appetizers, a breakfast-and-lunch weekend pop-up inside Studio City’s Vintage Wine + Eats, naturally leavened sourdough bagels are the canvas for sushi-grade hamachi and a whitefish salad made with smoked dry-aged kanpachi collar from famed seafood market The Joint. The non-seafood options at Smögen Appetizers are also strong: Eleanore’s heirloom, named after co-owner and former New Yorker Zach Werner’s grandmother (who lived in Smögen, Sweden), is a perfect combination of heirloom tomato, cream cheese, olive oil, coarse cracked pepper, flaky salt and red pepper flakes.
In Highland Park, 2024 James Beard Award semifinalists Danielle Duran Zecca and Alessandro Zecca are serving exuberant Mexitalian food at Amiga Amore. Pastas include excellent elote agnolotti and the wondrous duck duck duck with epazote-parsley linguine, Mary’s duck carnitas, broccolini, duck gravy and crispy duck skin. Chorizo and clams with fregola, pinto beans, Meyer lemon, jalapeno butter and housemade chile de arbol bread is another expertly composed symphony of big flavors.
At the weekly Smorgasburg food market at Row DTLA, 2024 James Beard Award semifinalists Alex Garcia and Elvia Huerta bring in the Sunday throngs with their purposefully aggressive Mexican food and heavy-metal sensibility at Evil Cooks. The poseidon at Evil Cooks has rightfully become LA’s most beloved octopus taco, and black pastor tortas, chorizo verde burritos and desserts like churro cheesecake tacos keep the flavors, volume and energy high at this food stand that often feels like a mosh pit. The 2024 James Beard Award finalists will be announced on April 3. But regardless of what happens, it’s clear that Los Angeles is playing its own game.
Hainanese chicken confit is a splendid brasserie riff on hawker-stand food.
In Santa Monica, Cassia chef Bryant Ng recently unveiled a new menu that taps deeply into his Chinese-Singaporean roots and his family’s history. (The previous menu was largely built around Vietnamese dishes as an homage to Ng’s wife, Kim.) Ng, a 2022 James Beard Award finalist whose grandparents ran Polynesian-Cantonese restaurant Bali Hai in Culver City and whose parents owned Chinese-American restaurant Wok Way in Northridge, is now serving Hainanese chicken confit, mapo tofu, mushroom satay cooked over a wood-fired grill and wok-tossed Maine lobster with rice noodle rolls. This is still very much a modern Asian brasserie, so clay-oven bread comes with Singaporean chili crab for dipping, although we totally understand if you devour the crab with a spoon. Cassia turns 9 in June, but it feels like a vibrant new restaurant.
