Playground — Not Feeling the Love

You gotta work for my love.

If I had gone planning to write a review, I probably would have done the hipster foodie thing and shot pictures of my plates; we had plenty of lighting for it. I was there for my anniversary and didn’t feel like spending the meal shooting pictures of my food. I did shoot a picture of my menu, and I’ll get to that.

Playground is #66 in Jonathan Gold’s recent list of the 101 best restaurants in the L.A. region, and in all honesty, I can think of three restaurants in Orange County that are better than Playground that didn’t make Gold’s list (these are places that I prefer to Marché Moderne, #50 on his list). But since Jason Quinn, the head chef at Playground, has a mission statement (or something like that) that said “people only judge what we put on the plate,” I’m starting with the table.

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Waiter, I’ll Have the “Supo de la Tago”

Kion vi volas manĝi?

It would be nice to see the menus, if they still exist, or ever existed, but the claim made in 1913 was that seven hotels in the United States had restaurant menus in Esperanto, none of which were in Washington, D.C. The article, unfortunately, doesn’t indicate where they actually were.

The suggestion that there were seven restaurants with Esperanto menus is somewhat surprising. After all, the number of foreign Esperantists in the United States at any given time, has undoubtably been so small that they were probably outnumbered by other tourists from their country who didn’t speak Esperanto. Further, the whole idea of menus in a variety of languages seems to crop up in Europe, but not here.

An English-language menu isn’t always a help. I remember being perplexed the choice “Rhenish pickled beef” on a menu in Germany. I asked to compare it with the German menu, and there it was, “Rheinischer sauerbraten.” Sauerbraten isn’t actually pickled, it just gets marinated in vinegar, not nearly long enough to pickle it. Then there are the bad translations, where English just gets mangled on the menu.

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Why that Food Looks Pretty Enough to Eat

Attractive. And tasty

I admit it. I’m one of those horrid people who take pictures of their food at restaurants. And sometimes at home too. I was doing this even before starting the blog, and mostly it was for the same reason that I take pictures of artwork at museums: to remember it better later. (When I went to the Orangerie in Paris, I did something different. I took pictures of Monet’s Water Lilies with my big lens. I wanted to see the brushstrokes, and there’s no way they would have let me get that close to the paintings.)

In the New York Times, Pete Wells makes the claim that chefs are reacting to that reality, even though a dimly-lit restaurant is often a really bad place to try to take a decent photo. (I do wonder, when they’re creating their dishes in a brightly-lit kitchen, do they think about what they’re going to look like the subtle lighting in the dining room? Let me be blunt; some places to increase the feeling of intimacy put you in the dark.) Wells makes the claim that chefs are making plates more photogenic at the expense of tasting good.

But I wondered if Wells was right about one claim he made:

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Off Notes at La Sirène

It was too dark for cell-phone
pics. The wine was good.

The Yelp reviews were good and the menu looked interesting, so we decided to try out La Sirène. I’m going to note that it’s not the restaurant’s fault that it’s across the street from a construction site and somewhat out of the way, still, in choosing a restaurant, I tend to like a nicer neighborhood. Maybe things will improve when the construction site is no longer a big pit with fencing around it.

Since we were having dinner after theater in an area well off of Broadway, we were the last table. Two other tables were clearing out as we started. It’s always odd to be the last table in a restaurant. Odder if you’re the only patrons before you’ve finished your appetizers. Well, we didn’t have to contend with noise from other tables.

The appetizers were the off note. I ordered the duck paté; James ordered the octopus. Both came with a vast pile of salad greens. Those with the octopus were wilting, and not in a good way, from the heat of the octopus. The paté was largely hidden by the mountain of greens. It was not really up to snuff. If this is their house recipe, they might want to consider tinkering with it.

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How Sweet to Taste the Amari at L’Artusi

A nice plate of lamb

L’Artusi, in New York City’s West Village seeks to “demystify” Italy, though I hadn’t been aware that Italian cuisine was all that mysterious. The restaurant is lively with happy sound, or as some might call it, noisy. Despite this, it is more spacious than Lupa; no worrying that you’re going to bring the next table down should you get up from your seat. And, although the food and atmosphere at L’Artusi is much more casual, the waitstaff is much more formal. “Yes, sir.” “Certainly, sir.” I’m not knocking the experience; when you go an shell out your cash on a meal, it’s nice to be treated as someone who might enjoy a touch of deference.

The runners made one mistake that the wait staff quickly rectified. James and I both ordered salads; I additionally ordered the beef carpaccio. My salad and the beef came at the same time. I caught the attention of the hostess and asked that the carpaccio be parked somewhere cold until we were ready for it. “Certainly not, we’ll make you a fresh one when you’re ready for it.” The salads were immense. James’s resembled a great shaggy mountain with the cheese that was grated on it. We were able to finish these, then the table was cleared and a carpaccio appeared ready for us to share. It worked better after the salads anyway.

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Lupa, Satisfying Food at Close Quarters

I would have happily eaten more.

Before we walked to Lupa, Mario Batali’s “Osteria Romana” in Greenwich Village, we checked out Eric Asimov’s review in The New York Times. Shorter Asimov: Lupa is inconveniently crowded. That was certainly true, but first let’s get there.

We walked over. Things seemed quiet. No line. We read the menu. Ninety-minute wait for a table. We were advised to check back in about a half hour. We wandered about for a bit, returning to the restaurant about a half hour later. We were told it would be another forty-five minutes, but they actually sat us about fifteen minutes later. Were it not New York, I’d probably worry about starting dinner past 10 at night. Not so much a problem here. I did notice, however, that the restaurant did clear out while we were having our dinner. We weren’t the last to be seated, but we were a late seating.

We were shown to a table right next to a passageway to a service area. Waitstaff came in and out of this for various reasons. The focaccia and olive oil were plated up here. After about the fifth time someone grazed my elbow, I suggested to James that we quietly move the table two inches closer to the next table. He offered to swap seats with me, but I pointed out that as he is larger than I am, he was only going to be a bigger target. Once we shifted out of the traffic path, I was bumped into no more. (And when the party at an adjacent table cleared out, that gave the staff even more room. I gave a silent thanks to the woman who admonished a gentleman in her party that “chairs don’t push themselves in.”)

We did better than the couple at the next table. A person at the table beyond theirs, returning to his seat accidentally knocked their salumi platter to the floor. The staff was very apologetic to the couple. They declined getting a replacement salumi platter, so I assume the restaurant simply took it off the bill.

Careful, you could choke someone
on those

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Messa - A Lovely Meal in an Attractive Setting

If your food is the same color as
the table, maybe a glass plate
isn't the best idea

During a recent trip to Israel, I ate at Messa, a chef-owned restaurant in Tel Aviv. It was somewhat hard to find. We walked past the door, because it didn’t really look like a entrance. As we doubled back, a doorman positioned himself at it, opening the door to our inquiry.

Inside, form has triumphed over function. The place looks great, but I wonder how much the decor figures into my own enjoyment of the meal. Messa has no small tables. Large parties get tables with high-backed chairs set into alcoves. Couples, or smaller parties, get sat along a very, very long table. The couple to my right were speaking only Hebrew, which made it easy to pretend that they weren’t really there. I likewise pretended that they couldn’t really hear or understand our conversation, even though that probably wasn’t the case. The tall chairs in which we sat were lovely, though I found I pretty much couldn’t get in and out of it on my own. Nor did the design seem to take practicality as a concern; a couple times we heard wine glasses crash to the floor. Their storage area did not seem to be built for the convenience of the wait staff.

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