Another example: Caesar salad with garlic bread croutons, spaghetti with long-simmered veal and beef Bolognese sauce, chicken piccata and blueberry buckle cake.


Eva, 7458 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles; (323) 634-0700; http://www.evarestaurantla.com. Four-course menu, $39. Sundays 3 to 9 p.m. Note: Eva has just added Sunday brunch.

Ammo

Chef Daniel Mattern and pastry chef Roxana Jullapat are mixing it up at the long-running Ammo on Highland Avenue. The chef couple not only have added a killer Sunday brunch, but they've also started their Sunday night supper option called Ammo Roast, built around a main course from the wood-burning oven. The e-mailed menu arrives every week. I'd gone a couple of times already, but when the supper tribute to the late Southern cooking doyenne Edna Lewis came around in October, I couldn't resist. Southern cooking? Edna Lewis recipes? I'm in.

We started with a puréed watercress soup made with a good chicken stock and garnished with watercress leaves and a swirl of cream. I'd forgotten how deeply delicious this soup could be. It came with a dinner roll on a square of parchment paper. Fragrant with yeast, the rolls are rich and dense, the shiny brown surface slicked with butter. Why doesn't anybody else make these anymore?

The main event was a brined pork roast with black-eyed peas and ribbons of kale, and big dollops of custardy spoon bread. Miss Lewis would have been proud. Dessert was heirloom apples from Windrose Farm halved and baked in a buttery caramel sauce and served with a pitcher of light custard sauce to pour over the top. Not one scrap or drop was left in the bowl at the end of the meal — enjoyed with Ammo's always-great music track.

A more recent menu: warm escarole salad with house-cured pancetta and white beans; beef stew cooked overnight with buttered potatoes, carrots and parsnips; bread 'n' butter pudding with butterscotch prunes. Comfort, pure and simple.

Ammo, 1155 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles; (323) 871-2666; http://www.ammocafe.com. Three-course supper, $32. Sundays, 5 to 9 p.m.

Noir Food & Wine

This nearly year-and-a-half-old Pasadena wine bar is going with the Sunday night program too, this one with a four-course menu. The night I went, a wine dinner was scheduled inside, so we sat outside on the brick patio with a fountain and heat lamps (which work just fine, but you might want to bundle up on cold nights just in case).

The wine will warm you up too. Noir has a great list that is particularly strong on California Pinot and Burgundy and includes some 50 wines by the glass. But the Sunday supper menu offers two glasses of wine from a choice of four. If you prefer to drink something else, you get a $5 discount on the menu without the preselected wines.

The first course is usually a mixed green salad with a balsamic vinegar dressing (fine, nothing special), followed, on a recent visit, by fluffy crab fritters dosed with a Carolina mustard and white pepper aioli. Chef Claud Beltran offers a choice of three main courses, which might include an excellent grilled hanger steak with fingerling potatoes and red wine shallot reduction, a moist Cornish hen with rosemary risotto or terrific pan-seared scallops with chanterelles and cauliflower. (He changes at least one or two dishes each week.) A dessert of classic crème caramel with roasted apples could work with any number of sweet wines; co-owner Mike Farwell will advise on which to choose.

Another recent example: tatsoi, arugula and pear salad with rosemary vinaigrette; pan-seared scallop with white bean ragu; a choice of grilled Australian lamb chops with mashed potatoes and asparagus, pan-seared grouper with rosemary risotto and zucchini or grilled hanger steak with green beans and fingerling potatoes; a choice of poached pears with honey-orange sorbet or panettone bread pudding with hazelnut crème anglaise.

Noir Food & Wine, 40 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; (626) 795-7199; http://www.noirfoodandwine.com. Four-course menu, $39, including two glasses of wine. Sundays, 5:30 to 10 p.m. Closed Jan. 23 for a special event.

Dominick's

The great bargain among Sunday suppers is at Dominick's in West Hollywood, where partners Warner Ebbink and chef Brandon Boudet offer a three-course menu for $15. No choices, but you can also order off the a la carte menu. I've been to some Sundays when whole long tables out on the walled patio are taken over by single families or groups of friends. The restaurant's own label, Dago Red (or White), costs $12 a bottle; Moretti beer is just $3, so drink up. And eat up. The menus are usually down-home, red-sauce Italian in theme, sometimes pasta, sometimes not, but meant to evoke the meals the owners' grandparents made for extended family on Sundays. The spirit is festive and familial.

That could be bracciole or lasagna, or, on a November night a finely shaved fennel and Parmesan salad followed by grilled skirt steak, served family-style with roasted potatoes and a piquant salsa verde. And who wouldn't love the dessert — rice balls scented with vanilla, like deep-fried rice pudding.

Another recent example: Shrimp and white bean crostini, penne with turkey meatballs, finished with peppermint chip sundae. Straightforward and simple.

Dominick's, 8715 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 652-2335; http://www.dominicksrestaurant.com. Three-course Sunday supper, $15; bottle of Dago Red or White, $12; bottle of Moretti beer, $3. Sundays, 6 p.m. to midnight.

irene.virbila@latimes.com