Chef Jordan Kahn’s new restaurant, Destroyer, is now open in Culver City

If you were a fan of Red Medicine, the avant-garde restaurant that occupied an otherwise quiet block on Wilshire Boulevard on the fringes of Beverly Hills, you’ve probably been wondering when chef Jordan Kahn would reappear. You might imagine that a chef with his pedigree (his résumé includes the French Laundry, Per Se, Alinea and Michael Mina) would open a grand, big-budget concept in downtown Los Angeles, as seems to be the trend right now. What you probably didn’t expect is for Kahn to quietly debut a neighborhood café in Culver City, which is exactly what happened earlier this week.

Destroyer, whose name references a comet, is a tiny, 16-seat breakfast and lunch space in the Hayden Tract, an industrial zone turned design district known mostly for its experimental architecture. The café is counter service only, with a menu that changes daily. For breakfast you might have a slice of Icelandic rye with cultured butter and preserves, or a bowl of oatmeal — which looks more like a Scandinavian snow globe than a bowl of porridge — studded with wild foraged currants and topped with a frozen disc of skyr.

Lunch offerings range from a salad with chicken confit that wouldn’t be out of place on the menu in your local lunch haunt, to a beef tartare wrapped in a crispy parsnip the shape of a waffle cone. Destroyer may be the only place in the country where you can order beets with aronia berries and frozen horseradish cream to-go.

Coffee is sourced from both Coffee Manufactory in San Francisco and Roseline in Portland, Ore., and tea comes from Song Tea, a San Francisco-based tea company famous for its rigorous sourcing. There is also a daily herbal infusion of foraged herbs, such as yarrow and chamomile.

If you frequented Red Medicine, you will recognize the plating as distinctly Kahn: There are no terrariums this time, at least not so far, but this food is as visually enticing as it is delicious. While it looks like fine dining on the plate, Kahn insists the menu is designed for a neighborhood café. Substitutions are politely accepted (as long as the kitchen isn’t slammed).

Everything at Destroyer, from the ceramics to the furniture to the raw ingredients, is sourced from Kahn’s friends. Vegetables come from two farms, a privately owned 27-acre bio-dynamic farm and Cottonwood Urban Farm in Panorama City, which is run by the childhood friend of Kahn’s girlfriend. The uniforms, from the jeans to the aprons, are made by FRAME, whose headquarters are next door to Destroyer.

Kahn built the café to feed the surrounding community, which includes the offices of the director Alejandro Iñárritu, Nike and Beats by Dre. Unless you’re one of the 9,000 employees who work in the Hayden Tract, you would never stumble upon the tiny storefront; and unless you happen to follow Kahn’s friends on Instagram, who posted a few photos of a friends and family meal, last weekend, you would likely have no idea that Destroyer exists.

The quiet rollout was intentional. Kahn’s relationship with the Los Angeles media has been one of controversy (Red Medicine famously outed this paper’s former restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila, posting her photograph online and ending her anonymity), and he says opening without a press release, “was the best decision I ever made,” allowing him and his team time to fine tune service during opening week, a luxury in today’s restaurant business.

For now Destroyer is open weekdays only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Expect weekend service to roll out within the next two months.

Destroyer, 3578 Hayden Ave., Los Angeles, destroyer.la

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