Three Reasons to Play Hooky

Few of us take the time for a leisurely lunch anymore. It’s easier to grab a quick bite somewhere nearby than negotiate the snarl of cross-town traffic. But a sit-down lunch, stolen from the middle of the day, can be a guilty pleasure and, if it’s very good, it’s just the thing to mark a birthday or anniversary, savor with a long-lost friend or soothe a bruised spirit.

After three such indulgent afternoons, I’m convinced that lunchtime offers some of the most extraordinary meals at Los Angeles’ top restaurants. At midday, the kitchen is not under siege and the chef is not yet battle-weary. And since no one is likely to be waiting for your seat, you can happily spend two or even four hours at table (that is, if you’re playing hooky for the afternoon, something I highly recommend). Here are three of my favorite spots:

Friday lunch at Spago Beverly Hills is quite a scene. There’s Milton Berle in a yellow satin waistcoat, puffing a cigar in the garden, eyes twinkling and about to crack wise. At another table, a gaggle of women trimmed in gold or silver flounce and regroup for photos with and without their host, the always-affable Mr. Puck. Next to us, a tiny 90-year-old blows out the candle on her dessert, after which the waiter assures her that the same table will be waiting on her 100th birthday.

Without ever opening the menu, I request that chef Lee Hefter prepare a tasting menu for us. We start with a fanciful appetite teaser, a toy-size iron skillet filled with a fried quail egg dabbed with osetra caviar on smoked salmon and a blini. Next to it is a cup of roasted tomato “cappuccino,” which tastes exactly like tomato soup with steamed milk. Next, a sea urchin shell is heaped with a salad of julienned Asian pear, briny sea urchin, peeky toe crab, rice and a sweet pickled seaweed, but there’s far too much going on for this Asian-inspired dish to really work.

Then Hefter gets serious, sending out a fabulous warm salad of fresh Matsutake mushrooms on a bed of Chino Ranch wild watercress and garlic chives. His agnolotti, tiny pasta envelopes filled with sweet fresh corn and mascarpone and showered with the first of the season’s white truffles, are brilliant, napped only in a little butter, the better to showcase the subtle flavors. The fish course is Dover sole cooked in a light, graceful tomato water flecked with beads of olive oil and a colorful confetti of vegetables.

Terrific Wolfe Ranch quail comes with soft flaps of black trumpet mushrooms and a savory ragout of black-eyed peas and appaloosa beans from Chino Ranch swirled with the bird’s caramelized juices. But the piece de resistance is sliced leg of veal that Hefter has been roasting for the past 2 1/2 hours. It’s accompanied only by natural juices, some marvelous ochre French cepes and a copper saucepan of aligote, potatoes whipped with Cantal cheese and garlic.

No one who loves cheeses can forgo the cheese plate. On this visit, it includes a chalky aged goat cheese, Tete de Moins, shaved into delicate ruches, a pungent blue-veined Roquefort and a rich, absolutely a point Explorateur. Dessert, to our relief, is simply “lost bread,”

the French pain perdu, topped with fresh chevre and pears poached in Concord grape juice. Ah, but there’s also a tiny bowl of the most deliciously icy pear sorbet.

We roll out of the restaurant at a quarter to 5. It’s been an afternoon so well spent that I regret having made dinner reservations at 8.

Vincenti in Brentwood has lunch only on Fridays, and if you go more than once, you’re likely to see the same people. In that way, it’s very congenial. With sun diffused through skylights, the burnished walls look more plum than aubergine. And if chef Gino Angelini has been to Chino Ranch in Rancho Santa Fe the day before, lunch can be a singular treat.

First he sends out a plate of the lightest, most ethereal fried calamari rings--so good it’s as if you’ve never really tasted calamari before. It turns out they arrived from Italy that morning. There is a difference.

After that, Angelini plies us with a series of small appetizers. Sweet, tender seppie, or cuttlefish, are braised with tripe. Rabbit medallions shrouded in crinkly pale green cabbage adorn a salad of bitter little greens and herbs--I taste dandelion leaves, scallion, flat-leaf parsley, wisps of anise--strewn with a few handmade noodles. Then, just before

the pasta, comes a tiny plate of polenta with fat brown beans, a paper-thin slice of lardo--yes, that’s right, pork lard)--and shavings of bottarga, a pressed, dried fish roe. It is stupendously good. So is grilled radicchio di Treviso and imported porcini mushrooms also perfumed with lardo.

As good as everything is, we forget all else when the first pasta arrives: the most exquisite black spaghetti made with fresh cuttlefish ink, which coats your tongue and lips with black. It’s rich and complex in taste, spiked with peperoncino and scattered with diced nuggets of sweet cuttlefish. The second pasta is a plate of the tiniest cappelletti plumped with chicken, pork and turkey and cloaked in a little butter and broth and a dusting of white truffles.

The waiter shows off a handsome Mediterranean fish cooked whole in the wood-burning rotisserie. Fileted and eaten with either a squeeze of lemon or a little olive oil and diced tomato, it is moist and flavorful. The best dish, however, is the spezzatini, basically a stew, of Sonoma lamb and baby artichokes cooked with a little tomato, some onion, the bones, rosemary and whole garlic cloves. It’s so good that I have to sop up every bit of the ruddy sauce with bread.

To finish, we savor a scoop of dreamy lemon sorbet. Grappa? Not on your life. Sated, I can’t help thinking that Angelini is the rare Italian chef here who is uncompromising in his cooking.

In the mood for Asian food a few weeks ago, I called up Yujean Kang’s, not the original in Pasadena, but the newer Westside branch on Melrose Avenue. Without saying who I was, I asked if Kang could create a menu for four that would include Peking duck. When we arrive the next day, the tall, rumpled chef checks to see if there is anything my group won’t like. Once we assure him that we eat everything, he disappears to cook.

First out of the kitchen are heavenly steamed dumplings with a chopped pork and garlic chive stuffing, swathed in chile oil and a dark soy sauce. The fragrance of the dumplings is irresistible, and we each end up having seconds. By then, the Peking duck has just come out of the oven, and a waiter brings it out to show us before it is carved. It is beautifully browned and crisp, wafting a heady perfume of duck fat and star anise. Rolled with a smear of plum sauce into crepes, the succulent bird is as good a Peking duck as I’ve had in this country and I feel lucky to be eating it.

I also love the pristinely fresh white prawns with huge glazed walnuts and the plate of emerald-green pea shoots. Braised lingcod, a delicate fish not often seen on restaurant menus, is served in a light ginger- and garlic-infused soy sauce and garnished with a special frizzy dried seaweed that Kang’s mother-in-law brought back from Taipei. Last in the parade of savory dishes is a stir-fry of tender, juicy strips of marinated flank steak with red and green peppers and aniseed. And for dessert, there are warm pancakes filled with red bean paste to eat in alternating bites with spoonfuls of mango ice cream. One of my guests is so taken with the rich, sweet bean paste that she crows: “Who needs chocolate?”

Lunch, I tell you, is an excellent thing.

*

Spago Beverly Hills, 176 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills; (310) 385-0880. Lunch Monday through Saturday. Tasting menu, $38 to $58 per person. Valet parking.

Vincenti, 11930 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 207-0127. Lunch Friday only. Tasting menu, $35 to $45 per person. Valet parking.

Yujean Kang’s, 8826 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood; (310) 288-0806. Lunch weekdays. Tasting menu, $25 to $30 per person. Parking in lot behind.