At last, L.A. puts down its salad fork

At Melisse in Santa Monica, chef Josiah Citrin is beginning to sell a lot of sweetbreads and wild hare. At Cafe Atlantic in Pasadena, Xiomara Ardolina increasingly finds customers receptive to her stew of garbanzo beans, chorizo and pigs’ feet. At Angelini Osteria in West Hollywood, Gino Angelini now serves kidneys every Tuesday night. Down the street, at Grace, Neal Fraser counts wild boar among his bestsellers -- and on some nights, he says, his rabbit special has outsold his chicken dish, 7 to 1.

I don’t mean to suggest that Los Angeles is about to become the most adventurous dining city in America. Many people here in lotus-land-cum-lettuce-land are so diet-conscious that I certainly don’t envision the opening of a Melrose Avenue branch of my favorite restaurant in Rome -- Checchino dal 1887, which specializes in tripe, brains and other organ meats.

But over the last year or two, chefs here tell me they’re finally beginning to see more local diners willing to experiment, to say “Yes!” instead of “Yuck!” when presented with unusual menu choices.

No one seems to know just what triggered this nascent sense of adventure and curiosity. Is it simply a matter of the vanguard of Los Angeles diners coming of age? Or have recent articles suggesting that fat is actually good for you suddenly freed folks to express their innard selves?

Maybe we’re all benefiting from the emergence of a new generation of diners who, unlike those subjected to the laughable extremes of the nouvelle cuisine movement, don’t automatically reject something new and different because they know from experience that it will be truly dreadful. (Turbot in a kiwi chipotle marmalade?)

Offal is not awful, and with their clientele becoming more receptive, chefs are freer to stretch beyond the menu cliches of ahi tuna and free-range chicken breast. It’s no coincidence that our best new restaurants are offering diners new choices.

A.O.C. serves dozens of tiny plates, tapas-style -- including braised pork cheeks. Sona’s new menu includes beef cheek ravioli. Bastide is including veal tongue and pork belly on some of its chef’s tasting menus.

Indeed, several chefs say more customers are asking for tasting menus now, willing -- even eager -- to put themselves in the chef’s hands.

“It’s increased every month, and my chef’s special tasting menu is now up to 25% of the total,” says Alain Giraud at Bastide.

Lee Hefter at Spago Beverly Hills reports a similar trend. Moreover, he says that after “trying for seven years to educate the public” on the joys of wild game, he finally feels he’s starting to break through.

“They’ll order wild pheasant now and partridge, just like they order our veal cheeks and whole roast suckling pig,” he says. “But grouse and woodcock are still a tough sell.”

Too bad. Grouse -- the gamier, the better -- is one of my absolute favorite dishes in the world, which is why autumn -- game season -- has long been my favorite time of the year to go to restaurants.

But there are still a lot of hurdles to jump before the Los Angeles dining public becomes as adventurous at table as their counterparts in, say, New York or Paris or Barcelona.

Fit for a rabbit

Unfortunately, I think much of the Los Angeles dining public can still be characterized as “a bunch of rabbits,” in the mid-1990s words of a chef friend of mine.

“They order salad -- and only salad,” he said, “and they nibble furiously for a few minutes and then they hop off to the gym or the spa.”

Based on what several other local chefs have told me over the years, I think this characterization is not only accurate but -- I’m sad to say -- it even includes some of my friends.

One eats only chicken, wherever she goes. Another recently insisted on going to a new steakhouse in Beverly Hills because she’d heard it was “hot and really in” -- but when we got there, she suddenly announced that she didn’t like steak and wouldn’t order one. A third friend went to Napa Valley with us on a weekend trip, but when his family accompanied my wife and son and me to dinner at the French Laundry for his son’s birthday, he chose instead to go to Burger King by himself.

Why have diners here been so timid? To begin with, Los Angeles does not have the long-standing tradition of fine dining -- and fine dining as adventure -- that Paris and New York and San Francisco have. Although excellent restaurants did thrive here occasionally through the years -- Perino’s opened in 1932, for example, and Scandia in 1952 -- it wasn’t really until the late 1970s and early ‘80s that the dining experience began to become an integral and widespread feature of our local culture.

Then, of course, we quickly became one of the centers of the gastronomic universe, key contributors to the “new” American cuisine.

Los Angeles is faddish, though, and for many, the dining experience was just another fad. When it passed -- and when the recession of the early ‘90s set in -- the absence of a fine dining tradition left restaurateurs here with little to fall back on.

The absurdities of the nouvelle cuisine movement certainly (and understandably) discouraged many diners from experimentation. But it’s the obsession with weight and health, with looking trim and fit in our Hollywood-driven, image-based society, that’s long been the motivating force behind the play-it-safe-and-slim, “green salad, dressing on the side, iced tea” syndrome that for so long demoralized chefs here.

Some might say it’s none of my business what other people eat -- or don’t eat.

Wrong.

Timid diners lead to timid chefs and timid restaurateurs, and that adversely affects the rest of us. No one wants to offer a product that no one is willing to try. If most of a restaurant’s potential customers are not adventurous, the restaurant is not likely to be adventurous, not likely to offer new and different and exciting dishes on its menu.

That’s one reason why, for most of the last decade or so -- until very recently -- few truly interesting restaurants have opened in Los Angeles.

This has become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. People who really care about food -- including the opinion-makers who write about food -- either stopped coming here or came and went away unimpressed.

That meant fewer stories in the national press about Los Angeles restaurants -- and fewer food industry awards for Los Angeles restaurants. In the most prestigious of these award competitions -- the annual James Beard awards -- no Los Angeles chef has won the national rising star chef-of-the-year title, given to the best chef 30 and under, since the awards began in 1991; no Los Angeles restaurant has ever won the best new restaurant award; no Los Angeles chef has even won best chef/California since Joachim Splichal and Michel Richard won the first two, in 1991 and 1992.

Getting overlooked

This isn’t to say Los Angeles chefs and restaurateurs haven’t deserved to win any of those awards. A few have. I’m the chairman of the Beard Foundation Restaurant Awards Committee, and I voted for Los Angeles entries in all three of those categories this year. We had three restaurants -- Sona, Bastide and A.O.C. -- that were all better, in my opinion, than L’Impero in New York, which won for best new restaurant. And I think Hefter and Angelini, among others, are better chefs than Hiro Sone, who won the best chef/California award for Terra in Napa Valley.

But Los Angeles restaurants were in the doldrums for so long that none of these candidates, or the few other deserving local candidates in recent years, have had enough support nationally to win among the more than 400 Beard voters from coast to coast.

This may not seem important to anyone but the chefs and the restaurateurs and egos involved. But when chefs and restaurants in a given city win prizes, it encourages entrepreneurs in that city to open restaurants and encourages chefs in that city to take chances in the kitchen, to push the culinary envelope.

All of which is why I’m happy to say there are growing signs of both a restaurant revival and some incipient risk-taking at Los Angeles restaurant stoves and tables.

I’m even hoping that Splichal, who had to give up on the special offal (he called it “odd things”) section of his Patina menu several years ago, will re-introduce it once things are running smoothly in his new location at the Disney Concert Hall.

I’m not suggesting that everyone has to eat kidneys to have a good time at a restaurant or to qualify for admission to some mystical, exclusive dining club. Even my wife, Lucy -- so adventurous in everything that I call her “Our Lady of Variety” -- doesn’t like kidneys. Everyone is certainly entitled to individual preferences -- likes and dislikes. But to dogmatically limit oneself to only salads or only chicken or only fish or to refuse even to try something new and exotic greatly diminishes the pleasure of sitting down to dinner -- and ultimately diminishes that pleasure for us all.

To echo the plaintive cry of mothers everywhere, I can only say, “Try it, you’ll like it.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.