What the critics are saying about LA’s ‘Best Restaurant’
The Los Angeles Times has released its annual list of the city’s best restaurants, and the paper’s resident reviewer, Jonathan Gold, has placed the five-month-old Vespertine at the top. At $250 per person, the restaurant’s avant-garde tasting menu ranks among the city’s most expensive, and its futuristic building has drawn comparisons to a space ship and a wizard’s tower. But what about the food? Here’s what the country’s leading critics are saying:
Jonathan Gold, The Los Angeles Times
“The entire experience at Vespertine, from the lack of right angles in the dining room, to the throbbing four-note soundtrack, to the overwhelming abstraction of the food, to the stunning cost of dinner, is going to drive many of you insane.”
“When you are presented a course consisting of chickpea-size baby turnips, chewy rice dumplings and powder-blackened balls of ripe banana, all the same size, the relationship among them is for you to decide. Most great cooking is about deliciousness. Kahn’s is about the intersection of perception and space.”
“I would say that a meal at Vespertine is mandatory for a certain kind of diner, but mandatory in the way that the James Turrell show at LACMA a couple of years ago was mandatory, or Berg’s “Wozzeck,” or the current season of “Twin Peaks.” It’s not dinner; it’s Gesamtkunstwerk.”
“Almost all good Los Angeles restaurants have a sense of place and time, fashioned from local produce, a sense of season and a nod to the diversity of the area. At Vespertine, you may as well be on Jupiter.”
“Anybody inclined to paint the restaurant as a steaming pile of pretentious nonsense will find that Jordan Kahn, Vespertine’s chef and overall impresario, is standing there with an open paint bucket and a brush.”
“When he defines the cooking as rootless, Mr. Kahn is on more solid footing. Early in his career he worked in the pastry kitchens of Per Se and Alinea, so he knows how to take pains. A great deal of the pains he takes at Vespertine seem to go into making the food look like something other than food.
That, at least, is how it struck me after one meal at this “gastronomical experiment,” as the website has it. Writing up my preliminary impressions seems more appropriate than a full starred review for a work that is explicitly, intentionally in progress, one whose aim is to do something restaurants haven’t done before. Never mind that this has been the aim of a small parade of restaurants from El Bullí on, and that Vespertine falls right in step with that parade, however much it may pretend to have sprung from a fallen spore from another galaxy.”
Besha Rodell, LA Weekly
“Kahn has dreamt up for Vespertine an extraterrestrial mythology, a fictitious framework that makes eating here as much performance art as it is dinner. There’s a soundtrack that follows you throughout the evening, which sounds less like music and more like the universe shifting its astral gears. There are aspects of the meal that are absolutely meant to unnerve you rather than delight you.”
“Kahn might be in a bit of a bind: Either Vespertine is not weird enough, or it’s so weird that it ceases to be fun. Does dinner need to be fun? I’d say so. There will always be an audience for truly revolutionary art, including art that isn’t wholly comfortable or pleasant. But attempting avant-garde performance art as a sustainable business model rather than a limited-run series of events is more than ambitious - it’s foolhardy.
Vespertine may indeed be a foolhardy exercise. Even with its still-evolving turn toward pleasure, this is a profoundly weird and profoundly expensive restaurant. But if I let go of all the chatter and philosophy, if I judge it without any expectation of radical disruption, Vespertine, as it is today, emerges in a clearer light: as a flawed but thrilling meal, as a stunning act of creativity and as a singular Los Angeles experience.”
Find out which 100 restaurants round out Gold’s list and find out which are also on our national list of 101 best restaurants.
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