Newsletter: Counter: Vegetables and vineyards
It’s been a very, very long week. So play some Leonard Cohen tunes and go to your local farmers market and either cook for your friends and family or gather around a table and let someone else do the cooking for you. Food and sustenance, poetry and elegy.
It’s a good time to consider the intrinsic joy of vegetables, whether on those market tables or the ones lately coming out of chef Josef Centeno’s kitchen. Jonathan Gold’s review is of P.Y.T, Centeno’s latest downtown L.A. restaurant, which is intensely vegetable-focused. We also look at a vineyard in an unlikely location, in Bel-Air near the 405, and owned by an unlikely wine-lover: none other than Rupert Murdoch. And there are taco trucks to appreciate and vegan restaurants to explore. Because we live in a city with beautiful diversity in its people and on its plates, and there is enormous comfort in that.
Pretty Young Turnips
Jonathan considers P.Y.T., which can stand for Pretty Young Turnips if you want it to, and finds some very pretty vegetables indeed. The project is the chef’s latest addition to his DTLA collage of restaurants, and it’s intensely farm-to-table: “You’re not here for authentic-ish versions of things you’ve tasted before, you’re here to taste the produce of the season transformed.”
The Grapes of Wrath. Or not
Wine writer Patrick Comiskey tells us about one of Rupert Murdoch’s latest projects, Moraga Estate, a vineyard the media mogul owns in Bel-Air, of all places. There, near the 405 and the Getty Museum, is Bel-Air’s only working winery. It is “a little vinous oasis set against the tide of urban sprawl,” and the wines are both predictably expensive and very good.
Yet another reason to love taco trucks
Taco trucks are glorious things, of course, and food writer Ben Mesirow gives us yet another reason to appreciate them: the delicious and unusual salsa de aceite, or oil-based salsa. You can find the lovely stuff at a Sylmar taco truck, a DTLA taqueria or two, and a Santa Ana farmers market. Or maybe try them all, as a plate of outstanding tacos can cure many things, or at least help some.
Vegan shopping and other news
If you spend a lot of time at Neiman Marcus and prefer your meals vegetable-focused, Matthew Kenney’s new vegan restaurant in the department store might prove almost as much fun as all those shoes. In other dining news, Food Deputy Editor Jenn Harris finds more Filipino food in Santa Ana (maybe after your tacos?) and döner kebabs in Westwood.
Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants, the authoritative annual guide to local dining, is online for subscribers and now features his 2016 Best Restaurants. If you didn’t get a copy of the booklet, you can order one online here.
Our cookie bake-off returns: Have you submitted your favorite recipe yet? Entries are now open for our sixth Los Angeles Times Holiday Cookie Bake-Off. Now is the time to put your best up against the rest.
“City of Gold,” Laura Gabbert’s documentary of Jonathan Gold’s Los Angeles, is available on Amazon.
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