The best soundtrack is a bustling dining room
Plus, a new cookbook store from a Three Lives & Company alum + my current favorite turkey sandwich
Hi, angels. I’m writing to you today from sunny Los Angeles, my first visit back since we moved. It’s really nice to be here. Thus far, I can report that the Jasmine Market tea leaf salad remains the #1 salad in L.A., and RVR is still firing on all cylinders. Travis Lett’s izakaya was our first stop after getting in on Saturday. Our meal was 10/10, and two dishes particularly stood out: a grilled squid salad layered with heat, thin slices of mandarin, celery, pickled peppers, and herbs; and a pile of brothy pole beans (Good Mother Stallard, according to Sam Rogers) with charred tomato and shiso. Also, the seasonal, apple-persimmon-coconut number at Beverly Hills Juice—which recently got deserved love from Stephanie Breijo in the LAT—is $16, but perfection. Now back to New York!
Troy Chatterton, the longtime manager of beloved West Village book shop Three Lives & Company, is working on opening a cookbook store—and it sounds like it’s right up my alley. I buy too many cookbooks and collect vintage titles, so donating to his Kickstarter for Wild Sorrel Cookbooks was a no-brainer. H/t to Ruby, a decade-long Three Lives customer, for the tip.
Wild Sorrel [will] carry a mix of inventory: new cookbooks and food writing that speak to the current moment, used books for accessibility for all shoppers, vintage and out-of-print books from collections far and wide that have important stories to tell. This mixture of new and old offers a wide variety of possibilities for the way we can cook today. New books for inspiration and learning new ways of cooking, old books to keep alive traditions, techniques, and wisdom of the past that should never be forgotten.
Pop-ups can be dicey. In the best-case scenario, they’re fun and delicious, but it’s rare that service is dialed, and chaos often comes with the territory. That’s part of the deal; we can’t expect a streamlined dining experience from something one-night-only, with a never-done-this-before energy. This is why, for me, a series is more compelling. Back when I worked at Resy, the Franks’ Backyard Chef Series was a blast. Two examples currently underway: Sunday Supper at ILIS, featuring family-style rotisserie chicken roasted over embers (running through the end of Feb), and the extended Ops East Village pizza collab series, where chefs from Cervo’s, Adda, Bartolo, Naks, and more will put their spin on sourdough pies (dates vary, through March). Enticing.
Chicory salad season is in full effect, one of the few reasons to love winter. When I wrote my magnum opus to salad last year in Los Angeles, I neglected to include what’s become one of the most prevalent formats: chicories with some kind of nut, some kind of fruit, and some kind of cheese. It shows up most often in the colder months, when bitter lettuces thrive. Let’s call it the Winter Chicory. If I were a type of salad, I’d be this one, I think. Recent, gorgeous examples include pink chicories with toasted walnuts, pears, and piave vecchio at I Cavallini; radicchio with grilled hazelnuts, Bosc pear, and Gorgonzola dolce at Morandi; and mixed chicories with hazelnuts, apples, and Gouda at Borgo. New York’s preeminent chicory purveyor, however, Campo Rosso Farm, hibernates from the Union Square Greenmarket in the coldest months. Their labor-intensive, small-scale farming practice makes it impossible to keep up with demand throughout winter. “We are on limited land and we grow as much radicchio in the early and mid season that we can sell. The late selections are a little more tricky in our climate. Some years they over mature early because it’s warm late and then get messed up by the cold. Some years they mature late because it cools off early and we get a small harvest,” farmer Chris Field wrote to me over email.
