Page 78 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

No. No.

18 and its countless pretenses, this chill, female- 21
If you have grown weary of “gastronomy”

fronted hangout might be your end-of-the-
decade antidote. Natural wines get generous
pours. Chewy sourdough, baked in-house and
drenched obscenely in olive oil, begs for a
schmear of chicken livers tickled with Madeira.
Celery (yeah, celery) will be ignored no longer
after it takes a tumble with dates, pistachios,
and the pheromonal fish sauce called colatura.
Baltimore (yeah, Baltimore) can now make
rightful claim to having the sexiest third-date
spot in America.

No.

20 kinship with artichokes, but it’s pretty easy to
A T I P O F T H E
H AT TO T H E All it said on the menu was “braised arti-
O L D S C H O O L choke.” (Having grown up in California, I feel a
AT R E D H O O K
TAV E R N . mess them up. I have learned to accept disap-

pointment.) Guess what. I have never had a more
perfect artichoke than the one I wolfed down
during lunch one afternoon at Green Almond
Pantry. The place is a counter with only eight
stools, but chef Cagla Onal, who grew up in
Turkey, seems to treat each salad and dip and
Mediterranean sandwich and roasted vegetable
with the sort of loving care you’d expect from
l’Arpège in Paris. I later emailed Onal about the
braised artichoke, and she sent me a delicate,
multistep recipe involving olives, lemon peel,
parsley, mint, and sweet onion. Always remem-
ber: “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy,” and the size
of a place is no indication of its ambition.

Here’s the plan.
Grab a long table
during lunchtime at
No.
Vivian Ku’s bright Tai-
wanese canteen and
order everything. The
19 sandwiches with pork
dan dan noodles, the
belly and five-spice
beef, the thousand-
layer pancake with
egg and cheese—all
of it practically shim-
mering with just-
cooked freshness.
Eat. Then roll a few T H E G R E E N
B E A N S A L A D AT
frames at Highland G R E E N A L M O N D
Park Bowl so that you PA N T RY.
can work up an appe-
tite for a second go.

Step through the door of the
windowless building in Culver City and get
time-warped to a bygone Hollywood
Allison Plumer is cooking what you want to eat when era of steaks and oysters Rockefeller and
it’s Friday night and you’d prefer not to ruin your appetite with martinis. Dear John’s, the deliciously
overthinking. The burger is very good, but what I kept day- retro brainchild of chef Hans Röckenwag-
ner and his wife and business partner, Patti
dreaming about after visiting Billy Durney’s ode to the old New
(chef Josiah Citrin collaborated on the
York were the croquettes (which tasted like ham and cheese and menu), is a time capsule with a shelf life:
rye from a corner bodega by way of Barcelona), and the wedge The building will be torn down in April
salad with a rasher of bacon as big as a baseball bat, and the 2021. Go now. At least the memories will
confidence of the Hemingway daiquiri—as though the bartender last forever. —Kevin Sintumuang
understands that this is a tavern, damn it, and the cocktails matter.

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