The Bazaar by Jose Andres (Restaurant - Los Angeles)

Alriiiiight!

Jose Andres is possibly the best known and most accomplished Spanish chef in America. He introduced the US to the whole small plates thing in the '90s and has been at the forefront of introducing molecular/techno-emotional/modern/whatever cooking to America, too. He apprenticed under Ferran Adria in the late-'80s, he's a TV star in Spain, has an English-language show on PBS called Made in Spain and is a certified Friend of Bourdain. He also owns a restaurant called Oyamel in Washington DC that opened my eyes to how brilliant Mexican food can be. What a guy.

Photo: Luis Magán

The Bazaar in Los Angeles brings together the traditional and modern sides of Andres' cooking, with the menu split down the middle between traditional tapas and inventive small plates that are mostly in the key of Spanish.

It's a massive restaurant, with a huge bar, two tapas sections (Rojo and Blanca) that serve the same menu with different decor, and a "patisserie" that serves dessert to restaurant customers and others wandering in. The restaurant has a  fun, Alice in Wonderland atmosphere, although the indifference of some of our fellow diners astounded me. The table next to us was filed with two jaded early-40s power couples who had apparently been to the restaurant before, yet seemed not to care for the food. They played with their BlackBerries the whole time, and seemed to be disinterested in the food and each other. Why would you bother?

Anyway, other than some questionable customers, the Bazaar is an incredible restaurant. I'm not usually a fan of long blog posts that walk you through a meal dish by dish, but... here's a long blog post that walks you through a meal dish by dish. Sorry about that.

Olives: Modern

"Olives, modern and traditional" is a kind of thesis statement for the restaurant, uniting the "modern" and "traditional" halves of the tapas-based menu. The modern olive is Ferran Adria's spherified olive, pure olive liquid bound in itself with sodium alginate and calcium chloride like a raviolo without the pasta. If you've got a few olives and a stash of chemicals, you could make them at home!

The modern "olives" are ladled from a jar and set next to a tin of more orthodox green olives, stuffed with orange zest, piquillo pepper and superlative anchovy. You're instructed to eat the traditional olive first to get a sense of the texture and then to try the modern version.

Olives: Traditional

The spherified olive must be one of the most famous and defining dishes of this decade. I thought I was prepared for them, but they still shocked me. They flood your mouth with olive juice with a bang, and it's so completely strange that it forces you to focus on the flavour of olive, something that you're so accustomed to that it usually wouldn't be remarked upon. That's what's great about these modern techniques, cliched though spherification has become. This isn't flashy manipulation for its own sake, it's just a modern technique used to draw attention to a fantastic ingredient.

Shrimp cocktail

"Just a shrimp cocktail (yeah right)" is 3 large prawns, each skewered on a plastic syringe of sorts. You bite the prawn and squeeze the end of the skewer to fill your mouth with the shrimp cocktail "sauce", a spicy tomato water. Yes, it's actually called "Just a shrimp cocktail (yeah right)", but I can forgive that kind of tweeness when the result is this tasty and surprising.

On the 'traditional tapas' side, "papas canarias" was a surprisingly humble revelation. It's a simple dish of potatoes served in the salt they were cooked in. They're roasted 'til wrinkled and served with a Mexican mojo verde as a dipping sauce. The tangy sauce is somewhat reminiscent of an Italian salsa verde, all acidic zing and herbs. The potatoes themselves were incredible, with a concentrated, almost sweet earthiness, and somehow the salt dusting and the acidic salsa completely balanced one another. We're planning to start growing some potatoes just so that we can try and recreate this incredible dish. One of the very best dishes we ate in the US, and so basic!

We tried a few other traditional tapas, including rich, gelatinous braised beef cheeks and a rustic salad of egg, tuna belly, carrot and peas with pristine olive oil called "The Ultimate Spanish Tapa". They were fantastic, but it's the more inventive end of things that really sticks in the memory.

"Philly Cheesesteak"

"Philly cheesesteak" is a re-constructed ode to a low-brow American classic. Andres' version consists of wagyu carpaccio atop cruncy, hollow "air bread", filled with warm cheese foam. Delicious and fun, although the strong cheese slightly overshadowed the thin wagyu slices. If I'm paying for wagyu, I want to taste wagyu.

"Miso linguine"

This linguine isn't linguine at all. Instead, it's "miso linguine", made by pouring a shallow miso broth gelled with agar agar and then cutting the set jelly into ribbons. The strands of "linguine" melt in your mouth and reform the broth. It's served with smoke trout roe.

Cotton candy foie gras

This dish, cotton candy foie gras, plays off the tradition of serving foie gras with sweet accompaniments (or at least a sweet wine) to cut the fattiness. Here the cube of liver is seasoned and then wrapped in cotton candy that has been lightly accented with vanilla. I love the idea of presenting one of the ultimate fine dining ingredients in a way that is more reminiscent of a circus. I suppose that sums up the Bazaar, in a way.

The important point is that almost all of these dishes are extremely satisfying. All the whimsy and fancy technique just enhances the experience, it isn't a crutch or a smokescreen to disguise substandard food.

After our tapas feast, we moved through to the patisserie for dessert. It was a nice change of pace and a cunning strategy to turn tables faster for the restaurant. I'm fine with that when it's done this well.

We wandered around looking at the cases of mignardises, the open pastry kitchen, the massive stacks of candles that look like macarons, the art and arty objects. All for sale, all a fun multicoloured jumble.

Dessert itself was ever-so-slightly disappointing. My "nitro floating island" was flash frozen meringue atop caramelized bananas and vanilla. Very tasty and inventive, but featuring too much meringue perched on top of not enough sauce. A minor quibble with a great meal.

The Bazaar is surprisingly cheap for those of us from Perth who are used to cowering in fear at the sight of a tapas menu. I think (from memory) we spent around $125 per head for food, and we ate a lot of food (as you can see) and took a few things home from the patisserie.

A good start to our trip.


The Bazaar by Jose Andres
465 S La Cienaga Boulevard
Los Angeles CA USA

Coming up: The French Laundry!

Fruit and vegetables in Perth

We have a lot of good quality produce in WA. Fantastic lamb, great seafood, even our own rapidly developing truffle industry.

Eating my way around California, though, has opened my eyes to the sheer range of ingredients we can't buy.

There's the range of fruit and vegetables used in Central and South American cuisine: jicama, hominy, fresh tomatillos. Limes are perplexingly expensive, despite our citrus-friendly climate and large South-East Asian migrant population. There's a whole bunch of ingredients starting with 'p' that you'll struggle to find: plantains, persimmons, pomegranate.

We've got a temperate, Mediterranean climate in Perth and the south-west of WA that can support everything from citrus to wine, and the interest in food is rapidly growing, but our choices are still fairly constrained.

I don't think I realised the limits we face until I visited San Francisco, in particular the farmers' market at the Ferry Building. The Ferry Building is a bit of a food mecca, and every Saturday it's surrounded by a massive market. There are dozens upon dozens of vegetable and fruit stalls, with so much specialisation. There's the berry guy, the potato guy. There's a mushroom shop with all kinds of fungi, including fresh porcini and chanterelles, as well as domestic and imported truffles. I saw a leek farmer advising a customer as to which of his leek varieties would be best suited for various modes of preparation. Have you ever seen any kind of leek in Perth other than... leeks?

What stunned me, though, is that it's not an isolated thing. Another market, a few miles away, had probably the second biggest range of produce I've ever seen (after the Ferry Building market, of course). Even corner grocery stores had a staggering range.

There's just a lot more choice. In Perth we can usually buy maybe three different kinds of chilli (long red, long green, and short 'Thai' varieties), with the occasional habanero if you're lucky. The array of chillis and capsicums (all "peppers" in the confusing American nomenclature) contained every degree of heat, colour and size you can imagine.

Why do we have relatively few fruit and veg choices? Is it a quarantine thing? Is there really not enough Perth food enthusiasts to support small producers? Is Perth too far from agricultural regions now that the city market garden is more or less a thing of the past? Do we just have lower expectations, or less competition?

I don't want to overstate things. As I said at the top of this rant, we have a lot of good quality produce in WA. I just wish we had more of it.

COMING UP: Photos and breathlessly enthusiastic praise for the French Laundry, the Bazaar, and other restaurants I can't stop thinking about!

California!

Hello internet!

We're off to California for a couple of weeks, so no posts from us for a while.

We're going to plenty of restaurants including The Bazaar by Jose Andres, Chez Panisse (home of Pol Pot in a muumuu), Ad Hoc and... THE FRENCH LAUNDRY. I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about when we get home. We will also eat our weight in tacos.

Vamanos!

Change of address

Hello!
The address of this blog has changed to http://www.palace-foods.com

The RSS feed and all of that stuff should still work, and any links to http://palacefoods.blogspot.com or individual pages should work too, but please let me know if you have any problems.

Thanks!

Restaurant Amuse (East Perth)

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling of being out of place in restaurants more expensive than Red Rooster.

Childhood special occasions were celebrated in suburban Chinese restaurants, and throughout my early twenties a meal that cost more than $20 was an unimaginable luxury. I've always loved food, but spending a substantial sum of money on a meal always felt like something that other, richer people did, like listening to classical music or voting for the Liberal Party.

Since finishing uni a few years ago I've made up for lost time by eating in as many restaurants as possible, but I still feel like an imposter waiting to be found out. I start to panic and feel as if everyone in the restaurant has figured me out. Can they see the small rip in my jacket, did they hear my car backfire as it limped around the corner? Can they tell that I don't know the difference between sauvignon and savagnin?

Restaurant Amusé puts me at ease.

I think that's because Amusé (I'm going to drop the slightly poncy 'é' now) is all about the food. That sounds like it should be a given at a restaurant, particularly a 'fine dining' restaurant, but it's not. This is not the sort of place you come to be seen (gross!) or to gaze at the river. Amuse is stuck in the armpit of East Perth, and the exterior looks more like a suburban accountant's office than a fine dining restaurant.

Once you're inside, Amuse couldn't be more welcoming.  The dining room is mostly chocolate and beige with the occasional unfortunate splash of bad art on the walls, and the service is attentive and precise yet warm and friendly. The front of house staff are led by Carolynne Troy, wife of chef Hadleigh Troy.

I was stunned on our second visit that all the waiters welcomed us back... they remembered us! A few months later it happened again, despite all three occasions being booked under different names! How do you teach that? They never remembered me at the Red Rooster drive-through window.

Amuse serves a nine-ish course degustation menu for $115 with no a la carte menu. It builds from an amuse bouche (duh), through a number of small savoury courses, culminating in a couple of meat-centric dishes. There is a vegetarian tasting menu too, if you must. After a palate cleanser the degustation finishes with a couple of desserts and petit fours. It's a marathon, but you won't feel as if you'll need to roll out of there.

Matching wine courses cost an additional $65. Get the matching wines, it's worth it. I particularly appreciated the sommelier's descriptions of the wines and her rationale for choosing each wine. I'm not a wine guy. I know next to nothing about the subject, except for the fact that I like drinking it. This makes me keen to learn more, but I'm also wary of wine speak that is too jargony or assumes a high level of knowledge. The sommelier's descriptions are refreshingly bullshit-free.

The degustation isn't a tasting menu composed of slimmed down a la carte plates. The degustation-only format means that the menu is conceived of as a complete experience. Recurring themes emerge, different treatments of the same ingredients are explored, similar techniques are brought to bear on very different ingredients.

"Smoke, tomato and ash" could have been disastrous, with an astringent smoky smear, sprinkling of ash and tomato sorbet. It packed big, bold flavours, and was a pungent start to the meal. Like almost everything here, though, it was well balanced. It's an intriguing dish, and one that makes you sit up and take notice.

Two variations (on separate menus) on a coddled egg were not quite as successful. Coddled egg with marron was too texturally one-note. The slippery marron pieces covered in the unctuous yolk needed some crunch. "Chicken or the egg?" delivered some texture and salty balance in the form of fried chicken skin pieces, but it was still too much for me and could have benefited from some acid to cut the richness of the egg.

The egg dishes were the only slight stutters in three near-perfect meals eaten at Amuse (two degustations and a three-course classic French meal for Bastille Day).

The kitchen's skill at cooking seafood is nearly as impressive as the creativity underpinning the more complex dishes. A lone mussel in a refined bouillabaisse was the briniest, plumpest mussel I've ever eaten!

The meat dishes are even better.

Two slivers of blushing pink squab breast were accompanied by a spring roll of shredded squab meat and a line of granulated coffee and cocoa that hinted at sweetness. On another menu, quail got a similar treatment, with a tiny confit quail drumstick rivalling the squab breast for sheer deliciousness.

"Beef, bacon, butter" was a cube of medium-rare wagyu with a breaded parcel of molten Cafe de Paris butter that pleasantly exploded with the impact of a knife. It was precisely targeted to the pleasure centre of my brain. The next day I got a text message from my friend Nat that just said 'beef'. I understood. The uniform medium rare (and the fact that diners are given no choice about the degree of doneness) suggests that the meat is cooked sous vide, but it's so well seared on the outside that you're not left craving a simple grilled piece of meat.

The playfulness doesn't let up with dessert. "Carrot cake" is a completely deconstructed plate of crumbs, salt, dehydrated carrot shavings and smooth carrot sorbet that slowly melts in your mouth to reveal a sweet, pure carrot flavour. "Jaffa" is a similarly deconstructed play on chocolate and orange, tasting just like the lollies, which is no bad thing.

I wish I'd taken photos, but my restaurant anxiety prevents me from being comfortable taking out a camera. I'll get over that.

There is very little that's 'safe' about this place; no crowd-pleasing classics or 'signature dishes' to fall back on. If you rave about a particular dish to your friends they won't be able to try it. The menu changes completely each month in line with the seasons and the chef's whims.

We don't see a lot of this kind of boldness in Perth, but I wish we did. I love it.

Restaurant Amuse
Unit 1, 64 Bronte Street
EAST PERTH WA 6004
08 9325 4900