The Golden Age of Ice Cream

Sweet Rose

In Los Angeles, we are lucky enough to be living in a golden age of ice cream. Ten years ago, high quality ice cream was sparse in LA. Now, there are excellent ice cream shops all over the place (with more coming). Here is a list of my favorite ice cream shops in the Sku Eating Area*

1.  Traditional Ice Cream

No one beats Fosselman's in Alhambra for old-fashioned, high butter-fat traditional ice cream. Sure, they give a nod to modernity with flavors like taro and lychee (which are both very good), but this place is still an old-fashioned parlor dishing it out the old way.  My favorite flavors are coffee & cookies and peppermint (which is especially good in a hot fudge sundae).

Mateo's Ice Cream and Fruit Bars at Pico & Vermont is a traditional  Mexican ice cream shop with excellent paletas and great tropical fruit flavored ice cream.

Top Round, the Roast Beef sandwich place on Olympic and La Brea, does thick, creamy frozen custard, the mid-western way, which you can get plane or in a concrete with various mix-ins. Probably the best frozen custard I've had in LA.

2.  Hipster Ice Cream

The new wave of ice cream definitely has some of that ridiculous hipster vibe - everything locally sourced from farmers markets, cacao percentages listed on a chalk board, uncomfortable metal chairs, flavors like uni-fennel sorbet and olive oil goat cheese swirl, but you know, the stuff can be really good.

In this category we've got Sweet Rose Creamery, probably my favorite (everything is great from the punchy fruit sorbets to the standards like salted caramel and coffee), Carmella (especially the ice cream sandwiches), Jeni's (where pretty much everything is good) and Salt & Straw, which is definitely the silliest (which makes sense since it's an import from Portland) but still quite good.

SnowLA

3.  K-Town Favorites

Koreatown has developed its own unique ice cream culture with places like Snow LA, HoneyMee (which has multiple locations in the LA area) and CottonHi. SnowLA is a shaved ice cream place mostly fun for the diverse toppings bar. HoneyMee has a really delicious ice milk soft serve base. I like it plain or topped with honey, though if you like the idea of a big, waxy honeycomb in your ice cream or ice cream in a hot dog bun, you can get those too. CottonHi is soft serve topped with cotton candy. It seems like a silly novelty, but the soft serve is really good.

Bulgarini

4.  Gelato

Bulagarini in Altadea was the winner of my gelato tour of many years ago, and it still towers above the competition.  Altadena is a bit outside the Sku Eating Area, but it's worth the trip. The yogurt gelato with olive oil is the classic, but the seasonal fruit is wonderful and the nut gelatos (e.g., pistachio and macadamia nut) are as trasnscendent as a frozen dessert can be.

As to more Sku-adjacent gelato, we are now lucky to have Grom, an Italian gelato chain that serves up great stuff just like you can get at an Italian train station. The only downside, and it's a pretty big downside, is that it's located at Hollywood & Highland. Rumor has it that we will be getting a Venchi, an even better Italian gelato chain, when Eatly opens in the Century City mall. 



Those are my favorites.  Did I miss anything good?  Let me know, but don't say Milk. Milk is an abomination, a really popular abomination where you stand in a long line to get beautiful, overly sweet, mediocre ice cream. God bless them though, because I'm happy to let people stand in line there while I breeze into Sweet Rose across the street.

*The Sku Eating Area or "SEA" is not an official LA culinary designation, but it is the area of the city in which I most frequently eat and therefore that with which I am most familiar. It includes an area of mid-city bounded by Hollywood/Franklin/Los Feliz Blvds. to the North, La Cienega Blvd. to the West, Venice Blvd. to the South and the 110 freeway to the East as well as the western San Gabriel Valley.

Blue Star Donuts

After posting about the amazing doughnuts at Sidecar Doughnuts in Santa Monica, several folks advised me to hit another west side shop, Blue Star Donuts in Venice. Well, who am I to shrink form a doughnut challenge?

Blue Star is a Portland import located on a strip of Abbot Kinney filled with imports, including fellow Portlandian Salt & Straw Ice Cream and San Francisco's Blue Bottle Coffee.

Blue Star feels less like a doughnut shop and more like a doughnut museum with a display of single doughnuts on long white trays. I tried a variety. My favorite was the old fashioned which was the moist, buttery sort of cake doughnut that I really like. The apple fritter, while unlike a standard fritter - this one was more cakey and less fried, was also excellent.  However, nearly all the rest of the doughnuts were disappointing.

In my Sidecar post, I lamented doughnut shops that concentrate on toppings at the expense of the actual doughnut. This was mostly the case at Blue Star. The toppings and fillings are great. The passion fruit glaze had an intense passion fruit flavor, the Valrhona chocolate doughnut had a nice, dark chocolate topping and a well done, not too sweet, custard filling; the creme brulee had a satisfying burnt sugar crust.

While all of that was great, the actual doughnuts were lacking. The yeast doughnuts were too dense and not at all crispy. The cake doughnuts, with the exception of the excellent old-fashioned, were a bit mushy and also lacked a crispy crust.

If I lived nearby, I might stop by for the occasional old fashioned or fritter, but overall, Blue Star was disappointing.

Blue Star Donuts
1142 Abbot Kinney Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90291
(310) 450-5630

  

Sidecar Doughnuts are Without Equal

I'm a doughnut maven. I've scoured the city for great doughnuts. Over the last few years, there have been a lot of new additions to the doughnut scene. I haven't hit them all, but I've been disappointed with a lot of them which seem to expend a lot of effort on creative toppings while neglecting the actual doughnut. It's all well and good to cover your doughnut with bacon and Snickers bars, but I want to taste a high quality doughnut underneath.

Recently, after it was recommended to me by my friend Tim Read (of the late, great Scotch & Ice Cream blog), I made it over to Sidecar Doughnuts in Santa Monica. Let me be clear, these are the best doughnuts I have ever had. I do not make such a pronouncement lightly. Sidecar uses all kinds of toppings (including bacon), but they keep their eye on the prize, the actual doughnut. The doughnuts are made throughout the day, come out fresh and are topped while you watch. The glazes are more subtle and less sweet than a lot of places, allowing the doughnut underneath to shine rather than covering it up. Because of the constant production and the popularity of the place, all the doughnuts I purchased were still warm.

The Sidecar piece de resistance is the butter & salt doughnut. It's a cake doughnut with an amazingly moist and buttery texture and just a light glaze and sprinkling of salt. It's like a more refined version of Primo's buttermilk bar. This is a doughnut that is all about the actual cake, and it is pretty much a perfect specimen.

I also loved the choc-a-lot, an airy, raised chocolate doughnut topped with chocolate glaze and cacao nibs. The other doughnuts I tried, raspberry, blueberry cheesecake and salty caramel, were all very good but the butter & salt and the chocolate were the ones that stuck in my mind. In fact, pretty much as soon as I finished my last doughnut I was thinking about going back. It's that good.

Go there now!

Sidecar Doughnuts
631 Wilshire Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90401
(310) 587-0022
(There is also a location in Costa Mesa)

Recent Eats: Buns, Fries, Ice Cream and More

It's been a long time since this was a food blog, but I still get asked a lot about where I've been eating, so I thought I would do a brief, totally eclectic post which actually covered Sku's recent eats.

Republique, in the old Campanile space on La Brea is phenomenal.  The food is served family style on communal tables.  I went with a big group, and everything we had was very good; about half of it was mind blowing. And Jonathan Gold is absolutely right that these are the best fries in town and that the Bernaise sauce is nearly drinkable on its own.  Other highlights were the eggs and uni on toast, duck confit, and for dessert, a chocolate cherry bread pudding.  The cocktail menu was sadly unimpressive for a restaurant of this quality.

I was so impressed that I stop by for breakfast and they have what may be the best breakfast in mid-city.  The breakfast is a much more casual affair.  You order at the pastry counter and take a seat in the dining room.  This place has wondrous eggs.  The eggs on toast with asparagus and arugula was as simple as it sounds, but it was one of the best breakfast dishes anywhere.   The scrambled eggs are so pillowy soft and creamy they are almost a custard, sliced asparagus spears were perfectly cooked with just the right crunch, add toast from their bread and the slight bitterness of arugula with sea salt and...its hard to describe how good this dish was.  On top of that they had a perfectly executed kimchi fried rice.  At the bakery items are more standard but you must try the canelles.  The burnt sugar on the outside is crisp and sweet almost to the level of  a creme brulee crust which gives way to a creamy, custardy center.  I may have enjoyed the breakfast more than the dinner menu (though I would have liked a side of those fries)  

The Bun Shop. This new Koreatown shop is one of those Asian fusion food trucks that opened a restaurant.  This one is a great concept, Chinese style bao buns stuffed sandwich-style with all manner of fillings: pork belly, bulgogi, spam, chicken katsu and more.  They are slider sized and come with an order of macaroni salad or marinated edamame.  These things are great and highly addictive.  They make a great snack anytime, but you could see how this place could become a major late night craving, though it closes at 10 pm.  This place is all sorts of fun. Go there now!

Sweet Rose Creamery.  This Brentwood ice cream shop now has a branch on Beverly across from Pan Pacific Park.  As a huge ice cream fan, I'm always happy to see more great ice cream, and this is indeed great, with fresh ingredients and creative (though not insane) flavors. They have a standard menu with silky smooth salted caramel, strong coffee and other standard flavors and a changing list of seasonal offerings.  The seasonal offerings are particularly good, utilizing fresh cherries, orange and other seasonal ingredients.  This place immediately rockets to the top tier of LA ice cream; hell, it may be the best.  They also have homemade sodas and toppings, but the ice cream is so damn good that I've never gotten around to them.

I've never had much of a wait at Sweet Rose despite the fact that people continue to line up around the block for the mediocre ice cream at Milk, just down the street.  Just as well, hopefully those Milk drinkers won't find out that Sweet Rose puts their overly sweet  concoctions to shame.  They also make great coffee using Caffe Luxxe beans.

SnowLA. I'm not sure if snow ice has reached other parts of the country yet.  I first had it in Hawaii a few years ago, but it's been in the San Gabriel Valley for a while and is starting to make in-roads in Koreatown. An ice cream/shave ice mash up, snow ice is made by placing a large block of ice cream in a shave ice-type machine; then toppings are added that would be typical for shave ice or frozen yogurt.  The thin, ribbon-like shaved ice cream at Snow LA is airy and light and melts in your mouth.  I particularly like it topped with condensed milk and dulce de leche as well as "popping boba" that burst with mango, yogurt or strawberry flavor when you bite into them.  The snow ice at SnowLA on Sixth Street is the best I've had with a really fine texture and good toppings.

Isaan Station.  Great Thai comes to Koreatown.  Alright, we're not that far from Thai Town, but still, it's rare for good Thai to be available south of Santa Monica Boulevard.  Issan Station, on Western at First (just down from the Bun Shop) brings some T-Town to K-Town with its classic Thai street food.  Really great sour sausage, loads of larps and papya salads as well as soups and noodles.  This will definitely become a regular spot for me.

The Oinkster.  The Oinkster, the fast-casual-gourmet-hipster joint in Eagle Rock recently opened a Hollywood branch.  Despite all of the praise heaped on the Eagle Rock joint, I never went because I consider Eagle Rock to be nearly unreachable by major freeways and boulevards, and for some reason, it seems to take me longer to get there than to Monterey Park.  So I was excited to finally get to try Oinkster, where everything except the beer is homemade.  My favorite here was probably the pulled pork sandwich, which had a nice Carolina style vinegar based BBQ sauce.  The burgers were nicely flavored if over cooked. The pastrami, which is house cured, was quite good, though more in the style of The Hat (thin cut, greasy, fast food stand style) than Langer's (thick cut, juicy, deli style).  The homemade condiments were very good, particularly the chipotle ketchup (and I seldom like homemade ketchup), but the fries and onion rings were lackluster.  When you call your fries Belgian, you have a lot to live up to, and these were not crispy enough and needed salt.  The breaded-style onion rings were similarly bland.  All in all, pretty good food, though expensive (but that goes with the category).  A good option for that area of Hollywood.


Eat up!

Roast Beef and Frozen Custard: Top Round

Top Round is a new roast beef sandwich/frozen custard spot on Olympic and La Brea.  The sandwiches, which you order outside, are Arby's style roast beef sandwiches with various condiments and toppings, but none of them matter so much.  What you should do is get one of the sandwiches with extra beef and then slather it with their horseradish sauce, which had an awesome kick to it.

Then get some curly fries.  Fried in beef tallow, the fries come plain, or with one of a number of toppings: home made cheese whiz, beef ends and drippings or "dirty" with gravy, cheese and caramelized onions.  All of these were great except for the beef ends and drippings, which needed a little something else (cheese?).

When you finish your sandwich and fries, go inside and order a frozen custard concrete (sort of a flurry-type concoction).  The custard here is by far the best I've had in LA, smooth, rich and creamy with a clean vanilla taste.  The toppings are nothing special, but getting the concrete whips up the custard to a great, smooth consistency.  Usually when you see frozen custard in LA, it's soft serve.  This is the real deal and the true highlight of this place.  Sandwiches are good, custard is fabulous.

One of the owners of Top Round is Anthony Carron from 800 Degrees pizza.  Carron is a St. Louis native, and this place definitely has a St. Louis feel (my wife's a St. Louisan and I lived there for a year).  You can get provel cheese on your sandwich, which is a God forsaken processed cheese loved only by those who grew up in St. Louis.  And the frozen custard is a clear homage to St. Louis' great Ted Drewe's Frozen Custard stand.  But while St. Louis natives will undoubtedly love this place, so will everyone else.

Check it out!

Top Round Roast Beef
1000 South La Brea (SE corner of La Brea & Olympic - and there's a parking lot!)
Los Angeles, CA 90019
(323) 549-9445

The Best Things I ate in Paris

I was lucky enough to spend a week in Paris with my wife for our twentieth anniversary.  Having never before visited the City of Lights, I was excited to eat as much amazing food as humanly possible.  Based in the Rue Cler district, we branched out all over the city center and ate and ate and ate.  Given that it was my first trip, I make no claims to having uncovered anything veterans wouldn't know well, but these were my favorite things.

Cheese.  There are more cheese shops in Paris than anyone could make a dent in during a one week trip, but my very favorite was a small shop on Rue du Champ de Mars called Marie-Anne Cantin. They age their own cheeses and have a wonderful selection.  Epoisses is one of my favorite cheese and Cantin's had a wonderful grassy note, but I also loved their pungent Camembert, and their wide selection of aged goat cheeses as well as their butter.

Baguettes Cereal.  A baguette is a simple enough thing, but Paris baguettes are a wonder, with a density and richness absent in even the best baguettes I've had in the U.S.  While wheat breads in the US tend to be hard and flat tasting, the baguette cereal, a French whole grain baguette, is intensely flavorful, adding a zing to the regular baguette.  There were numerous boulangeries that had amazing baguettes, but one of my favorite cereal baguettes was at Nelly Julien on Rue Sainte Dominique.

Chocolate apes at Patrick Roger

Chocoalte Truffles.  The amount of cheese I ate in Paris was second only to the chocolate. Chocolate stores abound and display their wares like jewels in glass containers.  I'm a fan of the plain, cocoa coated chocolate truffle.  The two best I had were at Patrick Roger and La Maison du Chocolat.  The Patrick Roger truffle had a stronger and more complex flavor with a good balance of acid and bitterness. The Maison du Chocolat truffles may not have been as complex, but they had a creaminess that made them even more enjoyable.

Hot Chocolate.  Laduree is a chain of chocolate cafes.  Looking like a frilly English tea room, they might have been decorated by my six year old daughter, but they are oh so good.  Hot chocolate is everywhere in Paris in the fall, and the hot chocolate at Laduree is the best I had.  It's really a very thick ganache, much like the kind I make at home.   The serving is enormous and I'd recommend getting it with whipped cream (a la Viennoise) to cut the richness a bit because it really is more like drinking melted chocolate than any typical hot chocolate, though it is oh so good (and it'll give you a bit of a caffeine jolt as well).  They have great macarons as well.

L'As du Fallafel.  I thought it was curious that this little falafel stand seemed to be the single most recommended eatery in Paris by my friends and guidebooks alike.  Located in the Jewish corner of the Marais neighborhood, L'As dishes out falafel sandwiches to long lines day and night, and they are worth the wait.  These are small, perfectly fried, perfectly spiced falafel in a pita with a number of veggie slaws, grilled eggplant and an awesome, garlicky, hot sauce.  This may have been my favorite meal in Paris (I went twice).  The sweetness of the eggplant, the piquant sauce and the plethora of little falafel balls all comes together in perfect balance. You can go to the take out window or eat in, but the advantage of eating in is that you get your own little bowl of the hot sauce, which is a big plus.

Aux Merveilleux de Fred

Meringues from Aux Merveilleux de Fred.  These things are crazy.  Layers of meringue covered in whipped cream and rolled in chocolate (or other flavored) flakes.  Akin to a meringue layer cake, they come in various sizes.  They are creamy, chewy, melt in your mouth miracles of taste and texture.  The cream is not overly sweet and comes together with the delicate meringue to create a crunchy, creamy wonder.  The whole experience is like biting into a sweet cloud.  I'm not usually a fan of white chocolate but that was my favorite flavor.  The dark chocolate flakes overwhelmed the subtlety of the cream whereas the white chocolate just added to the creamy richness.

Ice cream. Ile St. Louis is a small island in the Seine that seems to consist mostly of ice cream shops.  Flocks of tourists window shop with cones in hand.  Most of the shops serve Paris' legendary Berthillon ice cream, but if you continue past the pretenders, you'll reach the actual Berthillon shop and find that its reputation is well earned.  Bold flavors and a creamy texture made this some of the best ice cream I've had.  We tried the rich, dark chocolate cacao, tangy passion fruit sorbet, and a creamy but nutty pistachio. 

Fine Dining.  I ate at a lot of bistros and cafes, but while in France, I wanted to do a splurge meal at a traditional French temple of fine dining.  On a friend's recommendation, I chose Le Pre Catelan.  The restaurant is located in Bois de Boulogne, a huge and beautiful (though somewhat seedy) park on the northwest outskirts of Paris.  The dinner menus at this three star Michelin eatery are extravagant and extravagantly priced, but they have a lunch prix fixe for 105 Euro (140 with the wine paring).  The lunch is an even better deal than it looks like as each course actually consists of two or three parts.  I will resist going through each course of this meal and say only that it was one of the most memorable meals of my life.  The ambiance, including the traditional French service with an army of waiters set in a beautiful dining room with a courtyard view, was of course memorable.  But, as part of my three part pork entree, the meal included probably the best cooked piece of pork belly I've ever had, with cracklin' skin, a thick, toothsome but somehow not fatty layer of fat and meat that was the rich essence of all that is good and porky in this world, all bathed in a pork jus (the other two pork courses were a braised pork in tomato foam and a sort of liquid head cheese served in a martini glass and topped with mayonnaise.  And of course, the cheese selection was wonderful, with a particularly well aged Mont D'Or.  The wine pairings added depth to each course, and unlike in most American tasting courses, the pours were generous and bottomless.

Not everything was perfect in the world of Paris food, but it was pretty close.  Sure, we had some mediocre bistro meals, and I can only imagine the world of tiny, out of the way treasures we had no clue about (and please let me know what they are!), but generally, the availability and quantity of amazing food was, well, just as true as everyone says it is.

Pastry Love at Cooks County

This Beverly Boulevard farm to table operation opened last year.  I stopped by for brunch on a Saturday, and the pastries alone were worth the trip.  The pastry basket isn't actually a basket; it's a tray, but the day I went it came with a fresh jelly doughnut, a blueberry muffin, a cheese biscuit and a ginger scone.  These were all excellent, but the scone impressed me the most.  Never have I had a scone that was so flaky, so melt in the mouth delicious.  The doughnut was slightly larger than a golf ball and stuffed with a thick, nicely tart strawberry rhubarb jam.

The baked goods also shined as part of the breakfast entrees.  The baked pancake is a unique and delicious beast, a puffy pancake with crisp edges and a light and fluffy center emphasizing the "cake" in pancake.

The house made bagel was delicious, though a bit hard on the outside, but the smoked trout it was served with was bland.

Overall, the sweet outshined the savory, but most everything was good.  I went back for lunch, and definitely enjoyed it, but nothing was quite as great as their various brunch pastries.

Cook's County
8009 Beverly Blvd. 
Los Angeles, CA 90048

(323) 653-8009

Ten Years at the LA County Fair

This year was my tenth consecutive year attending the LA County Fair. I first visited back in 2001, upon hearing of the deep fried Snickers bar, still one of my fair favorites. Over the years, I've become very strategic at navigating fair food, concentrating on a few old favorites (notably the aforementioned Snickers and Dr. Bob's excellent ice cream stand) while scouting for anything new that looks like it has potential. (All of my fair coverage can be found here.) This year, I came out with two new finds.

The best strategy at the fair is to look for stands that are connected to local restaurants. Why eat some generic corn dog when you could be eating a taco from King Taco or a shrimp po-boy from Harold & Belle's? This year's find was a stand from the famous East LA institution, Manuel's El Tepeyac. The fair stand, as with most stands, has a limited version of the regular menu, but it includes the Hollenbeck Burrito bursting with chili verde, beans, rice and guacamole and their famous taquitos, which are some of the best anywhere.

The next good find was from an unexpected source, Chicken Charlie's, that haven of deep fried crap (which may have been an actual menu item one year). I generally decry each year's deep fried novelty but then try it anyway because I'm a sucker for such things. This year, it was deep fried cookie dough. About the size of doughnut hole, the fried cookie dough balls were sweet and gooey with a chocolaty molten filling. The contrast of a sweet, gloppy filling with a fried exterior is exactly what you want out of a fried treat, and this one worked well.

The Fair has another week to go so you're not too late to catch some deep fried goodness.

Hawaii Eats: Alan Wong

Alan Wong is the godfather of Hawaiian cuisine. Around twenty years ago, he and a handful of other chefs created a new haute cuisine, blending classical technique with the global intersection of foods and the fresh produce that can be found in the islands. It had been ten years since I visited his flagship restaurant located in a nondescript office building on King Street, and I wondered if it was still great or had faded. I needn't have worried.

Alan Wong offers an a la carte menu as well as two tasting menus: one made up of classic dishes from the restaurant and a pricier chef's tasting menu. Since I hadn't been in a decade or so, I chose the classics, and I was not disappointed.

I won't run through all of the dishes but there are a few that were really memorable. A "soup and sandwich" included a mini kalua pig and foie gras sandwich served with a tomato soup. I expected to love the sandwich, but while it was good, I really found myself loving the soup, which had two parts, a tangy red soup and a rich, cream colored soup, served in a yin yang design.

The seafood lasagna featured lobster and scallops in a cream sauce wrapped in a single lasagna noodle. It looked very rich but the distinct flavors of the perfectly cooked shellfish cut through the richness.

Lastly, the "mini coconut" dessert consisted of a haupia sorbet in a chocolate shell, cut to look like a coconut. It was both amusingly presented and delicious. Haupia is a traditional Hawaiian coconut gelatin-type dessert. I'm generally a big fan of coconut sorbet and this one was as smooth and rich with coconut flavor as I could have wanted and it was well complemented by the dark chocolate shell, like a sophisticated Mounds bar.

Alan Wong, he's still got it.

Alan Wong
1857 South King Street
Honolulu, HI 96826
(808) 949-2526

Hawaii: Shave Ice Update

I've been a big fan of Hawaiian shave ice since I was a kid and discovered the old Island Snow chain in Waikiki. Even though those were likely sub-par examples, it was a revelation. A snow cone that was actually soft like snow, not hard and icy, with tropical flavors and ice cream on the bottom (only later on the North Shore would I experience the beauty of sweet beans mixed into the ice cream). I would sometimes eat a couple per day. When I go to Hawaii for vacation, I still eat an embarrassing amount of shave ice. Here's a run down of a few old favorites and some new ones from this trip. In tasting note fashion, each Shave Ice will be rated on three categories as follows.

1. Ice. The ice should be soft and melt in your mouth. This isn't a snow cone. Points off for big ice crystals or hardness.

2. Flavors. How do the syrups taste. My favorite flavors are strawberry, strawberry and cream and lilikoi, but I reserve the right to try whatever I feel like.

3. Add-ons. I like ice cream and azuki beans (sweet black beans) on the bottom of my cone. The beans should be sweet and soft so that they form a beany, fruity milkshake at the bottom of the cone. This is really the best part of a shave ice.

So, here they are in the order I consumed them.

Waiola Shave Ice, Kaimuki, Honolulu (pictured above right): This is an old favorite but many say it's gone down hill since a change in location a few years ago (there is another branch in Moilili). That's certainly true of the service, which was pretty bad and disorganized, but the shave ice is still very good.
Ice: Near perfect. Soft all the way through.
Flavors: Fantastic. Strong flavors that last through the whole shave ice.
Add-ons: Meh. The beans are too hard and not sweet enough which means they don't blend well with the ice cream and deny you of that lovely beany milkshake. It's like having canned kidney beans at the bottom.


Keneke's, Waimanolo: This storefront plate lunch stand makes a solid shave ice.
Ice: Good, some hardness and an ice chip or two, but mostly soft.
Flavors: Good. Nothing homemade tasting but solid stuff.
Add-ons: Good. Beans are a mashed paste, ice cream is fine, nothing to complain about. And hey, where else are you gonna' get shave ice if you're out there anyway.


Shimazu Store, Kalihi, Honolulu: This is one of the most popular shave ice places on Oahu. It's only been around for a few years but it's definitely got foodie cred. The shave ices here are enormous, the flavor list extensive with lots of innovative flavors. It's also a fun place and the proprietor is very friendly.
Ice: Very good. The inside of the cone is as soft as can be, but the outside of the cone tends to harden, possibly due to the size of the thing. This encourages you to burrow into the middle which leaves you with an icy outside shell, which is not a great situation to be in.
Flavors: I was actually not very impressed with the flavors. The lilikoi had an artificial-candy taste instead of a natural lilikoi flavor. The strawberry and cream was fine but not as rich as the Waiola version.
Add-ons: Beans were good, ice cream seemed a bit too sweet.

Aoki's, Haleiwa: I've stopped hitting the more famous Matsumoto's on my trips to the North Shore because the lines are just too long so instead, I went to nearby Aoki's.
Ice: Okay. Not super soft.
Flavors: Not very good. Flavors were weak and indistinct. Everything just tasted like sugar and citric acid.
Add-ons: Very good. Beans were sweet and mixed in well. Proportions of beans and ice cream were perfect.

Bonus - Snow Factory, Moiliili (pictured above). Technically, this isn't shave ice, it's shave ice cream, but the format is similar. Instead of ice, they shave a giant block of ice cream and add syrups and other add on such as mochi, cookies, etc. The add ons here are more similar to a Korean bingsu then a traditional Hawaiian shave ice.
Ice/Snow: The shaving of the ice cream creates a great, melt in your mouth flavors.
Flavors: Fruit flavors tended to be better than more traditional ice cream flavors. Maybe it's just the psychology of eating this as a shave ice, but I thought the lilikoi worked better in the shaved format, then say peanut butter.
Add-ons: Most were pretty good. The mochi balls go well with the ice cream, but the best were passion fruit pops. Little gelatinous balls that explode with passion fruit when you bite them. These reminded me of the "cherries" they serve at Jose Andreas' Bazaar and other molecular gastronomy treats.


Summary: Overall, I would say Waiola still has the best flavors and ice. Keneke's may be my favorite for the add-ons. Even though Shimazu is a big hit with pretty much everyone these days, I didn't think it lived up to the hype.

New Trader Joe's Sweets: Caramel Sauce & Cookie Butter

I wanted to give a shout out to two fairly recent Trader Joe's sweets I've been enjoying.

Trader Jacques' Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce is a fantastic caramel topping for ice cream. This purports to be salted caramel (I should note that the idea of using fleur de sel for this is just silly, since it's a finishing salt valued for its texture - when used in cooking, it's no different than any other salt). In truth, it's not very salty. What it is though, is excellent caramel topping for ice cream or whatever else you think should be topped in caramel. It's rich, not overly sweet (for caramel) and has a wonderfully smooth texture. It's one of the best store-bought caramel toppings I've had.

It looks like peanut butter and sounds like a medical implement of some sort, but Speculoos Cookie Butter is a creamy cookie paste. It tastes like mashed up gingersnaps but with the consistency of creamy peanut butter. It's tasty, though I find the ultra-creamy texture a bit creepy, and the ingredient list reveals that it is indeed achieved with a combination of oils and emulsifiers. Dip pretzels in it, spread it on a PB&Speculoos sandwich or just scoop some from the jar, but not too much.

Umamicatessen: Willie Wonka's Meat Factory

If instead of setting his eyes on chocolate, Willie Wonka had gone into the meat business, you might imagine a world of high end pork rinds, pig ear garnished cocktails and foie gras doughnuts, and sure enough, all of those things are on the menu at Umamicatessen, the new restaurant from the Umami Burger group.

Located downtown, the cavernous, high ceilinged restaurant's menu is broken into three concepts, each with its own name and style. There is a regular Umami Burger; a Jewish style deli called Cure, and a pork/cured meat/charcuterie section known as Pigg. The Umami Burger menu will be familiar to anyone who has been to one of those outposts. The New York deli has the deli staples you might expect such as knishes, matzoh ball soup and corn beef sandwiches. Each concept was designed by a different chef.

Being a pork fan, I was immediately drawn to the Pigg section of the menu, and was pretty pleased with its offerings. Designed by San Francisco chef Chris Cosentino, Pigg features a wide variety of pork products. The Cone o' Cracklins is a cone of pork rinds seasoned with sherry vinegar and sage and advertised as "100% lard fried." These rinds were light and fluffy with just a slight pork inflection. Far from the grease bombs that are packaged rinds or chicharron, they had the texture of those puffed shrimp chips and were surprisingly free of grease.

My favorite offering though, was the pork liver pate sandwich. Served on a ciabatta roll, the liver was rich and juicy, shimmering with fat, more like a lobe of porky foie gras than a typical liver pate. The arugula and caramelized onions offered just enough sweet and acid to cut the fat. This is really a superior sandwich which I will definitely return to.

For dessert, well, I do love the doughnuts, and in these last days of legal foie gras, how can I not order a foie gras doughnut. The FJ&J is a doughnut stuffed with foie gras and berry jam and topped with peanuts (pictured at right bottom). When you cut it open, the foie, in liquid form, explodes out of the pastry like the liquid center of a molten chocolate cake. The first bite of this is a heavenly mix of sweet jam, fatty foie, pastry and peanuts, but it doesn't hold up as well beyond that first bite. It's one of those high concept dishes that isn't quite as good as amazing as it sounds, though still worth trying.

The tres leches, cajeta doughnut (pictured at right top) was excellent, topped with cinnamon studded whip cream and filled with a milky sauce that references a tres leches cake.

Excessive, silly, strange, delicious, Umamicatessen has everything except the Oompa Loompas.

Umamicatessen
852 S Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90014
(213) 413-8626

Meat Market Mania: Mercado Buenos Aires

Part market, part deli counter but mostly restaurant, Mercado Buenos Aires is the place to go for a lovingly crafted meat-intensive meal with exquisite desserts. Taking up the bulk of a small Van Nuys strip mall on Sepulveda, the Mercado's lack of ambiance or even passable service in some cases is made up for by the food. There are empanadas, milanesa, Spanish style egg tortillas and many other choices, but the things to get here are the parrillada.

A combination between Braziailan churrascaria and Korean BBQ, the parilladas are grilled meats piled onto a small grill that is served at the table. As a lover of innards of all stripe, my favorite was the parrillada Buenos Aires which came with sausage, blood sausage, skirt steak, short ribs, pork, sweetbreads and intestine. The skirt steak was cooked to a perfect medium rare, well spiced on the outside and tender (particularly for skirt steak) within. The short ribs were sliced kalbi-style, juicy with melted fat. The sweetbreads had good flavor but verged on tough. I'm not usually a big intestine eater (pun intended) but the intestines were nicely charred to crispy with a liver like consistency.

My favorite part of the parrillada, though, was the morcilla, South American blood sausage. Now, I'm something of a blood sausage junkie, but this morcilla was all I ask for in a blood sausage, with a firm, deep black casing giving way to smooth as edible velvet meat mixed with bits of fat. The flavor was deep and intense but quite mild. This quickly becomes one of my favorite, if not my favorite morcilla in LA.

For those who are not as interested in offal, there are other parrilladas with the steak and short rib but with chicken instead of the innards.

Keep in mind while you are attacking the grilled meat that you need to save room for the Mercado's wonderful desserts. Their flan is the perfect texture, creamy but not gelatinous or overly eggy with a nice scoop of dule de leche; it's definitely one of the best flans in town. But the dessert to die for at the Mercado is the panqueques with dulce de leche. It's really a crepe as opposed to what we would think of a pancake, bursting with dulce de leche and bruleed on top to create a textural triptych of crunchy burnt sugar, yielding to soft crepe encasing gooey dule de leche. I may go back just for those panqueques.

While judging from the weekend crowds, this place is definitely popular, I don't hear much about it from the LA food crowd, but I should. If you like meats and sweets, you need to go.


Mercado Buenos Aires
7540 Sepulveda Blvd
Van Nuys, CA 91497
(818) 786-0522

RIP Thee's Continental Bakery

In all the hub bub over Nancy Silverton's new Farmers Market spots, Short Cake and Single Origin, there hasn't been much mention about the place that occupied that corner for the thirty years previously.

Thee's Continental Bakery low key bakery that made just about everything, from croissants to rolls to sweets. There are people who swore by their hamburger and hot dog buns as the best in town. I personally loved the tres leches cup, a parfait version of the Latin American treat. They also did a mean chocolate marzipan log, great florentine cookies and petits fours.

Thee's wasn't fancy by any stretch of the imagination and it was about as unpretentious as you can get. Often staffed by a lone counter person who was also baking, its memory serves as an amusing contrast to the massively staffed Short Cake/Single Origin.

Thee's wasn't a culinary destination (I rated it as second tier in my "Ultimate Guide" to the Farmers Market a few years back), but it was a nice corner of the market and one that I'll miss even though I'm a fan of its replacement.

Short Cake/Single Origin: More Nancy Silverton at the Farmer's Market

I recently reviewed Nancy Silverton's Short Order burger joint at the Third and Fairfax Farmers Market. Since then, Silverton has ordered a pastry/coffee shop as well.

Located where Thee's Continental Bakery used to be, Short Cake/Single Origin is really a single stand with two names (much like the Cognescenti "pop up" at Proof Bakery). While I was underwhelmed by Silverton's burgers, her pastries, unsurprisingly, are spot on. I'm already addicted to the chocolate bear claw, and I love the brunette, a sort of blondie (not a brownie or a blondie, but a brunette, get it?) with pine nuts and a sprinkling of thyme.

The coffee at the Single Origin side gives a welcome shot of third wave aesthetic to the tired Farmers Market coffee scene. Single Origin uses Verve coffee from Santa Cruz and brings a real third wave cuppa' to Third and Fairfax, which is more than welcome.

Unlike Short Order, which I found underwhelming, these establishments are an excellent addition to the Farmers Market and worth a trip on their own accord.

Short Cake and Single Origin
LA Farmers Market
Third & Fairfax

Last Minute Gift Idea: Sweet Confections by Nina Wanat

I was crushed earlier this year when Nina Wanat shut down her awesome candy company BonBonBars which produced some of the best candy anywhere, ever. But Nina must know the old adage, give me some candy and I eat for a day, teach me how to make candy and I eat for a lifetime, because while BonBonBars is no more, she has a new candy making book out just in time for the holidays.

Sweet Confections: Beautiful Candy to Make at Home, is a fabulous book. It's got some of everything: caramels, fudge, marshmallows, toffee, after dinner mints, you name it.

The best thing about this book is that it is very accessible. I've made lots of chocolate but never made any other types of candy, and I was able to jump right in and make some great things out of Nina's book. The recipes are clearly explained and not overly time consuming. And for the most part, you can do them with ordinary kitchen equipment, although you will need a candy thermometer. Lots of recipes also require a stand mixer, but I found I was able to do fine with a food processer. The only caution I have is to watch how much the recipe makes; some of them make quantities that are larger than you may need (unless you're opening your own candy store) so you may want to halve them.

One thing to be clear about is that this isn't a BonBonBar cookbook. Very few recipes for the old BonBonBars appear (the exceptions are some of their marshmallow candies). My guess is the candy bars were just too challenging for the average home cook, so I will have to wait to see if there is a second volume that teaches me out to make those Scotch bars.

So if you're looking for a great gift for a home cook or lover of sweets, check out Sweet Confections, available for only $12 on Amazon.

Disneyland Dining: Stage Door Cafe

A few years ago I did a write up of the various food offerings at Disneyland. One place I didn't make it to back then was the Stage Door Cafe. The Stage Door is in Frontier Land, just to the right of the Golden Horseshoe ice cream shop. The cafe is a counter where you order food to eat in the outdoor seating area.

It turns out that even more than most Disney eateries, if you can imagine this, the Stage Door is a palace of fried food. In fact, literally everything on the menu is fried, with the exception of the mandatory Disney-healthy-option bag of apple slices. The menu choices are fish & chips, chicken tenders & fries and corn dog & fries. The corn dogs are the excellent Disneyland version available at the Main Street red wagon and the Corn Dog Castle at California Adventure. The chicken was perfectly acceptable and I didn't try the fish.



For dessert, they have funnel cake offered topped with sugar, strawberry topping or chocolate. I had high hopes for the funnel cake. After all, Disney cuisine may have a number of draw backs but their strength is that they know how to fry the shit out of things. The corn dogs are probably the best food in the park, the churros are tasty and the monte cristo sandwiches at the Blue Bayou are legendary. Unfortunately, that deep frying prowess didn't seem to carry on to the funnel cake. Instead of being crisp, it was chewy and stale. I suspect it had spent some time sitting under a heat lamp, which is death for funnel cakes. But the flavor was also pretty non-existent, which is, I suppose why they buried it in strawberry glop and non-dairy whipped topping.

Overall, the Stage Door Cafe is not a bad option if you're looking for something fast and greasy. Just skip the funnel cake.

We All Scream for Sweet Cream

People who are obsessive about coffee insist on drinking only straight espresso or drip coffee. In their view, milk obscures the fragrances and flavors that make the coffee distinct and exceptional. Whiskey lovers are the same way...ice numbs the palate, and while a little water is acceptable, neat is preferred. Yet in the world of great ice cream, the trend seems to be to create the most bizarre flavor combinations. Everyone wants you to try their new bacon-wasabi-cheddar ice cream.

Well, when it comes to ice cream, I like fun flavors as much of the next person, but I also like to taste it in its purest form, and that means sweet cream. Sweet cream is the basis of all ice cream. A creme anglaise (a custard of milk, eggs and sugar) with heavy cream. Creme anglaise itself is one of the wonders of the world and I am totally happy to eat it straight, but when you add cream and freeze it, it's sublime. Tasting the core ingredients stripped of any additives makes you understand that all ice cream really is "frozen custard."

When I lived in New England, sweet cream was on offered at all the great ice cream places. I've seen it occasionally since then, but recently it seems to have dropped off menus, or maybe it was just never as big in California.

So now, I make it myself in a little ice cream make I recieved as a wedding present many years ago. My only addition is a few teaspoons of maple syrup which adds to the depth of the sweet element but isn't enough to give a maple flavor.

After 40 minutes in the machine, it's soft, white, fluffy and pure. Ice cream at its most basic and wonderful form. Long live the sweet cream!

No Fry Zone: (fōnuts)

Fonuts, or (fōnuts) as the proprietors spell it, is a shop on West Third Street that sells non-fried doughnuts (i.e. faux-nuts, get it?). It's hard to understand what would make someone make a non-fried doughnut. The first guess might be that they would do it for health reasons, but given that these are decked out with thick, syrupy toppings, filled with creams and even sprinkled with bacon, I'm thinking this wasn't a health decision. Whatever the reason for the decision, they should reconsider.

Like most doughnut shops, Fonuts has cake and yeast varieties. The cake do fine, they are cake after all. The unfried yeast doughnuts have a taste and consistency similar to Portuguese sweet bread. It's not offensive but it doesn't have the yeasty zing of a good yeast doughnut, plus that type of bread has a perpetually stale mouthfeel.

It's sad because the toppings at Fonuts are remarkably good. The Hawaiian doughnut is a round yeast doughnut filled with an almost mousse like coconut cream with a strong coconut flavor; it's rolled in powdered sugar and just a touch of salt. The sugar/salt/coconut combination is unexpectedly brilliant. The salted caramel doughnut has a wonderfully thick caramel topping with a creamy consistency. The maple bacon doughnut has a white glaze which tastes more of vanilla than maple and a nice sprinkling of bacon; it catches the sweet/smoky/salty balance exactly without any unwanted grease. The PB&J has a rich, dark filling with a strong burst of peanut butter. While they run quite sweet, the flavor combinations are wonderful and are clearly made with great care. The problem is that they lose out to the flat flavor of the bread. While eating them, I couldn't help but think, my God, this would make a really great doughnut, like Doughnut Plant great. Eating at Fonuts is like living a pastry tragedy.

I get that this is an innovation or gimmick (the difference can be hard to tell), but please Fonuts, get a fryer and make us some real doughnuts.

(fōnuts)
8104 W. 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 592-3075

RIP: BonBonBar - But Still a Chance to Get One Last Order

BonBonBars are so good that I've written them up several time. Nina Wanat's Bay Area based one-woman candy company makes amazing chocolate bars and marshmallows. She is a true artisan and a whiskey lover to boot, doing crazy things like making a chocolate Scotch Bar with Talisker and a Bourbon Bar with George T. Stagg. Her standard caramel nut bar may be the best candy bar I've had anywhere.

I suppose all good things must come to an end, and unfortunately, BonBonBar is no different. Nina announced today that she is closing down the shop. All orders must be in by this Thursday, October 6, so this is your last chance to enjoy these fabulous candies. Get some now!

The saving grace is that Nina just published a candy making cookbook which will hopefully allow some of us to recreate her wonderful creations. I've ordered mine and will post a review when it comes in, but for now, I'm stocking up on the last set of BonBonBars.

Good luck to Nina and I hope she's abel to continue to pursue her passions.