A Burger Sequal: Umami Returns

I ventured out to the new Hollywood outpost of Umami Burger to check it out.

I never made it to the original Los Feliz branch, but I have to kvetch a bit about the fact that I'm pretty much over the massive wave of burger bars that Father's Office has begotten. There is a certain sameness to these places: burgers topped with various pork products and blue cheese, a large selection of beer, the obligatory sweet potato fries being consumed by a hipster clientele and attended to by a too-cool-for-school waitstaff. It's not that this is necessarily a bad formula, it's just not very original.

At Umami Burger, I tried the original Umami which includes their homemade ketchup, a shitake mushroom and a roasted tomato slice. We also tried the Manly Burger which has cheddar cheese and lardons. For sides, we ordered their thick cut fries and sweet potatoes with homemade ketchup and garlic aioli.

I have to say that I wasn't really thrilled with any of this. The burgers were fine, though not as good as a number of the others available in this same genre (Father's Office, Hungry Cat's pug burger, the Lucky Devil burger back when it was good, etc.). Lardons are always tasty, but they are small chewy nubbins that don't work very well on a burger, where they tend to fall out or require excessive chewing.

The fries were highly disappointing; they were only lightly crisped on the outside and their innards were starchy and stiff. If you're going to serve thick fries, they need to be soft on the inside; these needed a bit longer in the firer. The onion rings with a tempura style batter were probably the best thing we got.

Alas, another day, another burger bar.

Umami Burger - Hollywood
4655 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(323) 669-3922

Recent Reads: The Foie Gras Wars

In the past fifteen years, foie gras has gone from an exotic ingredient that was virtually unknown and unavailable to American eaters to a staple of high end restaurant menus. As its popularity has increased, so has the controversy surrounding the dish made from the fattened livers of geese and ducks. Chicago Tribune writer Marc Caro explores the controversy surrounding foie gras in his superb book, The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World's Fiercest Food Fight.

Writing in an informal, journalistic style, Caro covers many fronts of the foie gras controversy but focuses on his home town of Chicago, where the fatty livers were subject to a much publicized ban. Starting with Chicago chef Charlie Trotter's personal decision to stop using foie gras, he follows the politics of the Chicago ban from enactment to repeal. While Chicago is the focal point, Caro spends ample time on other far-flung locales, from the streets of Philadelphia, where the controversy reached a fever pitch, to Israel, whose supreme court banned the livers, to foie gras farms from France to California.

Seeking to fairly represent both sides of the controversy, Caro gives voice to foie gras producers, restaurateurs and animal rights activists alike, presenting each in a sympathetic light and allowing each to make their own arguments about the ethics of foie gras. In the end, he does a good job of not taking sides and presenting each side respectfully, though he seems to slightly favor the foie.

The Foie Gras Wars is less culinary history than cultural history, touching on such non-culinary issues as activist tactics, agribusiness and even old-time Chicago politics. For this reason, interest in this work should go beyond the narrow group of people (like myself) who have a specific interest in foie gras.

Caro is an engaging writer with a healthy sense of humor and the book is a joy to read from the first page. If you are at all interested in food ethics or just looking for a good read, I highly recommend it.

Whiskey Wednesday: Discount for Sku's Readers at the Scotch Malt Whisky Extravaganza

Fall is whisky season in LA, and hot on the heels of WhiskyLive, we are lucky enough to have another major whisky tasting event, the Scotch Malt Whisky Society's Single Malt & Scotch Whisky Extravaganza.

The Extravaganza will feature over one hundred (mostly Scotch) whiskies for tasting. It will take place on Friday, November 20 at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel (1700 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica). Registration begins at 6:30 p.m. and the event will run from 7:00 to 9:00 and includes a buffet dinner.

The Extravaganza is sponsored by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, a private club which buys whisky casks and bottles its own Scotch for its members. In my experience, their bottles are of excellent quality.

The price for the Extravaganza is $115 for members and $130 for nonmembers, but the Scotch Malt Whisky Society is offering a special discount for all readers of Sku's Recent Eats to register at the lower, member rate of $115.

To get your discounted tickets, call (800) 990-1991 and tell them that you are a reader of Sku's Recent Eats. Tickets are by advanced purchase only, so call before the 20th.

I'll see you there!

FTC Disclaimer: Sku was invited to attend this event free of charge.

Kogi Schmogi

I'm not much for trends and hype and am especially not much for long lines, so I never got around to trying the Kogi truck. In fact, I was so sick of hearing about it, I couldn't bear to read another word about it, much less write about it (except for some gentle mockery). I made no effort to search it out and I don't do twitter, so unless I stumbled upon it, I wasn't going to be having any.

Recently, though, I was heading to Daikokuya with the family for some ramen when we saw the Kogi truck out in the plaza of the Japanese American Museum in Little Tokyo. When we got to Daikokuya, the wait was so long, as sometimes happens there, that we went off in search of alternatives (little kids + long wait = no fun for anyone). I remembered the Kogi truck, and thought, if not now, when?

The days of the massive lines are gone, but it still did a very steady stream of business for the entire time I was there. We grabbed some taro boba from I Love Boba and settled in for some trendy tacos. We ordered short rib tacos, spicy pork tacos, chicken tacos, sliders and a kimchi quesadilla.

I can't, for the life of me, fathom waiting hours for this stuff. The meat was gristly and/or fatty, and the sauces were too sweet. There was some nice cabbage slaw on the tacos, and I did enjoy the quesadilla with its surprisingly well paired combination of cheese and kimchi. The slider was a good concept with some good flavors, but again, the meat was not impressive.

I returned a week later for another try and picked up blackjack (pork) quesadillas, chicken mulitas and a Kogi Dog. This time the sauces were a bit less dominant than our previous trip. The quesadilla was good, but the Kogi Dog was simply a standard hot dog with a topping similar to that of the tacos.

The mulitas, a special of the day, were similar to chicken tostadas, but with a tortilla on top as well as on the bottom; the order consisted of two of them, one with salsa rojo and one with verde. It was the best dish I'd had at Kogi in both trips. The tortillas were fresh and crisp, and the salsas were piquant and zesty. This was also the least fusiony of the dishes, hewing toward more traditional taco truck fair, though there might have been a bit of kimchi sandwiched in the tortillas with the chicken. It was a pleasant departure from the rest of the menu.

As a whole, Kogi struck me as more inspired by the Cheesecake Factory or some other mass market fusion food hopped up on sweet sauce than anything truly innovative or interesting. But hey, given that I don't Twitter and am not on Facebook, maybe this stuff was never intended for the likes of me in the first place.

Reubens and Toffee Bars at Brent's

So after many years of meaning to go, I finally made it to Brent's Deli in Northridge. Yes, the pastrami reuben was excellent, with pastrami that was certainly better than any in town save Langer's. Was the reuben, itself, the best in town? I'd have to do a side by side with Nate'n Al's to be sure, but it was damn good.

I expected a great reuben after everything I'd heard about Brent's, but what really took me by surprise was the toffee bar, a sort of brownie/blondie like bar filled with toffee bits, topped with chocolate chips and other good stuff. It was dense, sweet, chocolaty and chewy. I bought one to take home and immediately wished I had picked up two or three at least. Oh yes, I'll be back to try more of everything.

Brent's Delicatessen & Restaurant
19565 Parthenia Street
Northridge CA 91324
(818) 886-5679

Whiskey Wednesday: Knob Creek and the Greatest Drought That Never Was

It was with great fanfare that Jim Beam announced last week that the great Knob Creek drought of 2009 was finally over. What? You never heard about the Knob Creek drought? How could you possibly have lived through this tragic moment in whiskey without realizing it?

For those of you who are living in a bubble, I will explain. In early July, Beam announced with great fanfare that there was a shortage of its Knob Creek Bourbon. Knob Creek is a popular, nine year old Bourbon made by Beam as part of its overhyped "small batch" collection. In announcing that it had not made enough Knob Creek to meet orders, the company press team sent out T-Shirts saying "I survived the drought" and empty bottles to customers and the press (not to me, I might add). Undoubtedly, the tongue-in-cheek freebies were aimed at encouraging articles about the shortage, to make sure people would, um, know that this dire shortage existed.

If you didn't see one of these articles, chances are, you never knew there was a "shortage" of Knob Creek. Most stores in my area carried healthy quantities of Knob Creek the entire time. Last week, Beam announced that the drought was finally over.

Now, while I appreciate the humor that Beam used in this ploy, it was one of the sillier marketing campaigns I've seen. Admittedly, my own cynicism may be enhanced by the fact that I live in Southern California, and when we hear about droughts, it tends to mean something a bit more serious than a slight production blip in your favorite Bourbon.

Even had there actually been some sign of depleted stocks or limited availability, I highly doubt that there is any person so committed to Knob Creek that they couldn't live with it for two months. After all, most of us Bourbon geeks wait all year just to get our hands on the latest Buffalo Trace antique collection or other limited editions, so a few months gap in a pretty standard Bourbon, just doesn't impress me.

So chalk one up to marketing silliness and let's all hope that the H1N1 vaccine shortage is as artificial as Beam's Knob Creek shortage.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes - Post Updates

One of the peculiarities of the new media is that reviews stay on-line forever. Someone who Googles a restaurant or whiskey might pull up a review from years ago. Unfortunately, the world of dining is not as static as the world of archived internet reviews. Now that I've been at this blog for a few years, I have a number of reviews which are outdated. The worst problem is restaurants that have gone downhill. (Why is it so few places seem to get much better over time?) A few months ago, I voiced my sadness at what had gone awry with the previously excellent Luck Devils, but I can't do that for every place I review, so I thought I would catalogue a few of the places that have changed, mostly for the worse, since I sung their praises.

Shanghai Restaurant. A year after my review of this San Gabriel Square Shanghainese, the food quality seemed to have dropped. The menu was the same, but the flavors just didn't have the same spark. I have heard that there have been some recent changes, hopefully for the better, so it may be worth revisiting.

Moishe's Village. As part of my tour of the Third and Fairfax Farmers Market, I gave a top tier ranking to this spot. While it calls its dishes boerek, but they are really closer to Georgian khachapuri, similar to an egg and cheese calzone. When I first visited, these were fresh and delicious, but since then, I've found the offerings lackluster with uneven flavor; perhaps they are using a different kind of cheese which resulted in a product with weaker flavors.

Crumbs Bake Shop. When the Crumbs shop first opened in Beverly Hills, I really enjoyed their cupcakes, though I did find them a bit too sweet. Fast forward around 18 months and there are five Southern California locations, the sweetness has gotten way out of hand and general quality has suffered. The actual cake in the early days was quite good, but now, for the most part, it is just a content-less vehicle for the overly sweet toppings.

No Reservations. Finally some good news. After watching the first season of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, I slammed it as contrived and over-written, but in the years since, it has become one of the best food shows on TV. It took Bourdain a little while to catch his stride, but once he did, he managed a balance of food exploration, humor and political commentary that you won't find on any other cooking show.

There are surely more places I've reviewed over the past two years that have changed, for worse and hopefully for better, and there are countless others that have closed their doors. Alas, even as I was writing this entry, I read that Disney has changed their beloved corn dog, and not for the better.

As a blogger, all I can do is write in the moment, and then turn and face the strain.