Made it to Avra this evening.
I would describe Avra as a sort of upscale Olive Garden. Hated, hated, hated the room. Ugly, bland and upscale chain restaurant looking – the kind of place you might find in a suburban gated community or a recently remodeled mid-tier resort hotel. I have also gotten so used to music playing in restaurants (was recently at Bavel, where, to my surprise, I liked the music quite a bit) that it seemed strange that there was no music playing at all at Avra (unless there was Muzak playing in the background that only an animal with good hearing could hear). Everything just felt very suburban (or maybe Beverly Hills is a suburb - the Calabasas of Los Angeles).
On to the food. First they bring you out a complimentary plate of pita chips, radishes that are soaked in sweet syrup and which were dreadful, olives and a small portion of mediocre hummus. The menu is rather large, but we were interested in the whole fish. You walk to the back of the restaurant and peruse the offerings – everything ranges from about $36 a pound to I believe over $60 a pound and all the fish are at least a pound. We chose Lavraki, which is a kind of whitefish, and which was the cheapest by the pound of all the offerings. You don’t know how much it actually will be until they weigh your fish – ours came out to $48.30. The whole fish comes with nothing. You have to order a side if you want anything else to eat with it. We ordered grilled vegetables for $12.95. The fish was okay – nothing special – and the vegetables were bland and uninteresting. I would been much happier eating fish at Michael Cimarusti’s fish restaurant at Eataly. And if we hadn’t stuffed ourselves with complimentary pita chips because we were starving and it took quite awhile for the fish to arrive, the fish would not have been enough food for two.
We drank a white Greek wine by the glass called Moschofilero which wasn’t bad (and which was better than the insipid white Greek Assyrtiko that we also had a taste of). We also had a Greek red, Troupis “Fteri” Agiorgitiko, which was insipid. It retails for about $15 a bottle and the restaurant offers it for $17 a glass. I don’t mind paying high restaurant markups if I am going to discover a great wine, but the wine list at Avra is as uninteresting as perusing the wine aisle at your local supermarket.
There is no way I would ever return to Avra. Too many good restaurants in L.A. to waste time and money with something like that.
After dinner, we thought we would go to the bar at Cut as I had looked at the Cut wine list by the glass and they had a decent selection of dessert wines (although the non-dessert by the glass list is unimaginative). We walked over to Cut, but were surprised to find both the restaurant and the bar closed for Labor Day.
We ended up at the Rooftop Bar at the Waldorf. I hadn’t been there since Christmas, when the wine list sucked, and the wine list still sucks. How badly did the wine list suck? Well, I decided to order club soda instead of wine. I also ordered a dessert - pound cake with cherry sorbet, which was mediocre. Against my strong advice, my dining companion ordered a glass of Scarpetta Pinot Grigio – you can pick up a bottle at Total Wine for $12. The Rooftop Bar sells it for $18 a glass or $68 a bottle. My dining companion pronounced it the worst wine she had ever had in her entire life. I tasted it and it was awful. Out of curiosity and because I would never return to the Rooftop Bar without bringing my own wine, I asked the very nice bartender how much corkage was and it is $65. Which might be okay, but the few times I ate at the Rooftop Bar last year, the food sucked. So much so that I joked to someone in the restaurant industry that the Rooftop Bar would be a great place to hang out if only they let you bring both your own food and your own wine. He said he didn’t think that was a viable business plan for a restaurant.
After tonight, my new mantra is “I will never dine out again in Beverly Hills.” When I was in college, the joke was that the closer you are to a university town, the worse the food (because college students will eat anything) and I think you can replace that with the closer you are to Beverly Hills the worse the food.