If they super blow up I will be both so sad and so happy for them. This place is one of, if not my favorite restaurant in LA. Definitely the one I’ve dined at most in the last 5ish years.
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They are blowing up… but in a good way! They are expanding their kitchen! With that investment, I don’t think they are going anywhere soon! This week they started serving from a food truck.
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is there menu at the food truck the same or reduced?
percebes on the tasting menu!
https://www.instagram.com/p/CspRmJ4vGN8/
as a sidenote, looks like alaskan percebes might be a new thing? seen them on fourstar seafood for sale… wonder who figured out that there were percebes in alaska…
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I didn’t even know percebes existed here! Only had them in Portugal
Goosenecks! Yum!
A bit uncommon but I’ve seen them at Korean supermarkets.
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Friends have gathered them on the Sonoma coast.
agreed - the two places I’ve had them are Portugal and a Korean restaurant in LA.
No percebes tonight, but I haven’t been this moved by a meal in LA in a really long time.
Photos coming soon—but holy shit the hot dishes are a damn revelation.
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Shells: Geoduck, Beausoleil oyster with trout roe, razor clam, blood clam
The geoduck was perfect, all sliced in front of you. Quite liked the blood clams too.
Two types of uni, kanpachi
Probably the worst dish of the night. Santa Barbara uni from SeaStephanieFish wasn’t perfect (according to the chef) so he put in some Hokkaido uni as well.
Shrimp aguachile, fried heads
This is a really remarkable dish. Perfect aguachile and the fried shrimp heads are immaculate. Noticeably better use of Transparent shrimp than Anajak imo.
Bluefin (farmed) tostada
The amount of thought that went into this dish is crazy. It’s a tostada raspada, in which only one side of the tortilla is cooked through, and the other side is left raw, then that raw masa is scraped off, then it’s like dried for two days, then fried, which results in a corny, nutty, super crunchy tostada. I mean the level of detail here is remarkable. Chef Gilberto said he was working on getting this tostada right for months. Generous amount of arbol hot sauce too. So good.
Razor Clams
Really great product, done simply in a white wine and garlic butter sauce. The least interesting of the four hot dishes.
Dungeness Crab and Kanpachi Taco
Dish of the year candidate. Heaps of dungeness crab with locally made oaxacan cheese, and a little kanpachi thrown in there as well. Drenched in a crab butter salsa. Blue corn house-made tortilla seared on the plancha, in the same way Carlos Salgado does at Taco Maria with that sturgeon taco. Ugh, nearly started crying here. Kinda like when you’re at a concert that’s really going off and you kinda disassociate for a little bit and fully process all the joy around you. Woof.
Abalone Tamal
Lol, this was stupid good too. Leftover masa from the raw tostada thing blended with chicken stock, abalone on top, all basted in a stock of lobster, crab, and abalone liver. The woman next to me teared up while eating this one.
Lobster and cabbage roll
So, Yucatan-style cabbage rolls (which are descendants of Lebanese cabbage rolls) stuffed with lobster knuckle and kanpachi sausage and rice. Also, more lobster in a saffron, lobster-head, and chives sauce.
Long story short, the raw dishes are similar, if not identical to the top raw dishes that you can order a la carte. In short, they are extremely good, as we all know. The final three dishes of the night though were all transcendent, if not legitimately moving. I was just sitting at that counter, listening to whatever corny music was playing through the Mercado’s speakers, and just absolutely marveling that a place like this could exist. What a testament to LA.
We walked out of there and my wife turned to me and was like “That might be my meal of the year.” There’s certainly some nostalgia at play there–when we were chowpups at USC I’d get her Chichen Itza’s sopa de lima whenever she was sick–but this was extraordinary. Spent two weeks in Japan in February and just went to Providence and Anajak and all that stuff. I dunno that I could think of a place that did it better. Maybe Kiyama in Kyoto? I mean, to compare closer to home, I really liked Providence and there were three dishes tonight better than Providence’s top dish.
Maybe they caught me on a weird night. I dunno why I’m being so damn sentimental. I really like Los Angeles, I really like eating in this city.
Take this review with a grain of salt. Holbox couldn’t possibly have been as good as I just thought it was.
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Damn I’m gonna have to go do the tasting menu looks awesome
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lol, just now updated with descriptions so you can get some idea at the depth going into these dishes.
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The pictures looked so good I don’t even need words!
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lol ur being generous to my outdated iphone.
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When a restaurant makes you sentimental, the food has truly touched you. I share your joy from your words. No doubt about it, eating in LA is truly remarkable.
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Where r the food pics?
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