Dunno about bounty compared with Girl & the Goat, which the photos remind me of.
Having eaten at both, Iâd sooner go back to Mankze. But to your point, yes food should be fun, and even though there wasnât anything that Iâd go back to Meteora to eat again, I had a blast eating there.
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Interesting take.
Itâs reminding me of thisâŚ
https://www.instagram.com/p/BQQT8Oyhmdv/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Toothpix needs to do a Meteora version.
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Wonderful!! 
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Coincidentally, Walter Manzke was dining there last night when we went.
Itâs a fun meal, lots of eating with your hands and assembling your own bites. Most dishes seem to come with some kind of bread/crisp/flatbread. I feel like some of the South American takeout menus from Vespertine were test running this style of dish. Itâs pretty filling, you donât need to order a lot. 5 dishes for 2 people + dessert was too much. Note they didnât seem to have a wine menu at all yet, only cocktails. Cocktails were a miss for me, you could not taste the base spirit.
Morel dish was great, probably our favorite. Although the plantain overwhelmed the morels if you had them together. They are delicious on their own.
Snap peas wasnât really worth it. Not great pea flavor, although theyâre kind of out of season now too so that probably has a impact. Lardo was interesting, could have used more to be honest. The hot rock renders the fat into the dish with the peas which was nice.
Squid was good, if you like the ceviches from the last Peru menu youâll probably like this.
Boniato flatbread was a miss. Mostly because the bone marrow was too small and didnât add anything to the dish because of that. Price was way out of line for this one IMO, even in a menu that is a bit expensive.
Pork was excellent. Cooked well, great flavor. They call the accompanying vegetables asparagus beans, they look like long beans to me. Portion size pretty generous on this too.
Of the desserts, we tried to strawberry and the corn dessert. The corn was ok, didnât have enough sweet corn flavor. Might be too early in the season. Dish has some nice texture, wasnât a fan of the raw tiger nuts though.
Strawberries were good, but not Harries Berries so could not ascend to the greatest heights :D. I liked the cake that came with it. Along with the buttermilk cream itâs kind of like a denser strawberry shortcake if you assemble all of that together. Good portion size here.
Space is nice if the style is in your wheelhouse. Bar area feels a bit like Mos Eisley Cantina + Endor. I donât know how big a fan I am of dark plates. Actually makes it really hard to see the food, especially where we were in the bar where itâs pretty dark. The server actually could not tell how much water we had in our black cups and had to pick up the tea lights to see 
I do appreciate that the dishes are easy to eat out of, which was not always true in our early Vespertine experience. The âsilverwareâ is carved wood, because of that they are pretty chunky which can make it a little bit tough to pick things up. However youâre doing a lot of eating with your hands so itâs not a big deal.
Iâd give it another shot when they get some time to dial things in and maybe hit the next seasonal menu.
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some of my random thoughts and observations.
space
walking through the twig and branch entrance i didnât know if i was entering a birdâs nest or a basket weaving convention. once inside i looked like i was in a production of an avatar x into the woods collab. thereâs a lot of wicker and macrame tapestry and i wouldnât be surprised if the light above our table was made out of a pigâs bladder.
smell
the first thing that hits you when you walk up to the restaurant is the strong scent of incense burning outside the doors and was glad I didnât have to smell it once inside. but to my surprise they bring the incense inside and parade it around the dining room every hour like youâre at mass or theyâre indoctrinating you into some kind of cult.
sound
soundtrack seemed straight out of a cirque du soleil show, which is to say, a huge improvement over vespertine.
service
servers are clad in beige linen (except for sergio whoâs in all black) and wearing flats with no arch support. theyâre friendly in a zen yoga instructor type of way, if not a bit precious. i wouldnât be surprised if they broke out into an interpretive dance routine in the middle of service.
food
the menu preface states âtheir cuisine emphasizes the healing energy of ingredients.â
i would imagine this is the type of food they would serve if noma and verspertine south america opened up a wellness retreat. it felt healthy and healing enough i donât even think @chrishei would be âcheatingâ if he ate here. succulents are healthy right?
welcoming peach and pineapple kombucha
never thought iâd see sea bucktorn on a menu in la, but here it is. paging @davidchang
ossum
apis
bigfin squid - quickly grilled and seasoned with wild spruce and birdâs eye chile, with young coconut, ripe cherimoya, crunchy jicama, and a vibrant dressing of macadamia nut milk
probably the âbestâ dish of the night for me, kind of like a peruvian ceviche with leche de tigre. the birdâs eye chile was a bit much if you happen to get too many in one bite. i liked how how the coconut and jicama mimicked the squid in appearance.
snap peas - cooked over hot stones with spring onion tops, pumpkin seeds, and burnt garlic, smoky pulses, cured pork fat, hemp, coriander, and thyme
when this dish comes out the server places the pork fat on top of a hot stone and it melts as you eat the dish. i liked the crispy pork after it got cooked, the snap peas got lost with all the other ingredients.
leaves & stones - heirloom and experimental varieties of stone fruit awakened over the fire, served with crispy brassica leaves, a paste of surinam cherries and grilled roses, quark, cured duck breast, and soft lettuce leaves for wrapping
the stone fruit and crispy brassicas were good, but everything all wrapped together didnât do it for me.
caramelized lobster rice - heirloom brown rice crisped in black clay, grilled lobster glazed with black jaggery and sugar kelp, roasted fruits of the moment, black butter, sea lettuce, and sour orange
this could have been the highlight of the night but unfortunately there was no socarrat as promised. lobster was cooked nicely, not sure why random stone fruits were needed.
boniato flatbread - grilled with rendered beef fat, an aromatic dip made from black trumpet mushrooms, plantains, and burnt cinnamon, served with grilled baby corn, spanish peanuts, and grass-fed bone marrow cooked over the live fire
flatbread had a slight boniato flavor when eaten alone but is completely lost when eaten with all the toppings. bread was also a bit too dense. favorite bite was the grilled baby corn.
red sea bream - grilled on the skin and wrapped in banana leaf, dried cacao flower, wild iceplant, served with a praline of smoked chiles, hazelnuts, and clove
skin was not crispy, fish was fine. iceplant was awful and does not belong on a plate or in your mouth. dried cacao flower was like eating a piece of sisal rope.
cou nu poussin - wood-grilled and brushed with yacon caramel and wrapped in sacred pepper leaf, leek hearts roasted in aromatic salt crust, smoked berries, and sauce of grilled poussin bones
dark meat was nice, white meat a bit dry. did not like the berries or sauce at all.
just couldnât do it
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Tacking on to @PorkyBellyâs takeâŚ
The drinks were immediately interestingâall can be made NAâbut if you do opt for alcohol each only have âexactlyâ one ounce of spirits.
The food was much more interesting on the page and on the table than it was in my mouth. Most everything just seemed pretty bland and under seasoned⌠maybe my palate is just blown out and expecting some spice or acid or whatever but there just wasnât much of it.
Favorite bites: bigfin squid, the herb paste that came with leaves & stone, the roasted stone fruits of the moment, and the smoked chili sauce that came with the fish.
Pretty much everything else was just fine.
Worst bite: wild iceplant. JFC I cannot believe I tried it twice. When our server came over, saying how amazing it was (brine-y and crisp and how weâll have the auditory sensation when we chew it) I was skeptical, but game. It was bad. The only sound I heard was my brain telling me to spit it out.
The cooking just left me scratching my head a bit. I could clearly see the flavor affinities theyâre going for here, but they just werenât executed well. There were either two many things smashed together in competition that I didnât really get anything at all, or just straight up mistakes like non-crispy fish skin and overcooked white meat.
I appreciated that theyâre taking actually creative shots. The berries soaked in chicken jus could have been like cranberries and gravy at thanksgiving, but it just wasnât good. Individual pieces of leaves & stone had punches of flavor, but unlike a fun bo ssam dish, it was kind of exhausting to put bites together. But they are trying.
Nonetheless, I was excited for each dish to come out and kept telling myself that maybe the next bite will be the one where it all clicks.
My final thought is that while the food isnât there yet, I did have an absolute blast eating here. It was weird and fun and mysterious and (maybe it was just me and @PorkyBelly because I didnât see any other table having an experience like this) hilarious. We were laughing most of the time. And because of that I can say that while itâs not somewhere Iâll rush or even walk back to try again, I did absolutely enjoy the entire meal from not knowing how to open the door, to getting smoked out with incense, to trying dishes that I havenât seen anywhere else.
I do think that this restaurant has a place in the LA dining scene, and while a lot of the food didnât work for me, Iâm curious to see how it evolves and gets better over the next few months. At least Iâll always have Destroyer (because I do really like that place 
)
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Thanks for taking one for the team, folks!
Iâve been to spas where while the food is pretty basic, it tastes good and I get an entire day to spend doing spa things. This place sounds like it wants you to think Golden Door, but it delivers something quite different.
Side note: I have been told that the food at the Golden Door is actually quite good. But if I were spending $11K for a week not including taxes and gratuities, Iâd want the food to be good, too.
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FWIW, for those who arenât familiar with wild ice plant, let me say that it SHOULD be delicious, and I donât know why it wasnât. I recently foraged some for friends, and everyone was blown away by how much it reminded them of a fresh vegetable version of salt and vinegar potato chips. 
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How bad would a dish have to be to get one 
?
Maybe iceplant needs to be super-freah, not all cultivars are good to eat, and/or to be tasty it has to be grown on certain kinds of soil.
All of these factors would certainly influence the flavor, and from my experience with wild plants, Iâd say that growing conditions are really important. A drought-stressed plant, or one thatâs accumulated god-knows-what from the soil, isnât going to taste as good as one grown in more favorable conditions. Iâm currently starting to grow ice plants from seed; the plants are too small to sample yet, but Iâm eager to taste them soon.
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canât be that hard to grow? for about a month or so back in march, the local 99 ranch was selling bags of ice plant, priced about the same as pea shoots - they were great too, crunchy burst of salt and acidity, lasted a couple of weeks in the fridge but when they started to whither away, the crunch was all gone and it was like slimy spinach but for sure one would know that in the process of plating them
vespertine bad.
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Thatâs also where he forages for iceplant.
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Iâll skip the photos since everything I had has already been covered.
I have some strong opinions about Vespertine. Been there three times; I appreciated the experience and their meticulous attention to detail, but the food fucking sucks. (I thought their takeout was one of the best in LA during COVID, however, and far surpassed any meal I had in person there.)
Jordan Kahn is up to some of his usual tricks here. The interior design is absolutely gorgeous (imagine a classy Rainforest Cafe). The waitstaff still dresses like theyâre in a cult, but it looks like they were given more comfortable shoes to wear now, at least. During service, someone walked around several times with a pot of burning pollen resinâwhich I found obnoxious not just in odor and smoke particulates, but also in concept. The âbigfin squidâ dish was a squid cracker with a jicama/cherimoya/young coconut dipâa bit of spice and a sweet macadamia sauce to cut through itâin a âplayfulâ sort of turnabout on ceviche.
That is roughly where the comparisons end. I found Meteora more similar to Red Medicine or Destroyer, in that the dishes resemble human food and taste reasonably good.
Least favorite dishes were the avocado pie (a whole grilled avocado served in a tostada-esque pie crust with summer herbs and fruitsâbeautifully plated, but I kept asking myself, âWhy?â with every bite). The lobster rice left the table mostly uneaten, resembling a dessert rice course more than a savory one.
The morels beat you over the head with an unreasonable amount of seasoning and flavorâthe delicacy of the morels is completely lost and thereâs absolutely no nuance to the dish, even in its individual components. The flavor profile might be for someone else, but not for me. If anything, this might be my major complaint with the food: most all of it tries to hit you over the head with so many flavors that any subtlety is absolutely lost. Even the herbs per plate tend to muddle each other with their sheer volume and variety. Youâre tasting A LOT, but does it always work together?
On to the good stuff: Leaves + Stones was a perfect opener. All the elements were perfectly balanced in flavor, and they all worked together regardless of how much or which combinations you choose. The proteins are the real star of the show here.
The red sea bream melted away, and the cacao leaves were a nice textural touch. (The iceplant didnât add anything at all to the dish for me, and there was A LOT of it. They did seem a little too mature, though, and lacked a lot of the savory flavor that comes with younger iceplant.)I find most beef dishes unmemorable, but the beef rib was utterly fantastic with a plate-up to match. (The tamarind sauce was slightly hat-on-hat given the richness of the meat, but itâs served as a side.) The lamb was wonderfully prepared and hidden under collard green leaves, and the pressed beet sauce cut through the gamey flavor.
Anyway, would I eat here again? Probably not. (Maybe once they open and start doing their tasting menu, or perhaps when they start opening for lunch two days a week.) Was I fucking upset like every time at Vespertine? Absolutely not. If anything I left fairly satisfied.
The proteins reminded me that Jordan Kahn operates at his absolute best when his creativity has some bounds on it. And Iâm sure there are people who will find this to be an outstanding meal.
[edit]: Forgot to mention: the large wooden forks are not particularly conducive to eating, you literally have to stab into your meat. Also, by default, you get one knife per meat for the entire table to share, which felt kind of ridiculous.
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+1 to Vespertine takeout being excellent. Also really enjoyed the Providence takeout experience (and the accompanying video on how to make things with the chefs).
Anyways Re: Meteora, I wonder if heâs going for a flavor profile from another culture that weâre just not familiar with.
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I donât believe any one culture uses those combinations of ingredients. Seems like heâs just taking the full array of ingredients available to him and going nuts.
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