Tag Archives: Sancerre

Parlez Vu Modern?

Restaurant: Vu [1, 2]

Location: 14160 Palaway Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292 310.439.3033

Date: March 25, 2011

Cuisine: Modern

Rating: Very creative, worth a trip, but needs a little tuning up

ANY CHARACTER HERE

Vu is a new place in Marina Del Rey. While I lived there in 1997-1998 MDR was a bit of a culinary wasteland. It hasn’t exactly had a renaissance, but it is improving, and Vu is certainly an example of that. This place is nicely situated along the Marina with good views — sort of oddly tucked into the ground floor of some apartment or office building — and it’s got very novel and even somewhat molecular food. There’s a lot of ambition here on the menu, and I give them an A for effort. But they need to tune it up a bit to rich the heights possible with this sort of cuisine. In LA, the current molecular champ (and there aren’t many contenders) is The Bazaar, and it’s tasting room Saam. This type of cuisine originated in Spain, and you can see some native examples HERE or HERE.


The menu offers both extensive small plates (front) and a few entrees and desserts (back). As I’ve said again and again, I love the small plate format.

The bread is homemade cornbread, with jalapeño butter. I approve. As a partial southerner, I love cornbread, and this was a good example of type.

The drink menus. The wine was all California, which is hard for me, a dedicated European Wine lover.

2009 Brander Sauvignon Blanc. Despite being New World, I enjoyed it, much like a good Sancerre.

““Reconstructed” Caprese Salad, balsamic-injected cherry tomatoes, basil-infused fresh mozzarella, red hawaiian sea salt, micro basil.” This was my wife’s favorite. A tad too much tomato for me (being a tomato hater). The texture was really neat though, almost like a merengue.

“Hamachi, bbq spice, collard green fluid gel, micro cilantro.” I was a bit disappointed with this dish. Maybe it needed a slightly better grade of fish, maybe more spice, but it didn’t have as much flavor as I would have expected.

“Grilled Cheese, toasted brioche, “midnight moon”, tomato jam, micro basil.” Overall nice. The sauce was very pomodoro sauce like. The cheese was maybe a bit tangy for the combo somehow, but good.

“Peas & Carrots, carrot noodles, pea puree, carrot chips.” The textures here were really neat (particularly the chips). The overall flavor was pleasant but very subtle and muted.

“Chicken-Fried Watermelon, pickled ring.” The fry here was great fry, and since you can fry anything it more or less worked. It was a little odd or surprising to bite into fry and get watermelon, but as I said, it was great fry.

“Lobster Tail, citrus, popcorn jello, fritos.” My favorite dish hands down. The raw lobster had a really nice texture, like raw scallop, and the crunchy crisp of the fritos really went nicely. Overall it showed off both the subtle lobster flavor and had a bit of zing (from the citrus I assume).

“Lamb “Lollipops” sweet tea poached, rosemary, roasted grape relish.” My second favorite. Very nice and meaty. Not a middle eastern lamb flavor as I might expected, but very tasty nonetheless.

“Buttermilk Panna Cotta, liquid nitrogen coke-a-cola, carbonated blackberries.” This was a little bit of a disappointment. I guess it should have been sweeter to my taste. The Panna Cotta itself was a little sour, like a yogourt and/or I expected the coke-a-cola topping to be VERY sweet to counter (it was instead subtle). The blackberries I loved. They had some serious zing. Overall it was pleasant, but it could have been great.

The view is, for the most part, very nice.

The menu here at Vu is really interesting and innovative. It has a good format (with lots of small plates) and is well priced. But I think the kitchen needs to tune things up a bit. I’m not exactly sure where the issue is, but the dishes were often just nice instead of wow — and it seemed they could be wow. It might be ingredients in a couple cases (like the Hamachi), or maybe it’s just a certain amount of zest or the ratios. The flavors were often a bit muted for my taste. It’s even possible that this is just a slightly flat execution by the kitchen (and the test recipes are good). This kind of cooking needs to really balance the flavors and have the whole thing jam through. Saam is a great example of this. At our tasting menu there a couple weeks ago, nearly every dish jumped off the plate and straight into your hind-brain.

But I very much applaud the effort, far too many restaurants churn out the same boring stuff. So I’ll check back again and see how things have developed.

Check out a second review at Vu here.

Capo Valentines

Restaurant: Capo [1, 2, 3]

Location: 1810 Ocean Ave, Santa Monica, Ca. 310-394-5550

Date: February 14, 2011

Cuisine: Italian with Cal influences

Rating: Well done, particularly for a special night.

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Valentines is tricky restaurant-wise, and rarely shows off a place at it’s best. The economics of the situation tend to force them toward set menus (at high prices) and to rush the service so they can get 2-3 seatings in. We decided to try Capo, which I have reviewed on a normal night HERE.

Normally, Capo boasts of being a “slow food” restaurant. Tonight they hustled a bit, although the food was very good. We had a 7:15 reservation and they had us out of there (7 courses later!) at 9! Actually, we didn’t really mind, but that certainly wouldn’t be the case here on a normal night.

The have good bread. I particularly like the flatbread.

And this probably chickpea based dip.

For Valentines there were two menu choices, the regular on the right, and the truffle on the left. Both had two choices per course (more or less). Click to embiggen.

The amuse, a cone of tomatoes. Essentially like a tomato bruschetta — in a crispy cone.

To start we got two glasses of white. A muscat on the left and a Sancerre on the right. Other than having a rather hefty per glass price tag they were very nice wines.

“Baby red beet, ricotta ravioli.” The first of many Beurre blanc type pasta sauces. They have very nice fresh pasta here, and well the butter sauce is hard to go wrong with.

“Russian Beluga caviar, linguini.” Again with the butter. A very simple dish of pasta, butter, and caviar. It worked. The sauce was bread dipping good. This might not be the BEST venue to show off the caviar, although it certainly wasn’t overwhelmed, lending a briny note to the whole thing.

I love Amarone, as it is very grapy, and that’s one of the things I like in a red.

Parker gives this 92. “The 2004 Amarone is beautiful and understated in its wild cherries, sweet herbs and flowers, all of which come together with unusual finesse and clarity. Silky, ripe tannins frame the exquisite finish. The 2004 is already approachable and should continue to drink nicely for another decade or so. This is a very representative vintage for Allegrini. Anticipated maturity: 2010-2020.”

“Bluefin tuna tartar, caviali.” This is a very nice sushi grade tuna, essentially chopped like you might find in a tuna handroll. The bread is very toasted.

“Gnocchi lobster, truffles.” Again with the Beurre blanc! The gnocchi were perfectly pillow-like, the lobster tender, and the truffles do go spectacularly with the butter — really one of the best ways to show them off. Everyone but my arteries thought this was a fantastic dish. Again, I lapped up the butter with yet another piece of bread.

“Heirloom tomato vegetable, burrata.” No faulting this combination. Capo always has a lot of burrata, and you know I love it (HERE FOR MORE ON THE BEST FRESH CHEESE!).

“Jamon Iberico de Bellota.” Spain’s best ham (see leg below). My biggest beef with this dish is that the bread is too toasted. It has a nice charred flavor, but that overwhelms the subtle salty-nutty taste of this very fine pig product.

Oink! How did my leg get from Iberia to American?

“”BBQ Wild King Salmon.” My wife, a salmon aficionado, loved this salmon. It had nice accompanying veggies too.

“Cote de Boeuf, truffle potato puree.” This was my least favorite dish of the evening, but this is just because I’m not really a steak guy. It was very rare, more than medium closer to rare. That was good. But I’m just not that into simple meat. I like things jazzy. If one were a steak lover, I’m sure this would be awesome. As it was for me it was good, but not mind blowing or anything. The mashers were really good though, and went particularly nicely with the black truffles.

“Fruit Crostata, zabaglione.” They described this as a pear tart. It tasted like apple pie. I wonder if they mixed it up and gave us “Hot apple tart, truffle honey ice cream” except that’s whipped cream (zabaglione?) and not ice cream. In any case, it was good apple pie, although it tended to fall apart.

“Chocolate creme brulee.” Yum! This was very good, rich, creamy, nicely chocolatty!

Some various petite fours. Mostly simple nut cookies and a couple fruit cream filled chocolates.

And they even included a rose!

Overall, this was one of the better Valentines dinners we’ve done. Really, just like with the flowers one can expect to pay more for less on this special night. But Capo did as well as could be expected. The choices were good, and every dish was very well executed.