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Eating in Los Angeles

THE JOKES about Californian cuisine are numerous and well rehearsed. It's generally conceived as little more than an absurdity, nouvelle cuisine on acid. I was prepared, then, for the Surrealist school of gastrono- my, prepared for the kingfish With sun- dried tomatoes and papaya, pine-nlas and pineapple salsa, the duck sausage, goat cheese, avocado and tOmatiilo pizzas, the meagrely sauced, kaleidoscopically gar- nished tofuburgers. But I don't know what allowed me to forget that one eats better in America than almost anywhere else. I wasn't going there this time to eat, in fact, but I did so well that I thought it would be mere irresponsibility not to relay my expe- riences. What follows is not a comprehen- sive guide but a list of those places you would be foolish to forgo.

First stop has to be Spago (310-652 4025), only you must book a good week or so before you want to go, longer if you want a table at the weekend. Wolfgang Puck, at least insofar as the casual cultural historian needs to know, is the man who invented Californian cuisine. It was he who created the kooky pizza, the West Coast Italianate flourishes and the designer eclecticism which in less talented hands have dwindled into the unpalatable pastiches we so love to hate. East Coast exiles are keen to profess that though they love the food they can't bear the circus. Spago remains, after all, and this is ten years after it opened, the most fashionable restaurant in Los Ange- les. Stars need to eat here just to prove to themselves they're stars. Tony Curtis, Gin- ger Rogers and Lee Iacocca were all hob- nobbing with Bernard the maitre d' the night I was in, and that was only as far as my eye could see. Spago is an obligatory feature of the schlock novel; any reference will usually include Madonna 'at her favourite table'. You get the picture.

What you also get is fabulous food. Don't, whatever you do, let its fashionable- ness put you off. For one thing, the fren- zied eclecticism of Californian cuisine works in America in a way it cannot over here. The melting-pot ideology may, this city well knows, cause political problems, but it makes perfect culinary sense. After all, there are Italians, Mexicans, Chinese all eating and cooking here: it seems natural to mix it a bit.

The famous open-to-view wood-fire is where the pizzas come from. Have one

111 bubbling with cheese and garlicky, fleshy mushrooms or ode topped with spicy chick- en, roasted peppers and sweet onions. What you order next is not easy to advise: you could get lost in a menu like this. Try a taste of angel hair pasta, tangled up with Louisiana shrimp and a deep-toned, garlic- soused tomato sauce, or quail, its crisp skin sweet and shiny with mandarin glaze. One dish I had — the grilled baby chicken atop a pea risotto — took my breath away. The peas, minute, sweet and nutty, were in per- fect partnership with the equally sweet and nutty arborio rice: food for the angels.

The wine list, lovingly administered by Bernard Erpicum who, true to LA form, is a bit of a star himself and has already made a video (with a special guest appearance by Dudley Moore) about the pleasures of Cal- ifornian wine, is full of good things. But although food, even in such illustrious places as Spago (where you can eat for the equivalent of about £25 a head) is about half what it is in Britain, Californian wine is still expensive. You can spend less, but $42 will buy you a bottle of the 1982 Joseph Phelps Cabernet Sauvignon, which is excel- lent. My favourite of all Californian wines (which I am not always keen on: they can seem to be all front of mouth) is one of their crazy varietals, the Bonny Doon, Le Sophiste '89, which will set you back $48. It's worth it.

I drank the Bonny Doon again at Patina (310-467 1108), which struggles with Spago for title of best restaurant in LA. Interest- ingly, the chef/proprietor here is also Ger- manic. (Wolfgang Puck is from Austria, Patina's Joachim Splichal is from Ger- many.) The pace at Patina is calmer than at Spago. It is, one could say, a more serious restaurant. The starter of Santa Barbara shrimp with mashed potatoes and potato truffle chips was the best thing I ate during my stay here. In fact, it's the best thing I've eaten for ages. I don't know why it should

Turn up the ,f4runting . . .'

work so well, but it just did. The large prawns were sweet and tender: they were; scarcely cooked and seemed scarcely solid, more of a melting dream of what shrimp could be. Cockscomb with curly cabbage,

pearl onion and pinot sauce was curious but rewarding: the small crenellated shapes were glossy and gelatinous, rather like a cross between squid and mushroom. Ravio- li of red and yellow bell peppers in a saf- fron sauce were fragrant and smoky, and the veal kidneys were pink and yielding in their ochre mustardy sauce. The pudding to choose has to be the blueberry tart with cheesecake ice-cream. Prices here, as everywhere, are in dollars what we are used to paying in pounds, say about $60 a head.

You should not contemplate coming to LA without paying a visit to the Inn of the Seventh Ray (310-455 1311). Reading the menu here you know you're in la-la land. 'Sometimes the Inn is not just an Inn,' it says, 'but an inner retreat experience, a special auric forcefield.' This is new age the first time around, the Sixties: food is pre- pared 'with love from the heart' and charged 'with the vibration of the violet flame'. At dinner, 'entrées are listed in order of their esoteric vibrational value'; at lunch you are given no such guidance, but at all times the Inn gives you 'the purest of nature's foods'.

But the point of this place is not just that its menu is easy to send up, but that the food really is excellent and it is the most beautiful restaurant I've ever eaten in. Wind your way through Topanga canyon to find a leafy dip in the hills, in which tables are set, in sedate elegance, overlooking a stream and surrounded by cascades of flow- ers. Lunch has a vegetarian bias, at dinner you can eat steak if you want. But this is proper cooking, none of the overcooked hessian offerings we get in health places over here. A vast lunch for two cost me $30. I had to drag myself away.

But the real thing about eating in Ameri- ca is not that you can eat well in the best restaurants, but that you can eat extraordi- narily good food in the malls and on the streets. If you're going to be snobbish about fast food, you're going to miss the whole point. Anyway, you can't go to LA and not go into a mall even once. One of my favourite meals, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, was eaten on the hoof in the Santa Monica mall: a cardboard plate of chow mein from the Happy Wok, followed by a sticky pecan pudding from the glori- ously named Bodacious Buns. Those who cannot contemplate the culinary slumming

I so exult in should meet me halfway, at Jody Moroni's Sausage Kingdom on Venice beach, where you can eat about a thousand sorts of hotdog, one of them green.

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson flew to America courtesy of Northwest Airlines, which have daily flights to the West Coast.'