Los Angeles, Lucques, etc.

LOS ANGELES magazine--a rag that I generally pay no attention to--just named Lucques, on La Cienega and Melrose, LA's best restaurant. I saw this when the wife and I stopped at the outdoor newsstand on Fairfax near Canter's and I perused the issue. Why I decided to look at this magazine was that we were just walking back from Lucques, where we had dined on Friday night, and the cover announced the rankings of the "25 Best Restaurants in LA."

I haven't been familiar with LA restaurants for about five years, since we lived there, and so I can't attest as to whether Lucques is LA's best restaurant. But it sure was the best place I've eaten for years. Damn. I had the suckling pig, which I was initially concerned would be served whole, with an apple in its mouth. Rather, it was served as a kind of pulled-pork cake, topped with crackling skin. The waiter assured me that it was cooked in a pit on the property for eighteen hours and then something else was done with it before serving. I don't care what they did with it, but it was brilliant. Now, I don't know that it needed to be quite as spendy as it was--it was truly pulled pork, Carolina or Tennessee-style, and I could have gotten equally good stuff in Spartanburg or Durham, I'm sure--but in L.A. it was just brilliant. The wife had the vegetarian dish--a mushroom lasagna--which was very tasty but soupier than it needed to be.

I've also never had a $14 martini. Now, it was a damn good martini, absolutely. And it's fun to be out in the big city, and all, but $14? Oy. What made the drink worth it was the snacks that came along with it: olives and roasted almonds accompanied by extra virgin olive oil and coarse salt. They were just fantastic.

Good spring-break trip to LA on the whole, although the boys were sick throughout. Disneyland was awful (although my sister-in-law got us in to "Club 33", which made the trip worth it. Very, very strange.

andina

Andina didn't disappoint. The food was as good as ever, and although it's one of the anchors of the slightly pretentious Pearl District of Portland it wasn't as snotty as one might expect. They have original dishes (Andean appetizers that I've never seen before, done extremely well) and they do a great job with traditional things like cebiches and lomo saltado. But what did it for me this time was the service: we arrived at about 6:30, with two small children who were already an hour and a half past their bedtimes and on the verge of crashing. This is a fancy little place that wants you to linger and order many courses, so this looked bad. But we ordered appetizers and entrees and mentioned that we wanted both simultaneously b/c the children were on East Coast time, and the wait staff had everything out in ten minutes. It was unbelievable, and made the dinner a success. (My wife was VERY skeptical about my idea to go out for dinner the night we arrived.) So bravo, Andina.

Unfortunately, we didn't have entirely good restaurant experiences. My wife got food poisoning at the new Hawthorne branch of what used to be (15 years ago...) one of my favorite Portland places, the Bridgeport Brew Pub.