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Surati Farsan's Fig Sweets

My fig tree is sprouting its first touch of green, but I’ve been eating figs all year—dried fig sweets from Surati Farsan Mart in Artesia’s Little India.

This shop specializes in Gujarati sweets and snacks. Among them is kaju anjir barfi, a delicious cashew and fig confection that would be at home in a health foods store. It satisfies that compelling urge for candy with natural goodness instead of a sugar high.

The shop has other fig sweets too, among them sugar-free dry fruit barfi made with pistachios and raisins as well as cashews and figs.

Apart from these, the counter is loaded with intensely sugary traditional Indian sweets, some of them in fanciful shapes and colors; salty snacks, and wonderful cardamom-flavored plain cookies.

Surati Farsan Mart serves meals and drinks too. Daily specials, all vegetarian, include vegetable curries, chole puri (spiced garbanzo beans with a puffy whole wheat bread), samosas, pav vada (potato patties and garlic chutney in a bun), vegetable sandwiches with cilantro chutney and south Indian snacks such as idlis and dosas.

The shop provides tables for customers who want to eat there. It’s usually crowded on weekends, because that is prime shopping time for the Indian community. I usually drop in loaded with sacks of groceries and retaining just enough carrying power for a box of fig sweets, and perhaps some of those cardamom cookies too.

Kaju Anjir Barfi (cashew and fig sweet) is $7 a pound; sugar-free dry fruit barfi is $9 a pound at Surati Farsan Mart, 11814  E. 186th  Street, Artesia, CA 90701. Tel: (562) 860- 2310.  Open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

A San Diego branch is located at 9494 Black Mountain Road, San Diego CA 92126. Tel: (858) 549-7280.

A Place to Sing for Your Supper

It’s hard to figure out just where I am. Is it a village in France or a karaoke bar? Actually it’s both, because I am in La Defence, a new Euro-Asian restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown.

The dining room is an imaginary village plaza. The large room is lined with fake buildings and windows behind which are the karaoke rooms. Fortunately, the twain don’t meet. No off-key singing assaults your ears as you eat.

Instead, you can gaze through the front windows at dramatic splashing fountains.  La Defence hides at the back of a large business complex built around a spacious courtyard. The restaurant caters to a business-entertainment crowd, and so the karaoke rooms double as conference rooms. .

The chef is Los Angeles-born Yuji Iwasa who has cooked at such restaurants as Koi and L’Orangerie.

Iwasa likes to create personalized tasting dinners, bringing together flavors that sometimes startle, as in an espresso-chocolate sauce for lamb chops. I thought the combination worked, but it bothered some of my friends.

We were eating our way through a 10-dish menu that gave us a chance to taste both Kobe beef from Japan (wrapped around jumbo asparagus) and American raised Kobe beef (a flat iron steak with jalapeno beurre fondu). I can’t say that one was better than the other, because they were prepared in such different ways.

Seafood dishes were very good, among them ahi tuna tartare “yu-ke” style, meaning seasoned like Korean raw beef  with such things as  soy sauce, sesame oil, green onions and pine nuts.

There were interesting tournedos fashioned from sea scallops and beef, delicious miso-bronzed black cod, and crab cakes modeled on Japanese croquettes, soft and creamy inside, crisp with panko outside and sauced with a grapefruit emulsion.

  The one dish that needed rethinking was seared foie gras “pina colada.” The foie gras was wonderful, silky and light. But artificial coconut flavoring overpowered the scoop of sherbet alongside.

After all this, it was hard to appreciate dessert, a busy platter of chocolate bread pudding with white chocolate-orange sauce, chocolate sorbet, raspberries and little dollops of whipped cream.

I’d like to go back to try the daily “plats du jour,” which include coq au vin with ginger-red wine sauce on Monday, steamed mussels in coconut curry broth on Tuesday, and grilled kurobuta pork chops with gorgonzola miso apple sauce on Thursday. Miso risotto sounds interesting, and I can't imagine what toasted Caesar salad would be.

La Defence is new and still getting settled, but worth a visit just to experience the unusual setting—to me, it felt like being on vacation somewhere—as well as Iwasa’s innovative food.   

La Defence Restaurant and Karaoke, 3701 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90010. Tel: (213) 384-9500.

As of May, 2008, the above review is history. The promising menu and chef are gone and the food at La Defence is no longer recommendable, according to my informant.

A Craving for Kimchi

Talk about consuming passions. No, not the usual man-woman thing, but a deliciously spicy passion, an intense addiction, an ecstatic love gratified morning, noon and night with—kimchi.

I’ve not met anyone with more devotion to this fiery hot, garlicky Korean pickle than my friend Clark Akers. Not even the Koreans I know speak of it with such awe.

Clark always had kimchi on hand at home. He would eat it for breakfast with bacon and eggs, at lunch with a sandwich or soup and at dinner instead of a salad. He adored it so much that I think he would have eaten it even with apple pie.

When we would meet for lunch in Koreatown, Clark would demolish all the kimchi that came with the banchan, ask for more, then order more to go. One of the highlights of his life was when a Korean friend brought him a jar of his mother’s homemade kimchi.

Clark has now moved on to other realms where, I hope, the kimchi is as heavenly as he deserves. I never eat Korean food without thinking of him, and I prize the one tangible memento that I have—his recipe for kimchi soup. Clark brought me a taste one day, and it was as good as he claimed. Luckily, I asked for the recipe.

Here it is, in memory of my friend, Clark Edgar Akers.

CLARK'S KIMCHI SOUP

1 quart water
1 carrot
1 stalk celery
½ small red bell pepper
2 to 3 green onions, including some of the tops, thinly sliced
1 slice bacon, cut in bite-size pieces
2 tablespoons frozen green peas
2 mushrooms (any type), sliced
1 beef bouillon cube
1 (3-ounce) package ramen noodle soup with seasoning packet
1 1/3 cups cabbage kimchi, cut in short lengths if in long pieces

Place the water in a large saucepan and set aside.

Cut the carrot in half lengthwise, then crosswise in ¼-inch slices. Cut the celery stalk in half lengthwise, then crosswise in ¼-inch slices. Quarter the bell pepper lengthwise, then cut crosswise in ¼-inch slices.

Add the carrot, celery, green onions and bacon to the saucepan of water. Bring to a boil, then boil gently, uncovered, 15 minutes.

Add the bell pepper, peas, mushrooms, the bouillon cube, the  ramen noodles and their seasoning.  Cook 3 to 4 minutes.

Add the kimchi and cook until heated through, about 2 minutes.

Makes 4 side dish servings or 3 servings as a main dish.