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Celebrating Malbec Day at Lucques

What could be nicer than a glass of Malbec with a great lunch at Lucques?

The answer is, 14 glasses of Malbec with the same lunch. This happened at a master class presented by Wines of Argentina in honor of the third annual Malbec World Day April 17.

The "students"  were handed a glass of Finca Las Nubes Rosé of Malbec 2011 as they arrived. This dry rosé was made by José Luis Mounier at a high altitude winery in the Cafayate Valley in northern Argentina.

The rest of the wines came in three flights, poured into glasses that formed a cheery crowd behind the lunch plates. The first flight, at the top, included the 2012 Finca Flichman Reserva Malbec 2012, the 2011 Lagarde Malbec, the 2010 Alamos Winery Selección Malbec and the 2010 Ricardo Santos Malbec.

You wouldn't mind having any of these on your table, especially because the suggested retail prices are $20 or less, making them great buys.  At $12.99, the Finca Flichman was the lowest-priced wine at the tasting. Founded in 1890, this is one of Argentina's oldest wineries. 

You may see Alamos Malbec in markets for less than the Selección, which is $20, but don't get excited. It's a different wine at a lower price point.  

As Master Sommelier Tim Gaiser from San Franciso lectured on the wines, the class ate spiced lamb loin with roasted baby carrots, dandelion greens and black olives (above).

The hardest part of the session was pouring the wines into a dump bucket when it would have been nice to sit back and enjoy them. 

But they had to make way for the next round, composed of the 2010 Finca El Origen Gran Reserva Malbec (at right), the 2010 Don Miguel Gascón Reserva Malbec, the 2008 Navarro Correas Alegoría Malbec, and the 2011 Domingo Hermanos Domingo Molina M2 Malbec.

The Domingo wine represents the Cafayate Valley and the Rupestre Valley in Salta in the north.  The other wines at the tasting were from Mendoza, where the first grape cuttings were planted in 1853.

To go with these richer and more expensive wines (the Domingo Molina M2 is $35), lunch escalated into a hearty plate of chicken paillard with Swiss chard bread pudding, wild mushrooms and walnut butter (above).

The final round brought on the priciest of the wines, the 2008 Renacer Malbec ($70), which is a limited edition wine aged two years in new French oak and then 6 months in the bottle. At 15%, it was the highest in alcohol in this group.

The others were the 2009 Nieto Senetiner Nieto Reserva Malbec followed by three blends: the 2010 Salentein Numina Malbec Blend (61 % Malbec, 21% Cabernet Sauvignon and smaller amounts of Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc); the 2009 Luca Wines Beso de Dante Malbec Blend (60% Malbec, the rest Cabernet Sauvignon), and the 2008 Familia Zuccardi Zeta Malbec Blend (73% Malbec and 27% Cabernet Sauvignon).

At $45, the Zuccardi Zeta was the second highest-priced wine at the tasting. The Nieto Reserva sneaked into this round at only $14.99.

To pair with this elegant group, Lucques sent out plates of braised beef short ribs with turnip greens, roasted cippolinis and horseradish cream (above).

Sated with wine and food and hardly able to touch the platter of cookies that served as dessert, the tasters had to sit back and agree with Sommelier Gaiser, who said of Malbec, "Whatever you do to it, you really can't change its soul."

Could This Be L.A.'s Best Polenta?

A friend who dislikes polenta marveled over this version at Tapenade, the new small plates restaurant in West L.A.

This soft and creamy white polenta has a faint hint of lemon and just enough grittiness to make it interesting. Chef Ressul Rassallat keeps the formula a secret, except for the topping:  big flakes of Parmesan, chewy hen of the wood mushrooms and a sprig of fried thyme.

It's not the only notable dish at Tapenade. The crispy Brussels sprouts (above) get just as many raves. They're crisp at the edges and tangy with red wine vinegar and capers. 

The scallops (above) with potato and caramelized shallots are so light they almost fly off the plate. 

The few desserts on the menu are only a start. Ask for something special, and Rassallat will whip it up, like this combination of warmed fruits, walnuts and vanilla ice cream with strips of vanilla bean (above). 

But if you stick to the menu, you'll be happy with chocolate panna cotta topped with coffee chantilly cream, berries and little pearls of chocolate. It's served in a jar, just like the restaurant's signature green olive tapenade.

Tapenade restaurant, 11301 W. Olympic Blvd. (in the Olympic Collection), No. 116, Los Angeles, CA 90064. Tel: (310) 312-6233.

Maximiliano's Hair of the Dog Dinner

Only a handful of people were able to get in on one of the rarest food and drink experiences in Los Angeles--the first Hair of the Dog beer dinner held here in 15 years.

The restaurant where this took place was Maximiliano in Highland Park. The organizers were Andre Guerrero, Maximiliano's owner/chef, and Alan Sprints, founder of the Hair of the Dog Brewing Company in Portland, Oregon.

Guerrero's job was to match food to distinctive beers that are difficult to obtain. Some are brewed every other year, others every few years. Some are vintage-dated.

The hardest to get is "Michael," a Flanders red style ale that is aged in American oak and sherry casks for two and a half years. "It's like trying to get Romanée-Conti, the most rare red burgundy in France," Guerrero said.

Nevertheless, Michael was poured at the dinner with braised pork belly, sweet corn polenta and a dry fig and cherry gastrique (above). The sweet, fruity flavors of the dish echoed the fruity, cherry tones of the beer. Sipping it was like drinking beer candy.


The most striking pairing was butternut squash soup (above) with "Greg," a golden beer brewed with Queensland Blue winter squash. The flavors were so similar, it was like pairing squash with squash. Like other Hair of the Dog beers, Greg develops flavor as it ages in the bottle, becoming sweeter, Sprints said. 

The dinner started full force with "Adam," a dark beer that weighs in at 10 % alcohol. "I was trying to recreate a beer made hundreds of years ago," Sprints said. Because he recommends Adam with oysters, Guerrero came up with a variation on oysters Rockefeller--baked Fanny Bay oysters with bacon confit, fennel and spinach (above).

Dark, with some sweetness, Adam is also "a very nice dessert beer," Sprints said.  

Hair of the Dog's best seller is Blue Dot, a dusky double India pale ale with strong citrus notes. Guerrero matched this with cold smoked organic Scottish salmon (at top), which he presented with aromatic "forbidden" black rice, grapefruit pico de gallo, yuzu lime and lemongrass.

"Fred" was another powerhouse, at 10% alcohol. This sharp and tangy ale came with a soft and soothing dish, beef short ribs cooked sous vide, with sage, wild mushrooms, potatoes and glazed carrots and finished with a splash of crème fraîche (above).

Fred gave way to an even more potent beer, the 2011 Doggie Claws, which, at 11.5%, was the highest in alcohol at the dinner. A barley beer, it went with pastry chef Jan Purdy's mocha cake filled with roasted almond and malt semifreddo and, on the side, butterscotch sauce. "It's a really big, intense beer. It's like finishing off with a dessert wine," Guerrero said.

Only dinner wasn't finished. Sprints threw in an extra, wine glasses of Matt, which is as close as you can get to Port in a beer. This Matt was brewed in 2008, aged in wood barrels and released in 2010. 

Matching beer with food gave Guerrero more leeway than a wine dinner. "There are actually more flavor components in beer than you find in wine," he said. This is especially true of Hair of the Dog beers. Founder Sprints, who was born in Culver City, started the brewery in 1993 and released his first beer, Adam, in 1994. Production is now 800 barrels a year. 

In a Pickle at The Sycamore Kitchen

The Sycamore Kitchen sold out of one Monday lunch special, a Vietnamese beef salad, but they still had a grilled short rib sandwich with onion-stout jam, sauteed mushrooms, Swiss cheese and horseradish mayo, which sounded better than a salad on an icy, windy day. Especially because it came on hot grilled bread.

There it is at the top, rather greasy, including the bread. The green salad on the side helped to cut that. 

The sandwiches on the regular menu come on "fresh baked country bread with a pickle."  Why a pickle? It wasn't the best accompaniment to a roasted chicken breast sandwich (above), unless you think Meyer lemon confit and pickle go together. The score was confit 10--it was  brilliant to put such a thing in a chicken sandwich--pickle 0.

Also inside the sandwich were green olive tapenade, sliced tomato, frisee lettuce and mayo, moist things that required rapid eating to stave off sogginess. Sturdier bread, or at least toast, would have been more resistant.

Perhaps it was hard to appreciate the sandwiches after viewing the baked goods in the counter (above). Monday's offerings included a roasted pear and tart cherry crostata, an oatmeal brown butter scone, flourless lemon custard cake, a blackberry oat bar, an oatmeal toffee cookie and a roasted peanut coconut butterscotch bar. 

A plateful of those could best a pickle any day.  

The Sycamore Kitchen, 143 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036. Tel: (323) 939-0151.

Robert Mondavi's Toast to the Coast

It was a very meaty night at The Tasting Kitchen in Venice. Butchers Lindy & Grundy (Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura) were showing what they do with beef, raw and cooked, working with Tasting Kitchen chef Casey Lane to turn out a seven-course dinner that lasted almost four hours.

The food was delicious, but its real purpose was to show off Robert Mondavi's Private Selection wines, made from Central Coast grapes. The media types who had been invited gathered upstairs at tables so elaborately decorated that they almost stole the show from the wine and food.

It looked like a florist's shop had contributed everything in stock to line the center of each table, some of the greenery stuffed into huge squash bowls.

Candles were in wine bottles (Robert Mondavi, of course) that dripped streams of wax. More were in flower pots and other imaginative holders.

One wall (at top) was covered like a blackboard with a chalk map of the Central Coast and the theme of the evening, "A Taste & Toast to the Central Coast." It must have been a lot of work to create that. Too bad it was for one night only.

The menu offered a couple of reprieves from meat, but the focus was on beef--filet, chuck ribs and raw, sourced from Rancho San Julian in Lompoc.

The prettiest came first--carpaccio (above) cut so thin that you could sweep the slices up in a single forkful. In the center, a dark swath of Nicoise olive tapenade contrasted with the rosy color of the meat. On top were the thinnest imaginable breadsticks. 

The tastiest was the simplest, just two small slices of seared filet, one balanced on the other.

The heartiest was a dark braise of rib meat and onions (above), accompanied by bowls of polenta soaked with gravy and topped with Parmesan.  

It was a relief to end with barely a mouthful of semolina crosta (above) and braised grapes, just two of them, cut in half.

The wines, all from either 2010 or 2011, were four whites, starting with a Sauvignon Blanc and ending with a slightly sweet Riesling to go with dessert. 

The reds were a Merlot, a Cabernet and a Meritage, which the people around me seemed to like as much as I did. A blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Petit Verdot, it was poured with one of the meatless courses, melted robiola cheese over romanesco broccoli.  

A Look at the Brand New Mo-chica

If you didn't know the right person, you couldn't get into Mo-chica Sunday night.  This new incarnation of the Peruvian restaurant was mobbed, with people outside wondering how to get a table.

It was "friends and family" night, a trial run before the restaurant opens on Wednesday (May 30). And it was apparent that chef Ricardo Zarate and managing partner Stephane Bombet have more friends than most of us could accumulate in a lifetime.

The bright, lively and commodious new space on 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles replaces the stand in the Mercado La Paloma where Mo-chica originated (above). 

The menu is classic Peruvian, comfort food as compared to the trendy approach at Zarate's Picca in West Los Angeles. 

That's not to say there aren't a few such things, like beterraga (above), a roasted beet salad with burrata, candied corn and orange aji amarillo dressing (aji amarillo is yellow chile). And, for dessert, crême brulée with more fruit than cream. 

The classics get updated with Zarate's contemporary touches, like the fried organic fertile egg on top of tagliatelle with alpaca stew in an aji amarillo sauce (above).

Cubes of crisp-edged pork belly come on top of the potato stew carapulcra, which is made from small Peruvian potatoes that are freeze-dried at night then sun-dried during the day. Zarate stirs in chimichurri to spice it up. 

Carapulcra is just one dish that shows off Peru's potato bounty--thousands of varieties grow there.

Another is causa (above), a layered cake of mashed potato, avocado and chicken or seafood. Zarate uses fresh crab at Mo-chica. 

In Peru, papa rellena (stuffed potato) is stuffed with meat and deep-fried. The Mo-chica version (above) skips the deep-frying and replaces the meat with eggplant stew.

If you've never seen Peruvian ceviche (above), you might think you've been given the wrong order, because it looks nothing like Mexican ceviche.

One surprise is the hefty chunk of sweet potato on the plate. Giant corn kernels are on the other side. That's ceviche mixto (mixed) in the center (above). Another ceviche contains only seabass.

Seco de cordero, or lamb shank with cilantro-beer sauce and canario beans (above), moved over from the old Mo-chica, as did lomo saltado, which is a stir-fry of beef strips with French fries. The fries are made with Kennebec potatoes, a hypbrid produced in the USA, not Peru.

No liquor was allowed in the Mercado La Paloma. Now Mo-chica has wine and cocktails, including, of course, Peru's famous pisco sour (right), which has been retitled "Tha Doggfather." 

Behind it in the photo is "OaxaCalifornia Love," which isn't Peruvian at all except for a dash of spicy rocoto chile mixed with mezcal, tequila, lime juice and pineapple.

The renaming is perhaps an attempt to woo the young crowd now inhabiting downtown L.A.

Others are "Papa Don't Peach," "Santa Claus is Back in Town" and "Tea-Nage Dream.

The weirdest (right) is indisputably "I'm Grapey and I Know It...(wiggle, wiggle)," which combines pisco with a green grape and cardamom reduction, ginger juice, orgeat syrup and soda. 

If you can get around that astonishing name, though, it's a very cool drink. 

Mo-chica, 514 W. 7th St., Los Angeles, CA 90014. Tel: (213) 622-3744.

Tasting Wine with Seaweed and Sushi

It wasn't the most conventional wine dinner. It started with Simi's 2010 Sauvignon Blanc (100% stainless steel-fermented, a tiny bit of Semillon and Viognier added) paired with seaweed salad (at top). And cold marinated yellowtail. No cheese and bread in sight. 

Then on to Clos du Bois' 2010 Calcaire Chardonnay (barrel select cuvee from the Russian River Valley) with tuna sashimi, avocado, shaved Parmesan and arugula in a soy-truffle vinaigrette (above), and spicy tuna on fried rice cakes.  

But no one was complaining, least of all the two winemakers, Susan Lueker, director of wine making at Simi (right), and Gary Sitton, who holds the same post at Clos du Bois.

They only had to walk across the street from the Mondrian, where they were staying, to Katana, where their wines and plenty of glasses were waiting.

Unlike the usual carefully orchestrated formal indoor wine dinner, this one took place on Katana's terrace, overlooking Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

The casual outdoor setting was the next best thing to dining under a grape arbor in a vineyard. It's the kind of place where you could wear jeans, as Sitton did (right). 

Dinner continued with skewers of seabass, shrimp and beef to dip in ponzu, mustard and ginger sauces. The Simi 2009 Chardonnay (Sonoma County) coped pretty well with these.

Simi's 2010 Pinot Noir (Carneros, Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley) had to deal with grilled Brussels sprouts on skewers, not the easiest task. Simi's tasting notes recommend pairing it with fried chicken, mushroom risotto, barbecued salmon or just plain goat cheese.

But Kobe beef fillet with black pepper sauce, chicken skewers with green onions, and shortribs with Asian barbecue sauce were easier matches for the reds.

These included the Clos du Bois 2008 Sonoma Reserve Merlot from Alexander Valley grapes ("more fruit forward and approachable than Cabernet," Sitton observed).

And Simi's Landslide Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 (mostly Cabernet, with touches of Merlot, Malbec, Cabernet Franc, Tannat and Petit Verdot). 

A little sushi got onto the table too, such as Katana's white lotus roll--shrimp, albacore, avocado and soy paper.  

"Some of it worked. Some of it didn't, but at the end of the day, the wines showed pretty well," Sitton said.  And the table was crammed with glasses, as you would expect at a wine dinner that ran from daylight to dark.  

A Piano Driven to Drink

Ever seen an alcoholic piano?

This one may have experienced too many sour notes.

Its drink of choice is Australian Shiraz. That's what's lined up on top. 

The keyboard was locked when I was there so jittery keys couldn't get at the bottles. Perhaps the piano is undergoing rehabilitation.

This wouldn't be painful, because there are plenty of non-alcoholic drinks on the menu at Javan, the West Los Angeles Persian restaurant where the piano hangs out. Like pomegranate juice, fresh lemonade and dough, which is a cold yogurt drink. 

A few sips of these and the piano might belt out a happier tune. 

Javan restaurant, 11500 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90025. Tel: (310) 207-5555.

Pizza Pockets Pop Up at The Charleston

It's great to be a first-nighter. That's how I got in on the debut of pizza pockets at The Charleston.

This Santa Monica gastrolounge has come up with its own version of the supermarket snack. The dough, made there, is filled with mozzarella and San Marzano tomato sauce, which is also made in The Charleston kitchen. 

Fresh, not frozen, these are big, savory, adult-size pizza pockets for the happy hour, which is every day from 5 to 7 p.m. If you're a late type, there's also late happy hour, from 11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday through Wednesday.

The Charleston, 2460 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90403. Tel: (310) 828-2115.

The Cocktail of the Week

It's the Jet 75 at The Charleston, which opened last night--at 10 p.m.--in Santa Monica.

The Jet in the name is Jet Tila, former executive chef at Wazuzu in Las Vegas and now The Charleston's managing partner and in charge of the food.

The drink (it's at right in the photo above) was perfect with anything he served at the pre-opening party, including shortrib tacos, margherita flatbreads and, best of all, uni bocadillos.

The oozy, unctuous bocadillos aren't on the regular menu, at least not yet, because Tila hasn't found a steady source of uni.

But the Jet 75 is there every day, or rather every night, because The Charleston doesn't open until 5 p.m. It's a blend of brut Champagne, gin, lemon juice and simple syrup, a perfect match for food with lots of flavor.

The 10 p.m. opening after the pre-party was perfect timing for a place to hang out at night, with drinks, food, live entertainment and, in the future, an occasional pop-up restaurant.

The Charleston, 2460 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90403. Tel: (310) 828-2115.