Stepping into Rivera for the first time, I had no idea what to expect. The long sleek room is spare and contemporary. Big loungy chairs line the dark bar at one side. And what looks like a bright white sushi bar gleams at one end.
No signs indicate that the main dining room is called Samba, for South America. The "sushi" bar is the Playa Bar and will eventually dispense Mexican snacks. And a clubby room behind the scenes has been named Sangre (blood) for the Spanish conquest of Latin America. The only hint of bloodiness there is the fiery color of the chandelier.
This nomenclature makes clear that the menu is Latin-inflected. Rivera, located in downtown Los Angeles, is the first restaurant in 14 years for John Rivera Sedlar, following Abiquiu and Bikini in Santa Monica and Saint Estephe in Manhattan Beach, where his innovative French-Southwestern food won wide acclaim.
A single meal at Rivera can travel from Yucatan to Peru, back to Mexico City and over to Spain.
Drinks range from complex infused tequilas and Peru's pisco sour to an exhaustive wine list that ranges from Spain and Portugal to Argentina and Uruguay.
After dinner, there is coffee from Brazil. And perhaps a glass of golden, nuanced extra anejo tequila. The walls in Sangre are lined with engraved bottles of this tequila, purchased by customers and kept under lock and key.
The food is decorative and interesting but not precious. An "old fashioned" red chile chicken enchilada is just that, a stacked enchilada filled with chicken and goat cheese and bathed in as pure and clean-tasting a red chile sauce as may exist in Los Angeles.
The sauce is made of guajillo chiles and a dash of chimayo chile from Sedlar's native New Mexico. Flowers scattered over the top and baby vegetables on the side give a nod to upscale presentation.
Fish tacos are equally direct--chunks of striped bass on small corn tortillas garnished with red onion rings, sweet red pepper and an avocado salsa verde.
A duck enfrijolada puts duck confit between tortillas coated with spicy-sweet black beans. Over this goes a red wine and cascabel chile sauce. Sedlar thinks so highly of the enfrijolada that he is already referring to it as his signature dish.
His updated quesadilla layers Serrano ham and Idiazabal cheese from Spain between white and blue corn tortillas so that each side is a different color.
And blue and white tortilla chips accompany xnipek, a Yucatecan salsa with a seductive deep, spicy taste from toasted chiles, charred tomatoes, onion and garlic.
Sedlar uses only tortillas made from real ground corn, not instant masa flour. At night there are tortillas florales, handmade tortillas embedded with flowers in pretty designs. The corn for these is cooked and ground in the kitchen.
The restaurant is new and experimenting. Black mussels in a broth of pisco and aji amarillo (yellow chile) from Peru arrived topped with strips of dried Spanish chorizo one week, with slices of red jalapeno the next. The spiciness of the chiles might appeal to some, but I felt it overpowered the subtlety of the mussels, whereas the chorizo added an interesting layer of flavor.
Milder dishes include wild striped bass with Peruvian purple potato salad, rib-eye steak with cilantro mashed potatoes and a poached artichoke filled with marinated slow-roasted pork.
Calabacitas (squash) and quinoa with spinach come in little packets formed of dried corn husks.
Desserts keep up the pace. The most interesting is a Mexico City style sundae with habanero caramel sauce, pine nuts and passion fruit.
The most dramatic is a wedge of dense chocolate torte draped with rum-soaked drunken pineapple on a platter flashily painted with the Catalan word for chocolate, Xocolata.
There's an important reason for the restaurant to endure. Sedlar has embarked on an ambitious plan to produce his own tequila. The agaves that he has planted in Arandas, a tequila region in the state of Jalisco, will mature in six years. Then the tequila will spend five years in French oak. That means at least 11 years until J. Rivera Sedlar Tequila can be poured at Rivera.
Rivera Restaurant, 1050 S. Flower St., Los Angeles, CA 90015. Tel: (213) 749-1460.
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