Gastrologica No Longer with CPN

Gastrologica and CPN have parted ways, so you'll need to update your downloads by going to our feed either directly through iTunes or at Libsyn.

Since we are no longer restricted by the rules of the network, we will be seeing how to roll Playing With Fire into Gastrologica, then ultimately figure which name to go with.

Which, I guess, means we'd like your input! Which name does everyone prefer?

Also, we were delayed on this weeks show because of Dan's holiday, so we're running a re-run of an old March 6th episode until we can drop a new show next week.

Homecoming: Cafe Bizou

That was the first indication of a change. It is no longer called Cafe Bizou, it's called Bizou garden bistro. Nothing to be alarmed about, and even the change in decor looked pretty nice. They built a new foyer and upgraded the bar area to have a more regal club style. Fine, fine.



Cafe Bizou is a perennial star among mortal restaraunts in our vulgar city of Los Angeles. It has earned a rabid following and admiration for serving high quality French bistro food at reasonable prices. The service is friendly and attentive. The corkage fee is legendarily cheap.

That is, until our last visit. I'm not going to carpet-bomb Bizou on the basis of one visit out of hundreds, but everything related to the service was just off. This was our first trip back to Cafe Bizou since moving from Santa Monica, which pegs it at roughly a little over two years.

The menu is as solid and nostalgic as I remember. One thing about Cafe Bizou, is the menu changes with the speed of a bureaucracy. While they may move some items around, most featured dishes are only slightly altered, or separated from their side and paired with something else. Reading the menu was like re-reading a favorite book. Except some of the chapters were more expensive.

Being situated in the Water Garden must have its overhead nightmares, so, seeing an increase of a buck or two on some dishes isn't a great shock. While the old menu topped out at $18.95 for the most expensive non-special dish, now the ceiling has been raised to $21.75. Still a bargain.



My biggest gripe was the service, which was tediously slow. It may have just been an off night. Our reservations were at 9pm, hardly peak dinner rush, but we had to flag down the waiter for damn near everything. Drinks took about 10-15 minutes to arrive. Bread took another 5-10 minutes after that.

We didn't receive our apps until about 25 minutes into the meal, and the entrees came a full hour after we arrived. Not stellar service. To top that off, we had to request four separate times for more bread. Not four bread orders, for times to get one order of additional bread.

Ok, so enough with the negative, let's talk about the positive. The food is as good as its always been. I started with the dollar soup, cream of potato-mushroom, Nayan had the stuffed mushrooms, and Mike got the carpaccio.

Food regret. "I shoulda got the..." usually comes from Mike's mouth, not mine. But in the face of fresh carpaccio, I should have forwent my soup and got that. Bright and fresh, it had a healthy mound of shaved parmesan and greens over what he described as flavorful beef.



Nayan's mushrooms are perennial favorites. You can barely make out the mushroom, not only because of poor flash quality, but because the mousse mixture overtakes the mushroom itself. They form an herbed chicken paste, ball it over the mushroom, and serve over balsamic reduction with a few arugula shoehorns. The sweetness of the onyx dressing really brings out the hearty chicken and mushroom flavor, complimenting it like a first date.



Our fourth in the group, Rohit, was on a diet or something, because he didn't get anything...just picked away at the bread.

Here come our entrees! (45 minutes later).

I'm jaded, so if I blow through these you'll understand why. We used to eat here like some people eat at McDonald's on the way to the contruction site. If I didn't mention it before, eating at Cafe Bizou can sometimes feel like an AARP convention or mausoleum. There is more blue dye in the dining room than a jeans factory. The reason is history and consistency. Old people know they will get the same great flavors and textures to gum their way through, at a price that's attractive to someone on a fixed annuity.



That's Mike's rack of lamb. I didn't eat it, but I've had it befo'.



Look at Rohit's seared ahi. Being a wimp he got it cooked well done. Good going, burn the ahi.



Nayan isn't too far from getting her AARP card herself, so she got the same thing she got two years ago, and the time before that and the time before that. Steamed vegetable plate. You know, for a cornucopia of vegetables, it isn't half bad. They give you a nice chopped mushroom ravioli, orange butter and a vegetable strudel with the rest of the greens. That dish can actually fill you up!



Finally, mine. Grilled monkfish on a bed of shrimp risotto, lobster sauce, topped with fried carrots. I must be qualifying for my AARP membership because I recall getting this the last few times, also. The monkfish ("poor man's lobster") tastes hearty and the shrimp risotto soaks up the lobster sauce. My theory is the lobster sauce is a reduction of the lobster bisque, but the bisque is so good, hell, why not?

As I said, I'm willing to let go of the trudging service based on Bizou's long standing ability to please and fulfill. There are three locations: Pasadena (mausoleum), Sherman Oaks (cemetary) and Santa Monica (Sunrise Villa's Assisted Living). Any of them are well worth your time to check out and enjoy satisfying, reasonably priced French-Cal food.

Show Update

Just a quick reminder that the show's going to be dropping later this week. Over the last several weeks, we've been publishing a bit later due to hectic schedules and capricious lifestyles. This week is no different, Dan just got back from Hawaii last night, so we're going to be hard pressed to find an evening to bang a show out.

Do not fear, rabid listeners, it will be up by the end of the week, and I can almost ensure you it will revolve around Hawaii (deja vu?).

In any event, look forward to a review of Cafe Bizou later today.

Keep Eating!

The Only Thing Worse Than Being Talked About...

Hey hey hey! Our first negative review.

With phrases like "It is sophomoric, rambling, profane and crude." You know we'll be a hit! Keep it coming!

I Wish They All Could Be California Grills

Vilson. Say it with me. Say it like a German. Vil-shuun. It's fun to talk with a bad German accent, and it's fun to eat at Wilson. Wilson is the new modern, minimalist, museum-adjacent restaurant and stuff. Its the latest in the Invasion of Innovative Dining in Culver City. Which makes me a lucky guy, working there. Instead of going for lunch, I opted to make dinner reservations so I could, well, get drunk.

The MODAA building is a cool monument itself, and Wilson plays off the architectural theme well...almost too well. Ripped right from the pages of Philippe Starck's Antiseptic Guide To Plastic Modernism, the space may be a little cold or off-putting to some, but I like that stripped down look.

So, at first, you may feel you're eating in a museum cafeteria, but the warmth is derived from the rich flavors of the food, which is also served on bone white, square, plates. And yes, they will be poorly represented here because the pictures came out exceptionally crappy.



Since neither of us were starving, and I'm frankly going broke ordering extra food so I can write about it, we each got just one entree. One of Wilson's charms is the whimsically presented menu. Quick, to the point...minimalist. Unlike other Menus that read like fictionalized narrative, Wilson gives you the straightforward dope.



Nayan ordered the 1/2 jidori chicken crusted in cilantro pesto & wasabi mashed potatoes for $22, and I got the slowww roasted pork with african spices, fresh corn polenta & bbq fresh cherry sauce for $22. That's not a typo. Nothing is capitalized and it is, indeed, called slowww roasted pork. Even though Wilson has been open for a short time, I could tell my the reaction and eye-rolling of the waitress that saying "Slow-w-w-w" has already worn thin.

The bread assortment, as I alluded to in another post, is a mix. No longer are restaurants giving straight up dinner rolls with butter. There was a pliable sourdough, buttery brioche, and a few other assorted flavors (one, I could have sworn was Wonderbread). Accompanying this is the standard olive oil and balsamic vinegar...separated, not like the 70's oil pictures.



They also have a nice variety of wine, and best of all, some cheap bottles that clock in around $25. I am no wine drinker, but we worked out it would be more economical to split a bottle than pound beers all night.

Well, the food was fantastic. In your face and bold, my slowww roasted pork was fork tender and spiced to perfection. The little cherries offset the richness of spices, and they all balanced off the creamy polenta.



Nayan's chicken was a generous portion, slatered in sauce so every bite was dripping with flavor. I'm not a huge fan of horseradish flavored potatoes (they've run their course), but this balanced well against the chicken. The chicken was moist for being white meat, and we picked at the carcass like vultures until there was nothing left but dry bones.



The portion size was nice, but I did feel a little peckish at the end of the meal, so I'd suggest you go for the appetizer or salad to really fill you up. Overall, it is a welcome addition to the new wave of restaurants bringing vibrancy and diversity to Culver City. Next stop: Howdy's.

Ye Olde British Food Place For Fried Things and Meat

Dan and I went to an overlooked British Pub in Sherman Oaks last night, on the corner of Woodman and Burbank Blvd called Robin Hood. There's a small Friar Tuck shoppe in there, too, where you can get ceramic knick-knacks, buck-teeth and whatnot, but we didn't check it out.

Dan heard about it from a homey of his, so before we recorded our new show (Gastrologica. On iTunes. Check it out!), we ran over there to see what they had. My impression before heading out was that it was a Fish 'n' Chips place like H. Salt. It was actually a full-blown English Pub, complete with bad dental work and dartboards.

You thought I'd take pictures? What I can describe to you no picture could ever capture, unless you're really desperate to look at a backlit hunk of battered fish and ceramic pot pie. Sustinence, not presentation, is what British food is known for.

The first thing I noticed was the presence of British accents. Being in LA, I assume forty percent of the time someone is faking it, but the old codgers behind us were the real deal. Crumudgony and bitter, the shaky octogenerian admonished the server to take the food back as he had not finished his salad yet. Sounded British to me!

Anyway, while we were knocking back a couple of Doddington's, I was mentioning how "If you build it they will come theory" works in the unlikliest of places. Build a British Pub in Sherman Oaks, they come trotting through. Build a German Bier Garten in Silverlake, everyone goose-steps in for sausage. Open a kabab place in Canoga Park, everyone straps on a bomb and heads up for some kubideh.

Somehow, some way, word of mouth spreads through thin populations, and they start trickling in. So the Brits have a place to hang out and chuck darts in Sherman Oaks.

The food was great. I ordered the steak and mushroom pie, and Dan had a full order of fish and chips. I'll explain why they have a half order in a minute. There are no appetizers except for soup and salad, and there are daily specials and traditional breakfast foods which became obvious why they never caught on outside of the UK. Deviled Kidneys and Toast. I'll stick with pancakes and sausage.

If you're like me, the only exposure to fish 'n' chips or fish fillets is either wedged between a thick glob of tartar sauce and rank bun from McDonalds, or from Gordon's or Van de Kamps straight from your toaster. These are meager, flaccidly breaded, painfully tasteless fakes of the real thing.

Our food arrived, and there were two huge, battered boulders on Dan's place, perched on top of chips (fries). Each bowling-ball sized chunk of Icelandic Cod was battered with a hearty, crispy shell that resembled volcanic rock: porous and crunchy. They killed Moby Dick!

Although I didn't eat any, he reported the fish was fresh, clean tasting, crunchy and the tartar was hearty. He plowed through both pieces like a goat chews through a field of trash, but that's Dan.

My plate was comprised of a ceramic bowl crowned with puff pastry, pile of fries, ramekin of plain, steamed peas and a side of jus. The jus was beefy and hearty, thickened with what I hope was collagen.

The pie had a great beef flavor, with the chunks of meat soft enough to offer no resistence to the teeth, and grant a lively burst of meaty flavor, yet firm enough to not fall apart and render the meat stringy.

I first delicately picked at the shell, and with measured bites, balanced the right amount of pastry, meat and juice. About halfway through I said "Screw it" and dumped the chips and gravy into the mix and meshed it all up. The 'pot pie' had enough of its own gravy, but the addition of the chips, like Peruvian saltado, added an extra dimension and absorbed the bulk of the gravy.

Hearty and satisfying. If you find yourself in Sherman Oaks, and craving Old World fare, definitely swing by and chug a few British beers on tap. Have some bangers and mash to absorb the drinks, or any one of their hearty meat pies. Unless you're Andre the Giant, stick with the half order of Fish 'n' Chips.

Robin Hood
13640 Burbank Blvd
Sherman Oaks, CA 91401
(818) 994-6045

Vege...tarian Lasagna?

Did you say vegetarian? RUN TO THE HILLS!!!!

Well, no, not every food that has the absence of meat is bad. Strictly speaking, it is vegetarian. The primary fallacy about vegetarian is that it's all healthy. That is complete bullshit. Vegetarian food is usually loaded with carbs and dairy products to take your mind off the lack of meat or protein.

I made a kick-ass vegetarian lasagna last night, and who would have thought Italian food was so copasetic to the vegetarian lifestyle? When you think about it, Southern Italian food has many dishes that contain no meat: eggplant parmesan, spaghetti with red sauce, fettucini alfredo, the list goes on.

So, don't get scared or think I'm wussified 'cause I made something called vegetarian. A friend did me a favor, and she's a vegetarian. As I made it, I was thinking, this is really a normal lasagna, I just left out the ground beef.

It's all marketing people.

I wish, I truly wish I could give you exact recipes, but my lack of detail orientation coupled with ADHD makes that impossible. Here are my approximated ingredients:

1 whole bag of spinach leaves. People, and I use that term loosely, this is the only bag leaf besides weed that I would buy. It saves a lot of time having to wash, rinse, drain, cut, repeat. Bag spinach is ready to wilt, right out of the bag.

2 handfulls of sliced criminis
1 chunk of butter for sauteeing purposes
1 box of lasagna.

Here's my theory on how to portion out the sheets of lasagna. If you don't par-boil your noodle, you can use exactly what you need because you'll assemble the lasagna with dry noodle. We'll get to that in a second. If you boil you (par) boil your noodles first, then just make the whole box, since its hard to approximate how many sheets you'll use. Better safe than sorry.

1 jar of spaghetti sauce, or make it your damn self.
1/2 lb of cottage cheese. I find it creamer and richer than ricotta.
1 whole cream cheese brick
salt 'n' peppa
1 block of mozzarella
2 eggs
1 package crumbled feta

First things first. Sautee your spinach and sliced criminis and set aside. 1 whole bag of spinach wilts down to almost nothing.

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs, cheeses, salt and shredded mozzarella. Shred it yourself from the brick. Mix it all into a nice mesh.

Once cooled and drained, you can add the spinach and mushrooms.

Now you're ready to assemble and bake. So here's my dissertation on lasagna noodles:

You don't have to par boil the noodles if you have enough liquid in the lasagna. This lasagna tends to be a bit drier, so for this recipe you might want to par boil them. If you bake a lasagna that uses ricotta, more spaghetti sauce or more watery ingredients, the noodles will cook and soften during baking.

My first lasagna did come out a bit too al really dente. The next one I made by par boiling the noodles.

Always sauce the bottom of the pyrex, regardless. Lay down your noodles, interlocking the wavy parts, if you like. Slater the cheese mixture and layer again. For this recipe I downplay the red sauce, since I'm trying to highlight the spinach/feta combination.

Bake for 40 minutes at 375. Keep covered the first 25 and uncover the last 15 for browning. Remove from the oven with your bare hands and immediately plant your face in the boiling mixture.

Legal Disclaimer: Removing pyrex from a hot oven with your bare hands and dunking your face into molten pasta is a good remedy for excema.

2nd Legal Disclaimer: Steve Wasser is neither a medical doctor or a lawyer, so these legal disclaimers nor medical advice have no value. Steve shall be held harmless if you follow his stupid suggestions, although you won't be able to send a complaint email since you'll have no skin on your hands.

New Show

This week's show is devoted to the simple pleasures of cold soup and Fish and Chips. Sure, we veer off in our own cute way through various tangents, but that's the crux of it.

My New Website

If you like political talk I've started a new site called Total Centrist. In it, I talk about news and current events as I see it. Centrist is a misnomer because nobody can be 100% objective or unbiased, but I derive my opinions from various sources. It has nothing about food, just opinion.

A Tale of One City, Divided in Half

Even though Latinos are the overwhelming majority of the minorities in this city, soon to be emerging as the overwhelming majority...period, its culinary influence has reached a peak.

As many listeners and readers know, we moved this weekend from the Latino stronghold of East LA/Hollywood, to the homogenized Whitebread 'paradise' of Santa Monica. Home of the Homeless. Each side of the city is culturally segregated into the main populations who live there. If you count homeless as a racial group, and why not?

Of course, there are exceptions. While East LA is notably Mexican, and features some of the best and oldest authentic Mexican food in the city, Koreatown certainly cannot be ignored...although it largely is outside of the Korean community. Why has K-Town fallen off the map for all except ravenous gourmands? I know, I know, I'm making gross generalizations, but K-Town occupies a huge swath of land from Wilshire-south and everything east of Western. It's a city within a city, like every other community in LA.

So why have we glossed over the Eastside Asian influence? 'Cause we're white, I guess. Because it's easier to compartmentalize areas by one particular group instead of acknowledging that Hollywood is both Armenian and Thai. We allow international borders to screw up our perception of peaceful commingling of different people. Ok, I'll grant you that Glendale is Armenian. Period. You want good kabobs and a place to get your car fixed and someone to hook you up with affordable stereo equipment, Glendale's your place.

Hollywood isn't known for a damn thing except hookers and heroin addicts, but there is a respectable Thai community with some great grocery stores from which to stock up on your lemongrass and durien. So why is East LA tagged as Mexican?

Well, the overwhelming majority of taggers are Mexican, but I did see Sushi scrawled on my lightposts and sidewalks of Los Feliz before I left. So you see, the tagging culture is even being wrestled away from Mexicans, and Asians are slowly assimilating into this dubious tagging culture. Nice job!

The Middle City -the flyover surface streets between Western and La Cienega- are a hodgepodge of mixed levels of cuisine, short-shrift chop-shop fusions of French-Asian, Asian-Fusion, Cal-Asian. Notice a pattern? Again, the Mexicans, who comprise the majority of population here in Southern California, are getting -at least culinarily- squeezed out of the game. There is no Mexican-French fusion or Mexican-Asian fusion...but there should be.

The two largest cultural groups in California (next to Whitey) are Asian and Mexican. Now, I realize that's a generalization since Latinos come from a checkerboard of countries south of the border, and Asians come from a nice quilt of their own countries. For the sake of simplicity, let's just pretend there's one Asian country and one Latino country.

But, you scream, you just posted a breakout not too long ago of the different Asian food. Right you are. I am a hypocrite for the sake of this argument. Mexico has, I dunno, many different states, each originating its own brand of unique regional dishes. What do we get here in LA? Tacos and burritos. Carne Asada. Supersweet Coca Cola. The occassional Oaxacan restaurant. But mostly, tacos and burritos.

That's like saying all Asian food is noodles and raw fish. There's just so much more to the food than that. But nobody has bothered elevating or breaking out the regional cuisines of Mexico. Or El Savador for that matter, Brazilian, Columbian or Nicaraguan. Belize? I don't even know how to spell Belize.

Perhaps it is so integrated into our California culture that we would never bastardize Mexican food. After all, California at one point was Mexican territory. By geological standards, Asians are recent immigrants. So, does the relative age of an immigrant culture open it up to fusion more than a rigidly ensconsed cultural cuisine? Perhaps.

But I think the reasons are more insidious than that. It's because Mexican food has not yet elevated itself to stylized cuisine. The best example I could force out of my tired and aging brain is Border Grill, and even that is more Southwestern than Mexican. I happen to know Susan Fenniger is a big fan of Mexican food from all regions, so I think their hearts are in the right place. The Border Grill is doing its darndest to elevate Mexican/Southwestern food into something more elegant.

Asian food already enjoys that posture, and it's a relative newcomer. Chinese food has been Americanized and franchised in the form of PF (Paul Flemming) Chang's. Most of us accept, prima facie, sushi and other Japanese restaurants are upscale (the prohibitively expensive pricepoint for sushi is the launching ground for that theory). But, as I noted before, Korean food hasn't gone mainstream yet.

A simple answer is that many Korean BBQ places are cook-it-yourself, and that just turns people off becuase they are dealing with raw meat, and they are being put to work. At it's core, Whitey is a lazy beast. Also, harkening back to a previous post, many Asian restaurants don't bother glossing over the menu with euphamistic terms, so grilled chicken heart will be called Grilled Chicken Heart on the menu. Marketing, fellas, marketing will do wonders for Korean food.

And there is the matter of dog. Like it or not, the Korean culture has been blessed with the honor of eating dog, and that is a sales killer to anyone who is not up on current Korean-American culture.

That aside, Mexican food has been mainstream for a while. It is probably the first non-European food to be mainstreamed, Americanized, homogenized, packaged in a styrofoam box and handed to you in a branded paper bag. Mexican food has suffered from marginalization. Even restauranteurs like Susan Fenniger and Mary Sue Miliken, or assholes like Bobby Flay, shroud their Mexican influence by calling the food Southwestern food.

So, in this case, we have two major cultural food groups that are mostly overlooked. Korean, which has been denied the proliferation it deserves, and Mexican, which has been overproliferated and watered down. There are a couple of exceptions, naturally, but overall, they are undersold.

Done Moving!

The backbreaking and knuckle snapping work is all over. We've moved and we're mostly settled in at our new Santa Monica location. I remember railing against SM when I lived here three years ago, but lo and behold, we've moved right back to where we were. I guess I'm willing to put up with the bums using the city as a public urinal more than I could stand the taggers using our walls as a public message board.

Blazing Honesty of Menus

Wake Up, America.

God knows some things are just delicious. Unquestioned Hierarchies. Sodomy. Cinnamon Toothpaste.

You know what else tastes good? Honesty. Pure, chisled-from-guano honesty. Like Mt. Rushmore during Bike Week.

Smooth talking menus are as genuine as a street copy of Windows XP.

That's why you can trust the good folks at ThaiCo, like a blinding ray of sunshine burning through the early morning mist.

No euphamistic terms for hippocampus or testicle, just unvarnished honest presentation of the ugly facts.



And what a fantastic way to balance your chi. You know, chi is so important to World Peace, so why not keep it in perfect equilibrium.

Wouldn't you rather know what is in the food you eat?



Sometimes not.



And, so, simply, totally, you want to have an honest inventory of what is in your dish.

New Show

I know it's been a few episodes since I posted the show notes. This one is short and sweet. As many of the listeners already know, I'm moving, so we're in fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants mode. This week we review some listener emails, particularly one discussing the varied flavors of experimental food. Since we've been under the yoke of thermal oppression, we've kept the topic to cold food and drinks.

Do you like BLTs? Spend a few minutes with us as we drool over our down-n-dirty BL(A)T recipes. The BLT is the go-to sandwich for this disaffected Jew looking to violate every kosher law and combat the heat of an LA summer. Let's see what that drunken putz Mel Gibson has to say about it.