GORBALS: A SCOTTISH/JEWISH CURATE'S EGG IN DOWNTOWN L.A.

As part of a week-long public celebration of my 46th Birthday, Sybil had treated me to a Thai massage and a facial (even fat, bald, big eared 46 year old Yorkshiremen are entitled to glowing skin)

The facial part was a breeze. I lay on a comfortable couch as an attractive young woman bathed my battered fizzog with exotic lotions from all corners of the globe, all the while drifting off to the peaceful sound of chill out music played on the Pan pipes.

The massage however, was a different matter entirely. No gentle back rubs here. For those of you who have not experienced true Thai massage, it is the equivalent of the sort of beating you would expect to receive if you asked a Hell’s Angel to give you a hand job. At one point, the burly lady who was unfortunate enough to have me as a client, spent a good fifteen minutes walking up and down on my back as I whimpered like a five year old girl. Revenge was mine however as she turned towards my bottom half, letting out a little squeal as she realised her tasks that day included giving a right good massage to my bunioned feet.

I hobbled out of the spa an hour and a half later feeling like I had endured a heavy kicking in one of the rougher areas of Glasgow. Particularly appropriate as supper that night was going to be at a relatively new restaurant in Downtown L.A, which carried the unlikely moniker of the same name; Gorbals.

Chef, Ilan Hall was apparently the winner of the second season of US TV cookery show Top Chef. He named his restaurant after the area where his Scottish/Israeli parents lived in Glasgow. It’s an odd choice for a name, a bit like calling a restaurant “Moss Side” or “Toxteth” but his unlikely selection added to an equally intriguing menu offering “Scottish/Jewish Fusion” food has won the place quite a few online fans and a mainly positive critical response since it opened its doors.

Downtown L.A. seems to be redeveloping at a pace, but you would hardly know it as you pass some of the more troubled of the city’s population and make your way through the lobby of The Alexandria Hotel into the dimly lit restaurant. It’s a small room, but not unappealing, with a handful of tables for couples and foursomes, some large communal benches and bar stool seating overlooking the kitchen itself. It was empty when we arrived, but by the time we left, there was barely a spare seat in the house, a definite testament to its current popularity.

The menu too is small and genuinely quirky. It contained only eleven listed savoury plates followed by just two desserts. These included Sticky Toffee Pudding, the only nod I could see on the menu towards any British, let alone Scottish influence. There were certainly some Jewish elements with gribines and even matzoh balls served with horseradish mayonnaise. Although, I am pretty certain the fact they were also served wrapped in bacon might preclude them from any Jewish ceremony I know about.

This is where it all began to get a little odd. We ordered five of the eleven dishes and sat back to sip on our drinks until they arrived. We didn’t have to wait long. In fact, we didn’t have to wait long until every single plate of food had been placed before us. Sybil checked her watch and calculated that we had been in the restaurant a mere ten minutes before our first food arrived and only twenty before the last of the small plates was deposited in front of us.

The meal itself was a real curate’s egg. When it was good, it was delicious, when it was bad, well just look at the pictures. Those bacon wrapped matzoh balls were surprisingly light and worked well with the wrapping of crisp bacon and the tang of the horseradish sauce. If they were an unlikely success, then the next dish was an unlikely flop. Few things can’t be improved by deep-frying and the slivers of crisp pigs head in our salad were spot on. They were far too few of them however and the remaining components of peas and other greenery had been overdressed with lime, to mouth puckering effect.

Top marks for the next two dishes. Gribines are literally “scraps” of chicken skin that are cooked until all the fat has rendered leaving them akin to my beloved pork scratchings. I make them myself, but Hall’s notion to use them instead of bacon in a BLT is a thing of genius. The lettuce in our attractive sandwich may have been overdressed again, but the crunch of toasted bread, chicken skin and leaves was good enough for me to consider ordering another one immediately.

Equally delicious were three “Lamb Buns” or sliders that, oddly enough, reminded me of the fabulous lamb rolls I ate in Xian, than anything I have ever encountered in Britain. I am normally no great fan of lamb in the US, but these were tasty, perfectly cooked chunks served in sweet, soft rolls. It was another good idea from a chef who likes his gutsy flavours.

Quite how then, I wonder, could a chef able to send out something as good as those two dishes also be capable of two horrors that should never have never have made it further than the kitchen waste bins? Just in case you think I am being deliberately unpleasant (and, oh yes, I know I am definitely guilty of that from time to time) I offer up as evidence photographs #4 and #10.

There seems to be a new trend appearing for charred green vegetables. Here’s a word of advice to all chefs. If God had meant asparagus and broccoli to be black, he would not have made them green in the first place. First, the incinerated asparagus at Chego last week and now, well as I said, just look the pictures. If you guessed that the bowl contained what was once broccoli, you are correct. It was really very nasty indeed.

Worse was to come with the dessert. I chose the sticky toffee pudding. Well, of course I was going to. Any chef with British heritage can have his chops tested with this classic pudding. Over the years I have eaten dozens of STP’s. The best have been gloriously soft, light and drenched in a rich coating of caramel sauce. The worst are dense, lumpy and dry. None however, has ever been quite like the one served at Gorbals.

That’s it there in the picture, next to the blob of rapidly melting ice cream. I thought of Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood” as I prodded at it

“Starless and Bible black”

The charred outside just about yielded to reveal the hard layer below and the texture was like eating the contents of a hypo-allergenic pillow. The addition of small flakes of Maldon salt did not add any relief and we both took one bite and pushed the plate away. I mentioned it to our waiter and he took the cost off the bill immediately. Quite right too, but they should also take it off the menu until they know how to make one.

The service, as it has been just about everywhere in LA, was lovely and efficient and deserved the tip we left. I ordered a smashing bottle of a dark, rich Angel Porter to drink with my meal and Sybil had glass of red from a small wine list, which included a Kosher wine that could only be served by Ilan, (presumably not after he had been cooking the bacon)

These brought our final bill to $85. That struck me as quite a lot to pay for six small plates of very, very hit or miss food. It struck me as even more to pay when we looked at the time again and realised we would be hitting the street less than forty minutes after arriving. The curse of small plates dining strikes again.

I can certainly understand the appeal of Gorbals. It is lively, fun and a useful addition to a resurgent part of the city. The food however is too variable to ever make the restaurant a regular stopping off point for me when there are better options downtown. That being said, I shall be watching Ilan Hall’s career with considerable interest. After all, anyone who can come up with the brilliance that is a chicken skin sandwich can’t be all bad.

LAZY OX CANTEEN: "I'VE SO HAD IT WITH SMALL PLATE DINING"

The last of our plates had just been cleared from our slightly cramped table. It was towards the rear of the Lazy Ox Canteen, one of the newest and hippest restaurants in the continuing redevelopment of Downtown L.A. Our dining companion, Angel, sat back in her chair and sighed “I’ve so had it with small plates”. Both Sybil and I nodded, knowing exactly what she meant.

We had just been presented with a bill that, with tip, came little shy of $150 between us for a meal that, while it showed off the obvious skills in the kitchen, also showed off what a confused and often grim experience is to be endured when faced with the seemingly unstoppable virus that is small plates dining.

The concept seems harmless enough at first. Food offered in smaller portions, at smaller prices so that they can be shared. Easy peasy, you would be forgiven for thinking. A good way for the kitchen to prove what it can do and a good way for you and your dining companions to sample a wide range of what the chef has to offer. Unfortunately, as our meal at the Lazy Ox Canteen proved, things are never quite that simple.

First of all, while the restaurant may shrink the portions, they rarely shrink the prices per plate by the commensurate amount often presenting you with a bill many notches above what you were expecting and certainly above that of a more standard three course meal.

Then there is the problem knowing how much to order. The menu is little help, usually leaving you, as they did at the Lazy Ox, to play a little game of guess the portion size from the price. This can end with you and your friends clattering forks as you duel over a single tiny plate or staring down more food than you could ever imagine eating in one sitting. Asking the staff is usually of little help. They, of course, have been trained to sell as many dishes as possible (those at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restaurant being the worst I have encountered) and will snort with derision if you order anything less than half the menu.

Finally, and most annoyingly of all, there is the seemingly random order in which the dishes appear on your table. The notion of meals served in courses may be a western construct, but there is a logic to it and, call me old fashioned, I actually like to have some vague idea of what order my food is going to arrive. The restaurants often explain this with reference to the more casual Spanish style of dining. Nowadays, just about any old rubbish can be offered up on small plates with the claim that it is being served ‘tapas” style. A claim that would make most Spaniards laugh until their nipples fell off and a claim that is made by chefs who have probably never been closer to Spain than having impure thoughts during a Penelope Cruz movie.

None of this is to say that the food served this way is always dreadful. In fact, at the Lazy Ox Canteen, some of it was terrific and, if it had been presented in a less frenetic and confused way, it might have made for a very enjoyable meal indeed.

The restaurant is loud, that’s L.A loud, which seems to be several decibels above anywhere else in the world and we had to shout to make ourselves heard by the charming server. There were two menus (well, of course there were) a printed one and another scrawled on a blackboard and between us we constructed a menu not knowing whether we would be faced with enough food to feed a platoon or little enough to leave us desperate to order more.

With the food also came the confusion. One dish arrived that we were pretty sure we had not ordered, but ate anyway, because we were not sure either way. Another was only delivered when every other plate had been finished and we had almost forgotten that we had ordered of it. Between those, plates arrived in no particular order and in random clusters. This meant that, at one point in the meal, I was to be found neatly dissecting to share two tiny anchovies on the only plate on the table and, at another staring down five dishes wondering which to concentrate on and which to leave to congeal nicely. Dishes that were priced as main courses arrived before dishes that we assumed were starters and seemed only marginally bigger and not enough to justify the disparity in pricing.

All of this was as shame, because it was apparent from the arrival of our first dish, a plate of razor clams, cooked “a la plancha” that the kitchen knew what it was doing. They were meaty and cooked perfectly, only slightly spoiled by too liberal a hand with the dressing.

Other highlights were to be found in the deep fried dishes, including excellent Octopus Frito and Pig’s Ear Chicharron, both served with a suitably spicy aioli. Attempts at two types of sausage proved slightly less successful, with morcilla offering up an odd grainy texture and a slick of unnecessary gravy, while a Merguez lacked the spice of its home-town Moroccan equivalent. A small slider sized hamburger combined excellent meat with some of the best fries I have eaten in a long while and a pork tenderloin, so often dry and tasteless, was splendidly moist. Steamed mussels were served in a spicy sauce so delicious it had us all scooping the last drops from bowl with empty shells.

The quality of the food could have made the Lazy Ox Canteen a serious contender and I can certainly understand why every seat was taken from the moment we arrived to the moment we left. However, the confused style of serving left us turning down dessert, as much through bewilderment as satiation and asking for our bill. That, of course, turned out to be more than we expected and had Angel adding to her initial comment “I feel full but not satisfied”

Once again, I nodded in agreement. She was spot on and I have to say now for the record, I have so had it with small plates dining.

HERMANO SEGUNDO LOST IN LA LA LAND: DAY FOURTEEN

In the 1920’s and 1930’s Downtown Los Angeles was where it was at, ritzy hotels and movie theatres lined the streets and the Art Deco offices were filled with workers speeding towards the American Dream.

Move on the best part of a century and Downtown L.A is a very different place indeed. Still filled with office drones by day at night they flee the centre for more fashionable areas leaving the heart of the city to the poor, homeless and confused. The stunning buildings too remain more of less intact but many are empty and for the most part Downtown is not a place where you would want to spend any great amount of time.

For some people, however, Downtown is home and more than that, a district they are determined to revive to its former glories. One such person is Monica May, chef and restaurant owner whose simple new establishment The Nickel Diner, run with her partner Kristen, is already giving people a reason to stay local for lunch and dinner.

Close to Skid Row, The Nickel Diner was converted with considerable effort from a run down Mexican taqueria and the renovations revealed the wall decorations of the original diner, which have been restored to charming affect.

I am in awe of great American Short order cooking and cooks, often overlooked as a talent and, as Monica explained to myself, Sybil and our new chum, Susan, it is increasingly hard to find people willing to fill the posts given that most young cooks have had their eyes filled with T.V chefs and the glitter of Michelin stars.

At The Nickel Diner, they seems to have done well and while the menu may be filled with solid diner staples, Monica’s chef’s background means the ingredients are a notch above what you anticipate from such places and the execution likewise. Sybil’s Tuna burger was a perfect example with a meaty steak cooked to medium and served with perfect shoestring fries. A hamburger for Susan came with terrific onion rings and my own BLT was as good an example as you are likely to get. With soft drinks including fresh lemonade, the bill came to $15 a pop including tip. Excellent value.

As the diner was beginning to empty of its lunchtime crowd, we then spent the next two hours chatting happily with Monica and Kristen who fed us one of their desserts, a cupcake with a difference, a “hidden” layer of Space Dust ( or Pop rocks as the yanks call them) that Susan rather took a fancy too.

When we finally walked out into the afternoon heat, Sybil gave me a tour of downtown to walk off some of the excellent lunch including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and The Bradbury Building where many scenes from Bladerunner were shot and best of all, The Grand Central Market where, despite her declaration that Mexican food in L.A is and I quote, “sucky” she let me try a carnitas taco. By local standards it may have only be ordinary, but I would love to have a place that made anything close to this quality in my neighbourhood.

A fun day and with places like The Nickel Diner, Downtown, L.A, it would seem is on the up again.