Los Angeles 2010 Day 3

So up until now, I’ve left out a key detail. I was pretty freaking exhausted. I slept for five hours on Wednesday night and left my house at 6:45 Thursday morning to walk 1.5 miles to drop Fred off at the kennel before hopping on the train to the airport. In LA that night, I was up until about midnight local time running around and eating. Then on Friday, I had a ridiculously long day that included me dozing off at the Clippers game.

Greg had class Saturday mid-morning until the early afternoon so I was on my own. My plan was to get up and go to the Santa Monica Market. On my previous visit to LA, I was blown away by the Hollywood Market and Santa Monica is supposed to be even better. But my exhaustion finally won out and I didn’t wake up until 9:30 on Saturday morning. With a 1:30 lunch reservation, I would have had to spend an hour on the bus to get to Santa Monica in order to spend an hour there and then hop a bus for another hour to get to lunch. I decided to sit on my ass for a while before heading out early to walk around before Mozza.

Mozza was the third and final place I was determined to revisit while in LA (Stan’s and Bulgarini being the others). Greg Nice and his opposite-of-positive wife had no interest in going, so I took advantage of him being in class and her being at work to go with some cousins (my mother’s first cousin and his wife and daughter). We started with the Eggplant caponata was an amazing combination of flavors with so much going on that figuring guessing the ingredients would be a colossal waste of time. There’s sweet, there’s spicy, there’s herbishness, there’s savory, and there’s a whole lot of umami richness. Fortunately, the recipe is here so I now know there is sugar, cinnamon, cocoa, hot chili flakes, mint, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pine nuts, thyme, onions, pepper, currants, tomato sauce and a whole mess of roasted eggplant. It’s too complicated for me to try at home, but it’s good enough that I can’t imagine returning to Mozza and not getting it.

As amazing as the eggplant was, I probably liked the fried squash blossoms filled with ricotta even more. I was a little worried that the delicate squash blossom would be thoroughly dominated but the batter was tempura-like in its lightness and the creamy ricotta complemented rather than overwhelmed. For a pizzeria to put this much effort into the non-pizza items is really a treat.

I love the pizza at Mozza. For those unfamiliar with the place, it’s a joint effort from the culinary minds of Mario Batali and Nancy Silverton. Everyone knows who he is but she’s actually the bigger force here. Silverton is widely known as one of the best breadsmiths on the planet and her pizza crust is a remarkably crisp and chewy piece of bread. The one problem with it is that sometimes the pizzas feel more like a bread with independent toppings rather than a unified pizza. That was how I felt about the pizza with Coach farm goat cheese, leeks, scallions, garlic and bacon. I liked it but there were leftovers.

I wouldn’t have ordered the mushroom and tallegio pizza but it was delicious. These mushrooms were packed with flavor and tangy tallegio makes for an excellent pizza cheese. I would have liked this pizza more if there were sauce on it, but it’s clear that Mozza is more geared towards white pizzas.

I tried seven pizzas on my first visit to Mozza. I tried 3 more this time. The best pizza of the bunch, by a decent margin, is this squash blossom and burrata pizza with tomato sauce. Light, rich, sweet, creamy, crisp, chewy and altogether freaking delicious. At $23, it’s the most expensive pizza in the place by $5, presumably due to the large lumps of burrata. This one was the pizza that I’d wished I’d tried last time and after a year and a half of regret, it was every bit as good as I dreamed it would be.

Going to Mozza and not getting dessert should be illegal. We got three. Pictured above was my choice, caramel gelato topped with marshmallow sauce, caramel and Spanish peanuts, all of which were on a chewy caramel wafer. I don’t know what took so long for sweet/salt desserts to catch on, but that’s a fad I really hope lasts forever. This stuff was amazing.

We also got Mozza’s most famous dessert, the butterscotch budino. This picture is actually from my visit in March 2009 but it looked and tasted the same. I said it last year and I’ll say it again: Rich and creamy do not begin to describe the succulent treat. Toss in some caramel and some sea salt and you’ve got about as good a pudding as exists. The third dessert, a simple bowl of housemade sorbet for my allergic-to-everything cousin, was also outstanding. She got chocolate and passionfruit which were merely delicious, and a scoop of coconut which was near Bulgarini quality.

After lunch I went back to the homestead to join Greg Nice where we hung out for a few hours before dinner. Tim Dog left his wife and child in Irvine and was nice enough to drive up to join us for dinner. We made it over to Jitlada around 7:40. Jitlada is a Thai restaurant that specializes in southern Thai food. It’s immensely popular and the back story as to how that came to be is pretty interesting.

There’s a dude named Erik M. who used to live in Chicago and now lives in LA. He was a frequent poster on LTH and he’s a Thai food fiend who also speaks Thai. He reported on Jitlada in 2007 on LTH and translated the menu into English. He also posted on LA’s Chowhound page. About a month later, a respected Chowhounder went and seconded Erik’s declaration that the place was amazing. A month or two after that, Jonathan Gold went and waxed eloquently about the place, solidifying its place in the LA food scene. Armed with menu suggestions from Erik M., we headed to Jitlada where we met up with another college friend. Randomly, not long after we sat down, a pair of friends of Greg’s friends sat down at the table next to us. We decided to merge, increasing our ordering power to 7.

I don’t know enough about Thai food to speak particularly intelligently on what I are. What I can say is this: I have never had Thai food as close to as good as this meal. The Crying Tiger Pork is one of the restaurant’s self-proclaimed featured dishes and for good reason. The pork was a flavor explosion and the accompanying sauce brought some excellent heat.

Cooling things off and bringing some sweetness was a great coconut mango salad topped with cashew and shrimp. This one was pretty straightforward, but that didn’t make the blend of textures and flavors any less delicious.

Recommended by Erik M. and Rachael Ray was the shredded catfish salad with chilies. Neither too fishy nor too spicy, this unique crisp dish went over very well.

Apparently tumeric is all the rage in southern Thailand and this off-menu fried tumeric chicken was outstanding.

Not a big deal that the picture of the spicy beef stir-fry with lemongrass is blurry. This was the least eaten dish at the table and the only dud of the night.

This one falls under the “I don’t know what I’m talking about” category. I think this is called Jungle Noodles with chicken but the interwebs tell me Jungle Noodles are extremely spicy. This one had some heat, but it wasn’t overpowering at all. So either I have the name wrong, the restaurant dulled it down for my non-Thai table, or the internets are wrong. Who really cares? The noodle soup was good.

Among the absolute best dishes of the night/my trip/my last several months was Goong Pear, fried shrimp and fried basil with a spicy curry sauce. The extra crisp breading was so good that more than one of us picked up stray pieces of it long after the shrimp and basil were gone. What’s that? Fried basil? For reals? Yes:

Mudfish doesn’t sound like a particularly good eating treat and it turns out that it isn’t. This dense dried fish was kind of boring but the sweet and hot curry it came in was not. Filling out the bowl was some water spinach. The curry was outstanding and had me thinking out loud that I’d like to come back to Jitlada and just do a curry sampler.

When deciding between a couple of soups, I asked our server for advice. This kind woman, who somehow managed to understand my butchering of her native language as I read off most of our order from a piece of paper I’d brought with me, convinced me to try this tumeric-seasoned soup with chicken and kaffir lime leaves. She said I could get the other soups at other places but that they were the only ones with this particular soup, which is called tom kai baan tom khii-min.

Here’s my little bowl of soup without all the pesky and delicious broth in the way. As I sit here typing this and thinking about the soup I am literally salivating. Freaking fantastic.

I wouldn’t have considered getting pad see ew as it’s something I’ve had plenty of times before. This was one of the choices by the couple I didn’t know. It was a particularly good version and was absolutely loaded with seafood. I’m not sure I’d get it again but that’s only because there are so many other more interesting choices. I certainly don’t regret eating it.

These shrimp were also ordered by the people I don’t know and I’m not really sure what they were. Check out the silverware in the top of the picture to give you an idea how big the shrimp were. They were cooked perfectly and covered in a thick sauce that had more seasonings in it than I’d care to guess. Very good, but about twice as expensive as the average dish at Jitlada (most are in the $10-$12 range).

The final dish of the evening was green curry with fish balls stuffed with egg yolks. This one was very, very good but it was more unique than it was delicious. The curry was, like every other curry we sampled, excellent.

The fish part of the fish ball was kind of a tough fish meatball. I liked it and would recommend people try it, but I’m not sure I’d order it again. Jitlada’s menu is huge and on my next visit (there will be one), I’ll want to try mostly new items. The egg yolk was particularly flavorful. There are rumors that it’s a duck egg, but in my limited experience, those are bigger and darker. I suspect this is more of an MSG-enhanced egg but who knows.

We skipped dessert because we had milk shakes on the brain. I’d heard great things about the toasted pecan shake at a trendy Hollywood burger spot nearby and the plan was to stop there on the way home. But at dinner, discussion had turned to donuts and the decision was made that we should get donuts and shakes for dessert. I had nothing to do with the decision but I certainly wasn’t going to object.

We said our goodbyes to the couple we ran in to and then the original five split up to get dessert to take to Greg’s house. G’Nice, wife and Timmy went for donuts while Emily and I went to get shakes. Upon our arrival, I learned that shakes are no longer on the menu. I was ready to cry when Emily suggested Milk.

It was 10:50 and Milk closes at 11. I called and they agreed to take a phone order even though we might not make it by 11. Very cool on their part. I had no idea what they had so I just asked what their most popular shakes were and I ended up with the The MILKIE Way Malt, which is vanilla ice cream, malted milk, chocolate chips and caramel-chocolate swirl. Milk shakes should not cost $7 but this one might have been worth it.

It turns out that donuts are an ideal accompaniment for donuts. These beauties were from a place called SK’s. They weren’t on the level of Stan’s or Donut Man, but they were still very good. Really, all fresh donuts are good.

Oh, there was a celebrity sighting that day. Now, if you tell someone you ate at Mozza and Jitlada and saw a celebrity and asked the person to guess where, the are going to guess the former. But seated near us at the decidedly not fancy Thai Restaurant were the remarkably shiny Jerry O’Connnell and his wife, the woman formerly known as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Food, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.