LA Food Hype
LA's food scene has been getting a lot of attention recently. I've read all over the news about two phenomena in particular: the gourmet food trucks led by the Korean taco truck Kogi, and Maria Batali and Nancy Silverton's place, Pizzeria Mozza. So I was lucky enough to hit both in the same day!
The first was Kogi (link to their site), and my luck extended to the truck being accompanied by another truck that I had wanted to try, Coolhaus (link to their site). There were four food trucks in total at this parking plaza in Venice (you find out about their whereabouts on Twitter), as well as a tricycle stocked with free lemonade promoting a new restaurant opening in Venice called...Lemonade. I got to the parking lot around 12:30pm, and the line was already ~40 minutes long for Kogi (no lines for the other trucks).
I sampled one each of the Spicy Pork, Short Ribs, and Spicy BBQ Chicken tacos. Can't tell the difference among them in the picture below? Taste-wise, I couldn't taste the difference either. Each had cubes of brown meat with indistinguishable flavor, topped with that Korean-esque slaw that was sopping wet. Each taco ended up being really soggy and bloat-inducing, and each tasted exactly the same. Within each taco as well, there wasn't any variation of flavor, since the liquid from the slaw totally overwhelmed every particle of food.
I was hoping for better luck at Coolhaus. This is an ice cream sandwich truck started by two architecture students, and each of the ice cream flavors has a punny architect-related name like "Mies Vanilla Rohe." I tried the "Le Corbusteaer" which is Earl Grey, and paired it with sugar cookies. This was a disappointment as well. The ice cream was so, so sweet, far too sweet for my taste. But even worse, the cookies had entirely the wrong texture. They were quite hard, meaning that biting down on both cookies with the ice cream in the middle sent the ice cream shooting out to the side. Give me an M&M's brand ice cream sandwich over this any day (I'm not joking - the M&M's sandwich is a tough one to beat).
The most interesting part of this eating experience was the edible wrapper. It tastes like nothing.
Oh yeah, and you can skip the lemonade from Lemonade. It was so sweet I felt like I was drinking Jolly Ranchers.
After these culinary disappointments, I was even more excited by the reservations I got for dinner at Pizzeria Mozza (link to their site). When I told some people that I got reservations, they asked me incredulously, "Who do you know there??" I didn't have the heart to tell them that I just went on OpenTable three days earlier and just clicked a few times.
Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, but I left my camera's card at home and took this with my cell phone. We ordered three pizzas: 1) fennel sausage, panna, red onion and scallions, 2) funghi misti, fontina, taleggio and thyme, 3) bacon, egg, and potato. So how did Mozza fare? I'd say I enjoyed the pizzas, with the funghi misti (mixed mushrooms) being my favorite for depth of flavor, and the bacon, egg, and potato next being very wholesome and comforting. The fennel sausage was so greasy that the crust underneath turned soggy and limp. They met expectations for nice pizza.
But they fell well short of expectations for all of the hype. "A master class in the art of making pizza," wrote the LA Times. Frank Bruni said the crusts had "extraordinary character" in the NY Times. Really? Times like this I long for Dewey's Pizza in Cincinnati - excellent pizzas with crusts I could eat on their own, and no hype or reservations needed.
Three strikes, LA, three strikes.
