The City of Angels

Swimming Pools! Movie Stars!

Feed and Supply has just returned from a wonderful whirlwind weekend in Los Angeles. To be honest, I've never been that interested in L.A. Too many cars, I thought, too much smog, too much urban sprawl. But guess what? Turns out I love Los Angeles. Sure, the traffic is crazy, and there's a lot of fake stuff (breasts, especially) and some extraordinarily ridiculous cars, but there's a rich soul of a city there and some good food, too.

The highlight of the many meals that we crammed into our three day stay was our Saturday night meal at Lucques, Suzanne Goin's warm restaurant in West Hollywood. We ate lamb tartare (really!) with fried chickpeas, a wonderful assiette composed of romanesco (that wacky vegetable that looks like lime green cauliflower) paired with jamon serrano, burrata cheese, and bagna cauda breadcrumbs and the quintessential green salad with Spanish blue cheese and walnuts and a sherry vinaigrette, which reminded me how great that salad can be--oft imitated, usually unsuccessfully. For our main courses we had rich, robust short ribs and the most MARVELOUS SUCKLING PIG.

This pig was legendary. Roasted for 12 hours, submerged at some point in duck and pork fat, the shredded meat was crowned with a crisp flag of skin, which was spread with a sticky sweet mustard and quince paste mixture. It was an amazing dish. It was an amazing meal.

And Los Angeles? A pretty amazing city.