GENERAL COMMENT: On a cold winter night Indian food hits the spot. Many years ago, when we sailed together as a family, we would come back to Marina del Rey cold and tired, clean up the boat, and head over to the Akbar restaurant on Washington Boulevard.
In the restaurant business, capturing a niche market can be very profitable. Among people I know, Chaya Venice is the place to go after work for a drink and a snack.
I rarely drive into Hollywood for dinner — only when something very special takes me there. And I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the décor in a restaurant; I’m mostly focused on my comfort level.
Thomas Keller, thought by many to be America’s best chef, leads the French Laundry’s restaurant team in Napa Valley. The people responsible for lists of the world’s leading restaurants often include some subset of Keller’s restaurants — the list of Keller’s restaurants includes the very successful P
I’ve walked by the Hikari Sake House on the corner of Fourth Street and Santa Monica Boulevard hundreds of times. I just assumed it was another typical overpriced sushi place run by another sushi-Gestapo-chef who would order me to leave if I ordered the wrong thing.
In Europe, a lot of the best restaurants are in fancy hotels. Generally that hasn’t been true in California, but it’s getting more common. A good example is Whist, located on the ground floor of the Viceroy Hotel on Ocean Avenue.
Now that I’m in my reduced sugar intake phase, I’ve been visiting restaurants that claim to be organic, sugar free, or otherwise oriented toward healthy foods.
With business down, restaurant owners are searching for new ways to bring in customers. While others are slashing prices or offering happy hour specials, Bob Stiles, owner of Hana Sushi, has brought in stripper poles.
One of the great marketing successes in the world has been the creation of anticipation of the Beaujolais nouveau each year for hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
There’s an area in the south of France where great wines are produced, and from the vineyards you can see oyster beds in the blue Mediterranean Sea. The best village to experience the oyster and wine relationship is Bouzigues, in the area called Coteaux du Languedoc, near the well known town of Sete
GENERAL COMMENT: We’re in a recession right? People are eating at home to save money, right? Well, you wouldn’t know it at the Enterprise Fish Co. in Santa Monica.
Not every restaurant can be all things to all people. At Typhoon, I really don’t like most of the dishes I’ve tried so far, but they have at least one excellent dish, and there’s the great music.
