A new Looka! is coming

An evening at Cure.

The Monteleone Cocktail (my entry).

Spatchcock!
This is my new favorite word. Oddly enough, I’d never come across it until today, considering that I’ve been cooking for so long. (I love this about life, though … I love learning new stuff every day.) Spatchcocking is the process of removing the backbone from a turkey, chicken or other bird and flattening it out so that it cooks evenly and in far less time than roasting a whole bird. From Grace Yang in Serious Eats: The breast meat turns out very tender, the drumsticks are juicy and flavorful, and the e

RH at the Andaz
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, Wes and I have a tradition for our birthdays. The birthday boy gets taken out for a fabulous meal … somewhere. The destination is a closely-held secret, and the birthday boy never knows where he’s going to end up until we pull up in front of the place. Keeps things fun. I love surprises! This year I had no idea where I was going to end up, mostly because of my horrendously unreliable memory. A mere two months ago, Wes read me a review by S. Irene Virbila in the Los Angeles Times of a new restaurant — a hotel restaur

Cocktail of the day: The Custer
Last Wednesday I enjoyed a wonderfully low-key birthday celebration (joined by several bartenders — aah, my peeps! — including ones visiting from Portland and Seattle) at Copa d’Oro in Santa Monica, surely one of the best bars in the L.A. metro area. A world-class cocktail menu, a long and beautiful bar, an amazing stash of liquor, a friendly and inviting space, dangerously close to my day job … all that and grilled Nutella-almond butter paninis too? I’m so there. A few months ago they debuted several new house originals on their cocktail menu, and I’ve bee

Po-boys and the President
A couple of New Orleans-related links … First, the New York Times writes about the upcoming New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival. Why, you might ask, would such a venerated bastion of New Orleans cuisine need special efforts to preserve it? Read up on the situation, which includes one of my most hated interlopers, the invasion of the mass-food monoculturalism of horrid chains like Subway, the lack of off-street parking at po-boy shops, and more. Fortunately, there are still many places in the city where you can get it done right. And, of course, the bread is just as important as the filling, some say m

Reason #112 why we love our neighborhood
When Wes and I were first looking for a house, we started in Highland Park. We liked the area, and figured we couldn’t afford Eagle Rock (and knew we couldn’t afford Silver Lake). We’d heard about a cool place there that stocked a lot of different kinds of sodas and soft drinks, so we made a point to stop there while looking around for open house signs. We entered Galco’s for the first time. Our jaws dropped, and grabbed a shopping cart. Before us was an array of nearly 500 different kinds of small-batch sodas, an equal number of beers from all over the world, two long cases full of hard-to-find, old-school and r