Los Angeles Times Food Critic Jonathan Gold describes Kali Restaurant, one of the neighborhood’s newest restaurants we reported on earlier this April, as “Locavore California-French cooking from two fine-dining veterans.”
Below are highlights from his review of the restaurant which appeared in today’s print edition and online.
Meehan’s cooking tends to be detailed, focused around California produce, and arranged with the precision of a Zen garden. When there are ridgeback prawns, tiny, crisp creatures trapped in the Santa Barbara Channel, they may be lightly marinated, arranged with segments of citrus, nasturtium petals, dots of foam, those nasturtium leaves that look like tiny lily pads, and halved kumquats topped with domes of jelly. When you get uni toast, the sea urchin is ice cold and the bread piping hot.
The avocado salad is novel: halved avocados from the grower J&J Farm, brushed with honey, briefly seared on their cut sides without cooking them through. They are sprinkled with that ash, buried under greens, scattered with transparent slices of radish and carrot, and crowned with those oily pistachios — a rich, nourishing dish that can be enjoyed even by people whose diets prohibit almost everything, writes Gold.
Gold’s recommended dishes include the Beet tartar; wheat berry “risotto’’; duck breast with carrots and lavender; meringue gelato.
Kali Restaurant
5722 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
323-871-4160
www.kalirestaurant.com
They serve all wines, including reds, ice cold.