Seven Restaurant Picks for Restaurant Week 2014 - Los Angeles Times
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Jonathan Gold’s lucky 7 picks for Restaurant Week

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Perhaps you have just realized that there are a few days left to go in Restaurant Week, the twice-yearly celebration of Los Angeles restaurants mounted by DineLA, under the auspices of the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board. Perhaps, like so many Angelenos, you find the list of options a bit overwhelming -- there are more than 300 restaurants involved this time around, each offering special, theoretically lower-priced menus through Friday. Some of the menus are worth it; others not. Here are a few of our picks. And don’t forget to reserve.

Night + Market. Unlike most restaurants, which tend to arrange less-expensive options from their regular menus into fixed-price meals, Night + Market’s $35 restaurant week menu actually offers challenging dishes unavailable the rest of the year, including a Northern-style pork and morning glory curry, an Isaan raw pork liver salad and a special bitter larb. Don’t worry -- you can get party wings and tofu salad instead.

Scarpetta. Scott Conant has managed to build a restaurant empire on a superior version of spaghetti in tomato sauce -- for which he charges $24, a price high enough to induce night sweats. During Restaurant Week, you can fool yourself into imagining that the spaghetti, available as a $12 supplement to the four-course $45 menu, is almost affordable.

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Allumette. Is there a giant difference between the four-course $45 Restaurant Week menu and the usual $55 tasting menu? Probably not. But Miles Thompson is a remarkable young chef, and the array of choices lets you taste a lot of things at a fairly reasonable price. Plus, white pumpkin agnolotti with white truffle and beurre noisette.

Scratch|Bar. Phillip Lee’s new modernist-gastronomy bunker is offering six courses of distinct nonclichés for $45. Are you going to love blackened cauliflower, cured pig’s head or “a box full of squid”? It may be a good time to find out.

Bazaar. José Andrés’ baroque, sprawling cocinaplex may or may not be your idea of a palace of earthly delight. But it is hard to argue with five courses of his meticulously prepared Spanish food for $45. When I visit Bazaar, I usually spend more than that on ham alone.

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Crossroads. Tal Ronnen is probably one of the better vegan chefs in the country at the moment, and his technical skills, especially with vegan cheese, are kind of mind-blowing. A $35 four-course dinner may be a good way to see if a vegan lifestyle might be for you.

Spago. This year, the list of Restaurant Week promotions includes $85 menus from Cut, Patina, Mélisse, mar’sel, Valentino and Spago. An $85 dinner is not cheap by anybody’s standard, but the Restaurant Week menus do represent a way to experience some of the dearest dining rooms in town. (Mélisse’s lowest-priced tasting menu, for example, is usually $125.) Of the six, the tasting menu at Spago strikes me as an especially good option, a chance to taste some of the restaurant’s best dishes at an almost reasonable price.

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