No bread crumbs required: David Campigotto’s cassoulet road show
Comfort us with cassoulet. Also, Thanksgiving prep begins, TGI Fridays struggles, Helms Bakery reopens and La Casita Mexicana gets sweet and spicy. Plus the full lineup for next month’s 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. reveal party. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.
How to build a proper cassoulet
David Campigotto, studded leather bands around his wrists and black chef gloves covering his hands, tenderly smooths the mound of white beans piled high in earthenware cassoulet pots lined in a row on the counter at L.A.’s Chi Spacca. Hidden beneath the beans are a complex strata of carefully arranged duck legs, pork ribs, sausage, pig’s trotters, pig skin and more beans, a construction nearly identical to what Campigotto creates at his restaurant Chez David in the town of Castelnaudary, known in France as the father in the holy trinity of cassoulet. (The son is Carcassone; the holy ghost is Toulouse.)
What emerges from the oven several hours later is cassoulet as most of us have never seen it, with a beautifully burnished mahogany, almost black crust and not a bread crumb in sight. It’s certainly something Chi Spacca owner Nancy Silverton had never seen until she came across Campigotto’s cassoulet when he was doing a dinner series at Paul Kahan‘s Publican in Chicago.
“I thought, cassoulet — great! I’ve had pork and beans with bread crumbs on top and I love it,” Silverton says when she described her first look at Campigotto’s cassoulet. “So I came down to the kitchen and Paul opened up the oven to show me the cassoulet cooking and I said, ‘Wow! Those bread crumbs look so delicious on top!’ And then I got scolded. ‘No, no, no! Never bread crumbs on cassoulet!’ It was just beans!”
Once she tasted the cassoulet she instantly knew she had to get Campigotto to add Los Angeles to his cassoulet road tour, which always includes Chicago and sometimes New Orleans and Florida. In March, she hosted his first three-night stand in L.A. Next week, Monday through Wednesday, Campigotto will be in town for another three nights at Chi Spacca. Reservations were snapped up almost instantly, but I’m confident Silverton will get Campigotto back for another series. With a musician’s soul, he loves to go on tour. I recommend keeping an eye on Chi Spacca’s Instagram page around March.
Meanwhile, if you’re thinking of making your own cassoulet — a perfect comfort food for troubled times — you might need a good cassole or cassoulet pot. Campigotto brings his over from France, but since French kitchen equipment isn’t available to most of us, I’ve had my eye on a couple of pottery sites, Minnesota’s Clay Coyote, inspired by Paula Wolfert‘s cassoulet recipe from her essential “The Cooking of South-West France” and Kathy Kearns’ Crockett Pottery in Northern California. Kearns’ cassoulet adventures began when chef Philippe Jeanty asked her to make a cassole for his Bistro Jeanty in Yountville, where, of course, the menu features cassoulet — with bread crumbs but also a beautiful duck leg emerging from the top. What would Campigotto say?
He’s actually pretty laid back about other people’s cassoulet. But he’s precise with his own procedures — beginning the process by rubbing garlic on the inside of the cassole, then grating nutmeg over the interior, adding beans and a layer of pig skin, arranging the pork ribs and sausage in alternating vertical spokes around the bowl, followed by a sprinkling of chopped pig’s trotter, more beans, the duck legs and still more beans. The idea is to make it easier for the server to give every diner some of each meat. “You need to have one sausage,” he said, “one pork rib and one duck.”
It all goes in the oven, low and slow for six hours with pork stock added at regular intervals and the top tamped down periodically with a long wooden paddle to bring up the meat proteins that help form the deep brown crust.
“I’m not close-minded to other meats,” he says when asked about others’ cassoulet. “But I’m not sure that lobster cooked six hours is going to be nice. Foie gras would melt and disappear.”
And he is adamant that good cassoulet is not fast food.
“Sometimes,” he says, “when I see TV shows with chefs that explain that in one hour and a half it’s cooked? I mean, I just turn the TV off.”
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Look who’s cooking at the 101 Best L.A. Restaurants reveal party
Sweet, but not too sweet. Spicy, but not too spicy. That describes the ceviche maracuya, or ceviche in habanero-passion fruit sauce, added to the menu recently at La Casita Mexicana in Bell. It’s also not a bad description for the restaurant’s sweet and spicy Jaime Martin del Campo and Ramiro Arvizu, chefs and owners of Casita Mexicana, named in 2023 to the L.A. Times restaurant Hall of Fame.
It had been awhile since I’d been to the restaurant, now in its 25th year, but when my mother and daughter wanted a Día de los Muertos chilaquiles breakfast at Casita Mexicana, I found Arvizu and Martin del Campo as inventive as ever. Martin del Campo showed us the garden behind the restaurant’s marigold-festooned patio bursting with passion fruit — certainly an inspiration for the new ceviche. And Arvizu brought us tacos de chamorro, which he said the two will serve at the reveal party Dec. 3 for this year’s 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. list, chosen by restaurant critic Bill Addison and columnist Jenn Harris. Martin del Campo added that they’ll be hand-making the tortillas for the tacos and also serving huitlacoche tamalitos at the L.A. Times event, which will be held for the first time at the Hollywood Palladium.
This week, the full lineup of restaurants serving food and drinks at the 101 reveal party was announced. In addition to La Casita Mexicana, they are A.O.C., Alta Adams, Azizam, Bavel, Bistro Na’s, Bridgetown Roti, Delmy’s Pupusas, Dulan’s on Crenshaw, Dunsmoor, Fat + Flour, Found Oyster, Here’s Looking at You, Holbox, Jitlada, Kismet, Knife Pleat, Kuya Lord, Ladyhawk, Lasita, Majordomo, Moo’s Craft Barbecue, Morihiro, Mr. T, My 2 Cents LA, Nok’s Kitchen, Osteria Mozza, Park’s BBQ, Perilla LA, Petit Trois, Pizzeria Sei, Poncho’s Tlayudas, Providence, Rustic Canyon, Stir Crazy and Tacos La Carreta, plus drinks from 1010 Wine and Events, the Benjamin Hollywood, Dahlia and Old Lightning.
For tickets and more info, click here.
And if you’re looking for restaurant recommendations before the reveal of this year’s 101, last year’s list is still an excellent resource. Assistant food editor Danielle Dorsey used Addison’s 2023 picks to put together a guide on where to get dinner in L.A. on a Monday night, when many restaurants are closed but where “you can linger over your food without worrying about turning the table over to another party.”
Dorsey also assembled a guide to the best places to eat and drink in L.A. this month based on the Food team’s coverage of recent restaurant openings, including Travis Lett‘s RVR, Michael Mina‘s Orla, Philip and Lauren Pretty‘s Olive & Rose plus the new pizzerias LaSorted’s and Ozzy’s Apizza.
Food columnist Jenn Harris explored chef Sang Yoon‘s new Helms Bakery, a 21st century market and prepared food revival of the Culver City bakery that opened in 1931 and has been mostly a memory and a very cool neon sign since its closure in 1969. She returned from opening day of the marketplace with a report on 13 things to be excited about at the new Helms Bakery, plus info on the special pie tin that Yoon had made to achieve the deep-dish crust he wanted to serve.
Also ...
- If you’re feeling overwhelmed as Thanksgiving approaches, there’s time to make one part of the dinner planning easier — leaving the cooking to the pros. Contributor Tiffany Tse curated a guide to 25 of the best L.A. restaurants for a Thanksgiving takeout feast. And if you just need a little help with the pie — without resorting to what’s left at the supermarket the day before — Food’s Danielle Dorsey, Stephanie Breijo, Jenn Harris, Betty Hallock and Cindy Carcamo put together a guide to 12 of L.A.’s best bakeries for holiday pies.
- And if you’re looking for holiday gift ideas, Dorsey, Breijo, Harris and Carcamo also collaborated on a guide to presents you can get from L.A. restaurants.
- Contributor Sarah Mosqueda writes about the kitchen tool she uses every day — a rice cooker — and shares five terrific rice recipes.
- And TGI Fridays — whose bartenders trained Tom Cruise for his 1988 “Cocktail” role and whose server uniforms were parodied in 1999’s “Office Space” — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with the company placing much of the blame on fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as changing consumer tastes. Reporter Caroline Petrow-Cohen has the details.
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