Emily Brochin

I consider myself an adventurous eater and it’s very rare that I encounter something that I find inedible, but I met my match last weekend at Hurry Curry. It wasn’t inedible in the sense that it was bad, per se. It was just….odd.

What did I eat? The famed chicken pasta at Hurry Curry of Tokyo. The ingredients? Pasta, fried chicken, onions, and some kind of tangy sauce rather like a marriage of tahini and honey mustard. To be fair, I was warned that the combination would be a bit jarring and I’d read about the dish online, but I really wasn’t prepared. 

The pasta was perfectly cooked and the fried chicken had a flavorful crust but it was the sauce that lost me. On the one hand, it did provide a nice creamy counterpoint that could have tied it all together had it not tasted exactly like the chicken tender dipping sauce at my childhood all-night diner. I couldn’t get past it. I still can’t tell if it was the memory that ruined it for me or if the chicken pasta was truly weird. Not that it matters. I can cross this one off the Must Try List and move along to brighter options.

It’s been oddly cold in LA lately and I’ve been having a nonstop French Onion Soup craving for about three weeks. Now, I can’t eat tremendous amounts of dairy so I’ve had to space these indulgences out like a carefully orchestrated march into foreign territory.

The first craving hit hard and I didn’t have time to research, so I went to the closest purveyor of FOS to my house, Figaro Bistrot. The thing about Figaro is that the decor is perfect. It’s all sconces and rose-colored imitation Tiffany glass. Zinc bar. Fresh macrons. It is the kind of place that makes having a moody bowl of hot and cheesy soup sound like the most romantic solo date possible. I was perfectly primed to have a Dining Experience, especially when a waiter brought me a pillow to sit on so my height (or lack thereof) wouldn’t leave me looking like an alcoholic 5-year-old, downing Chimays while waiting for her order. The lighting was perfect, the people were beautiful, the soup was underwhelming.

Maybe I’m a bit oldschool, but when I want French Onion Soup, I’m thinking beef stock, butter, onions, bread, and gruyere. I do not want stewed tomato chunks and celery, both of which I fished out of my Figaro broth, holding up to the candlelight to make sure my palate wasn’t imagining things. Needless to say, this soup experience left me totally unsatisfied and two days later, I found myself pining away for some more dangerous elixir.

Riverside Cafe in Burbank is not quite a hole in the wall, but it’s damn close. The tables are covered in sticky 80s oilcloth, the menus are crushed, and the outdoor bathroom is not much different than something you’d find at a Mobil station. But the food is home cooked heaven. They have a baked potato menu for God’s sake. Their French Onion Soup is divine, cooked-to-order. The crocks arrive at the table accompanied by a warning, DO NOT TOUCH THEM. Indeed, they are ingenious miniature ovens, keeping the cheese perfectly melty throughout the meal. With no extraneous vegetables in sight, Riverside’s take on this classic was simply perfect and enough to sate my appetite. For this week at least.

Let’s be clear—I love Los Angeles and its incredible mix of fancy pants dining establishments, greasy burger joints, and ethnic outposts full of exciting new treats. But I’ve been finding something lacking even in my favorite spots. Namely, the experiences never feel like mine. Maybe that makes sense for a city of roughly 9,878,554 people and it’s too much to ask for a really intimate meal that makes you feel utterly at home in the City of Angels.

But then I discovered Wood Spoon and this gripe had to be removed from the list. Simply put, Wood Spoon, a tiny Brazilian café located in a spare, comfortable storefront downtown, is the answer to many of my culinary prayers. There you can look into the quasi-open kitchen and observe Natalia, the owner, zipping between industrial stoves and the refrigerator actually singing to herself. A happy cook is a good sign for any meal and the food she prepares is certainly worthy of song.

Potpies cooked to a golden crisp reveal a meaty inside full of shredded, tender chicken, hearts of palm, fava beans, and green olives. The coxhina are soft and flavorful and not too greasy. And the homemade truffles….oh the homemade truffles. They are dusted with cocoa powder and beyond rich. Even the water is amazing—infused with piles of cinnamon sticks, raw sugar cane, or refreshing orange peel.

Most people associate Brazilian cuisine with the costumed pomp and circumstance of the meat orgy occurring at Fogo de Chãos across the country. But the food at Wood Spoon transcends traditional recipes transplanted and made cliché with nostalgia—it tastes joyfully alive.

Wood Spoon
107 W 9th St
Los Angeles, CA 90015
(213) 629-1765

I am terrified of cooking. And yet, I have one of the most well-stocked kitchens of anyone I know. This includes those of a gourmet baker and a former sous-chef. Sea-salt from Provence? Check. Red enameled Dutch oven? Check. Citrus reamer? Check. What is a citrus reamer? I have no idea. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Some people feel rich when they buy a pair of designer shoes. Or drive an expensive, hard-to-import car. I feel the most wealthy when I spend an afternoon comparing the merits of microplanes at a Sur la Table. I get this close to the promise that one day, I will wake up and intuitively know how to make a coq au vin perfectly. Instead, I settle for a silicone oven mitt and throw it in the backseat on my way to grab some takeout.

My fear of cooking started young. My parents weren’t very handy in the kitchen. My father made dry chicken, an underdone baked potato, and limp, flavorless broccoli once a week. My mother attempted to broaden our horizons with a series of epically bad meals, one of which included a ceramic dish full of eviscerated bread, white wine, and raw shrimp. The recipe she was following, culled from God knows what salmonella cookbook, promised great results and in a bowl of half cooked crustaceans drowning in a lukewarm bath of swill.

It is unsurprising then that the only food I would enthusiastically eat until the age of 15 was buttered spaghetti.

Like most things that you aren’t permitted in your childhood, food became a kind of dream for me. But not the attainable kind. Hence the minestrone where I cooked the noodles along with the soup, inadvertently inventing a kind of semolina sponge that absorbed all of the liquid until the pot was a solid mass of starch and tomato residue.

Restaurants are what make me happy. I love the intricate process of becoming a regular. I look forward to the moment where a waiter will stop bringing me the menu and just arrive at my table with a mild papaya salad and deep fried tofu. Even as a waitress, I never got sick of being surrounded by edibles. I looked forward to the moment when one of my customers would say, “What do you recommend this evening?”

And yet, when I’m feeling down, nothing makes me feel better than cracking open a cookbook and assembling my collection of very fine tools and beautiful ingredients. The worry doesn’t kick in until I’ve turned on the gas and realized that my stove mimics the slope of the floor, sending all of the cooking oil to the far left of the pan, leaving the ingredients stranded on the right with no protective coating. Or that it will be impossible to successfully coordinate the seared chicken and mushroom stir fry without seriously neglecting one of them. And that risotto is a pipe dream invented by women with kankles who were raised chained to a stove.

I feel like I can identify this as an addiction because no matter how badly I screw up, I’m back for more a week later, seemingly having learned nothing about my inability to properly braise a chicken.