Jonathan Gold’s 7 picks for Restaurant Week
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. (Christina House / For The Times)
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. (Liz O. Baylen/ Los Angeles Times)
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. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
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. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
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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 whether a vegan lifestyle might be for you. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)
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. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
