![101 Best restaurants of Los Angeles]()
101 Best restaurants of Los Angeles
#30
Eric Bost’s solo restaurant debut lays out a blueprint for how special-occasion experiences can still dazzle as we arrive at the 2020s. His menu has 12 items, including three desserts. Choose any of them in a progression of four, six or nine courses. Want cheese and all sweets, or nothing but seafood and vegetables? Done. The cooking finds rare equilibrium between head and heart. A dish such as box crab meat with various essences of tomato and seaweed looks downright surgical in its tweezered perfectionism, but then the ease of the flavors melts the day’s tensions. Warmed, runny, just-funky-enough Époisses spooned over soft sunchokes is frank, luxurious pleasure. Bost has an ideal counterpart in pastry chef Dyan Ng. Her signature dish pairs chilled yogurt with caramel deglazed using mushroom stock. Yes, mushroom caramel; it’s amazing, a dessert even non-dessert lovers can swoon over. Meals unfold in a storied Melrose Avenue building — previous tenants include the late Michel Richard’s Citrus and Hatfield’s — among exposed oak beams, soothingly blank walls, leather the color of white peaches and a purple-leaf acacia growing in the center of the dining room. It looks like the house of the friends whose home you most covet. You won’t want to leave.
Full bar. Valet parking. Credit cards accepted.
