Le Comptoir

101 Best restaurants of Los Angeles

@latimes

"#26 Dinner at Le Comptoir begins with a short preamble from chef Gary Menes, who stands behind the 10-seat chef’s counter inside the Hotel Normandie and explains the structure of the menu, the provenance of the ingredients (most of the vegetables are grown at his organic garden in Long Beach) and the virtues of the carefully sourced, single-origin coffees available at the end of the meal. Then Menes turns up the music — everything from vintage jazz to Jay-Z — and gets to work. What follows next is a procession of beautifully calibrated courses, centered around vegetables: a velvety purple artichoke soup poured over cashew yogurt and fried bread crumbs; a poached egg simmered in brown butter and fresh lemon; an elaborate, brightly mosaicked plate of bite-size vegetables, fruits and tweezer-placed herbs. You can supplement your meal with lobster or grass-fed beef, but Menes’ California-French cooking is most mesmerizing when he is extracting maximum flavor out of a sugar snap pea or slice of peach. And his signature dessert — doughnut holes made using a 20-something-year-old sourdough starter — inspire a rush of euphoria that’s hard to shake. Inside Hotel Normandie. Wine. Valet parking available at the hotel. Credit cards accepted."

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