We have just over three weeks until the autumn equinox arrives, but for many of us, me included, summer feels like it's over after Labor Day. It's comforting that peaches and tomatoes from around the state usually last through September.
I hope you have the chance to enjoy some extra time to relax and recharge this weekend. As inspiration for holiday-weekend dining, here are first looks at three new restaurants I've visited and enjoyed lately. As a rare bonus in Los Angeles, each is open for lunch as well as dinner.
HK Macau Bistro
The friend across from me sawed into the block of crisped bread, listed as A28 under the "toast and pineapple buns" section of the menu at HK Macau Bistro. The dish's name, in the months since the restaurant opened in May, has been translated on a sprawling sheet variously as "rich leaky milk Ovaltine French toast" and "French toast stuffed with milk and Ovaltine."
True to its description, a knife's blade released thin (but not watery) custard that oozed from the interior and around the plate. The malted taste of powdered Ovaltine sifted over the top reminded me of my grandmother, who drank that beverage while she percolated coffee on the stove for my grandfather before he headed outside to tend their farm.
A spread of dishes including Portuguese-style stir-fried bacalhau, center, at HK Macau Bistro in San Gabriel. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I imagine the cooking at HK Macau Bistro far more fuels the nostalgia of the many Cantonese-speaking patrons filling the dining room. This is another local iteration of a cha chaan teng, a genre of restaurant derived from Hong Kong's diner-like teahouses that merge Chinese and Western flavors.
The kitchen cranks out more than 150 dishes: sandwiches (including, as referenced above, pork chop on a pineapple bun with its crackling, cross-hatched top); chow fun, fried rice vermicelli (including a deceptively delicious vegetarian version flavored simply with soy sauce, onions and scallions) and other noodles; claypot casseroles and cheesy baked pastas; fried rice plates; a dozen vegetable preparations and on and on.
Two suggestions from a first meal, both listed under "House Specials": a satisfying stir-fry of salt cod threaded with scrambled egg, potatoes, crunchy slivers of onion and green bell pepper and the briny addition of black olives, and the Macau-style curry beef stew, its ingredients melting into coconut milk.
708 E. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (626) 225-3228
Bar Sinizki
My colleague Stephanie Breijo reported recently on the opening of this Eastern European-inspired cafe in Atwater Village by Scott Zwiezen and Anne O'Malley, who own long-running Dune next door, and Alexander Mirecki Tavitian, who previously ran Kaldi Coffee in the same space. Bar Sinizki operates as a coffeehouse, cocktail haven and restaurant daily from 7 a.m. to midnight, some ambitiously long hours.
At a recent Saturday lunch there wasn't an empty table either on the restaurant's patio or in its small, dapper dining room (checkered floors, marble counters, glinting tiled ceiling). The short, casual menu suits a midday meal. Bulgarian feta sharpens a lemony cucumber and tomato salad. On a Lyonnaise tartine, Dijon mustard and good salted butter offsets slices of Comté and Rosette de Lyon sausage, nicely garlicky and riddled with pork fat. The burger, its patty of mid-thickness with griddled onions and a lacquer of American cheese, arrived last and disappeared first.
Dishes from the lunch and dinner menu at Bar Sinizki in Atwater Village.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
If, like me, you show up at Bar Sinizki hoping to taste the pierogi fashioned from a recipe by Zwiezen's grandmother, know that they're available in limited quantities beginning at 5 p.m. I'll be back for them, and a Vesper.
3147 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 284-8419, sinizki.com
Bridgetown Roti
Two things, in my book, contribute to exceptional macaroni and cheese.
The first is baking the dish. Beloved as stovetop versions, from a box or otherwise, may be, the textures never transform and condense into the same creamy density as they do in an oven.
Also, the ingredients are so rich that the seasonings need to be far more trenchant than one might imagine. I'm thinking of the best cookbook recipe of mac and cheese I know — from "The Gift of Southern Cooking" by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock — in which dry mustard, cayenne, nutmeg and Worcestershire sauce slice through the custard and cheddar cheese.
Rashida Holmes' macaroni and cheese pie is the best example we have in Los Angeles. A slab of it has the correct portions of silkiness and crusty edges, and curry powder with not-too-incendiary hints of ghost pepper add complexity to each forkful.
Mac and cheese pie from Bridgetown Roti during its pop-up days. The version at the new East Hollywood location is just as excellent. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
The pie was an intermittent special during the several years that Holmes' Bridgetown Roti was a pop-up, based first out of her house and then from the Crafted Kitchen space in downtown.
After a long search for the right location to lease, Holmes and business partner Malique Smith began serving her Caribbean American dishes from an East Hollywood storefront six weeks ago. I'll have plenty more to say about her signature rotis, and the oxtail patty I savored with every order I made from the pop-up, but for now my advice is this: Don't skip the mac and cheese.
858 N Vermont Ave., Los Angeles, (747) 221-9026, bridgetownroti.com
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