Tag Archives: travel

Urth Caffe

Urth Caffe is my friend and hostess’ favorite place for coffee. A true California girl, she gets hers with soy milk, natch. Meanwhile, I ordered some carbs.

Famous Sticky Bun

If it isn’t actually famous, it should be. The crunchy, glazed outside yields to a soft whorl of pastry studded with raisins and cinnamon sugar. The nuts on top taste as good and fresh as they look.

a beautiful gray sack dress with rosettes

nice onesie, baby

A yogurt parfait, also divine. The yogurt is infused with the taste of fresh mint, and the raspberries are tender and sweet. The crunchy granola at the bottom is toasted with brown sugar and honey and laced with sunflower seeds.

P.S. The coffee is great too.

Urth Caffe
8565 Melrose Avenue, between Robertson and La Cienega
310-659-0628

also in: Beverly Hills and Santa Monica

M Café de Chaya is California Girl’s de facto lunch spot. She once went on a diet of all kale. Don’t ever try this at home.

What is macrobiotic food?

display cases full of the day’s offerings

all sorts of rolls

the chefs at work

books for sale

Here is the notorious kale. We doubled down on this and the lentils.

When legumes and veggies are barely cooked, as with M Café de Chaya’s macrobiotic food, they retain a wonderful al dente texture. Lightly dressed with a peanut sauce inflected with chili and a dash of rice wine vinegar (?), the chewy kale tastes more like an indulgence than a penance.

Below: toothsome French lentils, nice and shallot-y.

California Girl permitted us a ration of carbs in the form of these sesame noodles.

Chef Friend in New York goes gaga over sesame oil. Just a touch of it enhances nearly anything, she says. She would love M Café de Chaya’s sesame noodle salad. Dressed in sesame paste and a generous dousing of sesame oil, they are made all the more delish by the rawness of the sesame seeds, shredded carrot and cabbage. I enjoyed everything I tasted at the macrobiotic M Café de Chaya, but the sesame noodles won. Go carbs!

It was one of the longest trips I have ever taken for a meal. One hour-long taxi ride, one delayed five-and-a-half hour flight, and one excruciatingly slow encounter with a Cheech lookalike rental car attendant at LAX later, I was finally on the road in LA. The sun was setting. I hadn’t eaten since JFK. After a harrowing trip up the 405, I finally reached my destination, a restaurant heretofore unknown. This.

My first thought was: WTF? A ten-hour trip for this? Some LA Chowhounders had tipped me off to Monte Alban. Maybe they were smoking crack. Supposedly this exterior in a strip mall hid some of the best Oaxacan-style Mexican in all of LA. But Monte Alban looked just like a multitude of strip mall taco places I’d already passed on the way.

My friend and fellow WASP was already inside, seated in a room with an elaborate mural of a Mexican village painted on one wall. “I think they seated me in the gringo section,” she said, sipping her Negro Modela and looking around at the lone other diner on that side of the restaurant, who was also quite white.

Never mind. According to the menu, the place served food, and I was starved. I started ordering.

“I think you have too much food…” The mustachioed waiter’s pen hesitated on his note pad. I kept ordering.

The food, when it arrived, was a revelation. The chorizo on the perfectly crisp tostada was almost fluffy, it was so light and crumbly. Spicy, but also faintly sweet. Ten hours was beginning to seem more reasonable already.

It was difficult to imagine what the empanada de cuitlacoche with mushrooms and Oaxacan cheese would taste like, and it’s even harder to describe. The densely packed, sauteed mushrooms inside have an mysterious, earthy smokiness that was drawn out by the cuitlacoche and cheese. It serves as a nice reminder that true Mexican food is comprised of tastes that are truly, mesmerizingly foreign.

At one point, a small piece of the tamal de mole appetizer fell on the wooden chair, and I almost picked it up and ate it rather than let the tiniest piece of it go to waste, it was so delicious. (I like to think this says more about Monte Alban’s mole than about me.) When we unwrapped the banana leaf, the tamal we found inside had a molten brownie texture layered with chunks of stewed chicken. Again there was that mystery, this time in the mole. It was chocolate, but it was not. And the tamale itself was like the lightest, airiest corn crepe. The hot tortillas that came later were the freshest I’d ever had, with an almost spongy texture, as if they’d been made with seltzer water. Rarely do you find such delicacy and such earthiness in the same restaurant.

Going on LA Chowhound recommendations, I chose the barbacoa de chivo, the goat soup. It looks very simple: hunks of meat in a broth so dark it’s almost opaque, which you then top with shredded cabbage, chopped onion and a little green salsa, as I have here. But the flavor is many things at once: mesquite barbecue, the silkiness of a little bit of fat without the oiliness, and then an almost osso buco undertone. Picking out the bones from the meat, it was clear why: the bones were goat vertebrae, cloven to pieces and left to stew for hours.

Tortilla soup was something my fellow WASP and I had experienced in college: it was served for lunch when the dining hall really wanted to walk on the wild side. Needless to say, Monte Alban’s was better, spicy but with real legs to walk on. Instead of a watery broth, this was a deeply chicken-y soup piled with at least two kinds of cheese.

Monte Alban is a Mexican restaurant of many moles. There is red mole, yellow mole, and even the tomato mole that dressed the estofado de pollo. This dish was a little bit girly, sugar and spice and everything nice. The generous dose of cinnamon in the sauce reminded me of a milder sort of Indian food: gentle, delicate, and inoffensive.

Halfway through the main courses, we were already stuffed and the mustachioed waiter was shaking his head at our foolhardiness. The remainders of goat, chicken, and tortilla soup were packed into to-go containers. There would be no room for plantains. The check? Forty-five dollars for two.

By now the room was filled with all sorts of diners, not just gringos like us. Many of them knew the staff and said their goodbyes on the way out. If I lived in LA, I would want to be a Monte Alban regular too.

Mexican candies on sale by the register.

Monte Alban
11929 Santa Monica Boulevard, between Bundy and Barrington
310-444-7736