Ink's the best restaurant in L.A. By that I mean, they serve the most unique and delicious food in town... and in a friendly, comfortable atmosphere. I eat there a lot and always try to sit in the same seat at the counter. Eventually I got to meet a lot of the people who work there. And one of them was 34 year old chef/owner Michael Voltaggio, who had his moment of Top Chef glory before I had started watching the show or even knew I could get Bravo on my TV.

I could tell immediately that Voltaggio is on fire for food. He obsesses over every dish-- and this is the kind of restaurant where nothing on the menu is in a recipe book or available at any other restaurant. It's all his creation-- like a song or a painting. I worked as a chef in Amsterdam for four years and I grokked the compulsion from the first conversation almost a year ago. But that's not why I go there so often. I go there because the food is so good and so unique; nothing like it anywhere, not even Bazaar, the other "molecular gastronomy" place in town where I used to eat all the time, never knowing Michael was Chef de Cuisine.

One day I told Michael and Cole, the other chef, that I was going to India for a month and I'd see them when I got back. Michael mentioned he had been to India not long ago, starting a restaurant. I found that fascinating of course, especially because I had been to Mumbai so many times over the years-- since it's where the Indian music business is and Warners had a subsidiary there-- and it was in the Colaba neighborhood, down the street from the Taj Hotel, that Michael and his brother Bryan were working on opening an American food restaurant.

If you ever googled Voltaggio you were overwhelmed with information. Everything about his life and his work is online-- except India. There's almost nothing about his time in India available. A couple tweets and two or three mentions in a local Mumbai city guide type paper, Mumbai Boss. Mumbai "foodies went into salivation overdrive," according to a local restaurant reviewer when word leaked out that the Voltaggios were coming to town. “It’s better to keep expectations low,” said the 27 year old partners who took over the space, a former Italian restaurant, Ranbir Batra and Rohan Talwar, in March of 2010. Eventually I figured out that the restaurant, Ellipsis, opened but that neither Michael nor Bryan was there. In fact, Michael had just opened Ink when he was flying over to Mumbai to help Batra and Talwar figure out how to start a restaurant from scratch in India. I started asking Michael about it. He's an incredibly friendly, polite guy and he always said he'd be happy to talk about it so... several months later we finally sat down and did.

Someone asked Michael, who grew up in Maryland and worked in at the Greenbriar in West Virginia, the Ritz in Naples, Florida, Dry Creek in Healdsberg and at the Langham in Pasadena, how he likes L.A. He said all he ever sees is the inside of his kitchen. That may be an exaggeration-- as you can see from the video down at the bottom-- but pretty much everything revolves around being a chef. Same with travel. He loves it. But whether it was a trip to Mexico, to Spain, to Singapore, or his excellent adveture in Mumbai, all the stuff normal travelers and tourists do took backseat to chef stuff. In fact, he's been all over the world but he's never been anywhere for a vacation. In Mexico he was looking for fresh seafood that isn't available in L.A.-- and visiting Valle de Guadalupe, the Mexican wine country in Baja California. In Spain he was learning about how they make ceramic plates. and in India... the restaurant. He'd fly over for a couple weeks at a time, sometimes he'd be there, some times Bryan would be there. I guess you could call them hands-on consultants or hands-off-chefs.

By the time Ellipsis opened Michael was working full time back at Ink (plus all the other stuff that seems to take him on the road half the time). He's never seen Ellipsis in action. I couldn't get much out of him about his experience there, beyond how excited he was to work with fresh Indian spices and how tough it was to get imported ingredients in a free-standing restaurant (India's weird that way) but I read something about Talwar and Batra enthusing about “modern American cuisine, and how the Voltaggios were helping develope the menu and were instrumental in training the staff, including chef de cuisine Rupam Bhagat (a Mumbai native who had worked with the Voltaggios in the U.S.).

He was excited, of course, to experience another culture-- and India's is about as "other" as you're going to find-- but "when you go someplace," he explained, "you have a plan and the plan changes and you're not in control of the situation... Reality was the difficulty of going into a foreign country and doing a good job."

I haven't eaten there. My last trip to India was to Cochin and Delhi and those links are about the restaurants in each, although the Delhi one is from a trip there in 2007. The reviews of Ellipis at Trip Advisor are great: "the food was absolutely amazing, the cocktails were great, the place is decked out brilliantly, the service attentive and we would highly recommend this place to anyone," came from a Brit. And American tourist was as enthusiastic: "All I can say is that my meal was fantastic, cooked exactly as I ordered and was delicious. The exact same sentiments were echoed by everyone at the table. However, the biggest surprise was awaiting us all. We decided on the Rocky Road Ice Cream for dessert. What we got seemed to be a hand-made concoction of chocolate ice cream with nuts, marshmallows and more, glazed over with chocolate that seemed to have been frozen with liquid nitrogen, a fog covering the plate. Though hard as a rock we started picking it to death with our spoons and we were all delighted with the presentation and the dessert itself. I do have to admit I was the one that finished off this huge mound of ice cream. Impressions completed and they were high. Overall, the whole experience of Ellipsis was excellent. The biggest drawback is perhaps the price, which was close to $400 USD for four, but we did have 2-3 drinks apiece which inflated the bill considerably. However, I don't care how much it was, it made for us another memory of our first trip to India and Mumbai and for the beginning of a new year. I highly recommend Ellipsis..."

If you're closer to L.A., try Ink. There's nothing like it. Best Hamachi dish I ever tasted; best black cod I ever tasted. Best corn dish I ever tasted. Best cuttlefish I ever tasted.

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molecular gastronomy

Roland seemed pissed off yesterday when he told me that CNN reported that the new San Pellegrino list of the 50 best restaurants in the world was out and that there isn't one single Los Angeles restaurant on it. It probably didn't cheer him up any when I said that if Pellegrino expanded to the top 100, L.A. still would probably not make it. (I was right.) And the kinds of restaurants that Roland and I favor these days-- healthy ones-- don't even get considered. In fact, we were sitting in Life Food Organic when he mentioned it, munching tiramisu as delicious as anything we ate at Il Canto in Siena's Certosa De Maggiano Hotel-- only not harmful to our well-beings.

On the other hand, except for professional gourmands, who's eaten in as many of these restaurants as we have? The shock of Noma in Copenhagen being named the best restaurant in the world over El Bulli in Roses, Spain came as a bit of a shock-- although probably more to Ferran Adrià than to us-- but neither of us is that big a Scandinavian food fan anyway. And El Bulli (between Barcelona and Perpignan)... any time! El Bulli has been numero uno over and over again. This review by Sue Dyson and Roger McShane will give you an accurate idea of what we love about it.

A visit to El Bulli requires a willingness to suspend the reality that eating is a basic fundamental of life, something we do in order to survive. There is little about a meal here that bears any relationship to notions of eating for living. It's an experience that will give you sensual and intellectual pleasure, as far removed from eating to live as reading Kafka is to following a set of instructions on how to program a video recorder. The connection is there but it's not immediately obvious.

In a world where too many people struggle to get the calories they need just to survive, it is a luxury to eat just for the pleasure of a series of tantalising games, where the satisfaction of hunger doesn't seem to have any part in the motivation for preparing and offering the meal.

Once you accept all that, and it doesn't take long because from the moment you arrive it's so beguiling, then you're in for a memorable experience, one which the restaurant staff appear to enjoy as much as the diners. If you choose the degustation menu, and on a first visit almost everyone does, you'll experience some 25 different tastes, each one memorable and some exquisite.

...The meal is progression of some eleven courses. Some are a single dish. Others are a collection of three or four exquisite tastes. In all, you'll eat about 25 different dishes. Sometimes, you're given strict instructions on how to eat something, for example the famous pea soup, served in thin cone-shaped glass. Drink it all in one go is the advice. While the texture and colour remain constant, as you drink the temperature changes, starting hot and finishing cold. It's a fascinating education as the flavour changes along with the temperature, its ‘peaishness' more obvious as the temperature lowers.

Every dish is served with purpose-designed crockery. In fact every element of this place appears purpose-designed, not least the streamlined and beautiful kitchen, where each small masterpiece is constructed, and which chef Ferran Adriá's partner and master of the front of house, Juli Soler, shows off proudly.

Highlights? Although famous for his ethereal foams, which aim to capture the essence of a flavour, and which have now crossed the Atlantic and have even been sighted in Singapore, for us two of the most memorable flavours were ravioli. One, sea-urchin ravioli, served with a sea-urchin jelly, had a rich, creamy intensity. It was served with pineapple and mango jelly, a fennel jus, and a raspberry-coloured foam made from aromatic herbs! Another ravioli was almost transparent, revealing ahead of the first bite, small bright-green broad beans and just a hint of a strong ham. A later ravioli was filled with oysters, served with oyster jelly, with seaweed and tea foam. Hidden inside this were two tiny, invisible, pieces of extraordinary-intense lemon zest, revealed only in the mouth...

But this is Noma's year and everyone is raving about the young, aggressively Nordic chef René Redzepi. He's all about "a regional, seasonal agenda that is right on the cutting edge: if it isn't available in the Nordic region, he won't cook with it. The result is a very idiosyncratic style of food that speaks to concerns about the way a global food culture turns our eating experiences a uniform beige."

But it goes much further than the agenda: Redzepi is a gifted cook with an extraordinary palate who does amazing things with wild herbs and flowers, bitter green leaves and the freshest local seafood.

In some quarters, of course, the decision will be read as a slap in the face for the modernists, especially for El Bulli and the Fat Duck.

Heston Blumenthal, chef and owner of the Fat Duck, responds-- quite reasonably, I think-- that if his or Ferran Adrià's restaurants had plummeted down the list, then that might well be a viable argument; as it is, what we are really seeing is just a little bit of jostling in the rankings.

What other stories are there? The UK has just three entries, with Claude Bosi's Hibiscus making its first appearance, alongside Fergus Henderson's St John. There are a couple of other places in the UK I would happily see in there, but I can't argue with that overall result: three out of 50 for the UK seems about right. It was always absurd that London restaurants such as Nobu and Hakkasan ever made a showing. The best Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the world being in London? Ludicrous.

The fact that Chateaubriand is the highest ranked French restaurant, ahead of all the over-gilded gastro-palaces, is a breath of fresh air. It is a low key bistro, with apparently fabulous food (I've never been) and if the food is what matters more than the decor then that has to be a good thing. I'm delighted that Japan, with two restaurants, makes a showing, though it is still grossly under-represented.

We keep trying to fiddle with the judging system to up Japan's representation but it's very tough, because the interplay between Japan and the rest of the world remains low key. And that's what's needed for a restaurant to break through: lots of people from outside the country in which it is situated eating there.

Of course, lots of people will take issue with the list: in some European countries it has been decried as some sort of fix (though god knows how you are supposed to fix the votes of 800 people). As I've said in previous years, that sort of thing is taking it far too seriously.

Is it the definitive ranking of the world's top restaurants? Absolutely not, because there is no such thing as a definitive answer to the question. It is just a list, and we all love one of those. Each year, as a result of its publication we argue for a few days about the merits of certain restaurants over each other and, while it is only a tiny part of the conversation to be had around food, that has to be a good thing.

Aside from El Bulli. my faves from the list this year are-- in order of list rankings, not mine-- Daniel in NYC, Per Se (NYC), Pierre Gagnaire (Paris), Le Bernardin (NYC), Iggy's (Singapore), L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon (Paris), the French Laundry (Yountville, although they also have a wonderful affiliate, Mozaic in Ubud, in the middle of Bali that we love), the aforementioned Il Canto, Alain Ducasse (in my favorite place to stay in Paris, the Plaza Athénée), Biko (Mexico City), Hibiscus (London), Eleven Madison Park (NYC), and then in the bottom 50, Jean Georges (NYC), Chez Panisse (Berkeley), The River Cafe (London), Enoteca Pinchiorri (Florence), Masa (NYC) and La Pergola (Rome).

If there's a restaurant remotely like Spain's El Bulli in Los Angeles it's a new Basque, not Catalan, restaurant opened by José Andrés (who actually trained under El Bulli's Adrià) at the SLS Hotel on La Cieniga. The L.A. Times described the experience of eating there as "Fellini-esque, a gastronomical circus, a flirtation with the flavors and soul of Spain? Los Angeles has never seen anything remotely like this..." If any L.A. restaurant is ever going to wind up on that San Pellegrino list, it's El Bazaar. We took a friend from out of town there last weekend. When it first opened, the Wall Street Journal reviewed it and came away saying it "may be the future of fine dining." It cost over $12 million to put together. "It serves no appetizers or entrees: All meals are made up of tapas, and signature items include drinks and canapés dipped in vats of liquid nitrogen. First-time visitors might wander the ground floor of the SLS Hotel looking for the restaurant-- and not realize that they are already standing in it. A palm-reader roams the floor, offering predictions... A mobile cart of liquid nitrogen wheels up to tables that order a $20 Brazilian cocktail, which is dipped and instantly frozen in the steaming brew. Another cart offers 'Cotton Candy Foie Gras,' a block of rich paté that a waiter twirls in spun sugar. A third cart serves "caviar cones," fish eggs served in paper-thin pastry cones... Half the menu belongs to the category of avant-garde cuisine, or molecular gastronomy, which uses advances in culinary science to create new flavors and textures. Mr. Andrés's "olive oil bon bon," for example, looks like a tiny glass sculpture but is in fact olive oil encased in solidified sugar; bite down and it bursts flavorfully in the mouth. Avant-garde cuisine has transformed fine dining in Europe. American avant-garde chefs, from Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea to Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 in New York, are heroes to many young chefs."

We're having dinner at Cru tonight. The food is organic, healthfully prepared, delicious and... well eating there will add years to your life, rather than cut it short. Here's the menu (click to enlarge it):

Earlier this month I was practically apologizing for writing about my favorite new restaurant in L.A. here because... well because it's in L.A. and so am I and I just have to drive 15 minutes to get there. And here I am back with the L.A. stuff again. Kind of. It's L.A. via Mali.

If you follow this travel blog at all, you may recall that a couple years ago I was wandering around Mali and Senegal. While waiting for my friend Roland to arrive so we could head out to the world's biggest mud mosque in Djenne and then on to the unpaved wilds of Dogon Country, I somehow wound up in Ali Farka Toure's recording studio watching Bassekou Kouyate complete I Speak Fula, the follow up to Segu Blue, his widely acclaimed 2007 international debut album.

In the way of context, let me tell you I've been very lucky with music in my life. Even before becoming president of Reprise Records, I had always had good music juju. I was knee-high to spit when I snuck off to the Brooklyn Paramount Theater to catch Maxine Brown. Not only did she sing my favorite song, Oh No, Not My Baby, but she came out the stage door afterwards and gave me a big kiss and an autograph that I treasured until I went to Afghanistan 5 years later. In the interim I booked concerts at my school by Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Temptations, The Fugs, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Pink Floyd, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, The Byrds, the Dead... all the regular stuff we used to dance around to in college back then. And I was a dj and so on. Even when my music juju screwed up, it didn't screw up too bad. I once drove all the way to some village near Lyallpur in Pakistan, the familial home of the famous Ali Brothers (of my most enjoyable acid trips) only to find the Ali Brothers, Nazakat and Salamat, the world's greatest Qawwali singers, away on a concert tour. Years later I was working in a meditation center in Amsterdam and someone persuaded me to go upstairs to hear some "trippy Indian music" and it was... Nazakat and Salamat Ali Khan. Point: I've seen everyone (except The Beatles, all of whom I've seen individually). And the further point, when I saw Bassekou is the Jimi Hendrix of the ngoni, a description that is now widely used, and that the concert I saw him play at the French Cultural Center in Bamako was one of the greatest and most inspired live shows I've ever seen in my life... well, it's not like some kid telling you about the first live music he's ever seen. I knew Jimi Hendrix when he was the lead guitarist for the Night Hawks fronting John Hammond. He did his first American concert after he became the Jimi Hendrix Experience for me and that night I watched incredulously as he and my mother smoked a joint. I hung out with him in Essaouira and saw him play at the Isle of Wight Festival before he died and I went off in search of the Alis.

That said, Bassekou is not just playing in L.A. tomorrow (Sunday), he's playing a free show-- at Amoeba Records on Sunset, around the corner from that favorite L.A. restaurant I was talking about! If you're in the L.A. area-- unless you're lucky enough to have tickets for one of the shows at the Getty Center-- don't miss this chance.

Bassekou plays ngoni on President Obama's favorite record, Kulanjan but he's not well know in the U.S. yet, although he's a superstar in Africa and on his way to being one in Europe. This is what I wrote after seeing him play in Bamako:

I don't know how to describe the concert without losing the essence of what the music did for everyone involved-- both on and off the stage. Let me tell you, though, as magnificent as the recorded versions of his songs are, the live show is what makes it so amazing. The concert defined hot. When those syncopated rhythms get going, there is no resisting their power. Mali is the birthplace of the blues-- and the blues is still very much alive and vibrant here-- and it is the ancestral home of rock'n'roll in every imaginable way. Bassekou has that coursing through his blood and he knows exactly how to convey it to the audience.

And the dancing was as good as the music! Absolutely breathtaking! Truthfully, I can't remember the last time music compelled me to jump out of my seat and dance in the aisle. Last night it did.

I found this video on YouTube-- Bassekou at the Orange Peel in Asheville, NC a couple weeks ago. I wonder if Heath Shuler made it to the show. Bassekou will be in Savannah on April 2nd and I'll definitely tell Regina Thomas to check it out; it's right up her alley.  In this clip it looks like a local banjo player found his way onto the stage; you can tell who he is because he's the one with the store-bought instrument. If you're in L.A., hasta mañana. Otherwise, Bassekou's U.S. tour schedule is here. Wow! 4 nights in Minneapolis and three in Lafayette, Louisiana!

I don't write much about restaurants and hotels or any kind of attractions in Los Angeles, not because it's an unworthy of tourist attention, but because I live here. But it dawned on me the other day that with so many tourists flocking to L.A. I should point out my newest favorite restaurant. Sort of restaurant... most exclusive restaurant in town (only 6 seats)! I want to back track first.

A few weeks ago I was with some friends celebrating my birthday at an old L.A. favorite, A.O.C. Our regular wonderful waitress Suzanne (from Sweden) wasn't there and we got stuck with someone who would rather be an asshole than be helpful. So when I asked for the sublime Brussels sprouts in parsnip purée dish I had had earlier in the week to be brought with no bits of pork or ham or whatever pig flesh they use to screw it up with, she said it wasn't possible. But it was possible. Suzanne had gotten it for us a few days previous and I had been dreaming about it since. In fact, it's why I picked A.O.C. for the celebration. She said I was mistaken. I ordered the broccoli with garlic and chili instead and the meal was very good. Everyone loved everything they ate. Afterwards a cook came over to say happy birthday and discuss the Brussels sprouts problem. Turned out her name is Suzanne too-- Suzanne Goin.

I don't watch cooking shows on TV and I don't follow chef celebrity but my friend Heather was kvelling. Turns out Suzanne Goin is the chef-- and one of the most renowned in the chef celebrity circuit. She was very sweet too. Heather mentioned she's also the chef at Lucques, where I hadn't been since I turned in my company credit card. But Suzanne sure knows how to cook up some good food-- and Lucques is a lot closer than A.O.C. to my home so... a few nights later Roland and I tried to get into our favorite local raw vegan joint, Cru and, as happens more and more frequently these days, it was too crowded and we had to walk away. On the spur on the moment we decided to go "someplace different" and I called Lucques and they said, "Come on down." We did. Of course it was delicious. But I had a realization while I was eating. It was heavy-- really heavy. Everything was cooked in sticks of butter. And when I chatted with the waiter about... the Brussels sprouts, well... they were cooked in veal stock. The food tasted good but was clearly deadly healthwise and very, very expensive. Why bother? How had I drifted so far away from raw vegan to find myself, at least once or twice a week, in places like A.O.C. and Lucques?

The next day, I met up with Roland for dinner again and he basically had had the same thoughts. "Let's eat someplace simpler. Lucques was too heavy." I said "OK, I have just the place!"

Livefood Organic at 1507 Cahuenga in Hollywood, just a few feet from the corner of Sunset Blvd-- and very conveniently located to ArcLight and Amoeba, isn't really a restaurant. It's a raw, vegan take-out place. But there's a nice communal table in the window with 6 stools. It's only been open a few weeks and so far there's always been a little room at the table.

First of all, every single thing they prepare is absolutely delicious, healthy and incredibly inexpensive. And... you can order stuff to go with dignity. I mean that's what it's all about-- that and the healthy eating thing. My mouth is starting to water as I write because I'm thinking of the delicious lasagna I have in my fridge right now that I'll be eating when I'm done writing. Lasagna and blueberry cobbler. Eating at Lifefood Organic isn't about making any compromises with taste. Their food is unquestionably more delicious-- not to mention nutritious-- than the "same" dishes you'll find in conventional restaurants, including-- if not especially in the A.O.C.s and Lucques of the world. If you're a raw foodie, think about this-- their dishes are as good as anything you'll find at Pure Food and Wine in New York City! I've been all over Italy and-- more to the point-- I grew up in NYC and I've never tasted better tiramisu than at Lifefood!

Click on the menu so you can read it-- and a warning: they usually only have a few things on any one day-- but they're ALL yummy

I was just in the mood for someplace new to eat, someplace I hadn't tried before. And I didn't mind driving. My 2007 Zagat for Los Angeles is so worn already that I knew I was unlikely to get any new inspiration there. And then it struck me-- I had seen a story a few months ago in the New York Times about L.A. area Chinese restaurants. I hadn't had Chinese food in 4 years-- ever since my doctor told me they tend to cook the food in extraordinarily cheap and cancer-causing oil and to steer clear. But I was in the mood.

It was easy enough to pull up Mark Bittman's Times story, The East Is West: The Best Chinese Restaurants in Southern California, online. It was all about going out of town, away from the traditional Chinatown and east on the I-10 towards Jacksonville, Florida (just not that far). And not even as far as San Bernardino, although Bittman's point is that the whole 50 mile stretch of the I-10 between L.A. and San Berdoo is "a string of multiethnic communities that all have a large, dynamic Chinese population. There is strong evidence of this in the chains of Chinese supermarkets, the likes of which exist nowhere else in the country. (In these stores, announcements are made first in Mandarin, then in Korean, then Vietnamese; then Spanish, and last English. Really.)"

And one of those towns is Alhambra. Bittman was unequivocal "Follow my advice, drop everything, and rush to eat at Triumphal Palace."

The restaurant follows in the tradition of popular places such as NBC Seafood, Mission 261-- about which, more in a moment-- and the ill-named New Concept. Their menus are large and long-- several pages, at least — and often feature esoteric and very expensive ingredients such as abalone, shark’s fin and bird’s nest.

For my money-- and though it’s upscale by comparison, it doesn’t take much-- Triumphal Palace is the best of the lot, with food that is full-flavored, intricate and subtle, sometimes almost tame. The roast duck, which looks like every other Chinese roast duck you’ve ever had, is so good I suspect it’s not “roast” at all, but fried in clarified butter; it’s that crisp, tender and flavorful. It needs nothing, and certainly not the accompanying marmalade-like substance, which you should not allow to touch the duck. Other dishes are similarly simple, and just about as good: stir-fried Dungeness crab with scallion and ginger; pea greens with mushrooms and the distinctively flavored dried scallops; a pretty dish of chicken slices, huge shiitakes, ham and gai lan (Chinese broccoli), served in layers.

For all of this, Triumphal Palace is perhaps better known for its dim sum (served every day at lunchtime) than for its dinner dishes. Like many of the grand West Coast Chinese restaurants, from Vancouver on south, the dim sum is ordered from a menu-- you’re invariably given a short pencil and a printed sheet, to tick off what you want-- cooked fresh and served hot, rather than being hawked from steam carts. (Still, the problem of everything coming at once can only be solved by staggering your order.)

Six of us-- one of whom now claims she will be married here-- shared 24 dishes (about 18 of which came within 10 minutes), and while all except the predictably sad desserts were good, some were incredible. These were barbecue pork belly, firm cubes of slow-cooked, crunchy-skinned fresh bacon that, I swear, were a dead-on replica of a dish Alain Ducasse used to serve at about five times the price; Chiu Chow-style dumplings, with thick, chewy, slightly crisp rice-flour exteriors filled with (could it be?) jasmine-scented meat; deep-fried carrot cake, in fact a savory-sweet custard-filled dumpling; boiled baby bok choy in fish stock, which, like the duck I’d had at dinner, contained some secret ingredient that was the Bomb; and a wonderful layered creation of pan-fried sticky rice with egg.

On a recent Sunday morning, the place was packed, as usual. The design is faux Deco-slash-modern, not horrible, but with the inevitable stark lighting. Still, the walls are of wood, there are tablecloths, and the chairs are padded and comfortable. At dinner the napkins are cloth, and the plates are changed frequently.

Bittman is clearly insane. But I didn't know that until after I ate in this dive. Although I did know it before I came down with severe MSG poisoning. Before I left for Alhambra I decided to look and see what Zagat reviewers thought. The food rated a very undistinguished "20" (out of 30) and the review touted a "lit-from-behind Lucite bar" and "a spacious aquarium." Well, this New York Times food critic probably is a lot savvier than the John and Jane Does who did the rating for Zagat. Oh, was I wrong.

Let me take Bittman's review apart paragraph by paragraph. The menu was not "large and long;" it was medium-sized. The food was far from "full-flavored, intricate and subtle, sometimes almost tame." It was crap, MSG-flavored garbage and not "sometimes almost tame; always very tame. I took his advice and ordered the closest thing on the menu to what he called "pea greens with mushrooms and the distinctively flavored dried scallops," a soup that claimed those ingredients but which had no trace of scallops-- or flavor. I had asked the waiter if there was MSG in the food before we sat down and he shook his head enthusiastically. I figured he didn't understand. I was wrong.

I also asked him if the soup was enough for me and my friend. He said it was enough for 6 people. He wasn't exaggerating. All the dishes were oversized, which doesn't make up for quality in the slightest. My main course was a shrimp dish that was really bad and my friend had beef chow fun which he said tasted the same as beef chow fun does in any Hollywood dive.

Alain Ducasse should sue Bittman for comparing his creations to this swill. When I was around 16 I hitchhiked across the U.S. and a merchant seaman picked me up in a Cadillac and drove from Ohio to California. He claimed he had eaten in the best Chinese restaurants in Peking, Canton and Shanghai and that he would tale me to one that was better than any of them right down the road in Amarillo. I hadn't been to China yet but I had eaten enough Chinese food in Brooklyn to know that good Chinese food was not going to be served in a restaurant with baskets of rolls and rye bread on the tables. The restaurant was in a roadside mini-mall off Route 66, but it wasn't that much worse than the one off Route 10 in Alhambra. As for Bittman's other suggestions, if the Triumphal Palace is his "New Favorite Restaurant," I'll steer clear of #2, thru 5.

By the way, the next day I had the first headache I've had in many years and I was dizzy for two days. I didn't dare drive my car; something I never experienced in my entire life. I felt like I was going to fall over several times. My neighbor told me L.A. Chinese restaurants stopped using MSG years ago. I don't doubt it. Alhambra is like 30 minutes away though.