Vivoli Cafe is the best Restaurant in LA

Yeah yeah yeah, I know that a lot of people think the LA Food Scene has improved recently. Lots of celeb chefs are opening places here and there's always a line outside Mario Batali's outrageously expensive pizzeria. Gordon Ramsay (someone I really love) has a new restaurant here, and the list goes on.

So last May, I was looking for a place to celebrate my law school graduation. What I was finding were two extremes - casual inexpensive stuff and expensive overpriced pretentious stuff. Nothing in between, nothing where you could go and for $20 or $30 a person, get a damn good meal. Finally, I found the Holy Grail at the Vivoli Cafe and Trattoria on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. Offering a fairly large Italian menu, I was concerned that they had too many things to be good. But the reviews were good so I figured we should give it a shot. And oh my god. Combining price, value, service, and atmosphere, this has got to be the best restaurant in LA. There are only about 10-15 tables. The owners and most of the waiters are actually Italian. They give you warm foccacia (homemade, I assume) with olive spread (hello, delicious) instead of plain old bread and butter, and what certainly looks like a homemade biscotti with your bill. I don't even like biscotti, but theirs are amazing with whole almonds. They even send you a gift certificate on your birthday.

The menu is dirt cheap. I just came home from lunch (using my free birthday gift certificate). For 9.95 I got chicken with FRESH artichokes and tomatoes in a light white wine lemon sauce, which comes with penne pasta and the best marinara sauce I've ever had. I don't even like marinara sauce, but they make theirs homemade every morning. If they sold it, I'd buy it. The dinner portion of my dish was only $5 more for what I presume is a double portion of chicken breast. Even the steaks and seafood all hover around $20-25 and they make lunch accessible by offering a vast array of salads and sandwiches in addition to lunch-sized portions of pastas, chicken, and other Italian delicacies.

All of this is in a package of a very small restaurant that is dominated by a loud open kitchen - the smells permeate the whole place and you're instantly hungry. The service is excellent and they'll do whatever you want.

Today I treated myself to a tiramisu to go. Yeah it's against my diet, but theirs is homemade and I wanted to try it. Look at this masterpiece of deliciousness:




This place is special. I asked the manager where he was from in Italy and we ended up talking about Italy, the US (I asked why he was here when he could be in ITALY), Tuscan beef and gelato, and everything else. The fact that this restaurant is almost smack dab in the middle of the very yuppy Sunset Strip is amazing. You walk inside and you're not in LA anymore, you're anywhere - anywhere in Italy, that is. If you're in LA give this place a try. You won't regret it (and you won't go broke either, which in LA is really saying something for a really classy meal).

:)

Adventures in Pizza

It's already really clear that I love pizza. But on this crazy Montignac thing that I am trying to follow, my normal homemade pizza is a bit out of the question unfortunately. So looking for other solutions, I first tried using a 100% whole wheat pita (I'll say that bread and cheese on this plan aren't supposed to go together, but I can't give up pizza completely, I just can't. So I am just seeing this as an improvement and I don't think a small pizza on some kind of whole wheat bread a couple times a month is gonna keep me from losing weight.)

Not too bad.... but not quite good enough either :(



Then I tried 100% whole wheat lavash bread. I cut the bread in half and pre-baked it for just about 1 minute in the oven on 500 degrees.


I added a bit of pepperoni b/c dammit, I wanted to. This was much better than the pita. For the pita I think I will stick to making chips! :) But I would try this pizza on the lavash bread again for sure.


I finally tried making whole wheat pizza crust from scratch using 100% whole wheat flour. Something did not turn out right :( The glutens in the flour wouldn't develop (does whole wheat flour even develop gluten?) and I couldn't stretch it. It tasted alright but the texture was more like a cracker than a chewy pizza crust :( I did put a bit of flaxseed meal in it to bump up the health factor but I don't know if that would make a difference. So that was disappointing - I didn't even photograph it ;)

Man, I stink (and Chicken Adventures 1)

Well, some good job of updating I've done this past month. I've been cooking a lot, staying close to this Montignac plan as best I can, and overall doing not much in my unemployment-ness :p No excuses for not updating regularly but now I have so many pictures and posts floating around in my head, I have not much choice. So here we go.

First chicken adventure: Whole Grain fried chicken. I mixed whole wheat flour, flaxseed meal, and parmesean cheese for this breading. I wasn't thrilled with how it came out just b/c I like really crispy crunchy fried chicken.... but it wasn't bad, even if it doesn't really fit perfectly into the Montignac tenets b/c whole wheat flour has a glycemic index above 35.

So anyway, here's the breading:



And the chicken breaded:



And the finish product (ignore the brown rice, it didn't come out well ;))





Second chicken adventure: Garlic-y quinoa with grilled chicken. While looking for grains that have a glycemic index of below 35 that i can eat with meats, I decided to try quinoa. What I did here was saute it to toast it up, in a little garlic, then boil it per package directions.






I marinated the chicken in simple olive oil, a little red wine vinegar, lots of garlic, etc.:




finished meal (sorry for the blurriness, I suck):