Barbara Hansen

Tapenade at Tapenade

Newly opened Tapenade is already staging an ambitious chefs' dinner -- well, actually, a buddy party.

Set for Feb. 27, it will showcase dishes created by pals of Tapenade chef Ressul Rassallat. The pals are Andre Guerrero, with whom Rassallat worked at Maximiliano, and David Feau, who just ended his stint as executive chef of The Royce at the Langham in Pasadena. All three will cook together, like the good friends they are.

Guerrero has the first course, lobster, lobster reduction and pineapple served cold as panna cotta. Next comes Feau's plate of farmed lettuce heart and baby kale with salsify, kumquats, maitake mushrooms, onion petals and bergamot orange jus.

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Barbara Hansen

Chef Rodolfo Guzmán

Rodolfo Guzmán was hacking away at something you're not likely to find in an L.A. market -- tepu wood from Chile. He had brought it for a dinner at Playa, John Sedlar's Beverly Blvd. restaurant, that would show how he works indigenous Chilean ingredients into stunning modernist dishes.

Guzman, 34, has rocketed into the culinary stratosphere with Boragó, his 6-year-old restaurant in Santiago.

Translating what he does there into a one-night stand at Playa required the focus of a visionary, which he is, despite his easy-going good looks. Born in Santiago, Guzmán forages the length of his long, skinny country to search out unknown foods and explore native cooking techniques for his intricate, upscale preparations.

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Barbara Hansen

Chef Francis Mallmann

A roaring fire lit up the Hollywood Hills the other night, but the fire department didn't respond. Turns out it was a backyard barbecue with Francis Mallmann working the grills, just as he does in South America.

This superstar chef with three restaurants in Argentina, another set to open in March, one in Brazil and one in Uruguay, quietly slipped into Los Angeles for his first cooking demo here.

Renowned for his grilling techniques, which you can read about in his book, Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, Mallman appeared at a private gathering, and only a select crowd got to meet him.

The party was so low key that Mallmann wasn't introduced but mingled quietly with the guests. Wearing a striped linen apron made in Argentina, white hair streaming below his cap, he checked the grills constantly.

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Barnaby Draper Studios

The Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival

The second annual Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival concluded Sunday, a slickly produced, three-day debauch mostly held in and around the capacious digs of L.A. Live and its Marriott property -- though neither conference room nor rooftop exhibition tent could adequately contain the assemblage of white-coated, telegenic, A-list cooking talent that showed up, knives at the ready, to spoil us all with deliciousness.

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JoAnn Stougaard

Evan Kleiman's chocolate chunk bread pudding

If you're still mourning the loss of chef Evan Kleiman's Angeli Caffe (who isn't?), you can sample her food again at the Charleston on Monday, May 7, with two seatings at 6 and 8 p.m. The KCRW Good Food host will prepare a four-course rustic Italian meal, served family-style. "Every day I get emails from customers asking me to make Angeli food and bring it to them," Kleiman says. "It's pretty funny, like I should now run Angeli like a cottage industry from my house. Well, that's not going to happen, but the pop-up allows me and my staff to reunite and make food we love and, of course, to see customer friends we miss and give them a fleeting taste."

Kleiman's is the first in a series of pop-up events at the Charleston, where chef Jet Tila will invite various chefs to share his kitchen on a monthly basis. For the May 7 event, you can expect farmers market-plucked ingredients in dishes such as gnocchetti di ricotta, linguine vongole, pollo arrosto, lasagne Angeli and chocolate chunk bread pudding (pictured above).

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Courtesy of the Golden Globes' official site

Pastry chef Thomas Henzi prepares a gold shaving-topped dessert.

Sunday night's Golden Globe ceremony figures to be an entertaining few hours -- too bad the cameras never zoom in on our favorite (or least favorite) celebrities while they eat dinner. Unlike at the Oscars or Emmys, Golden Globe guests feast on a gourmet meal and can indulge by drinking endless amounts of Champagne.

Beverly Hilton head chef Suki Sugiura spent six months planning a three course meal to serve the ceremony's 1,500 guests, a menu that "spans the continents." Here's the lineup...

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Beverly Wilshire

Hay-smoked squab.

In these dark "Occupy" times, it is heartening to know that the abused and beleaguered "1 percent" has not been forgotten. Thinking up new ways to blow your millions can be so taxing.

Luckily there are still places like the Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel. Their executive chef Gilles Arzur has partnered with upscale Spanish skincare line Natura Bisse to offer a one-of-a-kind experience that combines spa treatments with avant-garde cooking along the lines of the late great El Bulli. The hotel calls their "A Taste of Beauty" offering "an unprecedented marvel drawing on gastronomy, luxury, beauty and technology."

The experience will set you back "beginning at" $1,500 per person, including tax and gratuities, with a minimum of six in your party. Reservations must be made at least a week in advance.

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Flickr user photography hobo

Ostrich Burger From Lulu's Cafe on Beverly

There are the typical farmers market discussions involving the final peach season days and those first fall apples. And then there are the back alley conversations about angry ostriches and vulture migrations, like the one we had behind Weiser Farms' stand at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market.

"The 'meat' ostriches are really mean," Tehachapi-based cartographer Anthony McDemas assured us as we were discussing the "what-if" psychological ramifications of eating ostrich on an ostrich farm. "It's the 'maters' [or breeding ostriches] that are the nice ones."

"He's right," nods Alex Weiser in agreement. Weiser Farms is in Tehachapi (about 90-miles north of L.A.), as is Indian Point Ostrich Ranch.

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You could file this one under the heading Fusion Cooking or maybe just Irony. Yotam Ottolenghi, the British chef and cookbook author, most recently of the book Plenty, will be in town next month cooking a dinner at Animal.

This is funny because Ottolenghi is justly famous for cooking stunning vegetarian food at his four London restaurants and in his cookbooks, of which he has two, the first one being Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. A fifth Ottolenghi restaurant is set to open next year in Soho (they're looking for help, if you're eligible to work in the UK.) He's also the vegetarian columnist for The Guardian. Why Animal? Why not Animal.

Plenty, about which the novelist Susan Orlean raved, "I haven't been this excited by a cookbook in quite a while," was published last year in the UK. And if you don't yet have a copy, you can get a signed book at Animal if you come for the dinner, which will take place July 14th.

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Barbara Hansen

Jet Tila and Alex Ageneau at Breadbar

When Jet Tila did a pop-up dinner at Breadbar on West Third Street this week, something was missing, and that was anything Thai.

Tila was L.A.'s man-about-Thai-Town before he left for Las Vegas to become executive chef of Wazuzu, The Wynn Encore's pan-Asian restaurant.

His last appearance at Breadbar was an Asian cooking class. This time Tila took on a new role, as front man for chef friend Alex Ageneau, who is currently sous chef at The Langham's Royce in Pasadena.

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