A. Scattergood

interior of Abricott

​For all of you who think of Pasadena as a food desert of sorts, your barren culinary landscape just improved. John and Jo Wee, the couple who own and operate Daisy Mint, just opened a second restaurant, on Lake Avenue. Abricott opened its doors last Monday, Jan. 23, in the location previously occupied by Koo Koo Roo.

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University Hospitals, Ireland Cancer Center

Chef Gino Angelini

​Chef/restaurateur Gino Angelini will open a new restaurant in the old Hamburger Hamlet space in West Hollywood.

The project doesn't have a name yet, but it's scheduled for a fall 2012 opening. The design is "rustic Tuscan farmhouse."

The lunch menu will feature artisan pizzas, pastas, salads and entrées, while the dinner menu will tend more toward the classic Italian cooking the chef is known for at Angelini Osteria.

Angelini's eatery will share space with an upcoming TBD Chinese restaurant. Both eateries are a partnership with Innovative Dining Group (IDG), the company behind brands such as BOA Steakhouse, Sushi Roku and Katana.

Patrick O'Donnell

Piper Goldstein and products

​There's a new wave of urban farmers, but Piper Goldstein takes it to the next level. She likes to farm in a gold lamé dress and work boots. A native to Los Angeles, she actually has Woodland Hills tattooed across her stomach. But she's not your average valley girl; she has a stronger than steel work ethic. And on Friday she opened Atwater Village Farm, a fresh-from-the-farm produce grocery store in Atwater Village. Not bad timing, as the nearest equivalent, Nature Mart, has recently been taken over by Lassen's, which has drawn criticism for its support of Proposition 8.

Goldstein has lived in the Silverlake, Echo Park, Atwater Village neighborhood for 20 years. What started as a business plan for a juice bar, has become an ultimate community service, giving people what they seemingly need and want out of a grocery store: local, organic and farm-fresh.

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A. Scattergood

Milo & Olive butternut squash flatbread, etc.

​The folks who brought you Rustic Canyon, Huckleberry and Sweet Rose Creamery have now officially opened the exceedingly pretty doors of a new restaurant, a pizzeria named Milo & Olive, which begins serving lunch and dinner today.

Milo & Olive is thus the fourth Santa Monica eatery from Josh Loeb and pastry chef Zoe Nathan, who named their new pizzeria after their 1-year-old son Milo. (And Olive because they just liked it.) Rustic Canyon executive chef Evan Funke is running the open kitchen, making pizzas in the impressive wood-burning Mugnaini oven (almond wood at the moment) and overseeing a menu that functions pretty much as his translation of the produce and products from the nearby Santa Monica farmers market into slightly more articulated form.

The bakery opened about two weeks ago and has been serving breakfast as well as coffee and pastries. Starting today, the place will be open every day of the week, from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., since chefs and the parents of small children never sleep anyway.

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Amazon

​Ahn-joo is the Korean word for pub food. It's what Debbie Lee serves at her newly opened Ahn-Joo, a Korean snack bar in the Americana mall in Glendale. No liquor there, but Lee frequents Koreantown pubs so she knows the dishes well. And she adds her own spin to come up with a modern take, even turning rice cakes into nachos.

Nothing is cheffy or pretentious. "I'm a cook. At the end of the day, I want to serve people the food that I want to eat," she says.

The three top hits since opening are Korean fried chicken, which evolved from her grandmother's recipe; grilled bacon-wrapped rice cakes with a jalapeño ponzu dip; and the nachos.

Nothing like the drippy American combination of tortilla chips and cheese, this is a version of the Korean rice cake dish called tteokboki. Lee fries the rice cakes until crisp, adds a complex chile cheese sauce and braised pork, then tops it off with kimchi salsa and Korean peppers.

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A. Scattergood

Maison Giraud canelé

​If you're the sort of person who dreams about pain au chocolat (see: 99 Things To Eat in L.A. Before You Die, 2010) and properly made canelés de Bordeaux (beeswax, copper molds), you may also have been peering through the picture windows yesterday morning at 7:30 when Alain Giraud opened his long-awaited Maison Giraud in the Pacific Palisades.

The restaurant -- which may or may not be French, and may nor not be a bistro or a brasserie but is definitely a restaurant -- started with breakfast yesterday and lunch today and definitely dinner on Monday, when it formally opens. The lovely open space was considerably reworked from its time as the Italian restaurant Dante, and how has 12 tables inside and 7 outside on the front patio. And there's a whole store next door -- you can see it through curiously medieval narrow vertical windows in the restaurant's dining room -- devoted to Catherine Giraud's gift shop Lavender Blue (French soap, linens, very cool stuff), which will also open on Monday.

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B. Hansen

Osaka entrance

​Osaka, the new Japanese-Peruvian place in Hollywood, has the scariest entrance. It's very dark, and you have to cross over stepping stones in a pool of rippling black water. I subconsciously felt drawn to fall, and all the time I was in there, I worried about how I would get out -- dry.

Osaka is part of a chain founded in Peru. The look was designed by Kristopher Keith of SpaceCraft (probably a good swimmer).

There are nice touches inside, like an overhead rope motif inspired by the ropes of Peruvian fishing boats. The food is Peruvian-Asian fusion, predominantly Japanese, but also with touches of Thai and other cuisines.

It's a small plates place with the expected Peruvian ceviche, tiraditos, anticuchos and cute miniature causitas. But also fish in a banana leaf with anticucho sauce and coconut reduction, miso-truffled American Kobe skirt steak with Peruvian potatoes, Parmesan scallops, grilled octopus with sweet miso paste and duck confit with miso oranges and caramelized onions.

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ProfessorSalt.com

Coco Ichibanya's Katsu-curry

​Do you love Japanese curry and need to fix that jones in the eastern San Gabriel Valley? We told you this summer that CoCo Ichibanya was coming to Rowland Heights, and we just found out that location opened two months sooner than we expected, on September 28. Happy belated birthday, CoCo Ichi, we would have sent a cake if we knew sooner.

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LA Wad/Flickr

Mendocino Farms Mascot inspired the new concept

​
Mendocino Farms is known for its quirky sandwiches -- the one that first got us was an addictive combo of duck confit with duck-skin cracklins -- and its approachable farm-to-table lunch fare at its three locations (two downtown and one in Marina del Rey). Some of the more ambitious sandwich combos -- poblano chorizo with dandelion greens, for instance -- have been lost on its more mainstream diners.

For the rest of us, the owners will open Blue Cow, a full-service restaurant and "sandwich think tank," early next year.

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Adam Murray

A mirror reflects the interior of Josef Centeno's Bäco Mercat (in its final construction phase).

​Update: 10/19, 4:29 p.m. Centeno has alerted us that Baco Mercat won't open Oct. 24, as initially planned. Instead, he says to expect an opening by the end of the month.

The bäco is back, and this time, in a starring role. Josef Centeno's Bäco Mercat is slated to open Monday, Oct. 24 for lunch.

The chef and owner describes his signature dish as "a sandwich-taco-pizza hybrid that encompasses my style of cooking in a sandwich: a lot of flavorful meat and sauce combinations." The name derives from Centeno's concept of a global taco.

You may remember the much-celebrated bäco from the chef's past restaurants.  He masterminded the bäco at Meson G, refined it at Opus and carried it over to Lot 1.  Occasionally he serves it at the Lazy Ox Canteen, the bistro praised for its adventurous blend of international ingredients, where he is chef and partner.

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