LexnGer

A restaurant is a place where people pay to eat meals. That applies to all the variations: café, bistro, diner, pizza parlor, gastropubs, etc. We all know what we're getting when we go to one of those versus another.

But what about all the off-the-grid dining establishments? What can you expect when you show up to a pop-up or a home restaurant? How about a secret supper club or a private restaurant? What you're walking into can be a little murkier. To that end, we felt it was important to apply some definitions to the myriad alternate options. This list isn't exhaustive, but it's a good place to start. Turn the page.

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B. Hansen

Evan Kleiman

Angeli Caffe popped up Monday night with the same kitchen crew, the same servers, the same food and Evan Kleiman in charge, just as if it had never closed. Kleiman shuttered her Melrose Avenue restaurant in January after 27 years of service.

The pop-up happened at the Charleston in Santa Monica, where managing partner Jet Tila had asked longtime friend Kleiman to stage the gastrolounge's first pop-up dinner,

"It's so nice, we were all crying in the kitchen," said Kleiman, as she circulated in the dining room.

Servers were happy, too. "It feels great," said David Avanes, wearing his black Angeli T-shirt with angel wings on the back. The nights that Avanes didn't work at Angeli, he ate there. "It was like my kitchen," he said.

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G. Snyder

Fruit and Veggie, Yin and Yang

You've probably heard some rumblings of the stellar work chef Gary Menes has been putting in after-hours at downtown's Tiara Café -- the former Patina, Palate, and French Laundry alum has quietly been reviving the art of counter-side dining at his pop-up restaurant, which has been running weekend dinner services since late last year.

Although the five-course menu looks rather condensed when you are staring at a handwritten page of paper, an evening at Le Comptoir unfurls at the kind of deliberate pace which hints that months of intense preparation are culminating in the span of a few hours. Even the warm loaves of crusty bread -- made from a starter that's almost old enough to vote -- is worthy of its own entry.

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Escamole Tacos

Fresh off his stint of "green-friendly" dinners chef Laurent Quenioux will be taking up residence at Highland Park's Good Girl Dinette, serving four dinners between May 7 and May 22. On the menu will be the usual kaleidoscope of bizarro ingredients, which this time will feature escamoles, a type of ant larvae culled from agave plants that's described by some as "insect caviar." Quenioux smuggles them in specially from Mexico, where they are known as a pre-Columbian Aztec delicacy.

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G. Snyder

Edible Garnish

If you happened to take a twilight stroll through downtown's industrial district last Friday, you may have spied a wild figure waltzing along the cracked asphalt, between the art houses, coffee galleries and bombed-out warehouses.

He was dressed in mismatched knee-high socks, a navy blue coat, a gold-rimmed admiral's cap, a fake mustache and a pair of black spectacles, all which made him look something like a jollified Hideki Tojo.

The man called himself Commodore Booty McHooters, official guide of the "We Love Lionel Ritchie Walking Tour," tasked with leading columns of bewildered fans on a short walk from one super-secret meeting place to an even more secret factory/loft dining room. Depending on how your 4/20 transpired, this may or may not have been the strangest thing you saw all day.

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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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Mike D and Roy Choi

It's not as if Roy Choi (Chego, A-Frame, Kogi, the world) doesn't have lots of things to do in his off hours, what few there are of them. But if Mike D (Beastie Boys, the world) asks you to cook some food, you'd probably do it too. Or, to quote the chef, "I don't know where you come from, but in my world if Mike D steps to me, I listen."

What Mike D asked Choi to step into, so to speak, is Transmission L.A.: AV Club, a 17-day festival at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. As part of the festival, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from April 20 through May 6, Choi will run an outdoor pop-up restaurant, each day with a different original addition to the Kogi menu. Or, as Choi put it, "I want to extend what we do on the streets one step further into an exploration of flavor and straight gangster love."

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djjewlez/Flickr

Foie Gras Croque-Monsieur at LudoBites 4.0

It's time for the lottery, again -- no, not that $640 million jackpot, though those mega millions certainly would help paying for this one: Chef Ludo Lefebvre will be cooking a 5-course, $105 per person "Best of LudoBites: Foie Gras Night" on Tuesday, April 17 at Gram & Papa's, the Downtown eatery that hosted the chef's LudoBites 7.0 pop-up. The state's ban on foie gras is effective in July so, as the mentality of scarcity goes, get it while you can. A portion of proceeds from the dinner will go to the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards (CHEFS).

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Anne Fishbein

Laurent Quenioux at Starry Kitchen

Over the weekend, Laurent Quenioux and Starry Kitchen's Thi Tran hosted their first marijuana-infused dinner; it was such a hit that the team already has plans for a second round. The next "(Weed+Chinese) Herb Dinner" will take place in a "secret Downtown L.A. location" on -- when else? -- April 20th.

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Outstanding in the Field

A field, where folks may be out, standing.

Outstanding in the Field is the Rolling Thunder Revue of underground suppers. Those who like table-to-farm eating as much as the farm-to-table sort will be stoked to learn that the organization has revealed its 2012 calendar and will begin selling tickets on Tuesday, March 20.

Beginning May 12 and continuing through the fall, Outstanding in the Field will wind its way to 29 California farms, including a handful in Southern California. For the uninitiated, Outstanding in the Field is a group of activists, artists and chefs steering an ancient bus to farms around the country where local chefs use each farm's products to cook lovely dinners. Diners capable of shelling out a few cool Benjamins get to kick back with the chefs and farmers.

Turn the page for the Southern California dates.

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