Anna Ostberg Casanova

Tierra y mar paella by Sandra Cordero

Sandra Cordero has been presenting food with art in Los Angeles since her days at Royal/T. She moved from New York City to help open the now-closed art gallery café, eventually stepping away from the front as general manager to helm the kitchen as chef. This Thursday, April 25, through Saturday, April 27, her company Cordero Negro and non-profit organization ART from the ashes will collaborate in Comida y Arte, a restaurant and art exhibition pop-up, at The Wine Vault in Glendale.

Cordero chose paella as the main entree for her three-course dinner menu. It reflects best her sensibilities as both a chef and a guest. As she describes, a well-made paella allows each ingredient to stand out.

"The rice gets the flavors from everything, but if done right you're supposed to taste all the ingredients on its own. It's not supposed to be a big mush of flavors," Cordero says. "You know some kids who had everything separate and don't want to mix it? I was one of those."

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Wikimedia Commons

Ferran Adria

According to the AP, Ferran Adria's legendary -- and shuttered -- restaurant elBulli will be reopening, maybe as soon as next fall. But don't start stuffing your suitcases with Euros yet: Adria told the AP that he's not sure as to the location, or the time, or the duration -- although it seems to be for about a month -- or even who will get tickets reservations to the show. Because the restaurant isn't reopening exactly as a restaurant but as a rehearsal set on which to train the actors playing the chefs in an upcoming movie about Adria and elBulli.

It's also possible that Adria might not even reopen the real elBulli, now used as a school, but might choose to have the famed restaurant rebuilt elsewhere -- like, say, on a Hollywood studio lot. Awesome. Who needs to fly to Spain when we can drive over to Paramount or Sony to eat tapioca of Iberian ham or razor-clam sushi with ginger spray.

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THrants

Busby's patrons watching the wrong kind of football

Set to unfold this Sunday, July 1, the 2012 Euro Cup Final is a familiar tale of the tape. On one side, you have Italy's defense, which stays at home and plays it safe, slurping down zabaglione and soaking up an opposition's assaults -- sort of like how the bread in a ribollita soaks up broth. On the other side, Spain's defense is no slouch either, especially when it comes to goalkeeper Iker Casillas, who eats up shots the way our husky uncle hoovers up canapes. Furthermore, a unit ominously dubbed Pata Negra or the "Black Hoof," Spain's burly midfielders have a passing game as silky and sweet as their porky namesake's flesh. On the soccer field, it's a clash of perennial titans. On the dinner table, the match-up is no less compelling.

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La Tienda

I is for Idiazábal

Do you ever find yourself having this reccurring nightmare in which you're hanging out with Ferran Adriá in San Sebastián and he starts showing you these crazy ingredients but you can't understand a word of his thick, heavily accented Catalan?

Uh, yeah, us neither.

But on the off-chance you want to learn more about the culinary vocabulary of Spain, which might prove handy when perusing menus these days, online Spanish food store La Tienda has launched Learning@LaTienda, an interactive website to help España neophytes familiarize themselves with cuisine and culture by using flash cards, regional bios and "hablo" images.

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Anne Fishbein

the invisible restaurant critic

Dear Mr. Gold:
Is there anywhere in L.A. where I can find angulas -- Spanish baby eels?
--Anthony Pan, via Facebook

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Fire and rice. No, James Taylor has not released a new album. We're talking about paella. Really good Paella by Castillan chef Alberto Herraiz, owner of Fogón, a tapas bar in, of all places, Paris. Yeah, it's going to be one of those summers of sweaty culinary contradiction. Aren't they all.

The just-released cookbook - with a very cool white cloth cover trimmed in red stitching, incidentally -- is highly focused on the subject at hand. As the press release reminds us, "Most people don't realize that [paella] can be savory or sweet, and can include ingredients as diverse as rabbit and crab, coconut and mango. Paella doesn't even have to be made with rice - it can be made with bulgur, quinoa, or almost any other grain. Alberto Herraiz presents [paella's] limitless variations."

Great. So how's the book?

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Ben Calderwood

Slivers of Jamon Ibérico glisten

Consider for a moment the casual brutality of the jamonera, little more than a wooden plank and a upright clamp in which to mount a leg of ham. The shank end is secured to the clamp via a spike or bolts, making it easy to shave the gelatinous flesh from the bone. It's a utilitarian apparatus, albeit one conceived for the exclusive purpose of butchering the skinned and dismembered thigh of a hog. One cannot deny the fascination, even appeal, of such an atavistic display, where no attempt is made to disguise the carnality of the act.

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La Vida

Memories of the Columbia Bar & Grill become increasingly distant with each successive new restaurant that occupies the building at the southeast corner of Sunset and Gower. Sort of like thinking back to the Harry Cohn era of Columbia Pictures during the studio's -- and the establishment's former namesake -- Coca-Cola years. The Patina Group's Pinot Hollywood and eat. on sunset gave the space a go but couldn't make the magic happen, and starting this past Tuesday, La Vida Restaurant and Lounge tries to inject some, er, life into the spot. Maybe using the two hospitality categories that have firmly supplanted the "bar and grill" titles preferred in the 80s and 90s will make a difference.

Sunset Entertainment Group (Pig N' Whistle, Cabana Club) has chosen Southern Spain as the inspirational jumping off point for decor by Touster Wright Design and California-Spanish eclectic lunch, happy hour, dinner, and late night menus by Executive Chef Joseph Panarello (formerly of Rivera). Specialties include baked black cod with verde sauce and Serrano ham, crispy squid with aji amarillo chile aioli, heirloom tomatoes with burrata and curried eggplant, black bean brushed quail, champagne braised branzino, various paellas, and anchiote rubbed Kurobuta pig steak with braised raisins.

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Ferran Adrià knows how to control a news cycle like an immersion circulator, although he'd probably rather not be at the center of this one. Last week The New York Times broke the story that Adria's famed restaurant elBulli was closing permanently, only to have Adria refute the story in a Spanish newspaper the next day. Yesterday Time Magazine wrote that Adria won't close his restaurant, at least not exactly, so much as reinvent it. ElBulli will be turned into a a nonprofit foundation, a "think tank" where young chefs will explore new culinary directions.

elBulli.com

elBulli Restaurant Flow Chart

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Photo credit: Anne Fishbein

Mr. Gold, with dim sum menu

Dear Mr. Gold:
I love this big giant melting pot we live in, but why do we have such little representation of Spanish food? Am I missing something?
--Matt Armendariz

Dear Mr. Armendariz:
Probably because L.A.'s best maker of charcuterie, La Espanola, is Spanish, the flavors of Spain have never been easier to find in Los Angeles: Its great chorizo shows up on the menus of local tapas joints and hamburger boutiques, expensive French restaurants and downscale deli counters. The Iberico and Manchego it imports make it into supermarket cheese displays, and the acorn-fed Iberico ham is an object of desire in almost every high-end restaurant in town. The custom of serving Spanish membrillo, quince paste, with cheese is everywhere. Canny wine drinkers have learned to look to wines from Monsant and Jumilla where once they depended on Chianti. Spanish expats Placido Domingo, Pau Gasol and Penelope Cruz are hometown heroes.

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