When last we checked in with Dinner Club For Day People, the seven of us were dining downtown at Otium. Remember that whole diatribe I wrote about Nate discarding his gum on a communal plate? Classic Dinner Club moment! Since then we’ve been to Toca Madera (which…I don’t know… I don’t really think I want to review that place) and we’ve struggled to get everyone together on the same night. This past week Mark, Louise and I had a small Dinner Club meeting. Call it Dinner Club .5. Louise chose Nest at WP24 as the location. Her “celebrity guest” for this installment of Dinner Club was her childhood friend Jenny.
WP24 is the Wolfgang Puck restaurant on the 24th floor of the Ritz Carlton near (at?) L.A. Live downtown. I guess Nest is the next door restaurant/lounge concept that isn’t quite WP24? I wasn’t too clear on the details. I suppose I could have asked, since I was the first to arrive and had no one but the bartender to talk to. I sat at the bar and ordered a new cocktail, the “Bourbon Barrel-Aged Japanese Old Fashioned.” The concept was confusing to me. Isn’t every Old Fashioned made with bourbon technically aged in bourbon barrels? Either way, it was one of the smokier preparations I’ve tasted. It was pretty good but not, you know, $26-per-drink good. Or was that the yuzu jalapeno cocktail? I really need to start looking at the prices on some of these menus. $50 for two drinks is absurd. I drank wine the rest of the night. They had a pinot noir from Melville that I quite enjoyed.
Once our full party arrived we were seated in the beautiful dining room. There were tables enclosed in little nest-like structures (Get it? Nest!? It all makes sense now!) overlooking the city. By following proper “ladies first” protocol I got to the table last, and hence had to sit with my back to the windows. My view was of Louise and the door to the kitchen. We met our server Vanessa, and fairly quickly the parade of dishes began. We toasted Louise. We talked about work, and the other people in Dinner Club, and our server Vanessa. We forgot the usual tradition of going around the table stating what we are thankful for. Some of us bent the rules of “Dress for Success” even though I broke out my fancy black dress pants for the first time in dinner club history, I think. Here’s a dish by dish breakdown, except for the bao. The bao were the highlight of the meal (I think?) and they were so good I forgot to photograph them. Whoops! More wine!
The Szechuan cucumbers were roundly applauded for their delightful combination of sesame and chili. At first we were like, “Cucumbers? Who orders cucumbers? This is Dinner Club! You either order the $50 foie gras and brains skewer or you stay at home. If you’re gonna come, come correct, please!” Actually I’m pretty sure that dialog was entirely in my head and not spoken by anyone at the table. We could have ordered several plates of these fantastic fruits (“Un-pickled pickles,” I like to call ’em), but that would be gauche. I think around this time the minutes show we were talking about North Korean labor camps. Dinner Club – we’re worldly?
The beef puffs really jumped off the menu, but sadly the prospect of beef puffs didn’t quite translate in the taste department.  There was a nice curry presence but the “American Wagyu” wasn’t all that flavorful. I declared that the beef to puff ratio was off, and after everyone else at the table finished laughing at me for being such a fucking loser and actually saying “The beef to puff ratio is off,” they agreed that the ratio WAS off. The minutes clearly state that “More innards, less puff” was a consensus review of the dish. Vindication!
These were not the kind of spring rolls I was expecting. Isn’t a spring roll normally in a transparent wrapper? “Transparent wrapper” – that’s the proper culinary term right? Anyway, I guess these spring rolls were fried (and thus not very light and refreshing…like their “spring” namesake would imply). The combo of Maine lobster and prawn was on point. The honey dipping sauce imparted a nice hit of sweetness to my first bite. Since I’m afraid of germs and don’t like double-dipping I only sauced that first bite. Ugh. I can tell already is shaping up to be one of those classic restaurant reviews that serves only to highlight how little I know about food.
I loved these guys. They were like the Rolling Stones to the Beatles (those incredible but unfortunately not photographed Baby Pork Belly “Bao Buns”) of the Nest at WP24 menu. We’ll debate until our dying days whether the spare ribs were better than the bao. Or maybe I’m misremembering. The official Dinner Club minutes kept by Jen say that around this time we were discussing Mark’s perfect attendance record at Dinner Club. Louise then said to me, “I feel like you’ve been funnier lately,” to which I responded, “I’ve been drinking more.” Then I laughed nervously and mumbled, “Kidding…?” The pinot went well with these ribs.
I wasn’t really interested in ordering pad thai. Our server Vanessa said it was one of the most popular dishes on the menu but I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with us or not. Who goes to a restaurant and orders a $20+ plate of pad thai? She had to be fucking with us, right? I mean, the pad thai was good don’t get me wrong, but…pad thai? Really? We should have gotten the kimchi fried rice or the Cantonese duck but I was only allowed to order one item off the menu and I picked the ribs.
Was it Jen who didn’t know the proper pronunciation of “General Tso’s”? Whatever she was saying, it sounded like “General Gay Chicken.” I ended up eating most of this because the girls were getting full and I’m a total glutton who can’t stand to see a plate with food left on it when its being paid for by yours truly. Whether that has to do with me being a cheap-ish Jew or being a jolly old fat guy who just loves to overeat, I’m not entirely sure. But the Tso’s was good. “The Tso’s was good?” That sentence feels like a grammatical catastrophe and yet I think it’s correctly worded. Was there another plate I forgot to photograph? I don’t remember. I moved on to a glass of Malbec from some non-Melville winery and things started getting a little hazy.
I don’t particularly care for sweets. I rarely look at the dessert menu unless I feel obligated to do so (special occasion, date, mom’s in town, et al.). While Mark and Louise went to the bathroom I let Jen choose a dessert for the table. She performed admirably by selecting the yuzu cheesecake. I love yuzu. It’s the perfect little citrus-y essence that elevates pretty much anything you combine it with. Even beer is elevated by yuzu. Evil Twin makes a yuzu beer that’s outstanding. So does that OWA Japanese Belgian brewery. Yay! Yuzu!
Even though I could have sworn she hated us, our server Vanessa was incredibly kind to offer us a complimentary plate of donuts. Maybe it’s just my crippling neuroses but I was under the impression that we’d slighted her somehow. For the entire meal I thanked her profusely for everything she did because she looked like she wanted to strangle us. Thanks, Vanessa, for temporarily alleviating my crippling self-consciousness with your free doughnuts.  The chocolate dipping sauce tasted way more like hazelnut than chocolate to me, but as you can probably tell from this review (and every other review I’ve ever written) I generally have no idea what I’m tasting when I eat food. I don’t think I dipped in the berry dipping sauce because I didn’t want to double dip my doughnut.
Look at these two childhood buddies hanging out eating modern fusion cuisine as real live adults, with empty wine glasses, 24 floors above downtown Los Angeles. They’re loving every moment of Dinner Club at Nest at WP24. Fuckin’ takin’ selfies and shit when I’m trying to document their presence at Dinner Club For Day People. Dressed for success? You tell me.
Louise and me. Hangin’ out by the window while the traffic snarls below, like smoke curling up from the nostrils of Smaug. Smaug? What the fuck kind of stupid, wannabe highbrow Tolkien reference was that!? Anyway, our server Vanessa was probably looking at us in this moment and thinking, “Jesus Christ they’re so close to the fucking door why haven’t they walked out it yet?” That’s why my expression is a cross between smug satisfaction (“I just treated myself to a really great meal with my buddies!”) and crippling self-consciousness (“Oh God is Vanessa looking at us? She wants us to leave, I just know it. She wants us gone and out of her life forever.”)
So there you have it! Dinner Club est mort, at least for the next month or so. I imagine sometime around late April Mark or I will organize the next meeting. Louise claimed on the Dinner Club email chain that I’m choosing next, which would be nice since it’s my birthday in late April, but we’ll see how the calendar shakes out. Calendars “shake out,” right? Like coconuts from a tree, or pins and needles from a restless leg. These are the days of ou–
Nope, not gonna say it.
Boduf Songs – Bought Myself A Cat o’Â Nine Tails [MP3]
