My wife and I are going to La Quinta for her birthday in two weeks and I am looking for a nice place in the Palm Desert to La Quinta area for a dinner (something other than a steakhouse). I don't expect it to be at the level of the better places in LA, but I also don't want to feel that the price had no relation to quality as I sometimes find in the desert. Also, looking for a good casual place (such as Mexican) for our other dinner. Thanks

After having attended the previous handful of Ludo incarnations, it looks like I won't get to sample 007. Once I got through the ludicrous Opentable security checkpoint to ensure that I wasn't a bot, every reservation was gone. That was at 4.02pm or two minutes after booking opened. Too bad as I always love his brilliance.

My wife and I are visiting Portland the second week of August and Castagna looks to be within our wheelhouse (I would add that Beast also seems to be, although the lack of any choice with courses worries me a bit with my wife who is a bit more limited in what she will eat than I am). Of course, the Castagna chef is departing several weeks before our visit and I wondered if anyone has an idea what will happen. I hate to waste one of our precious dining nights if there is a concern about a fall off for the place. Thanks

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Castagna
1752 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214

My understanding, which may not be correct, is that in order to permit BYOB, the restaurant needs to have a beer/wine license. I don't think that there is such a thing as a "BYOB license."

My guess is that many restaurants that dont have licenses have no idea that having a license is required to permit BYOB. And I know of at least two cases in LA area where fairly prominent places have been busted for permitting BYOB without or prior to getting a license.

The first time we went (late summer/early fall 2010), we were stuck with the one plate, one tumbler rule, so we literally bribed a busboy to get us decent stems (the waiter refused to do so when requested). The second time we went (for Tuscan beef night) in November, we came prepared with a roll of paper towels (to clean our plates--believe it or not, by the end of the night, the diners around us were asking for some of our paper towels) and our own stems. The last time we went for the pig-a-thon (April 2011), we brought our own stems, but they had changed their policy and were providing legit wine glasses and decanters upon request (only fitting for $30/bottle corkage) and changing out plates whenever you wanted. Hence, my two major complaints (actually my only complaints) about these dinners are now gone. I should add that $30/bottle corkage ain't cheap and we had heard from the Osteria somm that Mozza2Go's wine list was going to be expanding, so if you are going to BYOB it, make sure that the bottle(s) are worthwhile. BTW, if you are a larger party and thus want to bring more than two bottles, we break our reservations into more than one party and get to take advantage of the two bottles per reservation policy across multiple reservations. Just make sure that they are aware that you want to sit together as the last time we were there, there was assigned seating by reservation.

The first time that my buddies and I did the Pig dinner, we brought two syrahs (a SQN extended barrel aged and a Lillian extended barrel aged) and a Chateauneuf (2000 Mordoree Reine des Bois); the second time we brought three extended barrel aged SQN syrahs and one extended barrel aged SQN grenache. All of these wines worked perfectly with all of food served. In fact, I don't think that I have ever had a better combination of food and wine than the second Pig-a-thon.

We just got back from Princeville. Had dinners at Bar Acuda (twice), Tavern at Princeville (twice) and take out pizza from Kilauea Bakery (plus several lunches there). Tavern is solid if not superb (although their escargots are superb). Bar Acuda would be a good place even on the Westside of LA--it is that good, although there are only about 15 different tapas on the menu so a couple of visits can get you pretty much through the entire menu. Kilauea Bakery has great pizza crust as well as very good house smoked ono that goes particularly well in a salad.

I haven't been to the other two, but my wife and I had superb (and reasonably priced) omakase at Gaku Friday night. There may be a handful of places in LA that would better Gaku (although at much higher prices), though I doubt that they would best it by much. For me, Gaku is enough of a reason to visit Oahu again all by itself.

My wife and I went there on March 19th for my birthday. They had run out of sweetbreads several days earlier which I thought was odd but that compelled us to get the 7 course tasting menu. It was the best of my 4 or 5 visits there. Afterwards my wife remarked that we should go to LQ more often. Even if it gets transplanted to some extent at Vertical, Pasadena is just not all that geographically desirable for us. And who knows how long it will be before we see another incarnation of LudoBites.

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LudoBites
Roving wildly, Los Angeles, CA

I agree that wine glasses are additional costs and that is why I never complain about corkage charges at restaurants (well, at least when they are within the realm of reasonability), but as you noted, they were charging $20/bottle corkage and that should buy you decent glasses, which doesn't mean $20-$40 Riedels (there are plenty of adequate for the task glasses in the $10-$15 retail range including titanium Schotts). And if Mozza gave the option of 1 plate for $75 or different plates for $80, I would happily pay the premium. Or just charge everyone $80 and give us clean plates.

And don't get me wrong--I loved it and will happily attend again, even with the issues, but next time I will be prepared with my own glasses.

I can only speak to the Mozza pork dinner, but from a quality of the food, yes, I would definitely put Mozza above Solociccia, at least on the nights that we were at each place. Execution from a service standpoint was better at Solociiccia. IMO the food at the Mozza dinner, while nothing overly complex, was extremely satisfying and worth the inconveniences I noted (and the lack of military digestifs, which as far as I could tell, since I was driving that night and didn't partake, are spirits made with lots of aromatics)

Porthos, we did use the prosecco glasses at first, although they are really too small for high quality red wine (although far better than the tumblers). Ultimately, we got a friendly busboy to get us better glasses. It is just unfortunate that they took a penny-wise, pound-foolish attitude toward these minor items. There were people at our table who indicated that they would never return because of the attitude taken with regard to the one plate issue. For me and my buddies, the food was too good and the event too special to not attempt to work around the issues, but IMO it makes no sense to peeve customers off when the solutions (a clean plate, decent wine glasses that were available in the room in any case) are easily executed with virtually no incremental cost to the restaurant. After all, at Dario Cecchini's Solociccia, which is bound to be the inspiration for the Mozza events (the beef event is almost identical to Solociccia), every course came with clean plates, there were high quality wine glasses, BYOB was free and Italian military digestifs were included for a lower tariff.

I went to the pig dinner a month ago and although Nancy Silverton was not in attendance, the food was as good as described. And there was so much that you felt like a vomitorium would have been appropriate.

I did have two quibbles/complaints. FIrst, the insistance on providing only one plate for the entire dinner really diminished the food experience for me (and others at our table), particularly after the souffle was consumed. Part of my plate was just a sloppy mess and their excuse of "It's casual, family style just didn't cut it." And second, that same excuse was used when we asked for wine glasses as opposed to the basic tumblers they provided for wine. The three of us brought some pretty valuable wines (an SQN long aged syrah, a Lillian long aged syrah and a Mordoree luxury cuvee Chateauneuf) and anything less than at least pedestrian wine glasses seems unacceptable to me when you are getting charged $20/bottle corkage. Next time, I bring my own glasses and maybe a roll of paper towels to adequately clean my plate off.

Those complaiints aside, it is a truly special event and superbly executed from a food standpoint.

I went to the pig-a-thon with two of my friends last Friday night and the food was superb and I would gladly go again. There were two issues that I need to raise. First, the wine "glasses" are simple tumblers. We had brought several very expensive bottles of syrah to the dinner, gladly paying the $20/bottle corkage, and when we asked for legitimate wine glasses, the response was a curt "No, all you get are these glasses [the tumblers]--it's family style." Well, to me it is not family style when you are paying $20 per bottle in corkage and we had to beg one of the buses to get decent glasses. The other point is the use of one plate. After the pork ragu souffle, which was delicious but particularly messy, the woman next to me asked for a new plate; the response was once again, "No, you keep your plate--it's family style" to which she responded "In my family, we get clean plates." And having all the left over junk on a plate, even if it doesn't diminish the taste of the food (it certainly didn't improve the taste), it certainly affects the presentation. Several months ago, I was at Solociccia, Dario Cecchini's family style meat place in Panzano (and I feel confident that Mozza's operation is modeled on this as the prior month's meat menu was almost identical to Solociccia) and not only did you get free wine, free BYOB and nice wine glasses, but you also got clean plates after each course.

I know that this sounded like a huge bitch session, but I really loved the Mozza dinner and with these tweaks it would have been perfect. Next time, I bring my own wine glasses though.

The Mexican meat shop (forgot the name) on the NW corner of Manhattan Beach Blvd and Inglewood in Redondo Beach usually has them.

I have to be honest that I really don't know where this restaurant is (other than being within walking distance of my friend's apartment), but we had an absurdly good dinner (all seafood oriented) at the following:

Eleonora D'arborea
Corso Trieste, 23B
00198 Roma, Italy
06 44250943

We just returned from three nights in Radda. The best place we ate (and one of the better places we ate on a trip that included 4 nights each in Rome and Florence) was a place called Chiasso dei Portici. Reasonably upscale in a casual sort of way, with very well made pastas and cinghale stew (my wife loved the seared tuna). Apparently owned by two sisters. I know that this may be blasphemy, I was disappointed with Solociccia. It is probably still worth going to, but don't get super high expectations, as it was good but not otherworldly at least on the night that we were there.