Lychees are oddly sensual and deeply addictive: pearl-colored, succu-
lent fruits that taste kind of like grapes perfumed with rosewater. Then
last Sunday I spotted bags of just-picked lychees, their mottled pink ob-
scured by branches, on a table at the Alhambra farmers market.
Behind the table was Robert Dimitman, whose late father, Jerry, a
professor of plant pathology at Cal Poly Pomona, planted lychee trees in
his Covina orchard. Robert took over the management of his father’s
Kwa Luk Gardens, named after a celebrated variety of lychee, and has
continued to bring the lychees from about 30 trees as well as other fruit to
the Alhambra market. Sunday was the first picking of what will be a very
short season.
“I don’t know the names of them,” Robert said about the gorgeous
fruit, although he thought Sunday’s batch might be the Brewster, or
Chen Purple. “Dad never intended it for a cash crop; he was just growing
them for his Cantonese friends.”
— Amy ScattergoodL.A. FARMERS MARKET GUIDE
Mind-blowing lychees are here
Kit Mills For The TimesF2 THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019 LATIMES.COM/FOOD
Verve’s Roastery
Verve Coffee Roasters has opened
Roastery Del Sur in the downtown
Arts District. The two-story,
Bavel-adjacent space includes a
roastery, coffee bar, event space
and restaurant from chef Mario
Tolentino serving vegetarian
“beetstrami” BLTs, soba noodles
and sesame banana pancakes.
Info:500 Mateo St., Los Angeles,
(213) 419-5077, vervecoffee.com
/pages/los-angeles
Triple doubles down
The second location of Triple
Beam Pizza is open in Echo Park.
The restaurant specializes in
rectangular, Roman-style pizza
cut with scissors and priced by
weight. The pizza also will be
available inside both the Echo and
Echoplex performance venues.
Info: 1818 W. Sunset Blvd., Los
Angeles, (213) 281-9753,
triplebeampizza.com
Tamales off-script
Artesano Tamaleria is open in the
downtown L.A. Fashion District.
You’ll find 10 tamales on the menu,
including traditional pork and
chicken with tomatillo as well as
vegan tamales with cactus or
mushroom and more modern
versions with fish or goat cheese-
and-roasted tomatoes.
Info:819 Santee St., Los Angeles,
artesanotamaleria.com
Street slices
StreetZza L.A. is open downtown.
The hand-built street cart makes
grandma-style pizza slices fin-
ished on the griddle, with tradi-
tional toppings, as well as specials
such as “junk pizza” with pasilla
peppers and IPA sausage.
Info: 5th & Broadway, Los Ange-
les, instagram.com/streetzzala
Ramen at work
Ippudo will open its second L.A.
location in West Hollywood on
Friday. The Japanese chain spe-
cializes in Hakata-style tonkotsu
ramen and will include new menu
items such as takoyaki, pork
gyoza and chashurice.
Info:8350 Santa Monica Blvd.,
West Hollywood, (310) 986-2717,
ippudo-us.com
Italy on wheels
Roaming Italy is out on the streets
from chefs Gavin Mills and Mer-
cedes Montijo. Expect pasta made
on the truck as well as calzones
and sweet ricotta cannoli.
Info:roamingitalyla.com
Music Center eats
Go Get Em Tiger and the Mullin
Wine Bar will both open Thursday
at the Music Center Plaza down-
town. GGET specializes in single-
origin coffees and pastries;
Mullin’s wine list is curated by
some of L.A.’s most respected wine
vendors, beginning with Lou Wine
Shop. Lucques bartender Chris-
tiaan Rollich will create the first
cocktail menu at Mullin and India
Jones will be the bar’s first resi-
dent food truck.
Info: 195 N. Grand Ave., Los Ange-
les, gget.com; 205 N. Grand Ave.,
Los Angeles, themullinla.com
Temple City tofu
Mr. Kuso Café is now open in Tem-
ple City for Taiwanese cuisine. A
large menu includes spicy stinky
tofu, mapotofu rice bowls, three-
cup chicken and pork chop soup
noodle.
Info: 6326 Rosemead Ave., Temple
City, (626) 285-5876, facebook
.com/MrKusoCafe/
Quarter turn
Quarter’s Kitchen is open in Yorba
Linda from the owners of Korea-
town’s Quarters restaurant. The
menu includes quarter-pound
bulgogi burgers, spicy pork belly
rice bowls, salads, and sides of jap
chaeand tater tots.
Info:4901 Valencia Ave., Yorba
Linda, (714) 485-2515,
quarterskitchen.com
New in Reseda
Indian by Nature is open in Re-
seda, serving tandoori sheekh
kabob, goat curry, shrimp vindaloo
andshahi paneer.
Info:8241 Tampa Ave., Reseda,
(747) 237-7448,
ibnindiancuisine.com
Kit MillsFor The TimesNEWSFEED
Servers at Bon Temps in the
Arts District don’t explicitly
advise you to save room for des-
sert at dinnertime, but they
should. The sweets alone are
reason to come to the restaurant.
Chef and owner Lincoln Carson’s
savory dishes convey the memo,
though. The sculptural geome-
tries of meat and fish, the swoops
of sauces, a style of visual drama
usually reserved for pastry:
Throughout the meal, there are
subliminal messages that keep
the appetite primed for a finale of
soufflé or peach pavlova.
Carson’s take on a crab cake,
for instance, has no relation to
the lumpy, free-form masses
that Maryland made famous.
His version blends Dungeness
meat with scallop mousse and
crème fraîche into what is es-
sentially a wide boudin blanc
sliced into disks. Then, he
builds an appetizer that as-
cends to the heavens. The crab
has silkiness but also pleasant
bounce. Its texture recalls Viet-
namese chao tom, shrimp paste
molded around sugar cane
skewers. Carson lays a circle of
crisped, wafer-thin pain de mie
over the crab; he covers the
bread with fanned slices of
avocado glistening like glazed
fruits spread in a tart shell. To
crown it all: an erupting splay of
salad greens, the most flamboy-
ant staging of frisée and red oak
lettuce in town.
All the blueprinting and
technique pay off — in this dish
and with so much of the cooking
at Bon Temps. As a pastry chef,
Carson has been mastering the
balance between sculptural
plating and reassuring delicious-
ness for three decades. His top-
of-the-food-chain résumé in-
cludes Manhattan’s Le
Bernardin and Las Vegas’
Picasso and eight years as corpo-
rate pastry chef for the San Fran-
cisco-based Michael Mina
Group; in Los Angeles, he most
recently worked at Superba
Food & Bread in Venice.
Bon Temps is Carson’s first
solo restaurant. He was drawn to
the downtown location, next to
the new Firehouse hotel and
around the block from Bestia, for
the short, red-brick-lined alley
on which it sits. The patio cer-
tainly has a certain European
romance, and diners gravitatethere. Inside, the space shows off
some hard industrial edges:
stained concrete floors, exposed
ducts, cool white marble count-
ers. Metal strips form the bar’s
backsplash. Two elevated sec-
tions of the dining room hover
above the main open area.
They’re warmed with grainy
hardwoods and whitewashed
brick but, depending on a per-
son’s mindset, they could feel
either cozy or claustrophobic; I’d
rather be outside.
Carson’s glassed-in kitchen,
perched above the entrance,
overlooks the whole scene like a
command center. At a time when
many restaurants view desserts
as an afterthought — throw
together a sundae, outsource a
chocolate cake — Carson goes
willfully in the other direction.
He creates a sense of occasion by
honoring the art of pastry. Not
just in the sweet realms; the
savory canapés on the menu
show off his métier and his
team’s skills. The most opulent
of them is a tiny tart, so fragile
you think it’ll smash in your
hands (only it doesn’t), filled
with uni cream and a quenelle of
caviar. Gougères contain chicken
mousse engineered to gush; a
cylinder of pastry encases near-
liquid tomato tartare, a one-bite
burst of sunshine.
Include a dozen oysters from
the raw bar to start, or chilled
prawns whose heads are deep-
fried and presented hot along-
side (they’re the best part). Sip a
Normandy Tonique (Calvados,
Rinomato Americano Bianco,
tonic water) or a similarly civi-
lized cocktail by veteran bar-
tender Mike Lay; wine director
Krystal Kleeman follows suit
with a tightly edited, Old World-
leaning, just-geeky-enough
bottle list. The mood is set.
The heart of the menu has
modern American appeal: steak
tartare with meticulously piped
dots of egg yolk as garnish; sal-
ads such as grilled radicchio with
strawberries and runny cheese;
tomatoes offset with plums,
black olives and green almonds;
a couple of steaks.
I’m particularly taken with
the kitchen’s command of fish.
Mackerel served with tomato
and eggplant is a simple, lyrical
starter; a green garlic pesto
offsets the oiliness of the fish.
Black bass rests in a sauce fla-
vored with saffron and fennel
that conjures bouillabaisse; its
smoothness summons a text-book bistro bisque. King salmon
comes with mightily seared skin,
its crunch echoed in small fried
artichokes, the centers of which
bloom like tea roses.
The one de facto pasta is
English pea and ramp ravioli; as
we careen into September, I’d
like to see the focus of the ingre-
dients move away from spring.
Same goes for an appetizer of
asparagus and sweetbreads (an
odd yet savvy pairing; I’d just
rather savor it in April) and a
main of scallops surrounded by
morels, ramps and peas.
Simplify group decisions by
ordering the chicken to share.
Check out this luxe treatment:
The thigh and legs are made into
forcemeat, mixed with truffle
paste and wrapped in skin from
the legs; after a sous-vide bath,
the sausage is fried to crisp the
skin. The breast meat, anointed
with truffle butter, takes its own
sous-vide swim and it too is then
fried before serving. Turnips
and creamed, truffled leeks
accompany. It’s on the shortlist
of what I’ll eat for my next birth-
day dinner.
I’d follow it with Carson’s ode
to St. Honoré cake, another
made-to-share marvel. Layers of
dark, crackling puff pastry
brushed with chocolate; a stra-
tum of cake flavored with bour-
bon and vanilla; pecan mousse-
line; spheres of choux pastry
wearing circles of shattering
caramel like halo emojis; piped
cream and candied pecans: It
resembles a childhood toy so
delightful, with so many moving,
mesmerizing parts, that your
attention doesn’t know quitewhere to land. And it all tastes
as rhapsodic as it looks, the
caramel complex and never too
sweet.
It hurts this dessert lover’s
heart that so many avid restau-
rant-goers shun pastry chefs’
temptations. Give Carson’s
masterpieces their deserved
chance. Is the St. Honoré too
much for you? Go for the choco-
late souffle, the intricacies of its
flavor teased out by chartreuse
ice cream. Carson coats the
souffle’s billowing border with
large sugar crystals for crunch;
one can’t help but rip off cakey
hunks by hand.
Veering lighter, an inverted
pavlova involves a near-floating
meringue, looking like an enor-
mous mushroom cap, hiding
peaches cut into ribbons, black-
berries and white verjus sorbet; a
tableside pour of lemongrass
consommé adds piercing fra-
grance. Posset, a traditional
British sweet made with thick-
ened cream and often zinged
with citrus, trills here instead
with passion fruit. Matchsticks
of Campari jelly inject wonderful
shivers of bitterness.
I would happily show up later
in the night with a friend or two
simply to order the entire dessert
menu. But, as Carson moves
toward making Bon Temps a
viable all-day restaurant (he
recently started serving uncom-
plicated, satisfying sandwiches
and salads at lunch), there is
another option for experiencing
his tours de force: morning
pastries. A caramel-ringed
kouign amann is an early hit; the
strawberry and ricotta danish,
with its remarkably sheer and
buttery dough, startles me into
sudden happiness every single
time. The cream cheese-stuffed
croissant covered in everything
bagel seasoning is, yeah, pretty
much everything.
Dinner at Bon Temps admit-
tedly requires an investment.
The croissants and danishes are
an affordable way to get to know
this chef, whose name hopefully
will become ever more familiar.
He’s exploring many angles to
attract customers day and night,
yet in its marrow, this is undeni-
ably a pastry chef ’s restaurant —
a place where the cooking, while
comforting, esteems form and
beauty and chemistry and fas-
tidiousness. His approach cuts a
unique path through the city’s
dining landscape. Save room,
Los Angeles.The Dungeness crab cake at Bon Temps, with scallop mousse and crème fraîche, is nothing like the famous Maryland version.Allen J. SchabenLos Angeles TimesRESTAURANT REVIEW
Just let those good times roll
BILL ADDISON
RESTAURANT CRITICBon Temps
LOCATION
712 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los
Angeles, (213) 784-0044,
bontempsla.comPRICES
Canapes and raw bar items
$10-$22, appetizers $16-$25,
most entrees $35-$45, desserts
$12-$23. Morning pastries
$4-$7.DETAILS
Credit cards accepted. Full bar.
Valet parking. Some areas not
wheelchair accessible.RECOMMENDED DISHES
Uni caviar tartelette,
Dungeness crab cake, chicken
to share, St. Honoré, pavlova.What
Get as many lychees as you can
eat in a day or so. They’re best
eaten plain, as close to picking
as possible.Where
Robert Dimitman brings his
fruit only to the Alhambra
farmers market, Sundays from
8 a.m. to 1 p.m. His father also
favored that market, a small,
well-curated and neighborly
market that caters to the local
Asian American community.When
Robert says he’ll be bring the
fruit for the next two Sundays:
Sept. 1 and 8. Is a third week
possible? Stranger things have
happened. It’s farming.Tip
The Dimitmans hope to bring
wampees in a few weeks, then
longans and pomelos.