Took her to one of my favorite restaurants, Drago Centro.

Quite famished and to make this reunion less complicated, we had Chef Celestino Drago’s latest tasting menu, which featured a variety of classic dishes with a twist (of course). It was a leisurely two and half hour dinner where we had a merry good time catching up.

For libations, I had the American Graffiti, a root-beer tasting concoction featured in the “New Classics” section of the Spring/Summer Cocktail menu and highly recommended by a couple of our servers. It was refreshing.

Shortly after, we were presented with amuse bouche (sausage croquette over romesco?)… and began our gastronomic journey…

The first course was a salad comprising of prosciutto, bocconcini mozzarella, and compressed melon. The sweet and savory combination was phenomenal.

The second dish came out in clear plastic baggies that required the server to cut open with scissors, indicating that it was cooked sous vide. On the plate, we were greeted with a healthy piece of white sea bass, mussels, clams, and baby vegetables. It was a very clean dish that left me wanting more. Even the juices from the seafood mixture lent itself to being enjoyed with the table bread. I savored it all to the last bite.

As the sun set, we experienced two of my favorite dishes of the night.

The first (third dish) was a trio of conchiglioni pasta stuffed with snails and coated with herbs, garlic, and brown butter. This was sinfully rich, and though it does not look like much, the portion was perfect.

Whenever I go to Italian places, the experience never feels complete without a taste of gnocchi, whether it be from my order or from a companion’s plate. So, it was to my delight that the fourth dish comprised of crunchy, pillow-soft pork belly, gnocchi, and fava beans in tomato cream. The meal could have ended here and I would have been content.

Anyways…

For the last savory course, we were presented with a perfectly-cooked medium rare lamb chop, panelle, and cipollini onion, over romesco sauce. It was a robust dish full of provincial flavors.

As the moon made an appearance over head, we capped this adventure with delicately ribboned chocolate pudding and rhubarb sorbet. Like everything else that preceded it, delicious.

C’est tout.

Link: Drago Centro

Italian mortadella, cotto salami, Buon Gusto Italian salami, Italian capocollo, provolone cheese, peperoncini & crisp lettuce…all on 16” torpedo roll.

Also picked up a Sopranos-branded soda… Amaretto flavor… yum!

Links:
Giuliano’s Deli
Drink Sopranos

drago centro is one of my favorite downtown LA places. i love their smokehouse drink. anyways, ate a lot. tried new things.

amuse bouche

duck risotto. swiss chard, gorgonzola crème. SO flaavorful.

caciucco. spicy seafood broth, crostini

braised rabbit. gnocchi, fennel, carrots. in celebration of chinese new year =)

veal loin. speck, chick peas, parsnips

chocolate budino. walnut soil, banana chips, chantilly cream

apple cranberry crumble. vanilla ice cream

zabaglione semifreddo. tropical fruit. YUM!

mignardises.

c’est tout. will be back for sure!

Link: Drago Centro

amuse bouche. started off with some mozarella… yum.

famous for their creative cocktails, had the Smokehouse. It was comprised of Laphroaig 10 yr scotch (my favorite scotch), clear creek cranberry, berentzen apfelkorn, fresh apple, fee bros. whiskey barrel bitters, and candied bacon. DELICIOUS.

“bro” got this…

PR girl sucked on the 5th and Fig…a concoction of bertagnolli grappa, housemade fig syrup, fresh orange juice, fresh lemon

For the first course, PR girl and I had the Beet salad – l’insalata di barbabietole all’agrodolce. baby beets, warm goat cheese, pine nuts, and chile vinaigrette.

others had this thing that looked like a granola bar.

PR girl

Second course, I had the raviolli – i ravioli di zucca. butternut squash ravioli, amaretti crumble. YUM!

EA and “bro” ate some buckwheat noodles. i pizzoccheri della valtellina. buckwheat pasta, cabbage, potatoes, fontina, sage cream.

For my entree, I ordered scallops. le cappesante. seared diver scallops, artichoke, celery root, fennel. YUM.

PR girl had the gnocchi. lo gnocco alla romana. semolina gnocchi, oxtail ragout, gorgonzola creme

EA and “bro” had salmon. il salmone. salmon, asparags, piquillo peppers, potatoes, balsamic.

so good, i had another.

EA and “bro”

C’est tout!

Link: Drago Centro

tried being seasonal, and had the goat cheese, persimmon and pistachio salad. fuyu persimmons, medjool dates, goat cheese, winter lettuces, golden balsamic vinaigrette, toasted pistachios. delicious.

..the merguez sausage, spinach, and feta pizza. huntington lamb merguez sausage, wilted spinach, roasted pepper harissa, feta, red onion. it was just okay.

still kind of hungry… got another pizza. this time a White Pie. creamy ricotta, mozarella, red onion, parmesan, torn basil, mama’s lil hot pickled peppers. this was tastier.

EA sad. hahahahaha.

i’m not really a pizza person, but this place was okay. i’d come back…. in a year or so.

Link: Pitfire Pizza

I like this place. My dish was tasty, and it was the right portion size.

The madame’s cool clutch and sooj’s hand, wearing my ring.

See, we’re all a bit goth.

Link: Marmalade Cafe

Picked them up on a whim at Neiman Marcus. Comfortable.

Link: Dan’s Super Subs

Service is decent, ingredients are of high quality, and the bread is fresh. I’m getting hungry all over again.

Tip: Phone in your order to avoid a potentially long wait time.

Link: Caveretta’s Deli

The above picture is from the story of Marco and Ciro, a couple of wanna-be gangster teens who quote Scarface and try to create their own little gang. Kind of funny.

Trailer.

Instead of providing a mediocre review, here’s a Copy+Paste of Frank DiGiacomo’s really good one from Vanity Fair:

Gomorra is a film about the Mafia, but unlike any of the American classics of the genre, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather films and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas and Casino—it is devoid of any Hollywood romance. This might sound strange, but Gomorra reminded me of Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterpiece Alien more than any of the aforementioned mob films, because it is a movie about a relentless, voracious, ever-morphing force that seems to have an almost omniscient capability of tracking down and dispatching its victims and adapting to its surrounding environment.

Garrone’s Gomorra is an adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s bestselling book, Gomorrah, and both are a pun on Camorra, the name of the Neapolitan Mafia, which, according to Saviano, has killed more people than the Sicilian Mafia and the Irish Republican Army. I read Gomorrah after I saw Garrone’s film, and I should say that, in its own way, the book is as compelling as the film. In one of my favorite passages, Saviano describes Hollywood’s influence on the Camorristi, members of this far-ranging mob that has its hands in fashion, narcotics, gambling, and the illegal dumping of toxic waste. One Neapolitan gangster dresses like Brandon Lee in his ill-fated role in The Crow, and Saviano writes that there are female bosses whose bodyguards wear vivid yellow bodysuits like the one Uma Thurman sported in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Tarantino’s influence on the Camorra extends beyond fashion, too, although with messy consequences. Saviano quotes a “veteran of the Naples Forensics Division” who complains: “Ever since Tarantino, these guys don’t know the right way to shoot! They don’t keep the barrel straight anymore. Now they hold it crooked, like in the movies, which makes for disaster. They hit the guts, groin, or legs, seriously wounding but not killing. And so they have to finish the victim off with a bullet to the nape of the neck. A pool of pointless blood, a barbarism completely superfluous to the goal of execution.” (Apparently, even the cops in Naples speak eloquently.)

The Camorra reportedly did not react kindly to Saviano’s inside look at their operations and he has since gone into hiding with round-the-clock police protection. Apparently, the Neapolitan mob is more forgiving of filmmakers because, as far as I know, the same fate has not befallen Garrone. In fact, when I first saw the film last fall, the director was in the audience, and Scorsese was introducing the picture, telling the crowd that one of the great strengths of Gomorra was that “there is no exit: forget exposition; traditional narrative: you don’t know what country you’re in, you don’t know what city; you don’t know what street it is. You never know that.” Scorsese, who knows a thing or two about stomach-turning realism and claustrophobic tension, continued, “You’re just dropped onto another planet, and you’re on your own. There’s no relief…. The only way out for the people in the film is going to be bad”.

A large part of Gomorra takes place in what appears to be a cookie-cutter apartment complex that is the essence of depressing. There are endless concrete stairwells and bleak landscapes that enable ambushes and gunplay, and the gritty sameness of the landscape underscores the fact that no one is to be trusted. The Camorra seems to infect everything it touches, even childhood, and, for me, one of the most memorable scenes in the movie depicts a small group of young boys who wait in line to don a crude bulletproof vest and brave a gunshot to the chest—what amounts to a rite of passage in a region where manhood is brutal and often brief.

The violence may be local, but both Saviano’s book and Garrone’s film show how the Camorra’s reach is increasingly global. Early in the book, there is a chapter titled “Angelina Jolie” that depicts the Camorra’s involvement in producing high-end clothing designed by Italian fashion houses in underground sweat shops. Near the end of the chapter, a particularly talented worker at one of these factories is at home channel-surfing his television when he sees Jolie walking the red carpet at the Oscars wearing a custom-made outfit that he had assembled. Garrone wanted to use Oscar footage of Jolie for a similar storyline in his film, but, at the screening I attended, he explained that the Academy wouldn’t release it to him. So, the filmmaker improvised and bought footage of actress Scarlett Johannson walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival in 2006. (Press reports indicate it was a vintage gown.) “I don’t know if Scarlett Johansson knows she is in the movie,” Garrone said at the time. A few days ago, I asked Johansson’s spokesman Marcel Pariseau if his client was aware of her appearance in Gomorra. Via e-mail, he replied that Johannson hadn’t seen the movie and, thus, didn’t have any comment.

She should see it. And so should you.

Links:
Gomorrah (Blu Ray)
Gomorrah (Regular DVD)
Gomorrah (book)
Oscar Crime: Gamorra Shoulda Been a Contender by Frank DiGiacomo, Vanity Fair, 2/26/09.

… it was okay.

Link: Giovanni Ristorante

Handmade Norse God mask with headdress made of faux fur, ostrich feather, coque feathers and gold leafed horns.

Handmade Aretus Pewter mask with beak and horns.

Handmade Etherial Dreams gold mask with large black feathers.

 Amazing Craftsmanship. I wouldn’t wear any of these; I’d like them to hang on one of my walls. 

Link:
Gilt (Sign up and get $25 off first order)
Claudia Hapeman Masks

Link: Giovanni Ristorante