Great Places To Eat If You Get Stuck Over the Hill

November 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Over the last six months I visited La Sandia, Natalee Thai, Cafe Mango Six, and the new Fresh Brothers Pizza in West Hollywood. These are my stories.

IMG_6996Sweet sticky rice with mango at Natalee Thai

Okay, I know not everybody just gets “stuck” over the hill. People also go there on purpose. I suppose one has to venture out to Los Angeles proper at some point in time, otherwise what’s the point of living here? You might as well pick an affordable mansion in Ohio.

Besides, very nice people live in places only accessible via the 405 or Sepulveda, or even PCH. If it’s your turn to go visit them and you’d like a tasty meeting place, or if indeed you had a meeting that ended at 4:30 and there’s no way in hell you’re getting on the freeway at that time, then here are some places I’ve visited and eaten in those parts over the last six months. Forgive me for the lack of detail in some places, but trust me that everything I ate at all of these places was delicious, otherwise I wouldn’t be recommending them.

La Sandia at Santa Monica Place
395 Santa Monica Place, 305 N
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Tel. 310.393.3300


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Sandia is Spanish for watermelon, and the watermelon agua fresca and its alcoholic counterpart are two of La Sandia’s featured drinks. The beverage pictured above is the Latin Light margarita, made with tequila, natural juices, and something called nectreese sugar which helps sweeten the taste and keep the drink under 150 calories. I don’t care what’s in it. It tastes great.

That’s how I felt about the rest of the Latin Light menu, which I and several fellow MomsLA bloggers had gathered to sample.  We started with shrimp flatbreads and mushroom taco platters  which disappeared in a hurry.

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The main courses came out on neat arrangements of meats and beans and rices with lettuce leaves to wrap them in. I’m going to speak for everyone there that night and say the flatbread steak was the favorite, not because they all said it, but because that’s the platter that was devoured the fastest and the one we requested an encore from. It is not picture below because we ate it that fast.

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What IS pictured below is Ben Affleck. See? 

ben affleck at la sandia

Ben was the primary reason that each one of us took a turn casually strolling to the back of the restaurant to use the ladies’ room. Instead of getting all up in his face, tourist style, I simply hid behind this shrubbery to snap a discreet photo.

To top off the evening – as if that wasn’t enough – we each got served a cone of freshly made churros with chocolate sauce, effectively negating the benefit of keeping our dinner menus at low calorie levels, but hey, we were there to do a job, dammit, and we were gonna to it right. The churros? I recommend.

La Sandia also has a children’s menu that also features Latin Light entrees. Each meal has an entree, a beverage, and a scoop of ice cream for only $5.95. The choices are presented on a placemat decorated with 6 Lotería cards from the traditional Mexican game of chance. One of them is, of course, the watermelon.

Natalee Thai
10101 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90230
(310) 202-7003

IMG_6991This dish is on fire.

Here is where my memory gets fuzzy. I just studied the menu and tried to match some dish names to these photos and my memory but I can’t. So here is the best record of what I ingested the night I drove all the way to Venice (east Venice, but still) to join my MomsLA pals at Natalee Thai:

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Mine was the one on the left. I have no idea what was in it or what it was called, because I told the bartender to make his specialty. I always say that if I can’t decide what kind of drink I want, and usually they just blink at me without knowing what to say, but this guy perked right up and got to work. Verdict: tasty.

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I don’t know what’s happening up there either, except that it’s fried and there’s a delicious sauce on the side. What could go wrong? I don’t remember what these dishes below are, either, but again, YUM.

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This (above) is Thai iced tea with a smoothie floating on top. Delicious. The vibe at Natalee Thai was energetic and the staff were all lovely. Plus they have great matchboxes. Don’t you grab boxes of matches at a restaurant if there’s a bowl sitting on the hostess desk, even if you don’t smoke?

Cafe Mango Six
8428 W 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
323-966-5866

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I only have this one photo of the food I ate at Cafe Mango Six because a) I didn’t eat that much there, and b) the food was not the best thing about my visit there. The best thing was the chance to meet up with some wonderful friends who live on the other side of the hill. Cafe Mango Six is on third street right down the street from the Beverly Center. Parking is miserable so you just circle the block(s) and pray for a street spot to open up, which magically happened to me when I went. This cafe serves lighter fare including the boba smoothies that are their specialty. Pictured above is a mango shave ice just like you’d get at the mall in Honolulu. It really was melt-in-your-mouth delicious.

kim at mango sixSee? I liked it! (photo by Tee Burgess)

But the second best thing about that day at Mango Six was the discussion about peanut butter cookies (theirs was nothing to write home about) when a food writer divulged her favorite recipe and it was so simple it blew everyone’s minds so I decided to make it one morning and it really was so good and easy that I wrote about it on my other blog and slapped it up on Pinterest and almost 700 re-pins later it is the second most-visited post on that 9-year-old website. (The most-visited one is my simple explanation of what Twitter meant to me in 2009. I peaked a while ago, folks.) All because I fought through an hour and a half of the worst LA traffic to get to that cafe.

Fresh Brothers Pizza
8613 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069 ‎
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There is a special place in my heart for Fresh Brothers because everyone knows you get to a woman’s heart through her stomach and pizza equals love. And now there are lots of those places because Fresh Brothers keeps opening new locations all over town. I mean, lucky for us  we have two Fresh Brothers locations – Calabasas and Westlake Village – within easy driving distance AND they deliver. But it’s great that they are expanding because I have already found that no matter where you go the food, service, and environment at any Fresh Brothers is the same: awesome.
The newest location that I visited recently with my kids is right smack on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood. So that means that you get the best people-watching to go with your balls. Your meatball sliders, I mean.
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The meatball sliders are a new addition to the FB menu and I highly recommend these. They are served on King’s Hawaiian buns, so they are just perfection all around.
Of course, pizza is still the main attraction here so the kids got to decorate their pizza boxes, make their own pizzas, and even get a visit to the kitchen.
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Apparently you can park on the top of the building where Fresh Brothers is located, right next to Trader Joe’s, so parking shouldn’t be a huge issue, but I haven’t been to West Hollywood in a long time and my kids were with me, so I just nabbed the first street spot I saw open. Being Conejo Valley kids, they wondered why I had to put money into the little stand next to the car and I explained that it was a parking meter and I had to pay for the time we had our car in the spot. Their little minds were blown. But it was okay because our spot was right across the street from an auto shop, where there was a McLaren just hanging out, totally cool with us walking around it and taking pictures.
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West Hollywood FTW. Bonus, my friend Heather lives right down the street so she joined us and we tried to induct her into the Fresh Brothers fan cult. I think we succeeded.
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We dined free at all these places to facilitate this feature, but you can’t pay the bills with churros so don’t be jealous.
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School’s Out, But Public School 805 Is in Session (CLOSED)

June 20, 2013 by 2 Comments

UPDATE: This business has closed. Sad. They made really good gin and tonics.

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Night school

Tucked away in an overlooked corner of the Westlake Promenade shopping center at Westlake and Thousand Oaks Boulevards is the new restaurant Public School 805, or PS805. It opened this week hoping people will get wind of its existence. Luckily for me, I got an email about it, so I went to the media preview, took my seat, and got my lesson.

The interior of PS 105 is resplendent with construction materials like wood and steel, props that support its theme including a small wall made of bleachers and a larger wall festooned with lacquered vintage catcher’s mitts. The space is open and utilitarian with a large window into the kitchen, industrial light fixtures, and austere tabletops. There are plenty of nooks but only one large table for big groups. Marketing director Karen Sabourin told me that there is a space for larger parties behind The Grill next door; maybe they’ll borrow it in the future.

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Wall o’bleachers

For your small lunch or dinner group, though, it’s fun to enter PS 805 and see the school-themed elements. A basket of shiny red apples on the hostess stand. The menus that look like composition notebooks, noting a “study group”course (to split with friends) and “recess” (happy hour) which happens Monday through Friday 4-7pm, featuring $4 drinks and appetizers from $4 to $6 in the bar. Coming soon? “The Breakfast Club.”

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photo by Lexi Roehner

The bar, naturally, has its own mixologist who delighted me with a drink called the “Juice Box.” I had invented a similar beverage years ago out of sheer necessity – it consisted of Juicy Juice and vodka. This libation, however, was a sublime mix of golden rum, apricot marmalade, and vanilla bitters, garnished with a dried apricot. My friend Lexi tried the Agua Fresca, a surprisingly tasty watermelon martini, straight up.

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Food on the menu at this event included a starter to share, a dinner entree, and a surprise dessert – chef’s choice. As we sampled our charcuterie tray (“The Cutting Board,” with the sweetest carmelized onions I’ve ever tasted), we saw desserts being carried out to earlier diners. Which one would we get?

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Prosciutto, fig jam, Marconi almonds, etc.

For dinner, I had the jidori brick chicken and white bean ragout, and Lexi had the Tuscan chopped salad, made with kale. The chicken was a tender juicy organic dish, skin on, just the right crispiness. Although it was only offered with the lamb burger which I did not order, the chef brought out some “brown bag fries” for us to sample. After all, one cannot judge a restaurant’s mettle without tasting its French fries. These were served in a cut off brown bag, true to their name, with honey mustard sauce and sriracha ketchup on the side. They were tasty, but not the number one reason I would recommend PS805.

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The number one reason I would recommend trying PS805? It’s cute. The nostalgic food theme, the business’s support of local schools (on the night of this media dinner, drinks were on a cash bar basis, with all proceeds to benefit The Conejo Schools Foundation, a group that seems similar to Las Virgenes’ THE Foundation), the decor and menu, even the feedback card presented at the end of the meal, labeled “report card” and asking the diner to grade the business on different areas of service, all create an experience that at the very least gives you something to talk about. I would dine there again, simply to taste more of the drinks (and possibly sample one of the 40 beers) and try a few different foods. Our dessert was a cute presentation of PS805’s take on the PB&J: two large peanut butter cookies each with a dollop of sweet jam in the centers, served with a cold glass of milk. Just one. For dipping.

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Filed Under: Food, Local Businesses, Restaurants Tagged With: , , , , ,

Sip, Ride, Eat – Pedalers Fork Opens April 22

April 17, 2013 by 2 Comments

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Saddle up, cyclists, coffee lovers, and foodies – there’s a new joint opening Monday in Calabasas that you’re going to want to visit. You may not want to leave.

Located on Calabasas Road across from the Leonis Adobe in “Old Town” Calabasas, Pedalers Fork is a coffee shop, bike shop, farm-to-table restaurant, and bar, with a patio next to a creek (did you even know there is a creek there?) and an epic bike rack in the back. It’s the brain child of Robbie Schaeffer, who is an avid cyclist and wanted a place where he could meet his cycling pals early in the morning for a cuppa joe, then hang out after their ride for a delicious meal and/or beer, likely both. He teamed up with restaurateur Tim Rettele, who happened to be visiting Calabasas in search of an appropriate place to lay his beloved family dog to rest (did you know there is a pet cemetery there?!) and spotted the vacant building, and the rest is history.

Last week I attended a media preview dinner at Pedalers Fork. I actually walked around gasping in delight because the place is breathtaking. It’s airy, aesthetically pleasing, filled with eye-catching details and reclaimed materials. The creekside location and the patio made me instantly envision a future meetup.

It was a glorious, sunlit evening, and the cocktails, designed by noted LA-area mixologist Aidan Demarest, were flowing nicely. Based on my personal preferences, he selected for me the Cabacito – basically a margarita made with fresh grapefruit, which was delicious.

IMG_8216Menu choices for the evening included a baby kale Caesar salad with almond tofu Caesar dressing (delicious and incredibly garlicky), picturesque steamed mussels, braised beef with roasted Asian pear, and apple berry cobbler with almond milk sorbet. PF’s sommelier poured wines with our meal, and there was a pinot noir in there whose name I cannot recall but whose taste I will remember forever.

Knowing that everything on our plates was locally grown or sourced and obtained by special Pedalers Fork food procurement vans so that it could be as freshly served as possibly made the meal extra delicious, at least to me. We capped off the evening with coffee drinks from the coffee shop, and a pound of Kickstand Blend Ten Speed Coffee was in our gift bags, and is now on my kitchen counter waiting to start off my morning tomorrow.

I say it all the time, but it bears repeating: we live in a beautiful area. I’m delighted by Pedalers Fork opening a business here that blends in, takes advantage of local services, respects the town and the natural beauty surrounding it, and provides a gathering place for locals and a destination for visitors. I can’t wait to go back.

Pedalers Fork
23504 Calabasas Rd
Calabasas, California 91302
(818) 225-8231

More photos from the press dinner:

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