Diary 8|30|2014: Breakfast X 3. All-Noodle Lunch. David Yurman To The Rescue. Taste For Dinner.

[title type="h5"]Saturday, August 30 Not The Right Breakfast. All-Noodle Lunch. David Yurman To The Rescue. Taste For Dinner. [/title] Up at seven in our big, modern, but not quite good enough for Mary Ann room at the Beverly Hilton. Seven in Los Angeles is nine New Orleans time. I never sleep that late, but I'm glad I did today. Tonight's activities will keep us up late. Mary Ann says she doesn't want to eat a big breakfast. But she does show up, and the breakfast we split was anything but small or cheap. "Not especially good," would apply. This set the tone for breakfast the rest of the visit: too much of it, not good enough, and too dear. We try to work it off with a morning walk around Beverly Hills, through a neighborhood of little shops, few of which are open this early. We stop for coffee at a French café called L'Amande--"the almond." Why don't you try some of this?" MA asks. It's breakfast, I say, and I've already. . . But somehow I get quiche Lorraine. It is ordinary, about like the French bread that comes with it. What's the story on this place? I ask. Ah. A chain. The breakfast meter is now up to $55. Jude and The Blazing Redhead appear. They want to have a cup of tea at a shop called Teavana. Jude is a tea nut for years, and so is his girlfriend. Teavana is a small chain, they say, recently bought out by Starbucks. Which is next door. If there are not fifty kinds of tea here, then there are a hundred. I don't remember what kind I had, but its name was more interesting than its flavor. The breakfast toll rises to $70, and it's not eleven yet. We head out to Americana, a theme shopping mall for high-end shops. An old-style (but new) streetcar circumnavigates it. A couple of visits ago, Jude and I had a mediocre sushi lunch here. He has long been contrite for his failure to please me then. He has another Asian idea today that he thinks will gain redemption. Din Tai Fung is a veritable factory for noodles, made into many menu pages' worth of dumplings, pasta dishes, soups, and the like. It is packed with standees, a majority of them Asians, waiting for tables. We are among them, but not for long: Jude used an app on the way here to get a place in line before we even parked the car. [caption id="attachment_43702" align="alignnone" width="480"] Making dumplings by hand at Din Tai Fung.[/caption] During the few minutes before it was our turn, we watched seven chefs in a room not big enough to take three steps. They roll, stretch, fill, fold and form hundreds of dumplings into shapes so perfect that I would have guessed they were made by machine. Astonishing. We sit down and begin the complex calculation of what to order and how much. This is made slightly easier by the menu's offer to serve small, medium, and large sizes of many dishes. [caption id="attachment_43701" align="alignnone" width="480"] Hot and sour soup at Din Tai Fung.[/caption] We begin with hot and sour soup. It's beautifully presented, different from what we're used to. The broth is not as peppery as in New Orleans, and is riddled with more meat. [caption id="attachment_43700" align="alignnone" width="480"] Dumplings.[/caption] Now a parade of dumplings. The first is filled with pork and so much broth that you have to puncture it first and let it drain, lest you braise the inside of your mouth. You let out the broth into a little dish of shredded horseradish, into which you dip the drained, cooled dumpling. Fantastic. [caption id="attachment_43699" align="alignnone" width="480"] Pot stickers, bottom view (above), top view (below).[/caption] Then some steamed, fluted dumplings filled with vegetables, followed by the most offbeat version of pot stickers in my experience. Five of them form a sheet at the bottom, where they all stick together. Turn the sheet over, and the dumplings swell up like mountains. Jude is an avid eater of pot stickers since his youngest days, and was especially proud to show these off. I must say that Din Tai Fung was impressive. No chance such a place would make it in New Orleans, but in a city with the Asian population of Los Angeles, it's a natural. We walk it off around the mall, stopping for some frozen yogurt (eat the food of the region, I say). At the David Yurman store (female readers will require no explanation of what DY sells) Mary Ann finds a pendant in pearl and diamonds. When she hears the price, it strikes her as low. "I can't possibly buy that, even so," she says to me, with perfect aim. I let her get out of sight. I go and buy it. It is, to my surprise, less expensive than I would have guessed, but what do I know about jewelry? Only enough to know what to buy and when, using information from only one nearby source. MA is very happy I did the mental dirty work. We hang around the Americana mall for awhile. California weather is nowhere to be felt. It is hotter here than in New Orleans. Jude points out that the jets in the central fountain are controlled by the music playing from speakers all around. Frank Sinatra's voice makes the water move in ways he probably never thought of. On our way to renew ourselves at the hotel, we stop in Griffith Park for a look at the old railroad equipment on display there. This is Mary Ann's idea, not mine. If I were cynical, I'd say it's giveback for the David Yurman sparkler. But she seems as interested as I am, and I am a railroad buff from infancy. [caption id="attachment_43697" align="alignnone" width="480"] One of eleven steam locomotives at the Griffith Park train museum.[/caption] The park showcases eleven steam locomotives, most from the early 1900s, when the railroad mileage in the U.S. was at its peak, and you could take a train almost anywhere. About a dozen passenger cars, ranging from the 1910s to the 1940s, are also open for viewing. The docent says that they're working on restoration, but budgets are short, and it costs one or two million each to fix these things up. That seems high to me. Maybe they ought to ship them down to the Carrollton Streetcar Station in New Orleans, which keeps its 1920s trolleys not just looking good, but running perfectly for a lot less than that. [caption id="attachment_43693" align="alignleft" width="270"] The Paramount Lot, with some Buicks to be given away at The Taste.[/caption]The Taste began a few years ago, organized by the Los Angeles Times newspaper. Its program is a lot like the New Orleans Wine & Food Experience, but that's not where they got the idea--such events are common in California, particularly in the wine country. Everybody seemed excited about The Taste, particularly since its move last year onto the Paramount Studios lot. "Lot" is showbiz talk for a sort of enclosed mini-city about the size of the Vatican, where much of the major work of the big studios takes place. It is indeed a great spot for a grazing event. Particularly once we'd passed through the lines (half an hour in the first one, twelve minutes in the second), and began to avail ourselves of the works of some forty restaurants. These run the gamut from some very exotic places (both in terms of ethnicity and imagination) to national chains like Chipotle. If my three companions are waiting to hear me tear the food apart, they are disappointed. I try about twenty items, and if I had anything negative to say it would be that three is too many restaurants serving octopus. The food is fresh, original and enjoyable, using top-quality groceries. This is especially clear in the case of the fried oysters, grilled sea scallops, yellowtail crudo, and the hogshead cheese. [caption id="attachment_43694" align="alignnone" width="480"] The chef of Church Key pointing to the next person who will get one of his oysters.[/caption] If I did not carefully limit my intake of the many wines, beers, and cocktails available, I would surely have drunk too much. The liquors were especially appealing: they were pouring the good stuff. But I have half a cocktail, a glass of wine, and half a beer. But that was enough to make the fatigue of a long day take its toll. We keep plugging away at the surfeit of eats, but it's still going strong when we leave. Jude, who is much more an Angelino now than a Yat, is bursting with pride that his new hometown can impress his old gourmet dad.