FOOD: Orsa & Winston

This evening we were treated to the tasting menu at Orsa & Winston in DTLA. If you imagine how a chef with TexMex roots, trained in the classical European tradition, would prepare a Japanese omakase menu using mostly local ingredients from the local farmers market, that’s what you’ll get at Orsa & Winston. As Jonathan Gold said, “It tastes like Italy, Japan, and Spain. It tastes like Los Angeles.” The meal commenced with an amuse bouche of black sesame tofu topped with kombu and smoked trout roe, a rich dark bite set in a lovely blue-and-white patterned bowl. First course was a kanpachi (amberjack) crudo, fresh and mild, in a light yuzu dressing with red and yellow heirloom tomatoes and a couple little dollops of avocado, making a colorful array across a plain white plate. Next up was a duck foie gras au torchon, garnished with huckleberries, white figs, and labneh, with toast to spread the smooth rich pâté on. The “second course” (as is traditional with tasting menus, a “six course menu” ends up being more like ten) was a chilled summer melon soup, sweet cantaloupe-colored juice poured over some Hokkaido scallops, slivers of jicama, and little pieces of oro blanco grapefruit and cucumber. Third was a piece of seared aji (mackerel) with seared baby corn, malabar spinach, and a chopped walnut bagna cauda. (Yeah, I don’t know what all that stuff is either, and we often consult Google while decoding menus. Bagna cauda is a Piedmontese dipping sauce made from olive oil blended with garlic and anchovy. Don’t let the anchovy put you off. It’s all blended in, just good tasty dressing, here with chopped walnut added.) Fourth up was a “satsuki rice porridge”, like a risotto but with a short-grained plump Japanese rice and seasoning, with slices of abalone, pieces of geoduck (a long-necked clam), and Santa Barbara uni (sea urchin). Fifth, the meat course, was a Sonoma lamb T-bone with cannellini beans, cherry tomatoes, maitake mushrooms, some dark leafy green, and some minced castelvetrano olives. A palate cleanser of coconut sorbetto with passionfruit pulp was a lovely light segue into dessert, which was a peach clafoutis with a hearty dollop of crème fraiche Chantilly. (If you’re again diving for Google, a clafoutis is a custardy batter mixed with fruit and baked, so that unlike a pie or a cobbler, the fruit is baked right into the pastry. To be appropriately decadent, we did the wine pairings, which were really interesting. Though all Italian and French, the varietals and regions were mostly unfamiliar ones: a folle blanche from the Loire was very tart to pair with the crudo, a lagrein from the Dolomites made a dark rosato with berry notes that made a lovely compliment to the melon soup, and a dry white sciaglin from Venezia-Giulia made for pasta and aged cheese paired nicely with the rice porridge and shellfish. The desert wine was a moscato from Sicily where they press the grapes earlier, not letting them turn into raisins as is more typically done, for a light sweetness instead of a more typical syrupy moscato. It was lovely with the light pastry, fruit, and cream. We parted happy from good company and the tastes of Los Angeles in our bellies, feeling lucky to live in this city. (See full set of photos here.)