FOOD: Destroyer

If you're daunted by a $$$$ tasting menu at Vespertine, fortunately you can sample some of Chef Jordan Kahn's inventive cuisine at the much more casual Destroyer across the street. As you're standing in line to place your order (yes, it's that casual), you can peruse the menu, projected on the wall, divided into categories of "cold", "hot", "sweet", and "ready". And while you'll recognize nearly all of the individual words and ingredients in the menu descriptions, the way they are composed will be completely unfamiliar. Smoked egg cream? Pickled mushroom? Roasted strawberry? Berries paired with meats and vegetables? You just need to pick something you're not allergic to, and trust in the mad genius of the chef. When the food arrives, it mostly comes in ceramic bowls, and you learn that Kahn likes to layer things, with a top cover so that all is not revealed at once. It adds to the sense of discovery that you can't immediately recognize what you're looking at, and you probably have to dig under one ingredient to see the rest. You ordered chicken and it appears they brought you a salad? Dig down. Under those spiky greens (spigarello), you'll pull up forkfuls of tender chicken confit with a flavor that's really good, but you can't quite put your finger on it. That's because you've never before tasted what happens when chicken is mixed with heirloom grits and roasted strawberries. Another bowl arrives, and it too looks like a salad. But plunge in, and you'll find beef tartare lurking beneath those radish sprouts, with pickled mushrooms and smoked egg cream. A third bowl arrives, a dark bowl with a heap of creamy white powder that looks like a bowl full of finely grated parmesan. A tentative taste of the mysterious substance and you discover that it is cold, like snow, and has a little bite, as if snow were made not of water but of frozen horseradish cream. Catching on to the game, you dig under the snow drift to discover chunks of beets. But wait, there's something sweet too. It's blackberries. And that crunchy bit? Pumpkin seeds. You contemplate the comparison of vegetable sweetness with fruit sweetness, punctuated by pumpkin seeds and spiked by creamy horseradish. And the frozen horseradish snow keeps the whole thing chilled, which, you realize, affects the brightness of the taste, because it would be different if it were all warm. The roasted yams come on a plate with avocado, but you don't see either of those things right away, because the avocado is covered by yogurt and the yams are carefully concealed under endive leaves, along with a handful of fresh green herbs and a flower, in a very Instagrammable presentation. Kahn has referred to his flagship Vespertine as a spacecraft, and as you gaze across the street at that remarkable architecture, you begin to see why. But as you enjoy the delicious tastes of things you'd never have imagined meeting in the same bowl – vegetables and fruits, cooked and raw – you also realize he's transporting you to a whole new planet, fundamentally composed of known elements, but in otherworldly formations. (Fittingly, this whole neighborhood in the northeast corner of Culver City is filled with dot-com hipster ultramodern architecture, so as eye-popping as Spacecraft Vespertine is, it's not out of place.) Go with a sense of discovery.