Two things come to mind whenever I’m savoring the rectangular prawn toasts, fried to coppery crispness, at 88 Club in Beverly Hills: how brilliantly chef Mei Lin reconfigured the abiding Cantonese snack, and how its excellence amplifies what’s not as fully realized elsewhere on the menu.
Lin makes the toasts her own by using crustless pain de mie to form squared borders; the fine crumb seizes into thin, pleasingly sand-textured shells. Black and white sesame seeds vary the crunch. The prawn filling, rather than the usual slick pink paste, remains translucent with distinct pieces. It registers as squiggly on the tongue, almost sentient.
If cut in half, ginger and garlic dart out in front among many mingled scents. But the driving flavors of two condiments, pre-dolloped, one on each end, take over after the first bite. Hot mustard aioli is piped in a teardrop shape to resemble a white Hershey’s Kiss. Sweet-and-sour sauce, thickened to jam, wobbles like a small egg yolk. The pair of blobs are meant to be smeared across the surface into one zinging varnish.
Crunchy, creamy, hot, cool, slightly sugary, mighty savory: Each prawn toast is a complete package, a finger-food art object to be admired for a moment, particularly given that three pieces cost $38 (no $90 caviar supplement necessary), before they quickly disappear.
The toasts stand out among two dozen dishes, served in a posh lair, that meander through regional Chinese and Chinese American repertoires without limiting borders. Your dinner might start with egg rolls and vinegared mung bean jelly noodles alongside crudo crowned with slivered pluot, followed by glossy kung pao scallops and Wagyu pepper steak, or mushroom-based mapo tofu and a luxe take on char siu pork with a side of hot-and-sour cabbage.
On paper, the options read as compelling and individualistic — a collage of diaspora mainstays presented in a fine-dining context. In practice, too much of the cooking doesn’t seem to aim higher than beautifully plated pleasantness. In a city where personal expression defines the best aspects of our restaurant culture, 88 Club, just five months old, could use a stronger, singular guiding hand.
The journey from ‘Top Chef’
What’s hopeful is that Lin has already proved herself a treasure and a force in Los Angeles. Her win on the 12th season of Bravo’s “Top Chef” in 2014 propelled her career, leading her to Los Angeles as sous-chef at Michael Voltaggio’s modernist restaurant Ink, followed by the 2019 opening of her own project, Nightshade, in the Arts District with restaurateur Francis Miranda. Cuisines in her creations there milled and collided, corralled by her intelligence and precision: the spectacular mapo tofu lasagna (its pork ragu zapped with Sichuan peppercorn), congee laced with pork floss, Hokkaido scallops cured in coconut vinaigrette, quail given the hot chicken treatment, a Korean-inspired beef tartare. The shrimp toast, set over coconut-rich curry sauce and blanketed with fried curry leaves, was excellent.
Nightshade closed for good at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. Lin and Miranda regrouped in 2021 with Daybird, a still-thriving fast-casual operation centered on an unwieldy and delicious Sichuan hot chicken sandwich and a variation made with cod drenched in yuzu tartar sauce that might be even better.
The pair have partnered again on 88 Club, taking over the former Velverie space on a block of South Santa Monica Boulevard that falls notably quiet at night. Street-facing windows have been covered, presumably to afford privacy for the aimed-for affluent customer base. Inside, the cozy room is flatteringly dim, with jade-green walls, giving the recently revamped Sinatra throwback La Dolce Vita a few doors down some competition as a discreet, moody hangout. I most want to hide in 88 Club’s nook of a bar, lined in red marble as streaked as a raw rib-eye, hogging prawn toasts to myself and sipping a rhubarb-tinged mai tai designed by ace L.A. bartender Kevin Nguyen.
A narrative behind the food is broadly in place: Lin, born in China’s Guangdong province, grew up in her parent’s Chinese restaurant in Dearborn, Mich., so the menu, based around her adult travels as much as her childhood memories, brings her focus full circle.
One can trace the story’s throughline to persuasive conclusion in the black bean Manila clams, a riff on a Cantonese classic with an inky, nearly-but-not oversalted broth that’s powerfully herbal with lemongrass and Thai basil. Delicate, ingot-shaped wontons give way to the gentle snap of minced prawns and bamboo shoots. They rest in a master chicken stock that was pure liquid poultry intensity at one meal and a little wan during another.
On the subject of bird: The kitchen team marinates chicken in nam yu (fermented red bean curd) with other aromatics to acquire a gleaming coffee-colored sheen and complex fragrance after roasting. With a tame ginger-scallion relish generously spooned over, it’s universal comfort.
Too many dishes, however, come off as impassive. Salads — soy-splashed cucumber and wood-ear mushrooms, chewy-crinkly tofu skin offset with celery and edamame, a tuft of fluffy chrysanthemum greens flecked with peanuts — are sound in technique but leave little lasting impression. The yellowtail crudo, anointed with pluot vinaigrette and tangerine oil and dotted with XO sauce, wants for a thunderbolt of acid. We see these standards repeated in so many forms across Greater Los Angeles. Jolt us with perspective, edge, charisma.
I understand Lin’s resistance to be saddled with a signature, but this mushroom rendering of mapo tofu, even with a spicy hit of doubanjiang, mostly makes me yearn again for the silky-racy lasagna masterpiece at Nightshade.
A vegan version of Singaporean rice noodles is a mass so dry that the curry powder tastes gritty. And when things tip from perfectly fine to disappointing, my mind turns to prices. The noodles cost $38, a figure that’s hard to reconcile.
At a steakhouse, when I order an $88 dry-aged rib-eye, I expect funk and mineral and tang and char. Similarly, when I ordered the $88 char siu-style Iberico pork on Lin’s menu, I hoped for a shrewd calculation of spice and seasoning that conveyed someone or something, a personal sense of place real or imagined or somewhere in between. What arrived was a nice-enough splay of sliced meat.
And so it goes at 88 Club. There’s a centerpiece painting by local artist Javier Ramirez in the back of the restaurant depicting three tigers, side by side, their bellowing mouths wide open. That’s it, I thought finishing a recent dinner. The metaphor is on the wall. The food has been murmuring. It could be roaring.
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