If you go to Baby Bistro in Los Angeles looking for steak au poivre and a squidgy French onion soup, you might be disappointed. It doesn’t traffic in the yassified American fantasies of a French restaurant, but rather a slightly eccentric, seasonal style of food you won’t find anywhere else: This is the taste of Los Angeles right now.
You might remember Miles Thompson’s work from his time at Michael’s, Michael McCarty’s Santa Monica institution, or later at Konbi, the meticulous Japanese cafe with a cult following where he ran some pop-ups (R.I.P. Konbi). But Mr. Thompson, who started Baby Bistro as a pop-up in 2023, has been cooking professionally since he was a teenager and works with ease across genres and cuisines.
Months ago, I fell for a dish of raw squid and smashed, salted cucumber, the two weepily enmeshed in a yuzu kosho dressing under a dusting of shiso leaves and umeboshi. Mr. Thompson had cleaned bigfin reef squid and then aged it for a few days, until it gave in with an almost tacky chew, like a rare sour candy.
The little menu of about six dishes looks handwritten — it’s an all-caps typeface made from Mr. Thompson’s handwriting — and the best dishes on it deliver complex, occasionally improbable, fully realized flavors.
You don’t have to, but you should order the whole thing and let it unfold as a shared prix fixe. The trick of the food, the trick of the whole place, is in this easygoing presentation that waves away all of the technique and precision that went into it. These dishes are made to be shared — to be eaten, not recorded — and they’re served without fuss.
The kitchen bakes a supple, fine-crumbed, olive oil drenched bread that you might call focaccia, though it technically isn’t, with sweet, lightly caramelized onions folded through the dough.
Recently, it’s been striped with the Bay Area cheesemaker Franklin Peluso’s creamy Teleme, made even creamier with mascarpone, draped with petals of zucchini, the whole thing absolutely dripping with miso brown butter.
There is fruit everywhere — melon with the clams, grapes with the corn, raspberries with the tofu, figs with the pork belly. While it was still hot, that pork was supernaturally weightless and airy inside, crisp and glazed on its edges. I swiped pieces through a spread of pistachios and labneh, marveling at how many little things worked together for my enjoyment on a single plate.
Descriptions on the menu are amusingly spare. “Blue prawns, tomato” is accurate, sure, but it doesn’t begin to give away the depth you’ll encounter when you meet those whole shrimp in a thin puttanesca-like sauce. After tasting it, my table needed plain onion bread to wipe the plates clean and a server who understood the urgency of our request quickly appeared with some.
Inside Baby Bistro, it can feel like you’re at a dinner party and a witty friend is keeping your glass full. It’s not just that the restaurant is set in a converted home. There’s something about this style of hospitality that feels genuine and intuitive, completely unscripted.
Mr. Thompson’s partner at Baby Bistro is Andy Schwartz, who has put together a list of natural wines from niche producers, mostly but not exclusively in France. His tasting notes read like tiny poems and they get across, more than anything else, a vibe.
You could ignore these notes, or roll your eyes, but for so many diners they’ll be more inviting than the data points of varietals and vintages. At the very least, they’re delightful: The phrase “endless spliffs” pops up in a description of Samuel Boulay’s wines from Ardèche. “Gutterpunk kid sings something soft and pretty at karaoke” described a Grolleau Gris from the Loire that I couldn’t resist and didn’t regret.
If you want to talk about wine in more depth, the servers are ready. But if you don’t? No one is bothered. Dinner can be excellent in all the ways that matter without being a production. Sometimes, isn’t that the point?
The kitchen is open to the dining room, a twinkling warren where you could see off-duty musicians from Topanga sucking on prawn heads, or a chef visiting from New York, wiping the olive oil from his fingers onto a cloth napkin. Recently, a man at the table next to me realized his daughter had gone to college with a woman at my table, and insisted on pouring us all of his undrunk wine.
Dishes change often to accommodate new ingredients coming into season, as well as Mr. Thompson’s relentless creative output. Very rarely, I’m glad to see one go: A bowl of turnips and soft tofu, swimming in ume vinegar and pomegranate molasses, was so sharp-edged it almost hurt. I had it a second time, trying to pull at some thread that might unravel its pleasures, but never could.
I did cycle through an enemies-to-lovers plotline with a thick pine nut cookie that reappeared, again and again, for dessert. I was deeply suspicious, at first. Why was it so unwieldy, so full of whole pine nuts? Why was it spritzed with thyme vinegar and decorated with wisps of fennel fronds?
Reader, I scorned it until I loved everything about it! Then I noticed it was tender inside, pleasingly sandy, exactly the right amount of sweet. The sticky waves of cucumber custard on top were fresh, gentle, but sinewy enough to carry some sour candied rhubarb.
Did the cookie change, or did I? I can only say that on my most recent visit to Baby Bistro, I was thrilled to see it again. I didn’t want it to be over. I missed it all before it was even gone.
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Tejal Rao is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
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