Is there somewhere I should take my mom for her birthday that’s like trendy but also comfortable and not too expensive and maybe within 10 miles of downtown L.A.?
My DMs are full of people I’ve never met, who treat me like their personal Yelp. It’s an occupational hazard that I have accepted after years of writing about L.A. restaurants. The answer, lately, to all restaurant recommendation questions, is Henrietta.
It occupies the corner of Glendale Avenue and a 500-foot-long stretch of asphalt known as Pizarro Street, on the same Echo Park block that’s become a budding restaurant row. While the sun is shining, it’s a deli and market, with sandwiches that have already captured the hearts of those inclined to drive across town for stuff between bread. An Italian sub with a one-track mind trained on spicy capicola. A broccolini-filled panini with romesco, sweet dates and smoky cheddar. In lieu of fries, a mountain of crispy and creamy, smashed potatoes smothered in garlic aioli, buried under a snow storm of Parmesan cheese.
When the lights dim, Henrietta becomes a cozy eight-table bistro with a concise menu of familiar dishes you’re likely to find at dozens of other restaurants: beef tartare, a half-chicken, rigatoni, all served on quaint, mismatched dishware that looks like someone got up early to scour the good vendors at the Rose Bowl flea market . Only Henrietta is doing them better, in a comfortable, neutral-toned room that feels like a first, second, and 30th date kind of place.
At the risk of sounding like I’ve entered my dad era, the dish I find myself most enthusiastically recommending is the half-chicken. In chef Alexis Brown’s hands, it should have the entire city talking.
It’s served as a deconstructed Caesar salad, with a heap of bone-in chicken crowded next to fuchsia chicories and croutons. The entire plate gets a drizzle of Caesar dressing sharp with white balsamic vinegar. Brown butchers then salts the chickens overnight, and marinates them in a mixture of ancho and puya chiles, garlic and chipotle. They’re grilled then finished in the oven, rendering the skin crisp, and a little sticky. The meat is almost bouncy, with juices that run wild and into the well-dressed salad. The croutons, made from torn and grilled Clark Street sourdough (the restaurant gets all of its bread from the bakery a few doors down), are massaged with dressing while warm, so they’re crunchy in parts and wonderfully soft and saturated like bread pudding in others.
It is the antithesis of the chicken Caesar salad wrap that has a choke-hold on the city. I understand the need to swaddle things in a tortilla, but this is a chicken Caesar salad you want to linger over, explore and appreciate like a lover’s silhouette.
An homage to the Zuni Cafe chicken and bread salad, it’s one of the first dishes owner Max Lesser tasked Brown with making for the restaurant. Lesser, a life-long restaurant lover turned first-time restaurateur, will likely be the one to greet you at the door, regardless of the hour. Like many aspiring actors, he worked in dining rooms all over New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. When the entertainment and restaurant jobs disappeared during the pandemic, the thing he longed for most was the warmth of a dining room.
Henrietta is named for the fictional, maternal figure Lesser created for Henry’s Bear, a toy store his mother ran for decades in Cambridge, Mass. Rather than opening a place that focused on a specific cuisine, Henrietta was built around Lesser’s appreciation for good hospitality, pulling from the aspects he loved best while waiting tables at the Publican in Chicago or Chi Spacca in Los Angeles. Mainly, he wanted to capture the joy and ease of settling into a space that feels familiar, even on your first visit.
And in Brown, he found the perfect chef to bring his vision to life. The former sous chef at Alimento is establishing herself as a trailblazing acid queen who favors vinegar, pickles, citrus and layering textures. Recently, her Bluefin tuna crudo was spiked with a nearly electric calamansi vinegar and blood orange vinaigrette. You ride the wave of acid, balanced by a mild sweetness from bits of knob onion that pickle ever so slightly in the dressing. It’s worth ordering a baguette to sop up every last drop of the vermilion liquid.
The same goes for Brown’s buttermilk dressing, which highlights the runoff she saves from making the restaurant’s butter. It’s a tangy, creamy, lemony dressing that coats the seasonal salad. In May, she used it to dress fat slices of avocado, slivered red onion, snap peas and tangerine.
The beef tartare toast is what Brown jokingly refers to as “sloppy Joe,” mainly for its resemblance to the saucy ground beef filling. The meat is combined with a sweet and smoky romesco punctuated with piquillo peppers, Fresno chiles, lemon and lots of charred onions. It’s blended with bits of sourdough bread to bind and create a homogeneous texture. Arranged over the top are dollops of crema and slivers of pickled yellow squash. It’s the most refined, well-balanced sloppy Joe in all the land.
Every dish registers as comfort food, but I tend to find the most solace in the ricotta dumplings. Similar to gnudi, the quenelles feature impossibly thin skins that collapse into pillows of ricotta cheese. They’re served in a puddle of sweet, extra earthy Madeira mushroom broth you sip like a soup.
Katie Vonderheide, whom Lesser met while she was overseeing the wine program at Chi Spacca, is responsible for an eclectic list of bottles that mostly hover in the $50 to $90 range. I have Vonderheide to thank for a new obsession with Listan Blanco, a Spanish white grape primarily grown in the volcanic soil of the Canary Islands. Its beautiful, dry complexity — bright, a little smoky with a tinge of saline — carried a recent dinner of lavish deviled egg spread, tartare and urfa-dusted grilled pork collar through to the polenta cake for dessert.
If you’re still thinking about sliding into my DMs with a restaurant question, know that Henrietta is likely the answer.
The post Where should you be eating this summer? This cozy Echo Park bistro is the answer appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
