Over on Vinography, you can read Alder Yarrow’s piece on what constitutes a wine bar. For the most part, I agree with his definition – you need a good wine list, you need to pour many of those wines by the glass and the taste, and you need to have a place to sit down. But what about a place like Lou – places where you can sit down, where they have several size pours for you to try for each of their available wines, and yet their list isn’t that big – maybe 30 different wines per night? The trick is that at Lou, the wines change very often, sometimes daily. While Lou doesn’t have the extensive wine menu that AOC or Bin 8945 does, it still manages to bring in 25-35 interesting wines every night, most of which can’t be easily found in stores, and that’s pretty good for me. I like a place that makes me wish I could buy a bottle of something out in the world; it makes me want to come back and try it again.

We took our second trip to Lou about a week ago. It’s a small, dimly lit place nestled into a crowded corner strip mall on Vine in the middle of Hollywood. Peering into the spaces between the drapes covering the windows from the outside, Lou looks like it could be anything – a gothic upholstery store, a Yakuza strip joint – but once you walk inside, everything looks like it should. There’s about twenty tables in the room, a small bar, and that’s it. Nice wallpaper, a pleasant black-and-white design on the tables. As you might imagine, the space is a little cramped, but not enough to make one uncomfortable.

While we knew from our previous visit that Lou has good wine to offer, we were really surprised this time at the quality of the food they have to offer as well. We were pretty hungry when we arrived, so we decided to make a full meal from the choices on the menu. The menu isn’t really built for this, per se, since they tend to have options mainly limited to appetizers and salads, and they only offer two main courses per evening, but we figured what the hell. Unfortunately, J is not a fan of the pig candy, so my appeal for the good stuff fell on deaf ears. All was not lost, however, because we the first thing we ordered was a burrata salad with prosciutto, candied kumquats and arugula that was excellent – a great combination of salty cheese and meat, piquant and sweet kumquat, and a nicely tart vinaigrette with a bit of citrus. Man, who doesn’t love burrata? What an odd thing to be a Los Angeles specialty, but it’s on the menu of every Italian restaurant in this city, it seems. Anyway, I’m not complaining.

We followed that up with a deconstructed bistro salad, a compartmentalized dish holding chambers of marinated cauliflower, roasted beets, cheese and walnuts. And it was pretty good, too – J was particularly enamored of it.

The final dish was hanger steak with frites, and I was eager to try it because I’ve never had hanger steak before, despite how much I’d read about it and how amazing it was. Verdict? It was pretty damn good – a very flavorful cut of meat. We had ordered it medium rare, and the grill man had left just on the rare side of medium rare, but that was probably better to show off the meat. And the steak frites were very nice as well – crispy on the outside and fluffy inside, with some kind of nutmeg/cayenne spice coating on the exterior. I was really pleased with how well the food turned out here. While I think the preferred method is to sample small things off the menu to match the wine, you could very easily construct a nice dinner for two here on a regular basis. Good deal.

The wine we tried that night was generally a success as well. I opted for a flight of reds from the corvina grape in the Veneto region of Italy. The most famous version of the corvina grape is Amarone, the heavyweight wine of northeastern Italy, but it’s also made into other wines, like the Quinciarelli’s “affordable” option, Primofiore, and it’s also used in IGT blends with various grapes. The first wine was the Venturini Amarone (there were no vintages listed on the menu, so no years for these wines), which was just the kind of wine I’ve come to expect from Amarone – that powerful combination of bitter and sweet fruit that comes from the air-drying of the grapes. I’ve loved Amarone on the few occasions I’ve been lucky enough to try it, and it was great to be able to get a glass of it and not pay an arm and a leg – which a bottle of the stuff will usually cost you. The second wine, also an Amarone, was from a maker called Beretta, and while it was pleasant enough, it didn’t have quite the supple weight of good Amarone. Maybe it just suffered in comparison to the Venturini, but it didn’t seem like it was quite all there. The last wine in the flight was a “Super Veneto” blend (named after the “Super Tuscan” IGT blends of non-DOCG grapes from Tuscany), the Giuseppe Lonardi Privilegia Veneto IGT. This was a blend of corvina and cabernet franc, and it was definitely my favorite wine of the evening. The cab franc’s herbal notes and cool fruit cut a beam right through the heaviness of the Amarone, but the Amarone’s core of fruit still held the day. It made for a terrific combination. Eric Asimov hypothesizes in his blog “The Pour” above that Primofiore contains some cab franc – is this an oft-seen blend? In any case, I was a fan.

Other wines we tried that night included the Blanquette de Limoux “Brut” Rosier NV (pleasant), Clos des Brusquieres Chateauneuf-du-Pape (a little thin, basically unremarkable), and a Ruston Family Merlot (a very nice, meaty wine with good balance and a long finish – the clear winner of the other three). The total bill, for all food and drink, came out to less than $80, which is pretty good for all that we ended up getting. The staff was kind and accommodating, too. In short, Lou is a great little place, and I don’t think it will be too much time before we find ourselves back there.

As in, “When a blogger goes out for a dinner at Lucques, they are obligated to divulge the details of the evening.”

I don’t post a lot of restaurant reviews here, because I get a little skittish talking about a place after only one visit. Sometimes I make exceptions if the place is exciting enough or provides for some sort of comparison, but in general I feel like the particulars of who cooks your food, when it’s cooked, and what you happened to feel like ordering on any given night can swing the pendulum of your opinion very far one way or the other. And it’s a bit of a risk to catch the pendulum at that moment and offer some kind of lasting analysis based on its position right then. I’d like to think that I’m learning as I go along with this thing to be more conscientious about food in many ways, and that should include, I think, an understanding of restaurants as continually changing organisms that are born and grow and shift and eventually wither and die. That sounds a little hippy-dippy, but there’s a lot of truth in that, too. And with this in mind, going forward I really want to go to a place at least twice before calling it a “review.”

But hey, it’s Lucques. So let’s not call this a review – just a recap of an enjoyable evening. I guess it’s sorta not possible to blog about a restaurant and not have it be a review in some way, but I do want to stress that I don’t feel like this is my final word on Lucques. Not that I’ll ever have said final word, most likely, but still…

Since I’d just received a sort of permanent position at the company I’ve been working for las week, we decided a little celebration was in order to end the week. Trying to figure out where to go out to eat is always a bit of a challenge for us, but since I’ve been quite fond of my recently acquired copy of Suzanne Goin’s “Sunday Suppers at Lucques” cookbook, we chose that venerable temple of all things Goinian, Lucques.

The restaurant is settled in a very nice space on Melrose near La Cienega on the west side, near Mel & Rose Wine. We showed up without reservations at 7:30 on a Friday night, so we had to sit at the bar instead of a table.  No problem, though – the bartender was very nice, and since I’ve never had an upscale meal at a bar before, it was a good time to try it out. Inside, there’s lots of wood tones, reminiscent in a way of Chez Panisse. The lighting is artfully arranged to throw soft light on the room that bounces off of all that wood, and it works. We started with a glass of 2005 Domaine des Vieux Pruniers Sancerre, which was pleasant enough, citrus and oak being its main characteristics. The munchies they brought out included bread with some of the best butter I’ve had in a restaurant, marcona almonds that I think had been quickly roasted with some butter, and the famous Lucques olives, which were wonderfully nutty and rich. All in all, probably the best “bar food” to be found in LA.

As an appetizer, we split a beef carpaccio with white beans that was covered in a white sauce – creme fraiche-based, maybe? This was pretty good, although with something as subtle as the carpaccio, I would have dialed the amount of sauce back a little to bring out the flavors in the beef. Our main courses were Lucques’ popular short ribs, which J ordered, and the market fish of the day (bluenose bass) for me. The short ribs were very rich, and fell apart very quickly with the slightest provocation. My fish was cooked perfectly, but maybe slightly undersalted. The fish came with clams and sliced fingerling potatoes paired together in the clam shells, and those were amazing – definitely the best thing I had that night. The broth that the fish and clams were resting in was also terrific; it tasted like the beginning of a great bouillabaisse.

Over dinner, we worked on a bottle of 2004 Loring Wine Company Pinot Noir Rancho Ontiveros Vineyard, a central coast Pinot that was a fun wine without being really transcendent. It had a pleasing combination of cola, spice, and cherry on the nose and on the palate, but it lacked anything earthy that could balance out all the sweetness. And at 15.1%, you could really taste the alcohol. It certainly wasn’t a bad wine – it was one of the better pinots I’ve had over the last few years, but maybe that says more about how many good pinots I’ve tried more than anything else. I think I bought this for around $37 or so, which is a bit steep for me; I’m not sure I’d go back to Loring for more, although I’ve heard that their 2005 wines are a little less fruit-forward than the previous vintage, which sounds encouraging. We’ll see.

We had a good meal at Lucques, a nice bottle of wine,  and the check wasn’t even that steep. Granted, we had split an appetizer and brought our own bottle, but it was certainly a pleasant surprise nonetheless. I think it’s safe to say we’ll be back.

(Pictures to come. Eventually.)