On La Cienega below Melrose. A still, clear Saturday evening. Me, Aldo and an old friend of his. She has cut her hair, and it’s very becoming. Aldo is wearing a little hat that he says makes him look like Justin Timberlake, which is not so: He’s more like Bing Crosby in his mid- to late forties. By that point Bing may have been doing his commercials for orange juice. I don’t recall.
Sona has a dining room so understated and muted in its soft lighting and palette that you might walk straight through it and back out onto the street without realizing it. The L.A. dining experience is so different from New York’s: In New York, no matter how fine the establishment, you can never quite escape the impression that the maitre d’ is really Pol Pot and you stand a strong chance of being re-educated somehow, and not pleasantly. In New York, in other words, you tend to wait for the lurking comeuppance. The Table of Doom by the kitchen door. The basket of bread that one never stops longing for and that never arrives, like Come Back Little Sheba with carbohydrates. That does not happen in Los Angeles. You sit, you eat, you drink, time passes in a calm, measured flow: It is like sitting through a nice piece of classical chamber music.
I start with a glass of Audoin de Dampierre Ambassadeurs 1er cru at the bar. Light, persistent mousse with a hint of mushroom. The bartender is handsome and young and athletic-looking and I feel like a moth crushed against a lamp, but no matter. With dinner, we have the 2004 Domaine Weinbach Gewurztraminer “Altenbourg” Cuvee Lawrence. I love the wines of Weinbach, and the richness of this wine pairs superbly with the appetitizer, a delicious corn soup so corny it makes me want to hum something from Rodgers and Hammerstein; and then the entrée, macademia-crusted opah, which I keep calling “oprah.” Oh, Weinbach! Have you made me silly? The opah comes with roasted pineapple and coconut curry emulsion.
Aldo observes that “coconut curry” sounds like an unsuccessful drag character.
A delicious evening that sent me back to the hotel happy.
