3 meals in LA

[hollywood]

Elsewhere Jason asks about the definitive LA dining experience. Putting that aside, if you could only eat 3 meals in LA, where would you go, what would you have, and, if relevant, what wines or other beverages would you choose to accompany the food?

[russ parsons]

I'm going to cheat and answer this two ways (since I already partially answered it on Jason's question). Picking three ultimates is different in some ways from picking three favorites--the favorites being places you wouldn't mind going back to again-and-again, while the ultimates are more in the manner of one-time splurges. That said:

In LA: I think I'd include Valentino ... in November/early December, when they are one of hte few places that get white truffles that actually taste like the Piedmont. I'm not too particular about the menu ... they'll figure something out. And I'll leave them the wine, too. Having Piero Selvaggio choose wine is the most sublime kind of education. Since I'm bound for a desert island, I would splurge on a great Barolo to finish, preferably from Aldo Conterno because he is such a wonderful man, and probably from the 1971 vintage.

I'd choose Bastide, because I've known Alain Giraud since he started working for my great friend Michel Richard in the mid 1980s and it is so wonderful to see him finally come into his own with incredibly stylish, elegant food in a beautiful setting.

I'd choose my house, on a winter night, with my wife and daughter and a couple of best friends and a table full of cold, cracked Dungeness crab and great Chardonnay (we do this once a year and it is our "let's talk about god" meal. There's something about such simple perfection that makes you think about big topics ... even if it sometimes is embarrassing the next morning).

Outside of Los Angeles, I'd want dinners with the three greatest chefs I've known: Thomas Keller, whom everyone knows, Michel Richard, whom everyone should know, and the late C.B. Stubblefield, a barbecue cook in Lubbock Texas who was the first person to open my eyes to the power of good cooking.

[hollywood]

There's a line of Stubblefield 'cue sauces, isn't there. Do they do him proud?

[russ parsons]

I think they probably as close as any commercially made product could. They're OK. It's a funny thing about those sauces. Stubb was a great and wise man and a helluva cook. But he was probably the worst businessman in the entire world. Toward the end of his life, he was sick and there were several of his old friends who would chip in and send him some money to help him pay rent. In return, every once in a while he'd send along a case of hand-bottled barbecue sauce (I've still got 2 of them on my counter ... a kind of shrine to cooking). Imagine my shock when I was in New York, browsing through Dean and Deluca and all of a sudden I see Stubb's face lookingout from the shelves! And now they're in my neighborhood grocery.

He was truly an amazing man and I could tell Stubb stories all day long. He changed my life, for sure. When I was a sportswriter at a miserable paper in Lubbock, I'd eat dinner at his little bbq place a couple times a week (it was really a shack, the first time I took her there, my wife [then my fiancee] refused to eat; when she smelled the sauce, she backed off and refused to eat only the potato salad). One night I was eating dinner and he got hit by a crush (which at that place could have been two extra tables). A waitress had called in sick, so he asked me if I could fill in for an hour. Of course. Well, the first time I put a plate of Stubb's barbecue in front of someone, I realized what it was to do quality work that you were really proud of and how profound the act of cooking could be.

[hollywood]

Great story. Thanks.