Full Belly Files: Chemical Fire, Lobster Slaughter, and Grenache Gris by the Sea: An L.A. Overnight

---

Sign up to get Matt Kettmann’s Full Belly Files, which serves up multiple courses of food & drink coverage every Friday, going off-menu from our regularly published content to deliver tasty nuggets of restaurant, recipe, and refreshment wisdom to your inbox

I noticed the low clouds of billowing smoke through Saturday’s hazy sky as I zipped past Griffith Park and turned onto Interstate 5. A quick tap on my phone’s Watch Duty app revealed a structure fire a few miles south in Boyle Heights, and then came the eardrum-rocking roar of massive, double-prop helicopters swooping overhead as I got off the freeway in Silver Lake. 

None of the people hustling down Glendale Boulevard to watch the World Cup at The Red Lion Tavern nor the folks walking their dogs and kids on the steep hills above even flinched at those big-bellied beasts soaring overhead. They were steadily filling up at the reservoir in the middle of the neighborhood, flying back southeast to hit the warehouse fire, and then doing it all over again. 

I, meanwhile, was suddenly in multiple uphill-versus-downhill, no-room-to-maneuver standoffs on those same steep, San Francisco–esque streets. I was looking for nonexistent places to park, and eventually pulled precariously into a driveway to unload my many wine bags.    

“Hey man,” I said upon finding my friend, who was hosting his 50th birthday party that afternoon. “Did you know there’s a huge fire over there?”

“Yea,” replied Niko. “It’s been going for three days.” 

It’s a chemical fire, he added, burning through some sort of foam — and, I later learned, ammonia lines and solar panels and rotting food, as the warehouse had been a cold storage facility before it caught fire. That’s why they can’t just put it out, despite those choppers making their rumbling rounds all day long. (It’s probably smoldering as you read this.)

And yet, life went on. Niko tended to the ribs on his Big Green Egg, I put ice on the kid and adult drinks, and we plotted how to deal with the risk of live lobsters that our Virginia-based friend sent as a surprise that morning. Just down the hill, The Red Lion crowd could be heard screaming whenever Germany scored on Côte d’Ivorie, and vice versa.  

Nonchalance amidst acceptable chaos, I thought. Welcome to Los Angeles.  

My quick, albeit multitasking jaunt to L.A. for the weekend came on the heels of another busy week back home in Santa Barbara. I’d seen my mom and son off on their trip from SBA to Iceland on Monday — and would be picking them up at LAX on Sunday night — and then spent that night in Hollywood in order to fly on FlexJet’s brand new Gulfstream 500 for a ridiculously luxurious day-trip to Napa on Tuesday. (More on that next week.) 

I was back in our own wine country on Wednesday, visiting Pence outside of Buellton and then the new tasting rooms for Ashkahn and Cambria in Los Olivos. Dinner that night was with two visiting wine pros from Sonoma County — Christopher and Alexandra O’Gorman, from Rodney Strong and Foley Estates, respectively — at Dom’s Taverna, where the always solid cuisine was cranked up to 11, as Colombia handled Uzbekistan on a wall-projected screen. The new prawn ajo blanco and GGGG salad were particularly awesome, as was Dom’s Louie and the final bites of Basque cheesecake topped with caviar.

Thursday was a blur of corralling the 35 writeups from Sandwich Week into a comprehensible package — that’s about a 12-hour day in itself. (Read them all here.) Friday featured lunch and pitchers at Shalhoob’s at Magnolia for the enthralling U.S.A. versus Australia match.

That night, we celebrated another friend’s 50th birthday at The Chanticlair, the brand new spot on West De la Guerra Street that was conducting only their fifth service that evening. (George Yatchisin wrote about it and the two other connected concepts here.) Aside from attending the occasional soft opening, I don’t usually visit restaurants until they are a couple weeks into opening, so that they can work out the kinks. But this was a special occasion. 

The place didn’t look open from the outside — we even walked all the way down the alley past Elsie’s back patio to find a rear entry that didn’t exist. Then, we just opened the front door, and sure enough, people were seated at tables inside, much like walking into the dining room of someone’s humble home. 

As could be expected, the servers were still learning the ropes, but were all friendly and helpful. We ordered the whole menu and two bottles of wine — Story of Soil’s grüner veltliner and slightly funky Spanish red imported by former S.B. resident Ted Vance. 

The food, served on an assorted collection of antique china, was all rather delicious, from the crudo, melon salad, and chicken liver toast to the black cod, pork & grits, and hangar steak. The setting was a little harder to quickly comprehend, with the front room taking on a Victorian living room vibe that recalled restaurants we’ve visited in Charleston, South Carolina (or the old Chad’s on Chapala), and the middle room sporting classic diner look, with checkered floors and tiled walls. There’s a private dining room in the back and, oddly, stairs in what looks like a one-story building, at least from outside.

The vibe feels like a few friends decided to throw their resources into opening something interesting, eclectic, and built-to-evolve, a project with more spontaneous spunk than we usually see in more polished restaurant openings. I thought that was quite cool, and I’m excited to see how this vision grows.   

Back at home, I checked on the pork tenderloin I was sous viding and onions I was pickling for the next day’s Summer Solstice potluck at the Independent’s new offices on East De la Guerra Street. I seared up and sliced those loins on Saturday morning, turned their juices into a hoisin-laced barbecue sauce, and served them with Hawaiian sweet rolls, scallions, and spicy peppers from my garden. Then I hit the road to L.A. as the Solstice parade cruised up Santa Barbara Street.

You may remember my friend Niko the Greek from the short documentary (“The Fifth S”) he directed about my job as a critic for Wine Enthusiast. (He’s looking for more short doc projects, if you’ve got any, and recently did this Eilish Constance music video.)

Like me, he loves to cook, and that usually leads to us tending to various sizzling meats even during our own parties. Niko felt quite prepared for Saturday’s affair: cherry smoked spare ribs; tri-tip for added beef sustenance; grilled salmon with herbs and Greek olive oil; mac ‘n’ cheese with cheddar and gruyere; and his wife Lauren’s lentil, feta, and nectarine salad. 

And then came the dozen or so live lobsters that morning, from our friend Dr. Drew in Virginia (he showed up in this colonoscopy File). Niko rightly labeled the surprise delivery a “curveball,” and I later called it a “chore-gift.” 

We didn’t get into the lobster slaughter part of the party until the sun had set, which was also when the vegans had left. Most of the remaining men gathered in the kitchen to watch Niko employ the knife-through-head method of dispatching these large, cross-country-traveling crustaceans, as we heard that quick attack was the most humane method given the situation. (I’ve tried the freezing strategy before, but sometimes they wake up, leading to the knife after all.) 

I was charged with drawing up the herby butter to douse the lobster tails as they grilled, and we decided it would be better to boil the fat claws, which I helped detach in a messy dismembering session. The wine had flowed all day at that point, so the details are a little foggy for me, but we somehow managed to eat almost all of the lobsters. A mop was reportedly required for the kitchen cleanup and Niko realized, while cleaning up at 2:30 a.m., that the tip of his big knife snapped off during the slaughter. 

“The lobsters did not go quietly,” he reported. 

Sunday morning was Father’s Day, and I was in need of a diner, for I still had an entire day to kill in L.A. before grabbing my mom and son from LAX all the way across town at 6 p.m. Niko lives a couple blocks from the Astro Family Restaurant, a historic example of “Googie” architecture (I had to look that up) that’s, fittingly, owned by a Greek family. We sat at the bar, and I ordered the Greek scramble in their collective honor, all the while marveling at the trio of high-toqued chefs working in the sunset-hued kitchen. 

My next stop was our friend Greg’s brand new house, just a couple miles away and still in Silver Lake. He’d gotten the keys a few days before, and was actively moving from his longtime townhome in West Hollywood, trading that deeply urban experience for a slightly more suburban scene. I got the tour and we toasted with some Coors Light as Iran played Belgium on his laptop screen. 

I’d briefly considered spending my Sunday at that exact game, which was happening in real life at Sofi Stadium, just across town, but then watched the “cheap” seats go from $575 to more than $1,000 over the week. I’d hoped to hit some World Cup games this year, like I did at Stanford Stadium with high school buddies back in 1994, when we saw Russia whoop Cameroon, after drinking Hamm’s and Olympia beers in the dirt parking lot. 

But times have changed — Russia is rightfully banned from any international fun, and ticket prices are unfairly out of reach for most of us. And that’s no fun for anyone.

My last stop before LAX was the Santa Monica tasting room for AJA Vineyards, one of the few estates still producing in the Malibu Coast appellation after repeated rounds of wildfires ravaged the region. I’ve visited the property near Agoura before with vintner Amanda (Greenbaum) Rubin — I mentioned that briefly here and she even wrote about it here — and have watched (and reviewed) as the wines get better each vintage. She’s invited me to check out the tasting room for a couple years now, and this was the first time that it fit in my schedule.

Amanda wasn’t there, but her engaging staff members Jenny Noble and Harrison Peck played great hosts, running me through the lineup as Uruguay and Cape Verde battled to a tie. There’s an impressive longevity to the syrahs from Pamela’s Vineyard while the sauv blancs from Eds’ Vineyard — named after her two grandfathers — keep getting more distinctive. And that grenache gris–based rosé, sourced from the ONX Vineyard in Paso Robles, is one of the tastier pinks of the year. 

I was tempted to jump in the ocean just a couple blocks away, but then my son called from LAX, a half hour or so ahead of schedule. They could have stayed in Iceland another week, had schedules allowed, but they seemed happy enough to be back on American soil. The drive back was easy, although, embarrassingly, their return meal was Taco Bell. When we got home, my dog seemed scared of me, which we chalked up to the stink of burning chemicals on my clothes. 

I was happy to crawl into my own bed, and I needed the rest. I had yet another affair on Monday night, this time with the blind wine tasting group that meets every week at Ca’ Dario on Coast Village Road to trick each other over Billecarts, Burgundies, and Barolos. Such an experience is worth its own story, so more on that later.