Living Food Legend Alice Waters Opens Her First LA Restaurant
The backlit bar. Wonho Frank Lee Tomorrow, Los Angeles marks the arrival of Alice Waters, a food luminary and international culinary icon known for her genre-defining Bay Area restaurant Chez Panisse and her tireless work promoting sustainability, regenerative agriculture, and modern American (and specifically Californian) foodways. Her new restaurant Lulu opens inside the Hammer Museum on Thursday, November 11.
The highly anticipated Lulu is, like any Waters project, meant to act — much like the museum itself does — as a showcase, a place for the artistry of local farmers and purveyors to be put on full display for a paying audience. Waters’ oeuvre, of course, is in restaurants, creating places for people to come together over lightly-manipulated dishes that highlight the sum of their ingredients; think a simple bowl of perfectly in-season fruit or (as with the new Lulu) a baked Sonoma goat cheese starter with golden beets and lettuce. The restaurant will begin with a prix-fixe three-course lunch offering only, spread across a market menu that changes daily to reflect whatever has come in from local growers. That might mean a halibut carpaccio one day, lamb tagine with saffron couscous another, and olive oil walnut cake with pomegranate for dessert.
While Waters is the spiritual signpost for the new Lulu, she’s certainly not alone in making the day to day of the restaurant happen. David Tanis, a longtime food writer and Waters collaborator, is on as chef to run the restaurant, and Rosemary West leads the beverage side with a focus on female winemakers and small, biodynamic vineyards. The entire project was conceived in conjunction with Ann Philbin, Hammer director, and the restaurant’s director of operations is Jesse McBride, formerly of Chateau Marmont and the Standard hotel group. The overall CEO is Chez Panisse’s own Jaemie Ballesteros Altman. — Farley Elliott, Nov. 10, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Eater LA website.
HEADER IMAGE: Baked goat cheese and garden salad. Wonho Frank Lee
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