Susan Feniger of Border Grill and Cuidad fame has opened a new restaurant, this time without her longtime Too Hot Tamale partner Mary Sue Milliken, in Hollywood, and the name of the restaurant is Street. The space is more art gallery than resto, though containing “art” of the avant garde (or, indeed, just simply graffiti) sort.
Wow, that paragraph is reading like a boring yet pretentious Miss Irene review. Must. Make. More. Janet-y. How? Incorporate funny cats. Yes.
The front of the restaurant boasts a fluorescent tube-bulb outline of a man with long legs, extremely reminiscent of Longcat. Behold:
Christopher named him Longman. Christopher is a Longman himself (you’re welcome for the complimentary innuendo, C) so it was all very appropriate.
Half of the restaurant is indoors; half outdoors. We were seated in a lovely, lovely courtyard two-top next to a super fancy glass-rock-shard-bottomed (if you watched Redesign you’d know what I’m talking about) fireplace that, when the breeze was right, scorched my eyebrows off with the heat on this cold June Gloom night. The table was also so incredibly dark that I’m forced to display the incredible Stefano Paltera’s LA Times’ photos in this post.
The menu is a conglomeration of street food from all around the world, though the aforementioned Miss Irene noted that practically none of the items are from Latin America – probably to avoid duplicating the flavors of the other restaurant, but kind of disappointing since that area of the world has top shelf street food.
But upon actual consumption of said non-Latin-American street food items, I say fuck that and fuck tacos. It’s time to make way for jewels such as my favorite item of the night, pictured top – Kaya Toast: “ A uniquely Singaporean experience; toasted bread spread thick with coconut jam served with a softboiled egg drizzled in dark soy and white pepper.” The instruction was to take the tiny squares (think grilled cheese but with sweet coconut goo rather than melted cheese inside) and drag them through the runny, soy-stained yolk. You know sweet-savory is my thing. Add to this my two favorite textures – crunchy and creamy. Then add my favorite condiment, soy sauce, which courses through my veins instead of blood. Finally, make everything tiny and cubelike-cute, and it’s a plate made for Janet. I wanted ten more.
Next came the Cuban stuffed potato cake filled with spiced beef, raisins, and capers with tomato mint salsa and poblano crema. Before our server had even finished telling us what it was I had already taken a big swipe of the sauce with my finger and licked it. Extraordinarily poblano-ey with a nice slow burn. The outside of the cake was just that side of gloriously burny, and the inside soft bits came tumbling forth with a mere gentle stab of my fork and did somersaults through the crema. That shit had to have been choreographed. Using my fingers, I created little mushed pyramids of everything on my fork and ate it all up.
The lone dud of the night were the Indian semolina cakes: “Crispy pan-fried cakes of Utma semolina with toasted cashews, peas, tomatoes, and spices topped with fresh pea and tomato chutneys.” Sounds like a winner from the description, particularly with my undying (and in season!) pea love. The main problem was a severe lack of salt (shoulda just bled out some soy sauce onto them), and, as Christopher noted, there really was no flavor distinction between the two chutneys. And I didn’t even remember or realize until I typed the description in above that there were cashews inside. Shouldn’t cashews, particularly toasted ones, make for a buttery intensity?
Next some sort of Borscht which is not on their online menu – let’s see, there was a cake (potato?) that was breaded and crispy-fried, lying in a dollop of sour cream and farmer’s cheese, with a healthy slam of horseradish goat cheese somewhere in there. Christopher, like Barack Obama, dislikes beets. So when this came and I saw that the perimeter of the circular dish was lined with not only beets, but COLD beets, I was worried. But there’s nothing like a fresh-fried cake of something plus cheese plus horseradish to help a guy get over his beet-hate. Both of us particularly liked the temperature juxtaposition, and I’m recently on a burrata cheese kick, and have always adored horseradish, and this was yet another mushy mess of deliciousness that was great. I just needed a furry hat to complete the experience.
Finally, Malaysian black pepper clams: “served on Singapore’s eastern coast; clams simmered in oyster sauce with cracked black pepper, palm sugar, soy, and lime.” I was glad this came out last because my tastebuds were fully blasted by the intensity of the broth. They were panting, “No…no more flavor please…” but no means yes in the culinary world so I kept eating. C declared this dish as his favorite, and is definitely a must-order. Quite a generous pile of clams in a hugely generous depth of broth, which came with grilled bread (swoon!) to dip.
This really is the way to eat – little bites of many different things from many different parts of the planet, with little risk of E. Coli. Superb.
Street
742 N Highland, Hollywood
323.203.0500
