I should have gotten the chicken with no spice. The fermented bean paste + cabbage on the side of the short rib, fish, and chicken caused a ton of palette fatigue. Hojicha Orange Milk Punch was divine.
Desserts closed dinner out strong.
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Pretty sure we were sitting next to each other yesterday 
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Wow thatâs pretty cool loved ink and ink sack years ago
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Saw an ig ad for firstborn x little fish too
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Vin Folk as well
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Postponed until 06/17 due to a scheduling conflict.
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Went tonight and really enjoyed.
started off with a cocktail at Steep
Got green tea yuzu martini and jasmine vacation. Liked them both a lot, jasmine vacation more.
At firstborn, the kumquat apricot was my favorite drink Iâve had in a while. Peach was not as exciting
onion butter with bread was crack
Leek with crab salad was fine, the cherries probably best part. Trout was good.
Second course included fucking incredible duck sausage/meatball and ok scallops
Main was local rock cod in a Szechuan peppercorn sauce and the short rib. Both quite good though give the nod to the short rib
Desserts were both fun, there is a thin layer of a crunchy cookie type thing in the strawberry one while the makrut lime one is just a very refreshing lime flavor bomb.
Enjoyable evening and out the door for low hundreds per person.
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Last night was a good time. I canât believe ink has been gone for so long.
Firstborn regulars are built differentâŚthey just hop into the kitchen to say hi to chef and the crew without hesitation.
The Hong Kong Milk Tea Old Fashioned was fantastic. It starts with toasted milk powder that is infused into the bourbon with tea before being strained out. The only thing I was missing was some boba pearls and youâre good to go.
Also had the house peach cocktail which I loved because it was light and fizzy. The peach flavor was pretty gentle. I am very impressed by the bar program at Firstborn, and their clear as glass ice. Would definitely come back for the bar alone.
Service is pretty impeccable at Firstborn. Like you walk in and it has a casual feel of a neighborhood restaurant, but itâs all fine dining with plates and serviceware changed out at every course with a wipe down/crumb clearing. It felt very much like my experience at Jeune et Jolie in Carlsbad last year.
Squid ink taiyaki, fermented egg salad + Astrea kalugaâŚthis was so fun and hot damn, I could eat this everyday for lunch. This was a play on the ink charcoal potato dish.
Tomato as a fruit, coconut sago, ume, fig leaf
Prawn toast, corn, âcool ranchâ
Another banger course. This was the best and juiciest prawn toast Iâve ever had. If you werenât careful, youâd have liquid running down your arm. The corn mayo was lovely. We were told that Chef Mei Lin took the lead on this one.
The salad/cold soup was so good! Refreshing after the prawn toast, offering so many interesting flavors and textures. I love how they turned the coconut sago savory. It was both familiar, but new. This was a collaboration between all 3 chefs.
Egg yolk gnocchi, mushroom mapo, coriander, crispy yuba + truffleâŚthat egg yolk gnocchi was like an adult savory gusher. Wild! While my friend thought this dish was perfect, I felt it was salty. That mushroom mapo has been reduced to the max. The truffles made the aroma more heady, but taste-wise, I donât think it made my bites significantly better.
Roasted rock cod, grape jus, âstrange flavor,â cauliflower, peanutâŚmy palate was kinda blown from the previous dish so I didnât get to this as soon as it hit the table. My fish was over when I did bite into to. That sauce was so good and the âgranolaâ underneath was significant.
Wagyu beef cheek noodle soup, squid, preserved mustard, chili crispâŚholy hell! Taiwanese beef ânoodleâ soup! A banger. I loved that the calamari rings played off the squid ink pasta rings. The heat was greatâŚI personally would have liked a little more acid, but my friend said I was nuts because she thought it perfect.
Apple 2.0, burnt wood creamâŚloved it. No notes. So fun to eat, and we were sad because it was the end.
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We went last night for a later seating. Kitchen was definitely slammed with a full house and new menu, some lengthy waits between courses which was not too surprising.
Agree with you impressions, and kinda glad I skipped the supplements. I liked the mapo a lot, but my wife thought it was too salty as well. I didnât think the âstrange flavorâ on the fish came through, agree that the mapo might have blown out my palate and I didnât think the flavors hit as hard on this one.
My wife felt the Taiwanese beef was too salty. I didnât find it too salty, but it was quite strongly flavored/reduced and had proper heat.
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Agree with you on timing between courses. It was pretty fast when we were first seated for 6:30. With each course, the time between progressed longer and longer.
I didnât get the âstrangeâ sauce, either. It just tasted good and even better with the granola.
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Same experience with:
- timing between courses, but it seems standard for collabs these days
- Mapo saltiness and umami intensity were overwhelming, too bad as the gnocchi was light and delicate
- rockfish a bit over
- beef soup was slightly over reduced
All that being said
- tomato, coconut sago dish was a revelation
- I heard it was a charcoal tayaki, squid ink makes more sense to me, it was delicious as was the fermented tofu egg salad, great dish
- Prawn toast also excellent and beautifully executed
- the nitro pearls with apple jus and the melon balled crisp apple for texture
You could feel Anthony, Mei Lin, and Michaelâs contribution on every dish. The grape jus and peanut felt like a classic MVoltaggio peanut butter and jelly play as was the granola.
A nice effort and great to see AW, ML, annd MV together.
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In retrospect, I think it would have worked better if they had just swapped the order of the mapo and fish. Progression in intensity of flavor would have made more sense that way, but they might have been thinking of it as progressing in heaviness of the dish.
For me the mapo worked because the gnocchi is the reference for the tofu that is normally in the dish which has a similar flavor and texture. I enjoyed the play on the traditional dish and thought the flavor and spice were true to proper mapo tofu with plenty of ma-la.
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SHUT DOWN by the health department. Appears to be due to racking up more than 30 points in a single inspection (their latest inspection resulted in 39 points). The very rare closure not caused by vermin. I imagine theyâll be cleared to reopen in a couple days, and I know that thereâs quite a lot of variability with health inspections these days, but still a shocking number of violations for a restaurant of this caliber.
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Surprising that a chef with his fine-dining background would get such an old-school health inspection report.
I usually try not to reveal too much of the back end of restaurant stuff civilians arenât privvy to but for fairness sake there has been a new batch of health inspectors in the Chinatown and Little Tokyo area who are doing things far too strictly by the book. They have been and will likely be the reason some of the mom and popâs decide to close if they are already on their last legs.
Nobody racks up this many infractions unless they are trying. Most health inspectors will allow you to fix certain things on the spot and not ding you for it but the most recent ones have been on a warpath so I would not take this seriously as something to hold against the chef. If anything its more of the cities bullshit to make it harder for business to operate and these extremely difficult times.
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Appreciate hearing your perspective and having people in the industry participate on the board. Clearly others feel the same way given how many likes your post has received.
I love analyzing data, and the inspection scores are public, so I decided to dig in.
I pulled 82,000 restaurant inspections countywide, then narrowed it to routine inspections in LA City: 34,252 inspections at 13,002 facilities, including 553 at 218 facilities in Chinatown and Little Tokyo.
On your point about quick fixes, if inspectors used to let something slide if it was fixed on-site, and now count it as a violation, that would show up in the data.
Over the year ending September 22 (the last date for which I have data), the two neighborhoodsâ combined average fell from 93.4 to 90.1. Thatâs about 2.7 points more of a decline than the rest of LA. Itâs worth pointing out, as my only goal here is to determine what the data shows, but we need to keep things in perspective. Thatâs only a couple of points.
But letâs look at the broader timing. Scores were already falling during 2025, and both neighborhoods averaged higher this JulyâSeptember than in early 2026. For JulyâSeptember, through September 22, their combined average was roughly unchanged from both AprilâJune and the same dates last year. The rest of LA slipped, so Little Tokyo and Chinatown actually did slightly better relative to the city in the most recent time period.
So while there might be some minor slippage over the past year in these neighborhoods (weâre talking a few points on average at most), they seem to be doing better compared to the rest of LA over the most recent period of the last 3 or so months.
The data does show that over the past year scores in Chinatown/Little Tokyo went down slightly (though they are now ticking back up) but it does not support an assertion that new inspectors are hammering restaurants in Little Tokyo and Chinatown - either compared to those same areas in the past, or LA as a whole.
For the record, if you read through my posts on this board, youâll see that I am absolutely in agreement that itâs too hard to operate a restaurant (or any business, really) in this city for a multitude of reasons, and I believe significant changes are desperately needed. But when it comes to health inspections specifically, the major issue there is not that theyâre being too tough, itâs that we donât have enough health inspectors.
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To your point a recent a great read from Tyler Wells on Betsy/Bar Betsyâs recent tussle:
As one co-proprietor of a now LA 3Mich* restaurant on opening a new restaurant said, âItâs as if LA doesnât want anyone to be in the restaurant business in this town.â
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Thank you for posting data. That is helpful.
Iâd be interested in data about the efficacy and costs / benefits of frequent health inspections. Conceding that I have an anti-government bias, I quickly found research raising doubts.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov : âResults suggest increasing the number of annual routine inspections in high-risk restaurants was not associated with a significant difference in measures of compliance with food safety regulations. Findings of this study do not provide evidence supporting increased frequency of restaurant inspection from annually to twice annually.â
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov : âthe frequency of inspection was not correlated with diseaseâ
Restaurant Inspection Scores and Foodborne Disease - Volume 10, Number 4âApril 2004 - Emerging Infectious Diseases journal - CDC âDespite the ubiquity of restaurant inspections, few studies have been published about the correlations between restaurant inspection scores or violations and foodborne illness, and the conclusions are conflicting ⌠The limited data available on outbreaks in Tennessee suggest that restaurant inspection scores alone do not predict the likelihood of a foodborne outbreak occurring in a particular establishment.â
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Thanks for sending. Iâll dig into those studies in more detail, but I did quickly read the abstracts.
Two initial thoughts popped into my head.
(1) It seems like the evidence could support that screening multiple times a year may not have any benefit over, say, once a year. But none of these studies looked at, nor can I even think of how you would look at, getting rid of screenings altogether. In any case, we have such a shortage of restaurant inspectors that >30% of restaurants are still not even getting inspected once per year.
(2) I am skeptical of government as well, but Iâm also skeptical of businesses. Iâm a firm believer that, on aggregate, individuals, businesses and governments act according to the incentive structure in place. I donât think restaurants should fear health inspections, but I do think they must understand that there are legitimate consequences for substandard health and safety practices. Whether our current restaurant health inspection system tests the right things or is fair and consistent is a separate conversation.
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