Fabulous. I didn’t think so but thought I’d give it a shot. I want that bread and that spaghetto… spa ghetto. 
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Oh, well, they’re calling the public number. Of course no one picks up. They don’t want the public in there.
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Lmao
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The tasting menu included
- Spring is coming
- Insalata di mare
- Pasta fagioli
- Flying buffalos
- Dessert
So same price for smaller portions…
135 instead of 155
Ah…you’re right. I was looking at the fagiolini. Still a bad deal…
Can you folks stop “screaming” about the “absurd” prices and “ripping apart” the small portions? we’re starting to make click bait headlines.
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Absurd. How can one scream about small portions without trying it? Which requires a reservation 99% of us can’t get because the Resy which requires a phone number that works to get through to a real live person seems to be going to ether.
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i’m starting to think ‘we’ aren’t the only ones reading this board. lol
For all our arguing I think we do it pretty politely and really it’s a fair conversation to have -If you are going to charge that much you better bring it. Italian in LA is pretty competitive.
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Eater continues w/ the shameless content mining of this place.
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Not just eater - LA Times writers are cribbing the shit out of us. Here’s BLADDY’s discussion of Needle, PRD and Chef Tony from today’s newsletter (in contrast to eater at least he tries the food and interviews the chefs):
“Last May my colleague Lucas Kwan Peterson wrote a column about a string of 1980s-era Cantonese restaurants that had recently closed in the San Gabriel Valley. The closures included three Monterey Park behemoths — Ocean Star Restaurant, Empress Harbor Seafood Restaurant and Lincoln Seafood — that relied on opulent banquets and the popularity of weekend dim sum cart service to thrive.
Lucas discussed a combination of reasons for their shuttering: the ever-increasing costs of running large restaurants; business models that likely relied on grueling work conditions; and, from a cultural standpoint, changing generational tastes.
The shift in palates and predilections makes sense considering the breadth of regional Chinese options in the SGV. The area’s early waves of immigrants arrived from the coastal Guangdong province (formerly known as Canton); immigration from Mainland China over the last couple of decades has given us da pan ji (“big plate chicken”) and hand-pulled noodles from Xinjiang province, Beijing-style lamb pie, salted Nanjing duck, Shanghainese yan du xian (double pork soup with bamboo shoots), the many nuanced glories of modern Sichuan cooking … and so much more.
Cantonese restaurants, saddled with an unfairly fusty reputation, can drift into the background in the churn of all these exhilarating new regional specialists.
The term “Cantonese” encompasses Guangdong’s direct, lightly seasoned, vegetable-rich cooking and also the mingled, urban foodways of nearby Hong Kong and Macao, with their centuries of global influences.
I treasure the SGV’s culinary pluralism; I would also mourn the loss of ambitious Cantonese cooking in our area. So it’s been encouraging to see three new Cantonese-influenced restaurants open in recent months outside the SGV. Each of them tells a story about directions in the cuisine’s local evolution.
Chef Tony opened in Pasadena last month. It’s the latest restaurant from Tony He, who owns 17-year-old Seafood Harbour in Rosemead. He runs two similar restaurants in Richmond, British Columbia. Seafood Harbour leans to oceanic luxuries; Chef Tony takes a more casual, lighthearted and often Westernized approach to the cuisine, particularly dim sum. (He doesn’t shy from the word “fusion.”) Har gaw comes in dumpling wrappers dyed opaque with squid ink and topped with gold leaf; pork and shrimp siu mai are adorned with black truffles.
More compelling to me is the use of regional seafood in more traditional dishes, such as Dungeness crab or local prawns stir-fried in black pepper. For his Richmond restaurants He has squab and water fowl raised locally to his specifications (smaller, without antibiotics) for dishes he char-grills, and though they’re not yet on the Pasadena menu I hope they’ll appear as specials.
The other restaurants, both in Los Angeles proper, come from two young chefs cooking to maintain connection with their heritage.
Congee from the brunch menu at Needle restaurant in Silver Lake. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Ryan Wong, who grew up in the SGV, worked at Trois Mec and Otium over the last decade before opening Needlein Silver Lake four months ago. “I never really connected with the food I was cooking in fine dining,” Wong said in a telephone interview. “It was great to learn the techniques, but I didn’t feel it deep down. I wanted to figure out my own voice, referring back to food memories of my mom and my family in the kitchen.”
Wong’s restaurant is purposefully low-key: Nothing costs more than $14, and orders are taken at the counter. Among the cold dishes are wood-ear and frilly snow fungus mushrooms fragrant with ginger, scallion and chile oil and cucumbers paired with the faint funk of black garlic. White cut chicken with dipping sauces is an antecedent of Singapore’s famous Hainanese chicken. The cooks make char siu in small batches throughout the day so the pork tastes ultra-fresh. At brunch Wong serves the deep-fried, peanut-butter-stuffed sandwich known as “Hong Kong French toast”; the dish is emblematic of that city’s tea cafe culture.
Wong is thinking through ways that California bounty innately melds with Cantonese technique. He stir-fries pea shoots in garlic, a standard in the repertoire, but then adds an herbal vegetable stock of local winter vegetables infused with goji berry and jujubes (which I saw fresh right down the street from Needle at Saturday’s Silver Lake farmers market).
On the more caloric side, there’s a variation of pork chop bun, a classic snack made here with fried pork loin cutlet on a domed homemade milk bread bun with a vegetable relish and pickled cucumber.
Compare it to the one chef Johnny Lee is making at his brand-new Pearl River Deli in Chinatown’s Far East Plaza. Lee makes a pineapple bao, a sugared bun so named because its crunchy, cross-hatched crown resembles the fruit. He plops a whole, bone-in pork chop on the split bao and slicks on mayo and sofrito. It’s pretty irresistible. Lee was inspired by versions he’s seen in Macau (and watched Anthony Bourdain savor on television).
Pork chop on a pineapple bao at Pearl River Deli. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
It’s a staple on the Pearl River Deli’s short, mercurial menu. Lee took over the space recently vacated by Eddie Huang’s Baohaus, which sits next to Howlin’ Ray’s and its forever-trailing lines. Lee is best known for his obsessive take on Hainanese chicken, which he served for a couple of years at Side Chick in the Westfield Santa Anita. His family roots stem from Taishan, Guangdong; many of California’s earliest, 19th century Chinese immigrants arrived from the area.
“I’ve come back to food that I want to eat,” Lee said over the phone. He, too, is making char siu, sticky and charred and served over rice. He makes a comforting classic of silky eggs with shrimp (Needle frequently does as well). In the summer, to take advantage of the local produce, he’ll make Cantonese stir-fried eggs with meaty heirloom tomatoes. A sweet and sour dish is in the works, to help restore the good name of that long-standing Cantonese dish, often made tart with hawthorn berry.
No cuisine stays vital if it isn’t considered with fresh eyes, with eager hands, with curious minds willing to understand history in order to create the future. It’s awesome to see some fresh, sudden energy around Cantonese cooking. Look for formal reviews of all three restaurants in the coming months.”
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Damn he probably read my post! Hey Bill FYI Pasadena is in SGV.
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probably because they couldn’t get their exclusive
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The site gets almost as many pageviews by anonymous readers as logged-in readers. I’m not sure if the report is visible to non-admins:
https://www.foodtalkcentral.com/admin/reports/consolidated_page_views
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Addison has a lot of sources, including restaurants contacting the Times directly. He may learn some things from this board but for sure he’s sometimes ahead of it. And Yelp, Instagram, and the ABC license database are sometimes ahead of everybody else.
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Hey, shameless? We are giving clear linking and credit to folks here. Mona was at the first media preview of the restaurant, before anyone here. Things changed a lot since then. No need to get petty. We can all learn from each other.
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We were among the first to see the space and experience the restaurant, but things have changed a lot since the initial opening. And PR hasn’t necessarily been the most cooperative. We’re doing our best for the benefit of everyone.
By the way, while many of you are anonymous, I participate here with full ID and accountability. We’re not here to steal content. This forum is a place to collaborate and share ideas, at least that’s how I see it. Of course, I’ve been participating in food forums since Chowhound days and every time it just becomes some petty/ridiculous dick measuring contest. I hope this place doesn’t come to that.
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i have no issue with eater using this site and linking to it and i appreciate the content you provide.
but did you or mona actually read the thread before writing that headline and article? who’s actually “screaming” over the “$40 handmade tortellini, $42 trout with hazelnuts and mushrooms, $18 side dishes, and a $20 cheesecake with buttermilk, cherries, and licorice.”? besides the tortellini (which @moonboy403 says is a better value than osteria mozza) we don’t even mention any of the other items. and who’s “ripping apart” the small portions?
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