I think this is the most underrated restaurant in LA. Factoring in uniqueness and creativity, it is top ten. It has gotten better over the years, with the flavor level narrowing the gap with the novelty level.
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keep meaning to try it
great pics - I don’t think they could be mistaken for anyone else’s food or “plating”
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Thanks! Peony puts a lot of effort into the pics and does a great job.
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Was this the longer omakase menu?
dish.
Is it all omakase or can you order a la carte?
Looks like they have a la carte in the lounge and a choice of tasting ($75 weeknights, $95 weekends) and omakase ($195) menus in the dining room.
“This is called a flambadou,” Kahn says as he grabs his phone and plays a video of Meteora’s oyster-preparation process. “It’s a medieval cooking device. It’s an iron cone that’s hollow on both ends with a rod attached to it, and you keep it in the coals, and it gets glowing hot, well over 1,000 degrees. You throw dry-aged beef fat inside, and it immediately combusts and flame-throws beef fat at the oyster. It’s essentially a flamethrower where the fuel is beef fat. And what’s important about that is that when you combust something, it changes the chemistry drastically. The flavor of that beef fat tastes very different than if we were to just make hot beef fat.”
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They also have supplements you can add onto the smaller tasting menus. There’s some overlap with the additional courses on the omakase, but others like the red prawn are only available as a supplement.
Very cool, I’ve only done the shorter tasting menu. How would you compare this one? Looks like a combination of the shorter menu and the supplements.
Oysters cooked with burning beef tallow with the flambadou has been the signature dish of a live-fire restaurant in Stockholm: Ekstedt.
I took these pictures about 5 years ago, but they had been doing it for several years prior.
I also had a flatbread with lobster kissed by coals. Maybe not quite the scarlet prawn kissed with charcoal on flatbread one at Meteora, but looking back at my meal at Ekstedt, I found it maybe a bit similar to how Meteora’s sounds.
At Ekstedt, it was a rye flatbread with lobster emulsion and the tail kissed by coals, with smoked reindeer heart rested in cumin butter, parsley, and coriander seeds, with sweet sunchokes and kale.
Perhaps Kahn was inspired in a previous Scandinavian trip, or maybe not. Maybe coal/charcoal-kissed lobster/prawn flatbreads are a thing in parts of the world, I don’t know. I don’t plan to visit Meteora so I won’t be able to really tell if the dishes are similar.
at Meteora calling its menu “chef’s omakase.”
Anyway, live fire kitchens are hard to manage, so props to anyone trying to do this, particularly in LA.
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The waiter only handed us the tasting menu. But we saw the table next to us had the shrimp. So we asked the waiter to add the shrimp. So I assume you can order other stuff, too. 
We haven’t been there for very long time, so I don’t quite remember the shot menu. Warrior and I both enjoyed our dinner a lot last night. I think the flavor has improved quite a lot since our last visit. 
His food has leaned New Nordic for years and I’d be shocked if he wasn’t taking inspiration from places like Ekstedt. You see it on display the most at Destroyer. At Meteora I would characterize it as New Nordic through the lens of pseudo-indigenous South American cuisine? Vespertine is maybe New Nordic through the lens of… sci-fi dystopian future? 
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haha i’ll take your word for it! pseudo-indigenous 
how is this in anyway japanese? 
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story about the gardener that tends to the plants…
https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/meteora-restaurant-hollywood-jordan-kahn-plants-19495253.php
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Warrior: I don’t know Jordan Kahn or what he thinks about food. For me this food is like starting over. Not literally, but in spirit. Losing what we know now about what tastes good and what works, testing new ideas from scratch—using some residual knowledge of French cuisine (from reincarnation?). Using “foraged” ingredients (not necessarily literally) and primal instincts. I really like Meteora. The dishes have good ingredients, are executed well, and are, for better or worse, weird but tasty.
Peony: I like Meteora. Their dishes are always creative and exciting and use interesting ingredients. The only negativity I have today is I feel this tasting menu is not as good as the last one we had.
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It doesn’t look like the menu changes very much…This seems mostly the same as when the longer tasting launched?
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Yeah, the menu does not change as much as one would hope. Back when they first opened, they said they were going to change it every week.