Experimental chefs all around Los Angeles are shaking up traditional breakfast recipes and serving them all day long to satiate flexible appetites. Angelenos, particularly those engaged in creative endeavors, enjoy the freedom to shuffle up breakfast and business routines, and it’s transforming L.A.’s breakfast scene. We condensed The New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier’s report of some of the best specialty dishes, perfect for brunch meetings by the ocean or afternoon pick-me-ups out of the home office.
Jessica Koslow has pioneered day-starters that come across as simultaneously comforting and disorienting, on purpose. Try her Sqirl-spin on shakshuka, or sorrel pesto rice and a “Home on the Range” tartine that makes bedfellows of sturgeon, romesco sauce and apples.
A brunch-hours-only box where Ludo Lefebvre joins forces with Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook for wake-and-bake mash-ups like a tostada crowned with deep purple beets, tongue-tingling “chilaquiles” made with hash browns, and French toast that conjures the flavor and texture of churros. Catch specials that involve “a side of French onion soup to dunk a quesadilla in.”
Nontraditional all-day breakfast favorites are kimchi fried rice made with soft eggs and tender short ribs, and mushroom toast which is topped with soft-scrambled eggs, mushrooms, ham, spinach, hollandaise and red wine sauce. Walter Manzke and his wife Margarita use fresh ingredients from the farmers’ markets and careful technique.
Chef and baker Travis Lett serves house-smoked fish alongside fresh bread in a place that feels like an East-West fusion of Russ & Daughters and the “Good Vibrations”-era Beach Boys.
The yolk-gooey eggs sandwiched wagyu tri-tip steak, house-made turkey sausage, or hardwood smoked bacon, served on warm brioche buns, in Grand Central Market.
Amanda Chantal Bacon’s elixirs, milks and powders is said to aid with “anything you’re looking to achieve energetically or physically,” as Sean Brennan, an employee in the Silver Lake branch. The place also serves bullet-size shots of ocean minerals that another employee described as “unicorn’s tears.”
From about 100 yards from Venice beach, chef Nyesha J. Arrington whips up “adult Frosted Flakes,” a bowl of brown-rice pudding laced with dark rum and top-layered with cereal that has been toasted in brown butter.
With perfect proportions of smoked potatoes, chorizo, and avocado, this breakfast burrito wraps up crispy, soft, savory, and fresh all in one tortilla for a full-range textural experience.
Curated from The New York Times.
