The perfect California road trip meal

It’s Food Bowl weekend! Plus, Josiah Citrin’s Mélisse at 25, a coffee shop turned restaurant, pizza pop-ups, Frenchy grilled cheese. And robots in the kitchen? Meet the Autocado. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.
Last Sunday, I pulled off California’s 101 highway at Los Alamos, then clomped up the wood steps of the saloon-like building that is Full of Life Flatbread and had the kind of late-summer meal that shows the Golden State at its best.
A melon and cucumber salad is what first got my attention — the melon at peak ripeness was shaped into bite-sized orbs, its sweetness set off by the crisp cucumber, plus red chile slices for heat and a crumble of feta to tame the vinaigrette that was amped up with fish sauce. Fish sauce was also one of the welcome umami notes in Full of Life’s summer michelada with Tutti Fruitti heirloom tomatoes and serrano chile.
Then there was a genius burger of Waygu beef served with a crunch-perfect layer of potato rosti — think of your ideal hash browns — that erased the need for French fries. I can imagine a fast-food chain turning potato rosti on burgers into a nationwide phenomenon, but I’m glad I got to eat the real thing first.
Of course, we ordered flatbread for our group — multiple pies, in fact. One with dates, bacon and walnuts; one with beef cheek, caramelized onion, tomatillo, stewed tomatoes and cotija cheese; one with Full of Life’s own fennel sausage plus onion, mozzarella and Grana Padano; and another with great pepperoni and charred pasilla peppers.
Flatbread, after all, is the reason Clark Staub started the business more than 20 years ago, after he left his life as a marketing executive for Capitol Records. I started coming to his Los Alamos outpost back in the days when it was known as American Flatbread. But it wasn’t always easy to get a table. At that time, the dining room was only open on Friday and Saturday nights because the rest of the week it functioned as the workroom for Staub’s business making frozen flatbread.
The frozen flatbread business continued after the name change, but slowly the dining room hours expanded a bit because so many people fell in love not only with Staub’s flatbreads but with Full of Life’s salad and pasta specials, which always make great use of the area’s best seasonal produce. I’m convinced that those meals are the reason that Los Alamos, basically a one-street town that looks like the setting for a movie western (if you ignore the excellent artisan bakery and high-end “provisions” shops that have moved in), became a mecca for food lovers … and home to the one-star Michelin restaurant Bell’s.
In recent years chef Jill Davie, who has worked with Hans Rockenwagner, Josie Le Balch and many other chefs, joined Staub as his partner and wife. Her influence seems especially strong in the daily specials. Last year about this time I had a fantastic dish of chile crisp green beans and shrimp. And my friend Margy Rochlin and I are still talking about smoked chicken soup, packed with season produce.
I think I’m going to have to make Full of Life Flatbread more than a once-a-year road trip stop.
Our L.A. Times Food Bowl festival is in full swing this weekend at Paramount Studios. Last night on the L.A. Times Food Stage, Baroo chef Kwang Uh and his wife Mina Park received their Restaurant of the Year award along with Raul Ortega, who was this year’s winner of the L.A. Times Gold Award. Saturday tickets are sold out, but there are limited tickets remaining for Sunday’s session, which is the only day that kids are welcome to enjoy the fun. I’ll be on the L.A. Times Food stage on Sunday with Mozza’s Nancy Silverton, who is making treats from her latest cookbook, “The Cookie That Changed My Life.” Kismet’s Sarah Hymanson and Sara Kramer will also be on stage demonstrating recipes from their “Kismet: Bright, Fresh, Vegetable-Loving Recipes.”
If you have tickets, stop by our L.A. Times Food booth where you can purchase L.A. Asada and the michelada salt Spicy Angeleno, our latest spice collaborations with Burlap and Barrel developed by deputy food editor Betty Hallock, plus our original California Heat. Food editor Daniel Hernandez has been cooking with the spices and coming up with inventive ways to use them. We’ll also have copies of our 101 Best Tacos in Los Angeles zine, plus hats, sweatshirts and colorful aprons made for us by Hedley & Bennett.
And if you’re coming to Saturday’s Food Bowl session, look for TikTok star Owen Han, known as “the king of sandwiches,” who will be making recipes from his forthcoming “Stacked: The Art of the Perfect Sandwich.” Hallock profiled Han, whose TikTok post for his beef shawarma wrapped in laffa generated 52.3 million views. As Hallock points out, “that’s more than the entire population of South Korea.” We also have two recipes from Han that are worth checking out: Nonna’s Meatball Sandwich and OG Spicy Chicken Sandwich With Avocado And Bacon.
And here’s one more great sandwich for you from Pasjoli chef Dave Beran, star of the latest episode of our L.A. Times Food series “Chef That!” He makes the sandwich that Times restaurant critic Bill Addison called “a grilled cheese for the ages” and that columnist Jenn Harris named the best grilled cheese in the universe. At Pasjoli, the sandwich — served only on the bar menu — is named the Croque Matthieu for former chef de cuisine Matthew Kim. Find the full recipe for the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich at L.A. Times Food.
Food contributor Heather Platt spent time with Mélisse chef and owner Josiah Citrin when the restaurant recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. “Mélisse is one of the few remaining French fine-dining tasting-menu restaurants of its era,” she writes in her story. “Yet it has thrived not as a bastion of ’90s California-French cuisine but instead because of Citrin’s openness to redefining what California-French food is.”
Critic Bill Addison is crazy for Stir Crazy, the onetime Melrose Avenue coffee spot that Macklin Casnoff, Harley Wertheimer and Mackenzie Hoffman plus a kitchen team led by Caroline Leff, turned into a restaurant with “minimalist space, maximum impact.” Addison adds: It’s “a warming renovation that serves form and function. A casual, Euro-Californian menu. An incredible wine program led by Hoffman. In the year since the trio settled in, an old haunt has been reborn with a new soul.” Read more in his latest review.
Lately we’ve seen many of our favorite pop-ups transition to full-on brick-and-mortar restaurants. But that doesn’t mean we’ve seen a slowdown in pop-ups. In fact, more and more businesses — from wine bars to neighborhood markets — have become pop-up hosts with the owners giving customers a rotating roster of culinary talent coming through like touring deejays. Last week assistant food editor Danielle Dorsey and summer intern Bryan A’Hearn published a guide to some of L.A.’s most exciting pop-up hosts operating right now.
Pizza pop-ups are also still going strong. And though it almost sounds like a joke when L.A. Times Food columnist Jenn Harris describes the location of one of her new favorite L.A. pizza pop-ups — “a wooden table in a corner of the back patio of a coffee shop off Pico Boulevard started by a former management consultant who was briefly a vegan” — the pie is seriously good. “The bottom is golden and lacy with a delicate crunch,” writes Harris of Mievè in West L.A. “The middle is impossibly airy, a light, puffy cushion for all the toppings.” She’s also liking the blistered, bubbly crust of Jackson Baugh’s Caro Mio, which this month is available at Maury’s Bagels in Silver Lake.