People talk about restaurants as theater, and more Los Angeles restaurateurs are making it happen. Some of the most talked-about new restaurants around, including Meson G in Hollywood, Pecorino in Brentwood and Orris in West Los Angeles, have put their chefs in the spotlight by seating diners at counters facing open kitchens.
Nowhere, though, does the stage show match the drama of the original. For 21 years, during more than 7,500 running performances, Chinois has been serving up the most extravagant cooking theatrics in town. It's Broadway on Main Street. Flames, footwork and flashing cutlery in an arena of peened copper, mosaic tile, brick and stainless steel.
The dining counter at Chinois on Main in Santa Monica has stools for only nine.
These are not seats you choose for easy conversation or courtship. This is not a place to unwind, nor to wheel and deal. Here you won't find the best line of sight to scan the well-attended room for famous faces.
These seats are for serious kitchen voyeurs. Here you're as close to the burners of the stove as to the restaurant's other patrons. No need to ask what looks good tonight.
Turn on the spotlights; crank up the fires. This is industrial strength, Bessemer furnace, scorched-iron and scalding-caldron cooking for those who lust after the for-est-fire roar of chopped spinach leaves fed into volcanic oil, or the cauterizing heat of a wok that renders whole catfish into instantaneous catfish sculpture. This is where you are reminded to say your thanks, because we omnivores live by the grace of other living things -- a fact witnessed as your lobster is transformed from life to life-giving with a struggle of legs and claws against the sear of a skillet. If you want to talk to your spouse at the counter, you'll have to raise your voice over the cymbal clang of spatula and ladle or wait for that order of duck fried rice to come out of the pot.
This is not a solo performance, such as chef Nancy Silverton's weekly "mozzarella nights" at the cocktail bar of Jar in West Hollywood. It's a team pro show: six men and a woman cooking in a U-shaped arena precisely compact enough for, well, for seven. Anything more than a step in either direction requires someone else to make way, a fast-paced chain reaction that keeps the white-jacketed kitchen crew moving in a perpetual line dance.
Even money says that half the patrons here have been shooed out of more spacious kitchens in private homes because the host needed room to work.
