Radicchio

It used to be that radicchio was one of those oddball vegetables that you could find in the grocery store but not very often at farmers markets. That's because early on everyone except for a couple of big farmers had a difficult time growing it. Now, with a better choice of seeds and better knowledge of growing practices, radicchio is becoming more available. There are many varieties of radicchio. Most of what we see at farmers markets is Treviso, which comes in a red, round head. It is mildly bitter and makes a good salad ingredient.

It used to be that radicchio was one of those oddball vegetables that you could find in the grocery store but not very often at farmers markets. That's because early on everyone except for a couple of big farmers had a difficult time growing it. Now, with a better choice of seeds and better knowledge of growing practices, radicchio is becoming more available. There are many varieties of radicchio. Most of what we see at farmers markets is Treviso, which comes in a red, round head. It is mildly bitter and makes a good salad ingredient.

Brentwood Bar and Grille on San Vicente Boulevard is a knockout. Try their grilled chicken breasts with linguini and radicchio for lunch and their lamb chops for dinner. When we don't want to splurge, we go to Bob Burns Restaurant in Santa Monica. Try sharing their bouillabaisse for dinner, or else order their swordfish and start with the Caesar salad. ALAN J. PHILLIPS Santa Monica

CHOPPED salad is the quintessential Los Angeles salad. After all, it's akin to the Cobb salad, which rose to stardom during the heyday of Hollywood's Brown Derby. And who hasn't been tempted to order one in any of a dozen Italian restaurants that have it on the menu as a cornerstone? But let's face it -- for years, the chopped salad has been resting on its laurels -- or its iceberg lettuce, anyway. Fortunately, it's undergone a renaissance lately.

Question: So many of the holiday recipes call for some type of alcohol. What can those of us who keep none in the house substitute? Answer: White or purple grape juice is a good alternative. Fruit juices that complement the other flavors in the recipe may also be used. Q: I was given several pounds of white rice flour. I don't know how to use it. Could I substitute it in part for white wheat flour?

Ellmer is a chef-instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and he writes in a straightforward manner that makes the recipes easy to follow. Don't be put off by the designation "for professionals" in the title. This book will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in Italian cuisine. The current generation of pasta lovers will find a long chapter devoted to that item in its many shapes, but pizza lovers will have to look for another book. The dough-based snack is not covered in this one. What you get instead are formulas for such wonderful sounding dishes as stuffed veal tenderloin wrapped in savoy cabbage with garlic and green peppercorn sauce, spring lamb chops stuffed with porcini and sun-dried tomatoes, beef roulades braised in Barolo and deviled grilled chicken with grilled scallions and radicchio.

C'est Fan-Fan is a Franco-Chinese miniature, a miniature version of Chinois on Main, to be exact. Strip Chinois down to the counter seating with the view of the chefs, and then pare down the staff to one chef and a waiter/assistant, and you have C'est Fan-Fan. There's no decor but a flower arrangement and some calligraphic Oriental paintings.

Cafe Katsu is a chic little restaurant in a new pod mall on Sawtelle Boulevard. While the other shops house the more prosaic dry cleaners, jewelry shops and pizza joints peculiar to these instant shopping centers, Cafe Katsu (an offshoot of the stunning, minimalist Katsu, a sushi bar on Hillhurst Avenue) is in a different class and, like its mother restaurant, as spare as a La Cienega gallery. The walls are white; the floor, cement; the table tops, granite; the chairs, Breuer.

One of my stage-struck lawyer friends is forever dreaming of an evening at Spago, on the off chance that she will rub elbows with the likes of Warren Beatty or Jack Nicholson. But when I invite her to Shane Hidden on the Glen, a pint-size strip-mall Spago at the top of Beverly Glen, she hesitates. She isn't after the delicious pizzas, salads and grilled meats you can eat in a place like this; she's after, well, a cheap thrill. So tonight, I promise her a celebrity. She agrees to meet me at 7.

"YOU know your kitchen is small when you're making salad on the stove," Suzanne Goin says as she pulls a cutting board over to her range and meticulously begins to slice radicchio leaves into long, feathery strips. It's here in her home in the Hollywood Hills that Goin worked on the recipes for her new cookbook, "Sunday Suppers at Lucques."

The residential skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver, Canada, are already covered with green. Rooftops and balconies overflow with ornamental vines, shrubs, even midsize magnolia and maple trees. And now, there's more. Vancouver is launching a novel green initiative aimed at bringing food-producing gardens to the city's high-density developments.

LOOK at the wildly tangled leaves of curly endive, the furiously jagged edges of dandelion greens, the deep furls of escarole and right off you know there's something about them that's just begging to be tamed. It's a bit of a paradox. These greens are loved for their bitter bite, but harnessing that bite -- say, by adding the spice of chiles or the sweetness of bacon or by giving them a quick blanch or even just a saute -- is what makes them sing. And at this time of year, bitter greens are calling from nearly every other stall or stand at the farmers market or the grocery store; they're a boon of winter.

"YOU know your kitchen is small when you're making salad on the stove," Suzanne Goin says as she pulls a cutting board over to her range and meticulously begins to slice radicchio leaves into long, feathery strips. It's here in her home in the Hollywood Hills that Goin worked on the recipes for her new cookbook, "Sunday Suppers at Lucques."

DO you remember the first time you saw the word "radicchio"? The first time you tried to say it out loud? Now, how about the first time you cooked it? We didn't think so. Radicchio may have gone from an obscure Italian vegetable to a supermarket familiarity, but for most people it remains nothing more than a splashy colored lettuce, a bit of crimson to break up the monotony of a pale green salad mix. In Italy, particularly around Venice, it is cooked almost as often as it is served raw.

For hundreds of years, people have waxed poetic about the light in Venice. I was sure it would floor me on my first trip there last fall. But it rained and was overcast my entire stay, leaving me eager for some other equally moving visual experience. Hidden behind clouds, the full moon provided no magic, though it did bring the acqua alta, or high water, to flood the streets and keep me from the Byzantine mosaics of St. Mark's Basilica. Don't even ask about the gondola ride.

Normally, I'm pretty picky about the temperature of my lettuce. In fact, my wife and the servers at our neighborhood soup 'n' salad place will tell you that I'm downright obsessive about it. All because I feel obliged to point out, very politely I think, that serving my salad on a plate hot out of the dishwasher isn't the best idea. And don't even get me started on all of these so-called Caesar salads topped with grilled meat. Lettuces are mostly water. Heat them and they wilt.

Like fluctuating hemlines, certain dishes rise up and then almost immediately fall out of fashion with alarming predictability. And, something fresh on the food scene today is almost certain to appear stale tomorrow. Particularly if a much-touted food (like croissants, chocolate truffles or goat cheese) has already begun to filter into Middle America's culinary consciousness.

Nestled comfortably in that marketing niche between the Parkway Grill and the Chronicle, the Columbia Bar & Grill is in many ways the prototypical Pasadena restaurant: a basic grill menu only slightly inflected by New American eclectic cooking; prices in the range that well-off people might find reasonable; a dining room populated almost exclusively by casually dressed-up women and men in dark jackets and ties.

Nestled comfortably in that marketing niche between the Parkway Grill and the Chronicle, the Columbia Bar & Grill is in many ways the prototypical Pasadena restaurant: a basic grill menu only slightly inflected by New American eclectic cooking; prices in the range that well-off people might find reasonable; a dining room populated almost exclusively by casually dressed-up women and men in dark jackets and ties.

One of my stage-struck lawyer friends is forever dreaming of an evening at Spago, on the off chance that she will rub elbows with the likes of Warren Beatty or Jack Nicholson. But when I invite her to Shane Hidden on the Glen, a pint-size strip-mall Spago at the top of Beverly Glen, she hesitates. She isn't after the delicious pizzas, salads and grilled meats you can eat in a place like this; she's after, well, a cheap thrill. So tonight, I promise her a celebrity. She agrees to meet me at 7.