Wolfgang Puck Cafe

blossoms, and what Menashe calls foie gras halvah, which is to say duck liver whipped with sesame and served with slabs of grilled buckwheat toast. The crisp, flaky malawach, a Yemenite flatbread that you see in most Israeli cafes, is stupendously good here

doughnut holes are Middle Eastern only in the hint of rosewater. And her best dessert — a puck of chocolate-enrobed licorice ice cream with Maldon salt, a dead ringer for the chocolate-covered Lakrids licorice candy from Denmark — may be Middle Eastern only

snipped basil — a creation that out-Wolfgang-Pucks Wolfgang Puck. The avocado, shriveled slightly from the heat, were intensified versions of its raw self. Still creamy, but now doubly soft, it's the difference between a just-braised pork belly and one

, about when it opened. My story angle was this: here was a beloved O.C. success story, which was now exporting its influence and excellent Southern vittles into territories beyond. Usually it's the other way around, with the David Myers' and the Wolfgang

Pucks of L.A. breaching our borders to open restaurants here. For the time it was open, Memphis at The Beach decreased the trade deficit in our favor. ] The food was the same. The fried chicken still had the gravitational pull of a celestial object. The

so I crashed the joint even though it isn't opened yet. I meet the owners and I am totally excited. Their names are Roberto N Fernanda. He is a lifetime baker and has been working the pizza oven with Wolfgang Puck for the past year while this place is

of thing. Bignes has also worked with Wolfgang Puck (that’s him in a framed picture, arm-in-arm with the gourmet-pizza mogul). Now on his own at this modest square of a restaurant kitty-corner from Triangle Square, he seems determined to fine-tune his

—asparagus, sprinkles of crumbled pancetta and a fried egg with the yolk just barely warmed—become distractions from cheese-pizza bliss. A barbecue-chicken pizza—an homage to Puck himself and a rebuke of his copycats—bucks Neapolitan tradition with a drizzle

already divorced from its bones and now reminiscent of a pile of messy brown rags draping the hockey puck of a breaded “manchego cheese risotto cake” that, in retrospect, sounded better on paper. What Diego's has done here Anepalco's Cafe and Raya at Ritz

Diego's Downtown seemed to have materialized from nowhere. Apart from the location at the former Cafe Azteca across from the Yost Theater, the menu of alta cocina-style dishes and an anemic paragraph describing its owner/chef Richard Espinachio as a

You can't blame David Wilhelm for being proactive. With OC's once-meteoric housing market in a slump and its citizenry mired in rising debt, the restaurant mogul—the closest we get to Wolfgang Puck—had to make some changes quickly. His repertoire of