Restaurant: Red Medicine [1, 2, 3, 4]
Location: 8400 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, Ca. 90211. 323-651-6500.
Date: February 19, 2014
Cuisine: Elfin Fantasy Food
Summary: Open Late!
On my brother’s birthday this year we got out of a show (The Book of Mormon) late and needed to find some 11pm dinner, which isn’t always easy in LA. We ended up at the radical Red Medicine.
From my cellar: 1985 Castell’in Villa Chianti Classico Riserva. 92 points. My brother likes it old, so I grabbed this — and as we had no idea what restaurant we might end up at, it wasn’t exactly paired. Still, it was a great wine. A wonderful well stored Chianti Classico. Very firm and just hinting at some very dark mature fruits. More towards mature , mineral, tar, cigar. A unique wine and well worth the try.
FORAGED MUSHROOMS. elderberry, stambler’s rye, brown butter, balsam fir. As you can see, Red Medicine isn’t easy to categorize. This vegetarian dish was buried under — for lack of a better word — fronds. There are chunks, serious meaty chunks, of mushroom under there in a “creamy” sauce. It tasted wonderful, but sure was a helluva lot of fiber!
WILD YELLOWFIN TUNA. toasted grains, duck broth, roasted kale oil, quince. Radical. This sure looks weird, but it tasted great. The fish was soft and silky, and there was an interesting crunch to those fried greens.
DUNGENESS CRAB SWEET POTATOES. sea bean porridge, egg yolk. There was LOTS of chunky crab in here. Sort of a new age crab norfolk.
CHICKEN DUMPLINGS. banana vinegar, crème fraîche, caramelized sugar, confitures.
You wrap all those ingredients up in a leaf. It tastes wonderful. Juicy meat (chicken) with a nice BBQ flavor.
BEEF TARTARE / water. lettuce, water chestnut, nuoc, leo, chlorophyll. The meat is under the “dust” (the chlorophyll). The meat was great, but the dust is perhaps a little too “dusty.”
Shrimp chips for eating the tartar with.
COCONUT BAVAROIS / condensed milk, coffee, thai basil, peanut croquant. This was absolutely delicious. Creamy, flavorful, weird, and that crunchy stuff was amazing.
If you have a stomach for experimentation, vegetation, and unusual forms, you really should try Red Medicine. Despite the weird looks, and often oddball textures (not to mention oversized vegetable parts) it really does taste out of this world (and good).