Restaurant: Meteora
Location: 6703 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038. (323) 402-4311
Date: July 21, 2022
Cuisine: Primal Elfin
Rating: Late Red Medicine reborn
Meteora is the latest restaurant by Jordan Kahn. I’ve been following him for years, from Old Red Medicine, to Late Red Medicine, to Vespertine (on site), to Vespertine (at home), to Destroyer. He’s one “out of the box” chef for sure! Meteora is a new high end ala carte concept. it’s currently in soft opening, but as a “regular” customers (who ordered a bunch of takeout from Vespertine) Erick and I got invites.
It’s located in the old Auburn space (which was a great restaurant, BTW, and I was sad to see it close). I’ve actually eaten in at least 6 restaurants in this space: Citrus, Alex, something else, Hatfields, Auburn, and now Meteora. It’s a gorgeous space but must be somewhat cursed (probably too large).
Jordan clearly has a substantial investor pipeline because the build out is not only so “him” but is quite extensive. Really, the bones of the Auburn space are largely unchanged but they have grafted on a ton of primal, forested, elfin, Michael and Roger Dean details. It’s very dark, and really weird ambient music blares. It’s also scented like a forest. You just have to experience it.
The bar area and its whacky decor. It’s darker and moodier than these photos make it look, I brightened them up so things were visible.
The bar is like a weird Sleestak cave. Or something designed by Catalan genius Antoni Gaudí.
The cocktail tables, like most everything, are totally form over function. They are tiny, made of rock, and not even level. Barely usable at all!
The cocktail menu. Weird stuff. There is barely any wine yet. We brought ours. They do allow corkage fortunately, although it’s not cheap.
Pressed melon juice, anise hyssop, melon seed milk, aged grape liqueur, bee pollen-agave spirit.
Freshly-pressed sugar cane juice, lemongrass, jicama, ginger, biodynamic lime, wild corn and cane spirit.
Ancient purple corn, pressed plum juice, apricot seed, avocado leaf, opuntia, aged corn spirit.
The main dining room is just as weird as the bar — only larger. The open kitchen from Auburn is still there, only mostly blocked off. This space is huge. You can see how they have scaffolded the Alien Forest Gaudí details over the old Auburn interior.
It should be noted that the lighting in here is extremely minimal, and Jordan doesn’t like flashes, so photography was VERY difficult.
Welcome cocktail of “kombucha”.
From my cellar: NV Billecart-Salmon Champagne Brut Sous Bois. VM 92. Bright yellow. Pungent orchard fruit and lemon curd scents are complemented by suggestions of vanilla, anise and smoky minerals. Toasty and silky in texture, offering juicy pear and tangerine flavors plus a deeper suggestion of candied fig on the back half. Closes sappy, focused and long, with repeating smokiness and strong mineral cut.
The current menu.
Live Scallop. Lightly marinated in deep ocean water, dressed with smoked donganiza sausage, crunchy lovage steams, preserved apricots, Indian mallow, and crisps of giant kelp.
A liquified rendering of sausage was poured over it and then ground sausage sprinkled. The kelp can be seen on the left side. It was way too fragile to actually support placing the mix of scallop et al on top. But the unusual flavor of the scallops was delicious. Very rich with all that sausage fat. This set the pace for various systematic qualities of Meteora cuisine:
- concealed ingredients
- flowers, leaves and foliage on top
- high fat “sauces”
- complex and unusual pairings, tending to include sweet, savory, and “herbal”
- very varied textures
- bright colors mixed with earth tones
- awkward methods of eating that don’t allow all the ingredients in the mouth at once
- black bowls and awkward flatware
Bigfin Squid. Quickly grilled and seasoned with wild spruce and bird’s eye chile, with young coconut, ripe cherimoya, crunchy jicama, and a vibrant dressing of macadamia nut milk.
This was certainly a flavorful dish, one of our favorites. The black crisp was almost solid enough to support the squid, although it tended to break into small pieces. The textures were both soft and crunchy and firm. The flavors were spicy and assertive and distinctively southeast asian. There was a coconut acidic tone. Excellent.
Avocado Pie. Biodynamic avocados cooked in hot ashes, flaky crust of avocado leaf and einkorn flour, grilled strawberries, caramelized lettuce, herbs and leaves of the moment, finished with spanish peanuts, burnt onion and a warm bone marrow vinaigrette (pure fat again!).
Here after they basically poured molten bone marrow on top and sprinkled with the peanuts. This giant “tart” fragmented instantly. It did taste great but the failed attempts to get any reasonable percentage of the components into one’s mouth at any one time were a bit frustrating.
From my cellar: 2012 Prager Riesling Federspiel Steinriegl. 94 points. Screwcap. Slightly off-dry, barely any development. Didn’t have the exotic fruit that I sometimes get from riper vintages in Austria but instead it had lots of tart yellow fruit accompanied by an impressive steely minerality. Liked this a lot, a textbook Riesling. Just a shame this producer is so difficult to source here.
Caramelized Lobster Rice. heirloom indica brown rice crisped in black claw, grilled lobster glazed with black jaggery and sugar kelp, roasted fruits of the moment, black butter, sea lettuce, and a crisp of roasted brazil nuts and allepo chile.
The rice and lobster were (as usual) hidden under the foliage. This was a powerfully flavored dish — bursting with all sorts of tastes — except that of lobster. It was very good, but mostly tasted of exotic spices. The texture was primarily “wild rice” like. It was pretty spicy and so went well with the riesling.
Wild Pacific Dungeness Crab. Gently warmed over the embers and dressed with coconut fat infused with roasted crab shells and allspice, cucumber molasses, slow roasted turnips, and slices of heirloom banana.
You can’t see it in the photo but there was actually a lot of crab under the layer of greens. Once mixed up it had lots of crab in butter flavor. The other elements were interesting. I fortunately did not seem to get a bite of banana, which I hate. People thought it an “unusual” pairing. As you can see, this had most of the hallmarks of Meteora dishes.
Red Sea Bream. Grilled on the skin and wrapped in banana leaf, dried cacao flower, wild iceplant, served with a praline of smoked chiles, hazelnuts, and clove.
The net effect here was grilled fish with an excellent and powerful mole negro (black mole). The sauce was spicy with a hint of chocolate, cinnamon, and clove. This was one of our favorite dishes. It was also quite spicy.
Wildflower Porridge Bread. Baked in a clay pan and brushed with coastal wildflower honey and aged goat’s milk cheese, served with a condiment of charred heirloom peppers and passionfruit juice, with fresh buffalo milk curds.
The bread was dense and crispy under the pile of cheese. Much like a cornbread. The white topping was basically a buffalo ricotta. The red one tasted like Muhammara. Fairly nice, if very rich. The combo of the dairy and the “Muhammara” is something I do all the time at Lebanese and Armenian places by putting lebneh and Muhammara on pita together. This variant worked as well.
Wild Fire Morels. Grilled over smokeless coals, served with swiss chard stuffed with a jam of roasted duck jus, overripe plantain glazed with tamarind, spruce tips, and a griddled flatbread of young coconut and burnt wheat.
This is the flat bread. It was thick and delicious. I stuck a bit of everything else in there. It was quite good, very meaty, and rather unusual. The spruce was INTENSE. Most chefs do not cook with spruce!
Erick brought: 2005 Dom Pérignon Champagne Rosé. VM 94. The 2005 Dom Pérignon Rosé is an attractive, persistent wine with plenty of character. Sweet dried cherry, mint and rose petals are some of the many nuances that develop with air. Savory notes that are on the edge of vegetal and a real feeling of tannin from the 27% still red Pinot in the blend give the 2005 a decidedly savory edge. (Drink between 2020-2030)
Smoked Beef Rib. Rubbed with wild pine resin and gently smoked overnight, served with an array of grilled heirloom cucumbers, green melons, tamarind reduction, and a spicy paste of green peppercorn and coriander.
In the back here is the ring of odd “condiments” and the fabulous spicy pesto-like green paste. The meat itself was very rich and pastrami like with a great smoked flavor. It worked very well with the spicy paste. The crunchy cucumbers and the like were more “interesting.” Pine resin. haha!
Tamarind sauce on the left.
California Lamb. Coated with a paste of roasted cacao and panca chiles then slow-smoked over live oak embers, served with candied green papaya, charred collard leaf, roasted beats, and a sauce of elderberries and aged rum.
As usual for Jordan the protein was all hidden under some vegetation. There was actually plenty of lamb here (once one broke through). It was a bit well done but had tons of flavor.
The beets actually tasted fairly “normal.”
The dessert menu.
Strawberries. Lightly warmed over the embers, dressed with cherry pit kombucha and virgin almond oil, an ancient almond “cake” wrapped in aromatic fig leaf, whipped buckwheat cream.
This is the hard crunchy “ancient almond cake”. It was very crumbly, like shortcake, and you took some of the buckwheat cream and sauce and strawberries and made a kind of falling all over the place nordic strawberry shortcake. Very tasty though, even if it adhered to almost all of the “rules” of Meteora cuisine, including it’s inability to stay on the terrible modernist wooden flat flatware.
Buckwheat cream.
Cherry pit kombucha.
Redwood Ice. Ripe California kiwi dressed with green olive oil, sweet cream custard infused with crushed lemongrass, shaved coconut, puree of roasted almond cookies.
This was my favorite and was like a Filipino dessert with Thai and California redwood flavors.
Sweet Corn. Frozen sweet corn custard, crispy ancient cereals, a caramelized crepe made from almond, coconut, and psyllium husk, roasted pecan butter, wild candycaps, and a light cream of aged rum.
Mild and soothing flavors. A lot of textures going on here. It wasn’t super sweet, more primal and foresty.
We closed out the place, so I got to take a picture after it was empty.
Meteora will be polarizing for sure. I found it largely successful, at times brilliant. The experience is one-of-a-kind. The dishes are beautiful, unique, and mostly delicious. They are weird and a bit hard to eat, and you certainly wouldn’t want to come here alone — or really with 2 people — it pretty much requires exactly 3-4. I will repeat some of the features of the food:
- concealed ingredients
- flowers, leaves and foliage on top
- high fat “sauces”
- complex and unusual pairings, tending to include sweet, savory, and “herbal”
- very varied textures
- bright colors mixed with earth tones
- awkward methods of eating that don’t allow all the ingredients in the mouth at once
- black bowls and awkward flatware
And add some odd details about the service experience:
- Decor is really cool, but very form over function. For example our mushroom shaped table was very uncomfortable. There was no where to put one’s legs.
- It’s so dark that a phone light is absolutely required to read the menu or see the food.
- The odd shaped table barely fit one dish.
- Odd (but appropriate) ambient music was quite loud. At the same time the servers were instructed to whisper.
- The whole restaurant is scented (like a forest)
- Staff were all super nice and very excited to be there.
- Plates, wine glasses, flatware etc were all gorgeous but marginally functional. The flatware was hyper flat and food fell off it. The wineglasses had no steams, were heavy, not of crystal, and had a hyper annoying turned in lip that made them difficult to actually drink from.
- Dietary restrictions seem like they would be impossible to navigate. The dishes have so many ingredients and are so integrated.
- Not good for anyone who likes to know exactly what they are eating.
- Beverage options for those not bringing wine or loving really exotic cocktails are fairly limited.
For me, as most of this doesn’t bother me too much, this is the best incarnation yet of the “Jordan Khan” style. The food was delicious and had more “protein” than Vespertine. He’s a very talented “chef” (artist?) as is able to push the boundaries of what you expect food to be like while mostly still keeping it delicious. I found Meteora tasted better than Vespertine and was closer in style and spirit to “Late Red Medicine” but more advanced. It’s in this primal forest elfin style that doesn’t really have a clear definition. Hard to explain, but there is a consistency to all the elements food, decor, music, scent, style, and even the hard-to-use flatware.
I hope they change up the menu frequently, which knowing Jordan is likely. If they do it’ll be interesting to keep trying.
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