Review of CiudadReview of CiudadDowntown Los Angeles is coming back. True, most outsiders are unaware that Los Angeles even has a downtown, but there is a part of town, surrounded by freeways and jammed full of high rise office buildings. It is not an office park. It has shops, both at street level and a few floors up where the city blocks are connected by skywalks, so you can avoid dealing with automobiles. It also has restaurants, and Ciudad is one of the best.
Ciudad is a lively, imaginative restaurant in downtown Los Angeles serving food from the Caribbean and Latin America. This means fusion, with lots of new world and old world influences. You can start a meal with flat bread dipped in hummus and anchovy-parsley tapenade and finish it off with a coconut macadamia cake with boiled icing.
We started one meal with deep fried potatoes stuffed with spicy duck carnitas, a wonderfully flavorsome combination, but then, so were the arepas, corn cakes, served with chorizo in a brilliantly flavored romesco sauce. If this sounds a bit much to eat, start with a salad, with grilled zuchini, avocado, black beans and chick peas, or the calamari on toast with tomatoes and chorizo.
They serve real Argentinian beef here. Our rib steak was thick, dense and tasted like grass fed beef, rather than the blander corn fed stuff one usually finds. Then again, this was not the usual steak house steak. It was stuffed with hot green peppers and served with potatoes au gratin and sauted spinach with raisins and pumpkin seeds. This is not to fault their treatment of beef from the good old USA. Their beef short ribs were deep and dark with flavor and set off well by the cooked cabbage cole slaw and hash of white, purple and yellow potatoes with garlic and caper berries.
We liked our meal so much, we went back for lunch the next day and oohed and aahed over the jerked chicken sandwich with coleslaw and fires and the orangey osso bucco of pork leg with yucca stew.
The food was so good and so different, we ordered dessert, or rather a tasting of desserts. The coconut macadamia nut cake had real boiled icing, not the fake stuff, so it melted properly in one's mouth. The goat milk cajetas flan was excellent with a good sturdy texture and offered a full blast of caramel.
As for beverages. They make good margaritas and excellent caparainas - Brazilian drinks of sugar cane liquor and lime. Of course, if fusion is your thing, they have a nice wine list including some good reds by the glass.
So, thanks to Ciudad, we now we have an excuse to get into downtown Los Angeles<link>, for lunch or for dinner.
Review: 17 June 2000
