LOS ANGELES — I don’t want to be that person who recommends the chicken. Certainly not here, in a restaurant you’ll probably wait months or weeks to get in – a little less maybe, if you can maintain a healthy working relationship with Resy’s “report” button.
But all those people who say you should never get the chicken — because chicken is objectively bland and unambitious, or generally overpriced and mediocre, or because you can make it so much better at home — probably haven’t had the chicken at Horses.
The graceful Cornish game hen is spatchcocked to reveal so much crisp, tan skin, resting on a warm, unmade bed of panzanella as the juices spill over the plate.
While the dish may give you the impression of being effortless, as is so often the case with Horses, it isn’t. It takes precision and care to extract and concentrate the flavors of a roast bird, to augment them with little more than tart currants and slightly bitter dandelion greens, to serve it all at the exact moment the edges of crusty bread soften. soaking in warm pan-dripping water, a light stock and butter.
Horses opened last fall on Sunset Boulevard with a blue Yves Klein facade that hides a warren of cosy, lived-in dining rooms and wooden bars. It used to be the Pikey, a British restaurant with a gruesome name, and before that Ye Coach & Horses, an old Hollywood hangout.
Within months, it became one of those unbearably hot reservations in Los Angeles, a restaurant where the wait list on a recent Thursday was a staggering 1,784 names, where Beyoncé and Jay-Z enter through the alleyway leading to the back door, and where A Listers often fill the back room, which is decorated with dreamy paintings of horses by Kacper Abolik, known for his celebrity portraits. But it’s not like most Hollywood scenes where, if you’re going to eat, you might have to accept that the food doesn’t matter.
The menu doesn’t list a chef’s name, and the servers don’t refer to “chef” in conversation, but there are several: The chefs and owners, Liz Johnson and Will Aghajanian, a married couple, hired Brittany Ha in to the kitchen, and Hannah Grubba is devoted to desserts.
Multiple chefs and a dedicated pastry chef! This may have been unremarkable at one point, but it is now an unimaginable luxury as so many Los Angeles restaurants struggle to recruit staff following pandemic-related cuts and losses, and are gearing up to face another wave of Covid cases. to offer.
Horses seems aware of its allure as a low-key feast—a place to escape, to order platters of pasta alla vodka under crusty breadcrumbs, and to spoon fresh guava sorbet melting into cold, fizzy wine. For the most part, the kitchen has a knack for making both service and food appear bright, effortless, and charismatic.
Plates are never full of ingredients or unnecessary garnishes. Huge amounts of butter and olive oil move on tiptoe together, covertly, without weighing down a dish. See: the tongue under an airy, melting béarnaise, and the ripples of buttery Milanese pork fried in olive oil.
The menu reflects a fondness for offal, a deep respect for the power of anchovies and mayonnaise, a reverence for pan juices and a dedication to fat. While the food never feels old-fashioned, there are the occasional Easter eggs for chefs, the kind of nerdy, shot-for-shot tributes you might find in an episode of “Stranger Things.”
If that chicken dish sounds familiar, maybe it’s because it shares so much with Judy Rodgers’ fried chicken and bread salad, which has been on the menu at San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe since 1987. The boudin noir almost evokes a perfect slice of blood cake, draped with a delicate fried egg, at Fergus Henderson’s St. John in London. The caper-frisee sweetbreads could point to some important influences, but got me thinking about Gabrielle Hamilton’s cooking at Prune in New York.
The menu at Horses changes so often that great dishes can disappear, come back later in a new form, or not at all. Months ago, a bowl of tender, creamy beans sprinkled with a loose, salty tonnato was amazingly good. Although I never saw the dish again, the tonnato reappeared with chili oil to dress up lean, tender Romano beans and thin slices of seared tuna. A pile of tagliarini and clams, the strongest of the pasta dishes I have tasted, is unfortunately no longer with us. And his replacement, a thickly rolled pappardelle dressed in saffron butter, was unusually stodgy.
In the same way, the food can appear much fluffier than it is, so can the dining room. While servers maintain the party atmosphere, they always move intentionally and with an eye on the clock. In the kitchen, the chefs connect their phones to the restaurant’s security cameras — flashing red in the corners of the three rooms — so they can set the rhythm for tables and the time for sending the courses.
Recently, a friend who lives down the street and went regularly when the space was Ye Coach & Horses complained that he couldn’t go in on a whim and just popped at the bar. Technically, that’s not true. The bar seats are for walk-in dinners, and you might get lucky now and then, I just wouldn’t count on them.
It’s the dark side of the warm reservation: if the restaurant turns out to be good, you can’t keep returning with a sense of spontaneity, even if you happen to live nearby. It can make horses feel distant and unreachable which is a shame because once you get in and sit down, ideally for the roast chicken, it can be pure delight and warmth.