Thanks for the card, Mom and Dad. Actually, the party was at Campanile. If there’s a better way to celebrate a birthday than by walking over to a storied neighborhood restaurant and gathering a few good friends around a round table for food and drinks, I don’t know what it is. And brunch may be the best meal at Campanile, whether you go for fresh La Brea Bakery pastries; a BLTA; egg in a hole with olive bread, a dish that always reminds me of “Moonstruck“; or a textbook quiche lorraine, with a flaky crust and tender, flavorful bacon. It was so much fun, I forgot to take pictures.

Fortunately, I brought my camera to dinner at Fraiche. On a previous visit, I and some friends pretty much ate our way through half the menu, including all the pastas. The memory of the bacon risotto has haunted me ever since. I had thought it sounded horrible on the menu, but I was completely wrong: The smoky flavor of the thick chunks of bacon (or is it pancetta?) elevates the creamy risotto to something truly special. And this is coming from someone who once characterized risotto as “incompetent rice.”

But let me not get ahead of myself — I started with sweet potato soup topped with cinnamon marshmallows and fried sage. Yes, marshmallows! That’s what impresses me about this restaurant — the food is simple, but there are these unusual, yet somehow intuitive touches. If you were making candied yams, you’d add cinnamon, right? And marshmallows are the traditional topping. So this sophisticated-looking soup tastes somehow very familiar and homey.

I got the sweetbreads with pappardelle on the previous visit, but I couldn’t resist them again. I love sweetbreads. These are perfect, with a nice golden sear on the delicately flavored morsels for flavor. I was a little startled when our waiter asked if I knew what they were, as I’ve been eating them for years, but when they arrived, Wes took a bite. “This is really good,” he said. “What is it?”

Desserts at Fraiche, while excellent, err a bit too much on the flaky-pastry side for me. This is a prejudice I’ve only recently discovered in myself. I love a flaky pie crust, but these fragile concoctions in which the leaves of crisp pastry hide some filling, and it’s hard to scoop up a bite, and then you run the risk of slicing yourself on an edge, kind of irritate me. Still, I recognize that the Paris-Brest on a previous visit was excellent — I mostly liked it for the hazelnut cream filling. This time, I hesitated over the vanilla bean galette with sour cherry compote and Guinness ice cream, but decided I was too tired for adventurous flavors. Instead, I went for the apple strudel, a dish that always reminds me of my mom, who associates it with a restaurant on Aspen Mountain (I think the name used to be different?) that specializes in strudel, and where she says Ivana Trump and Marla Maples had their epic fight. Remember them?

Anyway, here’s the dessert, flaky pastry and all. It was quite good, and note the garnish of diced apple. The bright flavor of the fresh apple sets off the deeper, caramelized flavor of the strudel filling. Clever, eh?

Fraiche
9411 Culver Boulevard
Culver City
310-839-6800