Los Angeles Magazine, March 2004

Shine OnPatina has lost none of its luster in the move to Walt Disney Concert Hall

Los Angeles Magazine, March 2004 issue

PATINA HAS NO PATINA. It is as clean and uncluttered as a Clinique counter. It has abandoned its snug spot on a strip of Melrose that included a "pawnbroker to the stars," a self-service car wash, and a storefront church for the sweeping polished steel of Disney Hall.
The surprise announcement that Patina would relocate did not surprise many who follow restaurants in L.A. It seemed, in fact, to be preordained. In 1989, Joachim and Christine Splichal took over the old Le Saint-Garmain site on the corner of Cole and opened their first restaurant. Very little of L.A. reached the original Patina's boxy interior. Elegant and uncompromising, it conceded nothing to the city's casual ethos. With Christine's graciousness in the front of the house and Joachim's perfectionism in the back, Patina in the early '90s was the best restaurant in L.A. In 1992, the couple opened its initial satellite, the less expensive Pinot Bistro in Studio City, and embarked on a path of continuous expansion. Now a part of Restaurant Associates, the group's holdings stretch from Napa to Orange County, include seven spin-off Pinot restaurants, thrive in cultural institutions from LACMA to the Hollywood Bowl and in family destinations such as Downtown Disney in Anaheim, and dominate downtown dining with Nick & Stef's Steakhouse, Zucca Ristorante, Cafe Pinot, Patinette at MOCA, and Pinot Grill and Kendall's Brasserie at the Music Center.
What looks like the graph of success in the boardroom can appear to be the stairwell to impersonality in the dining room. With each opening, with each pizzeria and museum cafe that the company has rolled out, the image of who Joachim Splichal is has become less and less clear. Moving the mother ship itself to the downtown core represents a moment of truth for Patina. If the restaurant is to be thought of as more than the fully loaded version of its Pinot line of bistros, the public must become reacquainted with Joachim Splichal. No, not the Clausewitz of Figueroa we have come to know, that strategist who can open any eating venue on budget and on time, but the man who predates that incarnation: Joachim Splichal, the cook.
On first approach, as one turns down Grand Avenue, the restaurant looks dispiritingly institutional. A long line of orange cones directs cars to the valet parkers, then a swath of pavement must be traversed to reach the restaurant's door. Inside is a bar with a few stools and shelved bottles of aged brandy. Behind the hostess's podium lies the entrance to the dining room. One gets the feeling that designer Hagy Belzberg, who also renovated the Melrose location in 2000, has had to work with an area that was pretty much set. You don't just blow out a wall on a Gehry blueprint. So the restaurant's main artery is a crowded track that hugs a wall, is littered with side tables for the waiters to use, and is as packed with people crossing paths as an alley in a Marrakech souk. Only when you sit down do you get a sense of the room's elegant proportion and notice the restaurant's most significant design feature: the walnut paneling that had been laser cut to look like a slightly gathered theatrical curtain. It casts majesty on the room and hints at the personal statement the restaurant is envisaged to be. For the ancestral associations of the paneling's dark tones, juxtaposed with the building's pristine modernism, would represent a seductive pairing to any cultured German.
ONE WOULDN'T want to overstate the point with talk of crescendos and symphonic passages, but there is a musicality to the work of great cooks. They have their own key, a quality that is greater than the sum of ingredients; it is what makes a dish theirs. Joachim Splichal is a son of Swabia, the southwest corner pocket of Germany where the Danube rises, and his cooking has a serene lushness that, whatever it owes to France in technique, is central European at heart. His is a refined ease that is always alert to the rustic note. In music you hear this same combination in violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter's recent recording of Brahms's Hungarian Dances, in which by turns she is convert-hall virtuoso and village fiddler. Theo Schoenegger, the chef whom Splichal has chosen to head the kitchen, is someone completely alive to that sense of Mitteleuropa. He spent three years at Munich's famed Aubergine restaurant before moving to the United States and hails from the Alpine Trentino-Alto Adige, the northernmost province of Italy. It's a different country from Splichal's, but it's practically on the same latitude. These two could bond over a few heads of celery root and a case of parsnips. And they did.
I emphasize the Germanic angle because it is the connective tissue of Patina's menu, what gives cohesion and that special quality to any menu—a point of view. The chefs ignore it at their own risk. When they try to be Californian, as in the mandatory green salad, what results is the most pretentiously described ("seasonal vegetables, raw and braised, organic greens and herbs with a citrus vinaigrette"), most expensive($15), and dullest salad you are likely to encounter. But when they toy with the theme, matters get exciting. Yes, everyone must have an ahi tuna appetizer, but pairing the fish with a magnificent cream of celery gives the dish the snap of a Borsalino's brim. The chestnut bisque has an atavistic resonance—no ladled business here, just a liquid so pure, so intense, it offers a sense of place in a simple white bowl. White asparagus accompanies the sweetbreads, chestnut spaetzle comes with the loin of hare, apple-champagne sauerkraut sets off the pheasant, and a crescent of linzer dough crowns the caramelized apples served with milk and honey sorbet. The heart lifts at the sight of these ingredients on the same menu, a diner delights in their subtle perfection. It's the moment many of us thought would never happen and finally has. He doesn't offer knödel, but Herr Splichal has gotten sentimental.
Within this framework—which will undoubtedly shade toward the Mediterranean with the approach of spring—there are three important developments in the cooking. The first is a nervy delight in classic accents and preparations. Sometimes this is more successful than others. The little cheese puffs presented at the beginning of the meal in a skillfully folded napkin and the brandy cocktail sauce that accompanies the lobster salad with a heart of palm slaw radiate tradition. On the other hand, an offering like the frog legs served with gnocchi and a sweet pea sauce was a dish whose garlic pulse was so weak that before expiring it barely managed to gesture at the persillade it might have been.
The second development is what could be called a miniature monumentalism. There is a tendency among classically trained chefs to chop and slice until whatever gets placed on a plate is in its smallest possible form. This is due to the belief—actually the canon of haute cuisine—that in miniature lies elegance. Patina's menu resists that. The sweetbread in the appetizer is not separated into tiny morsels but is a juicy, chunky nugget that has been allowed a basic heft. The lobster in the risotto is thickly scalloped rather than rendered as some micro salpicon. These are what the French call noble ingredients, but even the modest, lightly breaded lunchtime skate wing that is served with horseradish-potato puree is permitted to have a grandeur all its own.
The third development involves a level of sauce making that is truly superior, which is not to imply that these are essences of essences reduced to spoon-coating consistency. Great sauces are the opposite, a means of adding facets to dishes that would otherwise be one-dimensional. Sometimes this requires a definite stress, a particularly strong ingredient that contrasts with a preparation and makes it memorable. I can still taste the gamy chocolate-based sauce that napped the loin of hare as well as the Madeira foam that set off the squab and radicchio risotto. At other times, however, sauces should be loosely constructed; these are the ones that offer the layers of flavor through which a restaurant is best perceived. The white sauce that came with the grilled turbot, truffled gnocchi, and chanterelles did it for me. I suspected it had been thickened with flour; not intent on its own self-expression, it let the flavor of the dish's other ingredients come through. Such nuanced technique, such a sense for food. By the time I was scraping my spoon along the bottom of the plate, I knew all my initial misgivings about the new Patina were unfounded. The restaurant deserved to be called Patina; it would not be better named Pinot Platinum.
BECAUSE IT IS attached to a concert hall, Patina had clearly demarked moods. During the early seating on concert nights, there is a marked attention to the matter at hand. A meal is not rushed, although diners and staff are aware of the eight o'clock curtain. As that hour approaches, the pace accelerates and the broad pavement outside becomes crowded. Here's a woman in an Astrkhan hat, here's another in a teal pashmina, and here—oh, blesses L.A. quirkiness—is a man come to hear Zubin Mehta conduct, stepping out of his black Rolls-Royce sporting spotless white special-occasion sneakers. By 8:30 the concert is on, and Patina, too is in grand waltz mode. A large party is being led to a central table, a food runner with a ponytail speeds through with steaming plates, a tall, dignified waiter explains each preparation, a côte de boeuf is being carved at one table, a two-tiered cheese trolley closes in on another. The busboys would have to burst into song for the scene to be more of a show.
Yet it is at lunch, when the people seated on the restaurant's terrace look across Grand Avenue at nothing more transporting than the Superior Court's parking structure, that I have felt the novelty of a downtown Patina wear off and the restaurant come into its own. Joachim Splichal's greatest risk is his greatest triumph. He had to gamble the loss of Patina's preeminent position for the significance of his accomplishment to become clear. No chef has ever seemed less interested in glad-handing a group of ten. Splichal's has been a different mission, and it has always focused on the broader public. He stuck to a path of expansion and took it as far as it could be taken, all the way until the opportunities presented by a restaurant empire transformed the very restaurant on which the empire was based. No bailing out at the end. No choking at the thought that high volume could alter Patina. It can. It did.
Patina is that rare thing, an exalted establishment that also manages to be fun. It's as if proximity to a place of live music has both brightened the dining experience and lightened the step of those who cross the threshold. Here, sommelier Eric Espuny can guide you to a fairly priced and stunning Santenay from Vincent Girardin, master fromager Andrew Steiner can crack you up ("That'll be five bucks," he might say to someone who breathes in too deeply when he passes with the cheese cart), and manager Patrick Davila can disarm you with an easy charm. With a location in an institution that for years to come will define L.A., Joachim Splichal has at last achieved what he always seemed determined to do. He has shorn his best restaurant of genteel airs. He has stared down three centuries of expectations of what the fine dining experience should be and fashioned something brilliant, thrilling, and wholly new.
—Patric Kuh