pre-soft-open

the early reviews are in:

“What the fuck i am at your gate i have a reservation and you are not even open.”

—a guy calling on the phone last night

 

“The indiscriminate use of cumin and urfa biber in the sea bass mock panzanella is both disconcerting and subtly brilliant.”

—elysian chef

 

“Devour the carpaccio—there is something utterly predictable and yet deliciously uncanny about the combination of lemon verbena syrup, lebneh, roasted radishes, and raw lamb tenderloin; the whole dish will leave you feeling like you just ate the whole dish.”

—candidate for graduate degree in yelp writing

 

“not enough star power, they will never make it in this town”

—someone's twitter feed (11 followers)

 

“This reviewer has been back several times because I have money to burn. My last time in, the kitchen had a little fun at my expense and served me a dish of crispy burnt dollar bills, toasted almonds, and tangerine supremes, jokingly (or not?) called "kale salad." It was actually the best kale salad i have ever had in a city rank with them.”

—well-known blogger at timeonmyhands.com

 

“The whole approach at elysian is self-inflated yet oddly and genuinely modest. The food is vaguely levantine and pseudo-californian, each plate a little identity crisis that screams, “omfg we don't have our concept figured out" but nonetheless grabs hold of your taste buds and gives them a good throttling. Don't leave without trying the poached compressed zucchini with anchovy, garlic, chile de arbol, and charred romaine—it is the essence of what they do best in the elysian kitchen, playing with poetic essences like lazy summer, brisk earthy ocean, and scorched field, with a bracing dash of global-warming inspired heat. This is essential eating in LA right now and I recommend you jump on this trendwagon before it crashes into something called tomorrow.”

—award-winning food writer who many people over-invest in

 

frozen yogurt for Homs

the days wind down early we are saving daylight for some other time in some vaguely possible future that we hope will come to pass such as next summer though you never know if we will be able to hold out that long it is no mean feat to get through to tomorrow at this point the flesh is older and still willing but the spirit is deathly weak battered by unbearable contradictions or just simply things seeming on the one hand so fine and dandy there is a tiny pea in the world growing into a little girl her brain and limbs are joyfully exploding with new everything and there is her mom and me swell with joy too running and screaming around the house with her until bedtime and on the other hand so totally fucked up its ludicrous to think you can shut out all the shit going on and just do your thing you know just grow up in bliss and purity that is idiotic there is no way around it no escape route only a straight shot to the edge of the flat earth to the brink of irrational thinking also known as “the way we think now” i didnt use to think like this i used to be very together and rational and capable of sufficient repression to function day to day but now its all over and i am all over the map i am a picture of disregulation let me give you an example i drive on any number of streets and see billboards for among other things american apparel apparently they make clothes though it is hard to tell because the humans in the pictures are wearing very little they are almost across the board flexing forward at the hip and rearing their buttocks which is pleasant enough i suppose i have no bone to pick here or an argument for prudism to make and no i dont think hey this is exploitation or hey this is some dime grind capitalist porn show or hey i find this patently offensive yes it is all of these things but no my turn of thought is this that the company is misnamed it should be called take me from behind apparel or fuck me up the ass apparel that would be more direct and cutting edge well maybe it would take the unspoken libidinal fun out of the advertising equation and that would be bad for business at the very least it would be unsemiotic plus if i were patriotic i would say it would be kind of unamerican to replace american with fuck me up the ass that might be verging on pro china lingo and this stuff is not made in china like almost everything else this scanty apparel is a homegrown sweatshopped bill of goods so why rain on their parade should i not be pleased that an all american company is still able to excel at something as important and complex as getting people to imagine sexy quivering buttholes under leather tights despite shutdowns and cultural venality and unrestrained settlement building or whatever is going on for real in their world should i not celebrate the savvy with which a garment maker induces people to buy things not so fast how can i jump on that bandwagon when i am really not so sure it works it is not working on me i hardly ever buy clothes and these ads don't make me want to run out to get fitted with some tanktops or speedo briefs all they do is make me want to stroke it in the car on riverside drive which would only put me in the same menacing oblivious drivers seat as the millions of texting jerkoffs barreling down the road everywhere no i wont push things to that precipitous point i am not that far gone or close to the brink the conditions that deteriorate thought and deregulate behavior have not gotten that bad actually i am gripping the wheel and nothing else just trying to get to pinkberry i am out on a frozen yogurt errand well hold on now even that simple statement is quite possibly worse for its banality than an ass-filled billboard it is a sad measure of the life of the mind i am in i am not alone in it it is a group effort it takes a village to be able to be out on a frozen yogurt errand but when the counterperson wants to know how are we swirling i say i cant answer you i am swirling too fast i am dizzy with your bright lights and glistening surfaces and ginned-up food service candy shop good looks though somehow still cogent enough to understand if i am not pleased with the icy result i am taking to go they will swirl me a new one that is what the little sign says at the cash register “if you are not satisfied we will swirl you a new one” ok go ahead swirl me a new one i do not like this result because once i am home everything goes downhill despite the unutterable tastiness of the product how could things be good when there are no more behinds in my face and there is just this picture in my inbox from Cornish Street in the city of Homs November 6 2013 i hope the Syrian regime had the decency to spare the pinkberry that just opened up there right next to the take me from behind american apparel factory seconds outlet the glib thought on taking in this view is “apocpalypse now” but i dont believe like that at all i dont buy that there will be any such thing as the end of days or that if there is this is it all this is is “the way we live now” all this is is how are we swirling

what a pickle

to strike or not to strike no matter which camp you fall in there are hypocrites stoking the fires i include myself in their number after all this evening i idly perused the crate and barrel catalogue before tossing it of course darling into the recycling i had to confirm through flippant inspection that it was filled with generally useless shit i then turned to sweeping and something called swiffering the floors of our little modernist marvel of an apartment i might claim to care about dead babies somewhere in this world but i will always choose cleaning over reading or writing my representatives especially if the reading list includes the latest reports from the front lines which by the way are not inside the beltway but in aleppo hama homs deir'ezour maalula etc yes hypocrites like me at every turn all the way from Moscow to Washington to all over the place the worst might be and my dear sweet one year old daughter you have to start watching out for them now even at your tender age the ones who are out beating their antiwar drums as though this were some other century really come on those signs are strikingly familiar they look letter for letter like the ones you used for iraq 2 and gulf 1 before that and before that somewhere else those were the days my friend we thought they'd never end they did but one would think they hadn't based on these simpleton placards i know the list can go on and on of fucked up us interventions but you can't just cross out the last failed nation state you wrote on a piece of cardboard taped to a stick and pencil the next one in it doesn't work that way plus you are going to run out of space at some point and just have to leave the slogan saying syria even though we will have moved on to pakistan finally its not and never so simple no war in on with against syria you say well the meaning of such imperatives is quite unclear there is already a war in syria in case you hadn't noticed what are you shouting about as you march side by side with assad supporters in times square or whatever classic rock of a location for antiwar protest you have fallen back on once again its not that i disagree with something of the sentiment i am generally against a military intervention but shit man i am confused here and the fact that your slogans sound so unconfused confuses me even more because it seems dishonest not to acknowledge that you are confused for instance in the spirit of full disclosure there is part of me that wants the us flyboys to bomb the daylights out of syrian regime installations i can very easily and happily picture the presidential palace on its hill west of damascus and its residents if they have not by now wisely opted for safer digs going up in a ball of flames very unseemly i understand but that is my idle fantasy and i will cop to it yes send in the top guns despite international law and despite the can of worms that might get opened i have thought about this for some time now its not out of repugnance that some arbitrarily imaginary red line has been breached i don't distinguish between chemical weapons and a knife across the throat this is what gets my goat the protesters are coming out of the woodwork only now only now that the man in chief is talking about a measured response to chemical weapons use baby none of you went marching when assads forces slaughtered people in banyas or bombshelled every fucking city on their map it's only now the us is threatening to interject that you take to your times squares so it seems like a petty nationalist isolationist move cloaked in humanist antiwar antiimperialist rhetoric or in dumb arguments that the syrians have to sort it out for themselves as though a history or two of us foreign policy has contributed nothing to this whole picture or even dumber wishes that everyone involved needs to just sit down and talk you know take a little prayerful timeout what planet should they do that on oh i don't know what to do either but i refuse to moronify the situation with such nonsense with a distant hey hey ho ho drumbeat with the disengaged restraint born of unspeakable resignation that this is the hell we all live in or at least in some nimby proximity to better someone elses hell and well hell god hell i had to jettison that concept as soon as i saw a baby in tiny red pants wet in death god bless youtube by which i mean while dying while going up in odorless smoke while spitting out white foam and blood with his last little breath his last pee came out of him jesus christ love and peace are not going turn this around i wish it weren't so i wish everything were coming up roses that god would decide to stop with all of this constant testing of mankind would just make everybody be good and loving and nonlethal to one another if something called god were ever here it has long quit the scene it has tuned out the newsfeed and decided to let the humans sort it out for themselves it's not gods business is it that there are some terrible people out there trafficking in death god is not the policeman of the world now is it after all there are alot of fires to be put out why should god focus on this particular conflagration and it's not gods business is it that you are kidding yourself if you think you can talk sense to the murderous and suddenly they will sit down at a historic negotiating table that is a ludicrous thought god would have a good laugh at that one if god were like a person or something and at this point only a twit would bank on the coming of a day of final judgement when all the killers and the killers of killers are weighed on a divine unerring scale and cast up or down that is an idle fantasy too god jesus fuck it is hot here in los angeles so far from aleppo so what if you can't stand the heat or you are sweating from swiffering go to ghouta who needs hell or another antiwar demo or another us intervention when there is already all this scorching earth

house-made yelps

(the name elysian has been removed to protect the brand identity and integrity of elysian)

took the wife to _____ for our anniversary. have to say i was expecting super high standards based on everything i read and heard about this place. big disappointment. she had the tasting menu and while she oohed and ahhed over a few of the items, the duck confit with rhubarb orbs in particular, overall it was pretty mediocre. i opted for the pork ribs, after a starter of squid ink pasta with blackened lettuce. The dishes were decent enough, but nothing that knocked my socks off. I wanted my socks knocked off. I wanted my wifes socks knocked off too because it was our anniversary and I was frankly a little randy and ready for some sloppy mildly wine-drunk sex (it’s been a while, to be honest with you) after our dinner out, and I know from experience that that scenario is not going to be in the cards if the food is not over the top good you know jaw droppingly good and she leaves the place all drooling if you know what i mean. thanks alot____ for making it another right-handed evening for me and old robert wood johnson.

well we finally went to ____ the other night--i have been bugging my girlfriend for over a year about it--and it was ahhhhhhhhhmaaaaaaazzzzzing! I  know alot about food now from all the shows and blogs and everything plus I cook alot at home I might even be one of those dreaded foodies! and i have to say everything we ate was perfectly seasoned and the balance of acid and fat and bitter and umami and everything was right on the money. kudos to the chef and staff and the service was exquisite. its a pricey night out that is true but if you are the kind of douche-chump-snob who drops $500 on a dinner this is the place to do it because it is worth every penny even though it is only $42 they could charge $500 and i would pay it because it is soooooooooo goooooooood!  if i could give this place ten stars thats what i would do but i can only give it five here on yelp, what is up with that yelp, i should be able to give as many stars as dollars i spent on my incredible meal, and like i said even that would not be enough!!

_____. four stars, wtf? hold the phone michelin! this place sucks and is really terrible i dont care what all these other reviews say, they are just plain wrong and are buying in to some hipster hype about where to eat in dtla west titticaca santa silverlake los feliza monica. i mean really, they say they are all local and hand crafted and all that, if that's true then so is dennys and so is iHop. they need to learn how to cook. where is gordon ramsay when you need him? even rachel ray could do better than this kitchen crew and she is about the pinnacle of the worst, at least in the kitchen, i mean you have to give her props for her marketing genius. seriously. never going back and i recommend you never go at all either take my word for it my word the word of a total stranger who claims to know something about food and whose attitude is venal and inconsiderate and unforgiving and just contributes to the demise of civility, decency and humility in the world you cant think for yourself anyway you are an idiot and a sheep that is why you are reading my buttheaded review even though we both know the old saying about what opinions are like if you had a shred of balls left you would not read this shit you would just go out and try a new place and form your own opinion and not feel any compulsion to write about it as if your opinion-asshole matters so much that the throngs are itching to slurp it up or as if there were not other things going on in the world that deserve at least a sliver of the attention you are devoting to this yelp nonsense

summer line-up

we are hard at it in the elysian kitchen working with trending ingredients and un-tested techniques to develop new dishes that approach post-edibility in the race toward the future of the food we eat now:

closed-loop self-aggrandizing bio-power onion ring with fermented quinoa homebrew batter and hand-mined salt (courtesy Sebastio Salgado); re-appropriated de-essentialzed fragmented "whole" yogurt with bare life mre flakes (dis-agambenated) and ranciered raspberry "coolie"; art fair hot air gougiere (gluten-free, made with 99.9% rennetless washed rind cheese, machine-minced art-market herbs), served on a sousvide wad of always already laundered cash; topologically restaged tamarind pulp (ou) swashed eggplant with historically reenacted state sanctioned aleppo pepper spray foam; genderqueer squash blossom stuffed with unsexed squid sausage and sprouted tongues of fire beans, performative wendy brown butler butter, imaginary cherry tomato; antioedipal duck breast (vacuum sealed), melted red licorice, deracinated black rice, and detourned turnip; neo-liberalized oklahoma ribeye (appropriate accompaniments distributed based on merit only); interstitial puff pastry filled with relational aesthetics shell game pea mush and magical thinking mushrooms, unutterability-infused veal demi-glace; rhizomatic pseudo-burdock brodo over manzanar sticky rice, cognitively mapped carrots, poached contingent salmon belly; radicalized watermelon radish, thermo-nuclear cooling water dashi, occupy-free jicama, late-capitalist kale crumble; uninterpolated sauteed haricot vert with foucault spice rub powder cream; salad of desublimated cucumber stewed in hand-extracted cucumber oil with unfarmed fennel, tequila-fried pheasant tenders--peasant-style; trans-fascist acidophilus-braised pork cheek ragu with amaranth cake; post-feminine fig gently simmered in white gazpacho; smoked oyster with blast-chilled classless society catfish caviar boba crunch (marx-free) and speech act clam broth, order some now it's already gone