An online ad recently popped up on my email that pretty well defies the conundrum of Mother’s Day for me. It read, “Show mom some love: Spoil mom this Mother’s Day with a delightful brunch … enjoy a delicious spread, a stunning view and celebrate the amazing woman in your life.”
The Mother’s Day menu goes on to detail the joys of steak and eggs, a burger with caramelized onion, fish tacos and huevos rancheros — dishes that would very likely satisfy none of the mothers in my family.
If my mother were still with us, she’d prefer a corned beef sandwich on rye, heavy on the coleslaw. My mother-in-law would probably lean toward a nice brunch of branzino, preceded by a Lemon Drop cocktail, and followed by a Lemon Drop cocktail. My wife would find happiness with a nice big plate of mixed sushi rolls and sashimi.
The standard Father’s Day feed of a steak dropped in the Weber, and a 12 pack of beer, would win no points. (We men are such simple creatures.)
Mother’s Day may be the most difficult holiday of the year — even more difficult than Valentine’s Day, which is generally accepted as a scam for selling cards and boxes of candy. Mother’s Day is taken seriously by mothers. It’s a day to tread lightly.
Mother’s Day didn’t exist until 1914. Not because nobody had thought of it, but because the U.S. Congress was opposed to it. In 1908, Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. … You read that right; Congress voted against motherhood. They thought the notion was a joke, and argued more than a little absurdly that it would lead to more holidays, like Mother-in-Law’s Day. (You think we’ve got an obstructionist Congress now? Given the opportunity, they probably would have voted against the flag and apple pie as well!)
But thanks to the creator of Mother’s Day — peace activist Anna Jarvis — in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson got around Congress with a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as a national holiday to honor motherhood.
And who was Anna Jarvis? As an activist, she had cared for wounded soldiers on both sides during the American Civil War, during which she created Mother’s Day Work Clubs to deal with public health issues. And when her own mother died in 1905, she began a campaign to create a special day to honor motherhood. She had the support of the growing women’s rights movement, including suffragette Julia Ward Howe, who made a Mother’s Day proclamation in 1870.
It took 44 years for that notion to finally be adopted. But only a decade for it to be turned into one of the biggest sales days of the year for greeting cards, and boxes of candy.
Which, for the record, upset Anna Jarvis so much she organized boycotts of companies selling cards, and showed up to protest at a candy-maker’s convention in Philadelphia in 1923. She wanted the day kept pure and non-commercial, with mothers being thanked with hand-written letters. She even objected to the selling of flowers. How she would feel about the notion of taking mothers out for nice meals can only be imagined.
And ironically, the founder of Mother’s Day never married, and had no children of her own.
But, back to the notion of Mother’s Day meals. I suspect Anna Jarvis would have insisted you have to do the cooking yourself, giving mom a day off. But a massive culinary industry has grown over the years, with restaurants gifting moms with flowers, and family groups gathering around large tables to offer more boxes of See’s Candy than seems rational.
Growing up back east, fancier folks than I would take their moms to somewhat fussy, upscale restaurants with names like Patricia Murphy’s Candlelight, and the fabled Tavern on the Green in New York’s Central Park. By contrast, nothing made my working-class mother happier than a mixed plate of brisket and corned beef at a local deli. My wife often opts for dim sum as often as sushi. My mother-in-law loves both branzino and IHOP.
So, my selection of restaurants is a bit random. But they lean toward the nicer side. I still think that the notion of handing mom a rose when she enters is a fine gesture. But then, I miss wearing ties too. Times change. And as my mother used to say: “Every day should be Mother’s Day.” Right she was.
Claire’s at the Museum
Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach; 562-439-2119, www.lbma.org
Is Claire’s at the Long Beach Museum of Art the perfect brunch experience? Not to enthuse too much, but it would be hard to imagine a better brunch — especially with our weather warm and breezy, and the joys of outdoor dining remaining unabated.
Brunch at Claire’s isn’t just a fine late morning/early afternoon in the sun — it’s also a meal enjoyed surrounded by art, adjacent to a remarkable space. The museum is a structure dating back to 1912, known as the Elizabeth Milbank Anderson House. It’s a dramatic piece of architectural history in which to eat your eggs Benedict.
Claire’s sits in the museum’s Sculpture Garden, at the center of which are the curiously fragmented copper-and-glass works of artist Claire Falkenstein, three of them, which give the restaurant its name.
The café is careful about not seating too many diners at one time, noting that tables are reserved for 90-minute “blocks.” Which may be a bit tough. For by the time you’re up to your second Bacon Bloody Mary, and settle into the warm comfort of the view of the distant Queen Mary, needing to return to what passes for our real world may be a wrenching experience.
Claire’s is a hard act to follow, with a simple paper menu beginning with a section headed, “Eggs.” There’s an applewood bacon and sausage omelet, with cheddar and jack. A red pepper and spinach scramble, with avocado, parmesan and pepper jack. And a good ol’ fashioned “country breakfast” featuring eggs any style, sausage and bacon — all served with roasted spuds, English muffins or wheat toast, or corn tortillas if you’re gluten-free. (For a buck more, you can go egg white only, which I’m not a fan of. There’s too much tasty goodness in the yolk to give it a pass. And anyway, new studies say it isn’t the cholesterol bomb it used to be.)
The eggies continue under the “classics” — a California avocado Benedict, a prosciutto eggs Benedict, a breakfast burrito with scrambled, bacon, sausage and cheese; a veggie burrito with eggs for those who are ovos.
There’s a crème brûlée French toast so iconic, it gets its own place in a box under the classics — puffy Hawaiian bread, seasonal fruit topping, real maple syrup, with bacon, sausage, hash browns or roast potatoes if you want. And a pair of eggs, also if you want. Gilding the lily if you ask me; why mess with perfection?
Saint & Second
4828 E. 2nd St., Long Beach (Belmont Shore); 562-433-4828, www.saintandsecond.com
Saint & Second is a restaurant where the house cocktails will leave you searching your smartphone, trying to figure out the meaning of Koval Spelt, Clove Smoke, Dolin Blanc and Velvet Falernum; spiritual esoterica is a big thing at modern bars.
Since I’m a simpleton, who likes his pilsner and his lager, often with a squeeze of lemon or lime for the goodness it brings, I’m happy to leave drinking as a branch of Trivial Pursuit to others. Just make sure mine is nice and cold.
It’s a bit hard to cubbyhole the food here, for it stands somewhere between gastropub and New American, between eclectic and eccentric. It’s a menu that should make a proper West Coast foodie feel right at home. The menu is divided into “Smalls,” “Bigs,” “Burgers,” “Flatbreads,” “Soups & Salads” and “Sides” — with a box for oysters. And though the “Bigs” are tempting, there are so many “Smalls” that cry out for a taste, you may never get to the 22-ounce rib chop for two (with roasted root veggies and shiitake butter), or the roasted organic chicken with cauliflower purée (with broccolini and fennel).
Instead, if you’re a committed grazer (and aren’t we all?), this is the land of familiar dishes, made with unfamiliar twists — a very creative menu. Consider the hummus, for instance. It’s made with fava beans, rather than garbanzos, flavored with smoked paprika and caper berries. It’s both hummus, and not hummus at the same time. It’s hummus on steroids.
Or how about the grilled prawns, served salted, with the heads still on, with a spicy green chimichurri sauce and a sort of creamed guacamole. It’s a very messy dish; be sure to ask for extra napkins. Ditto the hickory smoked lamb ribs with fried basil, which is so messy to eat, I finished it with a trip to the men’s room to wash my hands; no way that ancho chili glaze was coming off with a napkin.
The options are many; how to choose between an appetizer of Southern-fried quail and pozole clams, between duck meatballs with shishito peppers and marrow bones with mushroom and olive tapenade, between lobster and Dungeness crab cakes and a crab, corn and coconut soup?
There’s a fondness for pork here — in the double-cut heritage pork chop, the pork banh mi sandwich with Sriracha mayo, the pork belly flat bread with kimchi and mozzarella (a combination you don’t run into every day). But then, Saint & Second is filled with dishes and tastes and swigs not found every day.
Michael’s on Naples Ristorante
5620 E. 2nd St., Naples; 562-439-7080, www.michaelsonnaples.com
Michael’s on Naples Ristorante consists of a bar, a downstairs dining room, a semi-visible kitchen and, unexpectedly, a second floor that’s under the stars (unless it’s raining, in which case it’s under a tent).
There’s an inherent sweetness to the restaurant that isn’t necessarily a hallmark of high-end eateries; the staff is pleasantly relaxed, even jocular. The staff — and the restaurant — is (and are) comfortable in their own skin. It’s the sort of place you look forward to getting back to.
It also has a menu that’s manageable; the wine list may be encyclopedic, but the dishes can be considered without needing reading glasses and a pillow. Like the great restaurants of Italy, the menu is focused on fresh, often local ingredients, cooked simply — or at least, simply for a restaurant. This is not the world of dozens of ingredients, tormented and tortured into unnatural forms.
The cranchio (a cold crab appetizer) is just that — sweet, tender nuggets of Dungeness, served over a simple salad of Persian cucumbers and Little Gem lettuce, with an aioli mayonnaise flavored with tiny Taggiasca olives from Liguria, and a snappy oil made using Calabrian chiles. (It’s a dish that melds ingredients from the north and from the south of Italy; the cuisine here is very much Pan-Boot.)
Though the chef uses lots of Italian ingredients, a lot more of his ingredients are American — as well they should be, for it’s where we are. If you can source the best ingredients locally, why look to distant shores?
The antipasti are both familiar, and unexpected. There’s a plate of Italian cold cuts, pretty much an obligatory dish, served with ciabatta bread that’s been grilled and flavored with garlic (not too much, not too little), served with parmigiano cheese that has a bit of a granular crunch to it (which is a good thing), and some marinated olives.
There’s deep-fried calamari, which is a world — no, a universe! — apart from the standard preparation of chewy ringlets. It’s tender and sweet, fresh not frozen (which is rare), served with zucchini, and a smattering of rosemary, garlic, lemon and sage.
But there’s also the surprise of a poached duck egg in the spinach salad. Of heirloom beets served with a goat cheese mousse. And of a soup of grilled octopus in a fennel-flavored broth, with white beans, celery hearts and Calabrian chiles. And the baby artichokes with burrata cheese is just pure pleasure, with a texture that’s soft and soothing and tender as love.
If you want a pizza, you have to go next door. But if you want a pizzette (really, a grilled flatbread) you can have it in the dining room of Michael’s, topped variously with the smoked ham called speck, with baby artichokes, with sausage and peppers, with wild mushrooms and Taleggio cheese, with mozzarella.
All the pizzettes are flavored with pesto. I kind of wish they did one with anchovies, for I know the anchovies they’d use would be real, not the horrors pulled from tins. Real anchovies are a joy — too rarely found on these shores.
The pasta selection is small but select, the selection of entrées (in Italian parlance, “Secondi”) is even more carefully curated — lamb chops with potato gnocchi, a veal chop of remarkable tenderness with roasted potatoes and artichokes; pan-seared kampachi with black trumpet mushrooms, Chianti braised short ribs, and the aforementioned Liberty Farm duck.
The daily menu offers five more, including a pork osso buco, a whole branzino (Mediterranean sea bass) and a fish soup that gives bouillabaisse a run.
Marlena
5854 E. Naples Plaza, Long Beach (Naples); 562-203-1500, www.marlena-longbeach.com
I try really, really hard not to sound as if I’m writing fawning, desperate-for-approval fan mail about the restaurants I like. I am, admittedly, an enthusiast. I love going out to eat. I love discovering wonders and gems — and sharing them with those who bother to read my meanderings. But still, when I find a place that really hits my culinary sweet spot — that I can’t wait to get back to — I’ve got to go just a bit over the top.
So forgive me if I say Marlena is the best restaurant I’ve been to in a long, long time. It’s not perfect — I had to ask twice for a lime slice for my mineral water! But I’d have to be a staggering petty jerkwater to let that get in the way of the sheer happiness I felt dining at Marlena.
The place is unique. The place is filled with happy servers and cheerful diners. The bar is busy with elbow-benders inhaling Maria Pickfords (rum, pineapple, grenadine, maraschino liqueur) and Cortez the Killers (bourbon sherry, bitters, lemon oil).
Marlena is a remarkable space, both covered and wide open at the same time with evening breezes wafting through what would be walls if the place had walls. It sits just south of 2nd Street, around the curve from the Naples Rib Company. It’s more in the upscale residential comfort of Naples than on busy 2nd Street.
The neighborhood and the restaurant are both escapes from the world around them. A trip to Marlena feeds both your appetite and your tormented soul. I really didn’t want to leave.
Considering that Chef Michael Ryan spent half a decade learning from pasta master Evan Funke (at Rustic Canyon and the wonderful Felix in Venice), Marlena has precious few pastas on the menu — recently, just ricotta gnocchi with pesto Genovese, and pappardelle with pork sausage ragu, along with a special of tortelloni with prosciutto and black truffles.
By contrast, the place is virtually a neighborhood pizzeria, with pies — impossibly crispy, layered with lotsa stuff — by Waldo Stout who earned his bones at Bestia and Gjusta, two of LA’s best restaurants. This is a restaurant with trendy roots that run deep. Marlena’s ancestry is tasty indeed.
Like Spago in its early, funky, down-to-earth West Hollywood days, Marlena absolutely nails how we’re eating today — and probably how we’ll be eating in years to come. There are two breads on the menu that are so much more than bread — they’re the happy hybrid called pizza breads, one with a tomato sauce and aromatic Calabrian oregano, the other a pizza bianca, with rosemary, black pepper and olive oil. They arrive fast. They vanish from the plate even faster. And they’re just a hint of what’s next.
I could easily have made a meal of the small plates at Marlena, where every dish was awash with promises of flavors that were sui generis — unique to Chef Ryan’s eclectic palate. Mixed olives with orange, rosemary and … fennel pollen. I like fennel. But pollen sounds like something that’s precious and rare — and darned hard to harvest. The grilled octopus was actually tender, hard to imagine, served with the counterpoint of crunchy chickpeas.
The grilled heirloom carrots with Spanish goat cheese wasn’t so much eaten as inhaled — the carrots were more flavorful than carrots have any right to be. There was hiramasa crudo because there has to be. Crispy fried cauliflower. Pork meatballs with terrific grilled bread. And Saltspring Island mussels in garlic and white wine with crunchy ciabatta bread. (Wonderful bread is a theme at Marlena, a penchant probably picked up at bread-obsessive Gjusta.)
Look into the kitchen, and you’ll see an imposing, shiny and bright Josper Wood Grill, which is where Marlena cooks its whole butterflied branzino, wild swordfish, “pasture-raised” chicken, Pachamama pork chop, Creekstone ribeye, and Back Opal wagyu hanger steak.
Add a Tamai Farms beet salad with spiced lebni onto the bread and the small plates, and my need for a ribeye was finite. And anyway, there was burnt Basque cheesecake. And soft serve mascarpone and chocolate gelato to consume.
The pleasures are many, the downsides are few to none. Even the wallpaper in the bathroom, decorated with classic Italian dishes, made me happy. After a meal at Marlena, the real world seemed very far away.
The Attic
3441 E. Broadway, Long Beach; 562-433-0153, www.theatticonbroadway.com
The cooking at The Attic — which isn’t so much in an attic as it is in a house that has an attic — is delicious, indulgent, joyous, Cajun-inflected … and best for those who aren’t (like my wife) on a diet.
This is the sort of food you want to enjoy, without figuring out the calorie, cholesterol and sodium counts in your head. This is food to dig into, without hesitation; you can always go back to lettuce and cottage cheese tomorrow.
Consider, for instance (very much for instance!), the Appetizer Sampler. It consists of “Devilish Eggs” (deviled eggs topped with roasted corn and poblano chili relish), jalapeños stuffed with a crab and cream cheese mix and wrapped in bacon, Mac and Cheetos (which is just what it sounds like, only more so), and fried green tomatoes. The dish is crazy good, insanely fun to eat.
It’s also completely over-the-top — especially the mac and cheese creation, in which mac is mixed with cheddar, mozzarella and jack cheeses, then further tricked up with bacon and scallions, and finally topped with the sort of red-spiced Cheetos that leave cheese dust on everything for a mile around. It’s crunchy, soft, sweet, salty, spicy — a bestiary of different mouth sensations, all packed into each bite. Even in a world where mac and cheese is done just about every way it can be done, this one stands out from the crowd. All that’s missing is marshmallows to push it totally round the bend.
And speaking of round the bend, let us consider the Meaty Man Bloody Mary. It’s a fine Bloody Mary, topped with stuffed olives, shrimp and, yes (or perhaps I mean, no!) a pulled pork slider. With a cornichon on top. It’s not so much a drink, as it is a meal in a glass.
It’s just one of the many Bloody Mary options at The Attic; if you want, you can get your olives stuffed with Slim Jim. Or made with tequila, with a beer chaser. Or you can replace the slider with a baby back rib — hanging atop the Bloody. Once again, if they added marshmallows, this would be a total trip down the rabbit hole.
The thing with the cooking at The Attic is that as zany as it can be, it’s always grounded in reality. Perhaps a strange reality. But reality nonetheless. The Mac and Cheetos are … really good, crazy, too.
Aside from the bells and whistles, the Bloody Mary is a fine Bloody Mary — the drink around which the strange elements revolve is a well-made cocktail. And those Devilish Eggs are devilishly good; for my taste, you can’t make deviled eggs spicy enough. Even the short rib poutine is one of the few versions of a French-Canadian favorite that I find even vaguely edible.
In case you’re not familiar with poutine, it’s one of those regional obsessions, in this case built out of french fries, topped with cheese curds and a gravy thick enough to use as spackle. Also, braised short ribs in a red wine sauce replace the ghastly gravy, and the cheese curds are mozzarella, a bit more delicate in flavor than the usual thicker cheddar curds.
Like the Mac and Cheetos, it’s not something I’d opt to eat every day. But now and then — sure, why not?
There’s a Chicken Fried Steak Benedict, on a buttermilk biscuit, with country gravy. There’s a Boxty Benedict, made with the Irish standard called boxty — potato cakes — served with corned beef and eggs on an English muffin, with a hollandaise flavored with Guinness and mustard. And, the Brat Pack is a pair of beer braised bratwursts with eggs and Creole mustard. This is the sort of breakfast that makes me want to go take a nap before lunch.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
