Sustainable Gardens

We are so excited to announce that our friend, the talented landscape architect, Judy Kameon, has released her first book and we are featured in it! It is a true honor as I have admired Judy's work from afar before I knew her personally: she designed the gardens of The Parker, Isabel Marant, Marc Jacobs, Balanciaga, the list goes on and on. We are so thrilled for her to break out with this book and a new website designed by our own designers, Smog. Tonight we are cooking for a book launch at Heath Ceramics to celebrate and we will be cooking soon for the next one at Individual Medley, stay tuned, and be sure and check out the book here where she shares all of her favorite resources and tips.

We Get All Street In Our Garden

You may have already heard about our event inspired by our friends at Poketo we held out in our garden. It was featured in The New York Times and in 100 Layer Cake! The time has come to talk a bit about it here on our own blog. Here we go!

As is the tradition of these collaborations (here's the most recent one), we clear out everything from The Salon so our featured guests can completely reinvent it. Here Poketo made a pop-up of their downtown store. I especially like how they used tape on the floor to make designs, even a rug!

The chalkboard artist, Joyce Chai, works at Poketo so she did up all the many chalkboards we have around with little sayings and figurines just to add some pop.

In The Salon here is Nicolette, one of our catering managers. Together, she and I design and plan all of our special events. You may not always recognize her because she likes to roll out in costume.

We enlisted our talented friend Yasmine to do the flowers. She was a bit horrified that I gave her a bunch of artificially colored buds to work with. They had to be in our color palette: sea blue, red, purple, and yellow, all the colors of Poketo's logo! I knew they were cheesy but having Yasmine's delicate touch arrange them balanced it all out. I thought they looked beautiful!

It was a street fare after all so Nicolette took to spray painting milk crates in our color palate for seating. We also screened a Thai movie over off the bleachers there. Yes, those are stuffed animals in the audience. Better yet, they are MY stuffed animals from when I was a kid. My dad has kept my childhood bedroom like a time capsule from when I left at 18. He must've known these guys would come in handy someday.

Nicolette and I scoured Korea Town and Thai Town for components of flair and we were delighted to find very colorfully wrapped candies that we used in our decor. By the end of the night, those candies had been gobbled up.

Let's talk food! We had 4 "Action Stations" where we served our take on Thai and Korean street food. Our friends who own Poketo, Angie (who is Korean) and Ted (who is Thai), took us out on the town for some traditional comfort food from their homeland so as to familiarize Matt and I with the flavors and techniques of their respective countries. Then Matt put his own spin on things.

STATION 1: THE FRYER!

STATION 2: THE GRILL!

COLORFUL SOJU COCKTAILS!!

Let's get the tunes going! My dad drew and cut out those animals and vegetables that we painted in our color palette. Angie, of Poketo then wrote the names in Korean. Cute, huh? 

For the tables we wrapped wood blocks with Thai and Korean newspaper pieces and then spray painted little matchbox cars and tractors (it was a street party after all!).

STATION 3: THE WOK!

STATION 4: LETTUCE WRAP STATION

LET'S DANCE!

We made lots of little Thai inspired desserts that we tray passed.

The Flipbooth made it's debut at this party and it was a huge hit! Guests make little movie books that were printed for them on the spot as takeaway gifts. So much fun!

Photos: Stephanie Collins and Glen Nakasako

Oh yes and our friends at Smilebooth brought a set-up for us to have fun with, remember when we talked about it here? Did I mention we had ping pong table up too? We all had such a blast!

Heirloom LA Wedding Tasting

It is standard in the wedding world for engaged couples and sometimes their mom or their wedding planner to do a "tasting" where they choose from a large menu some appetizers and entrees they think they might want to serve on their wedding. 

For these tastings we always go in our garden and do trimmings for the salad and the garnishes. We are so lucky to be able to have access to delicate little edible flowers that we take with us on our events. They're a really pretty surprise to guests.

We built a private tasting room, The Salon, to hold special events in as you see here, but also to host these wedding tastings. It's a great way for our catering managers and our chefs to explain our philosophy of food and help brides and grooms make catering decisions to best suit their vision.

We start with a series of appetizers and sometimes a crostini station. This really helps couples imagine their cocktail hour.

Next up is a garden salad which we always preface with the explanation that we are a seasonally driven kitchen. Oftentimes couples come in 6-8 months before their wedding date so the apples and persimmons that were so crisp and sweet at their tasting will be replaced by nectarines and plums for their big day. Greens will be different also because we never know what farms will be bringing in. We trust them. We work with small, organic family run farms that have never let us down. They love that we appreciate what they do so they never fail to bring us their best offerings, and that's what goes in all of our garden salads and vegetable dishes.

Our sides to entrees are seasonal as well. Our menu features "Trust Us" vegetables. It's lovely that 95% of our clients choose to Trust Us. They understand that by choosing this option they are enabling us to trust our farmers.

We prepare these tastings "family style" so those eating all share from the same dish, serving themselves on their own plate to get a taste of everything. Fish is an entree that most people want to taste. Again, the fish we serve is seasonal and wild, more on that here.

Chicken is a popular dish on weddings and we do our Jidori chicken in many different ways. Since the quality of the chicken we purchase is so high, there is more flavor and juiciness.

Photos: Jennifer Emerling

We get our lambs (and pigs and cows) in whole from humane and sustainable ranches so it's great to encourage couples to choose "whole harvest" which is basically a way to incorporate different cuts from the same animal for their menu. This choice enables us to support these small ranches. If a menu choice is lamb rack for 100, then clearly we need to outsource our lamb from a larger purveyor and many different animals. We still take great care in who we purchase our proteins from but it is our goal to primarily support the little ranches like this one and this one. We all make important political decisions with every food purchase so why not support the guys who are working really hard to maintain integrity and humanity in their ranching? You can taste the difference and you're making a difference.

So there's a bit on our food philosophy and a glimpse into one of our wedding tastings. If you're not getting married anytime soon, there are many other opportunities to taste our food. We look forward to feeding you!