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Posted Dec 16, 2014, 4:06 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,712
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Everything added together is making dtla in 2014, 2015 & hopefully beyond, a fun time. It's the huge things....like the wilshire grand....the big things....like Fig Central & metropolis....the cultural things....like the broad museum....the housing things...like all the apt bldgs.....the rehab things....like the Redbird restaurant in old st vibiana's....that are making dt seem so much more interesting & 'with it' than the hoods that formerly were really the only game in town. Or the time when it was mainly just Samo, or the wilshire corridor from UCLA to bev hills, or hollywood/weho, or venice, or pasadena, or all the newer burbs that ppl in the past would run off to at lightening speed after having spent their workday in dt.
Quote:
Neal Fraser opens Redbird in downtown's Vibiana, finally
Amy Scattergood / Los Angeles Times
By Amy Scattergood
Fans of Neal Fraser's excellent cooking have long been waiting, literally or figuratively, outside the deconsecrated gates of downtown's Vibiana Cathedral for news of his restaurant, long-scheduled to open in the building's former rectory. Well, the gates are finally opening, as Redbird is slated to open Wednesday evening for dinner service.
Fraser, as you may remember, closed Grace in 2010, hoping to relocate the much-loved restaurant downtown. In the meantime, the space that was Grace became Playa, which then became Petty Cash. Much time passed, Neal and Amy Knoll Fraser moved their catering kitchen downtown and took over the Vibiana events space; the Frasers teamed with Bill Chait; and the restaurant evolved to become Redbird.
It should be said that Redbird — a reference to the cardinal who once lived in Vibiana's rectory — is decidedly not Grace. But it will have some Grace-like dishes on the menu, as well as the kind of cooking that has made Fraser one of the town's foremost chefs. ("We didn't want it to be too religious," Knoll Fraser says. "No crosses.")
As you'd expect, both the restaurant, which the Frasers have been effectively working on since 2008, and the menu show signs of much thought and preparation. The dinner menu (Redbird will open for lunch and brunch early in 2015) is divided into four sections: appetizers, mains, desserts and a kind of small plates course that Knoll Fraser named "kickshaws."
Fraser's Redbird crew includes a lot of old friends, including Jason Bowlin, the sous chef at Grace for its final two years, sous chef Austin Cobb, pastry chef Jazmine Corpuz (Ink, Patina, Bottega Louie) and general manager Christian Philippo (Republique, Patina).... The designer is Robert Weimer, who helped design Grace, Fritzi Dog and BLD and had the enviable job of working with one of the prettiest buildings in Los Angeles.
"The architecture was already outstanding; all I could do was mess it up," Weimer points out. (He did not.) The other thing that Redbird has that most restaurants do not? Four kitchens, one of which is in Vibiana's former sacristy.
Redbird is divided into two parts: a lounge inside with a gorgeous marble bar and a collection of vintage and repurposed furniture, some of which came from Grace and Playa (the bar seats 24; the marble came from a marble yard in the San Fernando Valley); and a courtyard dining room with a retractable roof that has a full bar, citrus trees and space for a wood-burning oven (Fraser is moving it there as we speak) where the chef can grill your dinner.
"It's a landmark," Knoll Fraser says of the location. "It deserves something really special." How special the space — and the new restaurant inside it — is can be summed up by noting that there's an actual finger lime tree growing from a large box next to a corner table in the courtyard, and that you can see Vibiana's gorgeous bell tower through that retractable roof. Not a bad place for a glass of wine and a plate of Rabbitchetta.
214 S. Main St., Los Angeles.
Amy Scattergood / Los Angeles Times
Amy Scattergood / Los Angeles Times
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^ But dtla still needs as many ppl as possible 24/7, 365 days a yr, since the much praised rivera restaurant on the ground floor of the metlofts apt bldg is closing at the end of the month due to apparently not enough business, & roy's, which closed earlier in the yr, even though it originally said its dt location was one of its best performing branches, but must have seen its sales drop when too much competition was created in its part of dt.
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