on the road: eating at palate in glendale, ca

As much as I love food, I've always held a grudge against Los Angeles restaurants. Actually, that's incorrect. I've always held a grudge against fancy L.A. restaurants. The food might be good, but often it's in competition with the hard-to-get to location, chi-chi atmosphere, and ridiculous prices. I'm making a really gross generalization here, but I don't often get that sense of craft and sincerity that comes with dining in Portland or San Francisco (maybe my two favorite dining towns). (Full disclosure: part of the reason I don't love L.A. restaurants is that in L.A. I get to eat at my parents' house, which pretty much beats the pants off most restaurants anyway). But, luckily, this past weekend, while spending a really wonderful weekend with my parents, I visited Palate Food + Wine in Glendale, CA.

Palate is a really exciting restaurant that celebrates great wine and delicious, seasonal foods. The menu when I visited this past weekend really reflected the cusp-of-spring: citrus, peas, quail, spring onions, parsnips, and spinach were well-represented on the menu.

We started off, however, with the Porkfolio, a selection of wonderful pig cuts with thin toasts and mustard on the side. I've had La Quercia proscuitto many times, and each time it's really wonderful. But at Palate, I fell in love all over again with Mortadella, a moist and fatty Italian sausage that, at Palate, has a very subtle rosemary and coriander taste to it (I like to call Mortadella "upscale balogna," much to everyone's dismay).

And though I'm normally a little freaked out by pickles (I know, I know), I really adored the picked spring onions, which were perfectly tart and salty all at once.


For dinner, I had the quail with bacon, wheat berries, pine nuts, golden raisins, and artichokes. This dish just called my name--every single thing on the plate makes my list of "top 20 foods of all time." Yeah, I like wheat berries that much. And it definitely delivered--the quail was so so perfect (and large--sometimes you get quail that's more bone than meat, but this one was perfectly-sized) that I definitely picked the meat off the tiny drumstick with my teeth. In a fancy restaurant. Sigh. ** When you eat at Palate, you have all sorts of seating choices. The front of the restaurant is a sort of classic L.A. restaurant space (pink lights, sexy booths). The back of the restaurant is a little more exciting--there's a room for large parties, a room that doubles as a wine store/tasting bar, and the "in between room" (where we were) where guests sit at high tables sandwiched between the cheese room and a beautiful refrigerated cellar.

I thought this seating would be strange, but it was actually a lot of fun to be in the middle of the action--we had a fantastic view of the cheese room, and, although we couldn't hear them, we were totally charmed by how much fun the two chefs inside the room were having. When we were ready for dessert, we decided to just walk in (they saw us peeking and encouraged us) to pick our cheeses. They were extremely helpful with suggestions, and we wound up with three wonderful cheeses--a blue cheese, a sheep's milk cheese, and a goat cheese.

Part of our emboldened excursion to the cheese room was thanks to two wonderful bottles of wine: a 2007 Testarossa Pinot Noir Palazzio and a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Brix Vineyards. They were recommended by our server and proved absolutely lovely.