One recent Friday night, at nine o’clock, there was a three-hour wait for a spot at the bar the hostess took down cell-phone numbers and sent customers across the street to a dive where they could drink in the meantime. There are forty-seven seats, which, from the beginning, have been occupied by the city’s hard-core eaters: pretty girls and mangy guys, who seem to be mostly in their thirties, or trying to recapture them. The tables are unadorned: no tablecloths, breadbaskets, or bouquets, just knives and forks and paper menus, printed daily, which warn about the chefs’ resistance to requests for any alterations to the food. The chefs talk wistfully of opening an old-fashioned sandwich shop, and a second restaurant seems imminent, though they are cagey about their plans.Īnimal is small and spare: a single room, with a framed lamb’s skull and an old Muppets lunchbox with a picture of the namesake character providing much of the décor, and a slim panel of soundproofing overhead, to absorb the music and the conversation, which are pitched loud. Animal serves both, though it is perhaps the only doughnut place in town that insists on making them “in season,” which is winter. and it’s, like, the junk-food capital-doughnuts, hamburgers,” Shook says. Shook and Dotolo draw on this tradition freely. But there is a countercurrent of roadside stands, drive-ins, and food trucks, which, along with grilled pizza and Cobb salad, arguably constitute the true regional cooking of Southern California. The restaurant uses three different kinds of bacon, and manages to incorporate pork into just about everything, including the bar of dense dark-chocolate mousse that is its signature dessert, and which customers often order with a glass of milk.įaithful to its roots as a tubercular colony, Los Angeles is a city of juice fasts, tonics, and brown-rice cleanses its image of itself depends on rigorous abstinence from comfort food.
The lease stipulates that Shook and Dotolo cannot advertise as kosher, for competitive reasons, but there is not much chance of that. The tamest offerings are a flat-iron steak under a slick of truffle-Parmesan fondue, and a forty-six-ounce rib eye, which requires nearly an hour on the grill.Īnimal is in an old Jewish district of Los Angeles, several doors down from Canter’s deli, and next to Schwartz Bakery, whose owner is the restaurant’s landlord. For the restaurant’s version of loco moco-a Hawaiian surfer meal composed of white rice, a hamburger, gravy, a fried egg, and sometimes Spam-Shook and Dotolo serve a heap of artisanal Anson Mills rice, a Niman Ranch beef patty, a quail egg, and a slab of Spam, all drenched with house-made teriyaki sauce. The petit basque, a bubbling crock of sheep’s-milk cheese and thin-sliced chorizo, accompanied by grilled bread, is like a personal pizza the poutine, with cheddar in place of the customary Montreal curds, has an oxtail topping the texture of chaw, and tastes unmistakably of chili cheese fries. According to Michael Voltaggio, a young chef trained in the cerebral techniques of molecular gastronomy, Animal is distinguished by its “gnarly big plates of food where each dish has three thousand calories.” (Voltaggio, whose menu at the Langham, a hotel in Pasadena, includes “A Study of the Vegetables of the Season,” eats there once a month.) Animal’s staples are outrageous concoctions that might be called whimsical if they weren’t so rich: expertly prepared junk food made from exquisite ingredients. “We’re a meat-eccentric restaurant,” he said. That meant the next week would be slow: the Lenten slump.
“Yeah, it looks like it,” he said vaguely, before someone realized it was Ash Wednesday. “What is that metal plate in her head? Man, is that a tattoo? Jesus Christ! That’s the craziest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen.” Shook stared. “Whoa!” Dotolo said suddenly, pointing at a mark on the forehead of a middle-aged woman in a station wagon nearby. Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook at their restaurant, Animal.