“This is not a restaurant,” says Daniele Uditi, heading to a multitude of 32 guests in a spacious warehouse in West Adams in a recent on Sunday night. “It may seem like that, but it is not.”
Uditi wants to leave the record, as soon as you feel to eat at the dinner club. The warehouse is equipped with tables in front of a kitchen that resembles the set of a daytime interview program. It is destined to be a substitute for Uditi's house. The diving steam of the great silver pots on the stove and the fire of three ovens of Gozney heats the room.
Daniele Uditi addresses diners in Le Cinner Club, a new dinner club that takes place in a warehouse in West Adams.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
“When you go to a restaurant, you never know the chef, you never understand the story behind the food,” he says. “I want to be close to you and explain the dish per plate and, hopefully, make you very full.”
In a city full of chefs that make Italian food, Uditi is a rarity. Cook like a grandmother, with her most important culinary training that took place in her family's restaurant in Naples and the bakery of her aunt in Caserta. In Le, he is shedding and avoiding the notions of an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, where the Italian is often a monolith of red sauce, pizza and pasta.
Uuditi presented to Angelen his unique style of Napolitan pizza in Pizzana. It must prove the Cacio e Pepe wave that swept the nation, with restaurants everywhere copying and riffing in its pacio e pepe pizza. His little Brentwood pizzeria is now a verifiable chain, with locations in Los Angeles and Texas.
In Le, Uditi is cooking food that reflects the regionality of your family home in Campania, and is doing it in an environment that is the antithesis of a chain restaurant. What began as a recurring dinner at his home in Simi Valley is now a dinner club two to four times a month with 6,000 people on the waiting list. Dinner is $ 250 per person and includes wine pairing.
The sommelier Ferdinando Mucerino pours wine pairing during the Le Cinner club.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
“I love pizza, but I wanted to expand the menu to truly Neapolitan dishes,” he says. “I wanted to tell a story of where I come, which is the Campania region, which is not really highlighted in Los Angeles, there is a lot of Tuscany, a lot of Italian from the North, but nobody really has the feeling of homemade cooking of the South.”
In the sommelier Ferdinando Mucerino, Uditi found a Napolitan partner with the desire to share the riches of the region and a commercial partner for his new company. The two guide the diners through a 2½ -hour party with wine pairings, designed to feel more like a meal in a friend's house than the next Los Angeles restaurant.
“Here, you can do whatever you want,” says Mucerino, demonstrably indifferent with a glass of red wine in his hand. “Come and talk to us. Come to Daniele and ask him for the recipes, come to me and I have more poured. Really enjoy, get at home, because you are at home.”
On my table is the friend I invited, and on the other hand, a newly graduated from UCLA, who learned about dinner through someone who is still on Instagram.
“In my family's restaurant, you come and feel wherever there is space,” says Uditi. “I wanted to recreate that feeling where the people who do not know each other move away the phone and spend time talking to each other.”
Daniele Uditi prepares the first bread course at his new Le Le.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
He starts with three bread courses. The first is the Pomodoro, a thick and spongy bread stained with Sugo di Pomodoro, a rich red sauce with a taste of deep tomato that knows as if it had been reduced for hours. Each slice receives a tablespoon of milks of milky buffalo and a generous drizzle of olive oil. It is the bread that Uditi used to sell for the kilo at the counter of your aunt's bakery.
The following is a pillow focus covered in a shake -made prosciutto made with the often discarded ornaments. Meat butter melts in warm bread under tablespoons of sweet figs and Roman conceiato chips, widely known as the oldest cheese variety in the world. The cheese is aged with wine and herbs, giving the sheep's milk its unique and fierce aroma. As the older and more spicy cousin of Parmesan.
The last focaccia is a tribute to the sandwiches that Uditi used to help your uncle sell under a bridge in Naples when he was a child.
The diners are invited to the kitchen to take video and photos and also help prepare one of the courses.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
“It was my Sunday concert,” he says. “We lower the bread with fried butter over the butter, then we surpassed it with Rapini and Pecorino, we wrapped it on aluminum foil and sold it as a burrito.”
Uditi cuisine Rapini Napolitano with Calabrian chiles, garlic and pecorino to create a disaster of creamy and bitter vegetables that spoon about the hot focaccia.
Mucerine wines combinations are so hyperregional and spills are generous. It was negligent to waste the remains of my glass of Cantina Di Marcho Greco di Tufo, a dry and citrus white wine of Campania that was served along with a salad of endive peas, sugar and tonnate intended to imitate the César dressing. Unless it is fast with its sips, the leftover wine in its glass is ruled out to leave space for the next pairing, with each piece of focaccia and individual element in the menu that receives its own wine.
The food pasta part begins with Uditi inviting diners to join him in the kitchen to break Mezzanelli.
“In Italy, they say that the Italians do not break the pasta, or when an Italian breaks the pasta, an Italian goes to heaven or gets angry,” says you. “So, guess what?”
Daniele Uditi prepares the lardiata, a dish made with mezzanelli paste in a fortified tomato sauce with Lardo.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
Take a piece of pasta and break it into four pieces.
“We are committing sins tonight!”
With phones trained in the kitchen, the guests put pairs of black gloves and filmed themselves breaking the long paste tubes for the next year, the family of a lardiata uditi used to make Sunday dinners. Lardo Di Colonnata gives tomato sauce a fleshy spine and a velvety texture that clings to each piece of broken noodles.
“In this space, you appreciate the Neapolitan cuisine without compromises,” says Uuditi. “The goal is to make people understand my culture.”
He is named after the nickname that his mother and younger brother gave him as a child.
The glory of the Uditi Crown is Pasta E Fagioli, a universally popular Italian dish that is part of the pool cucina canon. It is a lump mass of broken rifles, linguini, spaghetti, mafalda and ziti paste, fused with cooked Peruvian beans until blood starches and create a sauce similar to pasta. It is a dish that Uditi did once a week at the Naples restaurant on your family. For Le, the pasta fagioli is served next to the plateau of a colossal terracotta pot that is carried through the dining room. Each person receives a healthy portion with a drilling drizzle, or what Uditi likes to call Italian Chile Crisp.
The texture changes from chewable to soft, creamy to crispy in each tablespoon. It is a dish that offers a feeling of warming that wraps its entire body.
While the guests visit the kitchen frequently throughout the night, there is a crazy race to capture the sizzling of rib fillets that emerge from the furnaces. Uditi wears the fillets in a demi-glace made of all the meat juice and the ornaments and a little aglianic wine. It is a shameless moment of this unique pure carnal for anything he has experienced in a real grill in the last year.
Pasta fagioli bowls are served next to the plateau and end with a crunchy garlic chili.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
Mucerino combines the steak with its most precious wine of the night, a bottle of Taurasi wrapped in a white tuiry tape and marine debris.
“This bottle was aged under water in the Adriatic Sea for nine years,” he says. “Water accelerates the aging process, natural darkness, cold natural temperatures and the small water vibration change the molecular structure of wine.”
The tauurai is large and earthy enough for the steak, with enough acidity to help cut the wealth of the meat. Maybe it was my mind playing the tricks for me, but I tried a salinity in the wine that I like to imagine that it came from the sea.
Costilla steak with a rich demi-glace served in the new LE dinner club.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
For dessert, Uditi invites Ishnoelle Richardson to the kitchen. Richardson is the baker behind baking with ISH, a small pastry counter in the food hall of the Blossom market in San Gabriel. He is known for his infused cakes with Filipino flavors.
Richardson's pistachio dessert is like a luxury cake and a nut cake in a single round cake. The cortex is designed with 80% sound wheat of the Tehachapi grain project and 20% almond flour. It is on the thickest side, at least half inch, to form a resistant base for the cake inside. The spongecake is soaked in Limoncello and is surrounded by a white chocolate ganache with Italian pistachio paste with almonds, which gives the cake a slight taste to love. A tablespoon of rich beaten helps catch any piece of nut or crumble.
When dessert arrives, my ability for another bite is decreasing, but the cake disappears in a matter of minutes.
Uuditi makes its way through the dining room, registering with each table and stopping taking photos. It rises from a glass of wine and is sneaky from a pistachio cake.
Ishnoelle Richardon Bake with ISH serves a pistachio cake to finish the food.
(Red Gaskell / for the times)
“I don't want barriers, it's about living together and making memories,” he says.
The dates for the next dinners are announced every two weeks, and Uuditi plans to turn it into a kind of club, where people can register to be members. He also looks at opening a focus. Until then, your best option in a reservation is to register on the waiting list.
