La Times Restaurant Review: Cafe 2001 is the eccentric refute the needs at this time

In Cafe 2001, breakfast extends for the morning of the morning district at 8 in the morning, an unusually beautiful avocado toast, crowned with a soft egg, can arrive next to its capuchino or hojicha. The oval wobble is hidden, newly visible, in a nest covered with zucchini grass, Pepino and Kohlrabi Julienned. This is the healthy beginning of the day, represented as a search for Easter eggs.

After 11 in the morning, the dishes that leave lunch are available. The alignment revolves, but it can safely depend on a katsu pork loin sandwich that verifies all the boxes: soft and precisely rectangular slices of Shokupan; JUICOS pieces of meat outlined in the lightest empanado; and a sweet and sweet lacquer made of ketchup, hot mustard and a Japanese barbecue sauce brand.

The Katsu sandwich with pork chop and milk bread. Cafe 2001 is adjacent to the YESS restaurant, with its own rear entrance, in the district of the arts of the center of the center of the (Emil Ravelo / for the times)

The last menu element is ready at 1 PM and it is not a moment before: watermelon cake. If the algorithms did their job, a portion was the viral blow that he saw in the social ones this summer, the beautiful image that took you to Cafe 2001, a small peculiar and silently serious place, with a narrow but very high space recovered from urban decomposition, and casual and sophisticated daytime meals. Their eccentricities feel like a welcome shelter.

For the dessert Star-Turno, Cafe 2001 Chef Giles Clark easily accredits Toshio Tanabe and his French restaurant in Tokyo, Ne Quittez Pas, as inspiration. If in Clark's pastry case, glimpse an entire cake that is already missing a section, it could momentarily confuse it with an extra red velvet shiny. That tells you about the proportions: think of a round of the fresh fruit interspersed between thin layers of simple sponge cake and covered with soft glazed glazed cream. His delight is based on the proportions of the three contrasting textures, compensated by a watermella stain to jam.

The watermelon cake, inspired by chef Toshio Tanabe of Ne Quittez Pas de Tokyo.

(Emil Ravelo / for the times)

Clark grew in England, and the Slyest Touch to the Cake is a final garnish of Clear Fox glaciers, a 107 -year -old English sweet, grated at the top before serving. The dust sits invisibly. A menthol freshness moves through any other bite, more thought than to taste.

This portion of joy will disappear soon with the changing stations. At the end of a recent solo lunch, I asked to leave a wedge, and the staff declined politely, telling me that the chef would not allow it. The construction of the cake, he implied, was too delicate. The refusal did not surprise me or rile me. It is known that the players in question are sincere perfectionists.

CAFE 2001 resides in the back of the same fortress of a building, originally a bank that debuted in 1924, which Alber Yesss, the Polarizing and Mercurial Japanese restaurant where Junya Yamasaki directs the kitchen. Clark worked with Yamasaki in London. Both signed with the owner Kino Kaetsu to create Yesss, who opened with Clark as Sous Chef in 2023 after several years of delays related to the pandemic.

The team always imagined operating two restaurants in the massive space. Kaetsu incorporated a second small kitchen in a backwowery of the rear corner during the construction of Yesss, which is huge compared. She and the chefs made a rain of ideas about the unused area from the beginning: could it be a small and intelligent bistro? Or a corner to serve flavor menus, polished and gastronomic?

A metal staircase leads to the second level, where the narrow floor wraps the atrium style around the exposed brick walls.

(Emil Ravelo / for the times)

What finally joined was much more bootstrap. Adjacent to the order counter, Clark filled coffee with tables and chairs that do not match some borrows of friends. A staircase rises to the second level, where the narrow floor wraps the atrium style around the exposed brick walls. If I could take a look at customer screens camping there with their laptops, I imagine that half would polish television scripts and others by adjusting AI models.

The atmosphere is a cafeteria meets a concrete bunker, and the strange and industrial beauty pockets are revealed. Last week I thought about looking to the ceiling, where the scurdles with spider cracks filter the milky light. Its mixture of rusty stripes, stained painted lines and blue ovoid shadows could pass, out of context, for early abstract expressionism. Near the stereo on the ground floor, tuned at noon to classic Kusc, there is a real work of art: a glass sculpture by Sam Shotemaker that resembles rounds of aging cheese, but is made of mycelium: the root structure of the fungus, a material that emerges as a structure of biodegradable buildings, from which the shoemaker also recently creates a kayak from the island of the island of the island of the island of the island of the island of the island of the island healthy.

The configuration and the cooking cohers. Clark solves its own permissive definition of coffee food. It makes a bacon breakfast sandwich and a Benedictine propagation, a combination of cucumber and cream cheese accredited to a catering company in the early 1900s in Kentucky that also seems very British. With a balanced hand, it combines sweet and tasty in more substantial plates in the morning: blueberry jam with tablespoons next to smoked trout diapers with hash browns, a lot of cubes lamb hash with a small group of hidden apple puree between the meat and potatoes.

Coffee chef 2001, Giles Clark, worked with Jun Yamasaki in Yesss, as well as in restaurants such as Chez Panisse in Berkeley, St. John Breed and Wine in London and give tokio. (Emil Ravelo / for the times)

For lunch, beyond the Katsu sandwich, there is usually a portion of pig terrine and pistachio, textured and spicy and complete with cornichones, a pair of toast and a salad strand. A fun workshop spirit also encourages this part of the menu. Clark brings an advantage to more compound salads. He slipped thin half melon on a sneak in a corn and peppers summer salad. The Hunks of Chewy dill, Lemony Celeriac, such as algae algae on a coral reef.

Concentrate on the incoming change. It has been rock fish with the smell of saffron, Tripe in Ragout and more recently a classic Toglia Tuscany, the slices of almost rare beef in arugula and parmesan, served with a fantastic side of reissued fries and ultra crispy fries with fried sage leaves. Clark has gone through several Pedigrí restaurants in his career: Chez Panisse, St. John Breead and Wine in London and give tokyo among them, and these ephemeral dishes hint the fantaso and the technique he has in his reserves.

At lunchtime: a portion of pork and pistachio terrine, textured and spicy, comes with Cornichons, a pair of toast and a salad stray.

(Emil Ravelo / for the times)

So do impeccable brioche donuts, the species full inspired by St. John, which appears as morning snacks. It addresses them with vanilla custard or strawberry jam, and the movement is to order both and eat them almost at the same time until their content sprouts and fuses into a sweet rotating. Clark mentioned that, unlike St. John, he sprinkles them with powdered sugar “as the most voluptuous encounter,” he said, “and they do the donuts of old -style supermarkets in the United Kingdom.” It might seem somewhat lower, but the detail that you invest in the flavor memory comes home.

In the pastry department, Clark has a partner in Kota Kawamura, who moved from Japan to open Yesss. The two chefs would make lemon cakes in their days off, which ended up being the first proven coffee recipe. Kawamura now makes several demanding cakes on a daily basis, his shells produce and breaking. I especially love those found with seasonal spiral fruits, placed on a dense custard.

Katsu, bacon sandwiches, lamb hash, strangely wonderful salads, watermelon cake, donuts, cakes: Hodgepodge clicks and creativity feels unpleasant. In its disheveled, eccentric and affordable way, Cafe 2001 brings memories of the era of the experimental risks of the last decade (names such as guerrillas tacos, baroo, lasa, sqirl, rice bar and the first iteration of Kato, when the economy of restaurants in Los Angeles did not feel as terrible. Use it as a coffee stop, make sure for a cooking What could, like the dinner service, below: Clark's approach and his team incorporates the potential.

(Emil Ravelo / for the times)