Osteria Mozza Restaurant Review

Gold Dig #56 Grouped together as “Mozzaplex” on Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list are these four Italian eateries – Pizzeria Mozza (pizza as you might have guessed), Osteria Mozza (more formal restaurant), Chi Spacca (meat-focused), and Mozza2Go (takeout counter). We tried Osteria Mozza, which was packed even on a weeknight, with every seat at…

Pizzana Restaurant Review

Gold Dig #52 Pizzana is the current LA pizza craze. If you go for dinner or during the weekend, it’s an hours long wait. The Sprinkles Cupcakes folks and Chris O’Donnell and his wife have ownership stake in Pizzana. I have to admit that the celebrity involvement and the insane line made me skeptical, but…

Bavette Cacio e Pepe

Cookbook Club – The Mozza Cookbook For November’s Cookbook Club, we used The Mozza Cookbook: Recipes from Los Angeles’s Favorite Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria by Nancy Silverton, Matt Molina, Carolynn Carreno, and Mario Batali. I made the Bavette Cacio e Pepe. You can share in our full at-home restaurant experience on my Cookbook Club site….

Eating the Big Apple

Last year I visited a friend in New York for a few days. A couple weeks prior to the trip, he texted me to ask what I wanted to do while I was there. I sent him back a long list of eateries I wanted to check out. His response – “So I get that…

Officine Brera Restaurant Review

Gold Dig #41 Officine Brera specializes in northern Italian cuisine. It is one of the many downtown restaurants on Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list. It is an awesome, high-ceilinged space with a long wine bar on one end, and a wall of windows opposite a view into the wood-grilling and roasting magic. You’ll even pass by…

Pizza Party II

Anthony made another batch of his homemade pizza dough and seriously amazing homemade pizza sauce, so it was time for another pizza party (drool over our pizzas from the last party here)! We’re hoping to make this an ongoing regular thing, though this may be the last one for a few months given that we’re…

Spicy Sausage & Mushroom Tomato Sauce Pasta

I adored this spicy sausage and mushroom tomato sauce pasta when I was a kid. My mom always made it with spaghetti noodles, and half the fun was watching my brother eat it. He would suck each individual noodle through his lips, and then eat the sausage and mushrooms later. By the end of the…

Pizza Party

What’s a great way to close out the week? With an impromptu pizza party! And I’m not talking about greasy cardboard boxes delivered to the door. When Colin texted to say he and Anthony had each prepared homemade dough and homemade sauces, of course I was in. The rest of us brought abundant toppings, which…

Cutting Corners with Lasagna

Sometimes an impromptu night of home-making lasagna is exactly what you need. The Lasagna The star of the show, naturally, was the lasagna. We started with homemade pasta sheets. Anthony made his secret tomato sauce recipe, which included ground beef, Italian sausage, tomatoes, wine, and a set of spices that shall never be revealed. It…

Pasta Party

For Christmas, Katy got pasta attachments for her KitchenAid mixer. She invited a bunch of us to come over and make our favorite sauce to go with the three different kinds of homemade pasta she whipped up. Definitely my kind of party. Capellini First, she had capellini. These were the thinnest noodles. Alyssa made Marcella…

Vincenti Restaurant Review

Gold Dig #27 Vincenti in Brentwood is not only one of the “10 great Italian restaurants” Jonathan Gold has written about; it also makes Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list. A large bar runs the length of the restaurant. Many of the patrons are in business attire and look like they might be having a work meeting….

Ravioli, Gnocchi, Marinara, Brown Butter Sage Sauce

Cookbook Club – Handmade Pasta The holiday season tends to be filled with gatherings that heavily involve eating (and therefore cooking). It’s a wonderful time for the kind of people who would join a Cookbook Club, but we were worried that people might need a bit of a break. We didn’t want to skip December’s…