Greater Palm Springs, CA

Restaurants
Catalan Restaurant (Rancho Mirage)
Dish Creative Cuisine (Cathedral City)
Mastro's Steakhouse (Palm Desert)

Sights and Activities
Living Desert Zoo and Botanical Garden
San Andreas Fault Tour

Under The Radar: Buffalo Club (Santa Monica, CA)

Buffalo Club is a fine dining restaurant in Santa Monica that's been around for 19 years, and yet not that many people these days seem to know about it.

The exterior looks like a dive bar - that's because it used to be before the current proprietor bought it and reinvented it as a restaurant. Walking in, though, especially after the recent renovation, reveals an interior much different from the outside - an elegant, dimly lit, quiet, dining room. After the latest renovation, there are now two dining areas: the white tablecloth Iroquois dining room and the more casual (and cheaper) Garden Courtyard.

The chef and part owner, Patrick Healy, has been at the restaurant since its inception, a rare feat for fine dining chefs in LA these days. Healy trained in France under Alain Ducasse and other 3-star Michelin chefs before opening his own restaurant and later joining Buffalo Club.

We let the sommelier, Brayner Ferry, pair everything for us and he welcomed us with a brut rose from La Maison du Cremant de Bourgogne.
Our dinner was off to a great start with the Dungeness crab salad, avocado wrap, asparagus, Belgian endive, spicy gazpacho ($23). Pictured here is half of the portion, the restaurant split them for us.

The precious crab salad sits atop the gazpacho and covered by fresh, creamy slices of avocado. It's not quite salad, not quite soup. Either way it was a great, light way to whet your appetite. None of the flavors were too strong as to overpower the crab, instead they come together well.

Crisp duck confit, frisee, arugula, red onion, haricot vert, duck fat potatoes, Bing Cherry gastrique ($19).

While I've had duck confit salads before, it's the first that the duck was this crispy. The meat was rich, but nicely by the greens and the gastrique. This was paired with a classic Chardonnay for Carneros, to cut the richness.

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LA's Ultimate Tempura Bowl: Hannosuke

Tempura had always been an accompaniment to soba or udon for me, not a meal to order by itself .That is, until Hannosuke opened inside the food court of Mitsuwa Marketplace on Centinela. Hannosuke is an outpost of the tempura specialist in Tokyo, and the thing to get here is the Edomae Tendon ($12.95) (meaning Edo-style, Edo being the other name for Tokyo), a tempura rice bowl that comes with miso soup.

This upgrade from the Original Tendon that's $8.95 gets you anago (seawater eel) from Tokyo. See the longest piece of tempura up there in the bowl? That's the anago! Well worth the extra spending.

Both the seafood and vegetables inside and the batter outside are much better than other tempura you' d find in the area, and the tendon comes with a deep fried, soft-boiled egg that just brings everything together once you break it. Hannosuke is definitely the place to go for tempura in West LA.

Hannosuke
3760 S Centinela Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90066
(310) 398-2113