Treatsa: Hand Delivered Treats

It's that time of year again, when you're thinking of what gifts to give or send. As a food lover, I always want to send something food-related, but how do I send it to the people I won't see in person? Many bakeries/ chocolatieres offer some sort of expedited shipping, which tend to be pretty expensive and still take at least one or two days. And what if the products get ruined in transit? Treatsa tries to solve this problem by offering a service for hand delivering treats (currently only available in LA) from their partner bakery, one of the best and most well known in town.

Hand delivery costs $12 - comparable to usual shipping costs from bakeries, regardless of the order amount, so it's better if you go big. Treatsa picks up your order fresh from the bakery and delivers to your door the same day.
They offered to send me the "Premium Chef's Choice Package" ($50). They have smaller and bigger options as well. I scheduled my order for my last day in LA. The bell rang and there was the guy holding two boxes tied with red ribbons.

I think you can figure out which bakery they came from, yeah?

The Platinos

A huge box of cookies and more! And plenty of my fave, Brown Butter cookies with brown butter, chocolate chip, and sea salt.

Of course, the beauty of hand delivery is that you can get goodies that are typically not shippable, like these chocolate fleur de sel babycakes. I hope they will include the butterscotch pot de creme to at some point!

The total for this order is $62, which isn't a small amount to spend, and there were definitely A LOT of goodies. Send this to a big family, or an office. It's sure to please.

Gobi: Mongolian BBQ Done Better

When I think of Mongolian BBQ, I think of my campus cafeteria and a couple of dives around UCLA and Caltech. I think of people overstuffing their bowls with meat and noodles. Well, the latter may still be true at Gobi, but here they use all natural, hormone free meats and vegetables from the farmer's market. Plus, great gelato + good beer list = beer floats!

For those unfamiliar with it, Mongolian BBQ is pretty much a DIY meal. Starting with an empty bowl, you grab your own meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces - as much as you can fit in the bowl. At Gobi, the prices are $9.95 for lunch and $12.95 for dinner (extra $3 for shrimp).

Gobi uses hormone-free meats, and I stuffed my bowl full of the lamb! It's pretty unusual to find lamb at these places.

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Michael Voltaggio's ink.

Top Chef Michael Voltaggio's ink: perhaps the most anticipated restaurant opening of the year, stalled a bit by the surprise opening of ink.sack, its sandwich shop counterpart. Reservations are taken online and have typically been immediately snatched up as soon as they become available, but we checked on random occasions and there are often cancellations.

We had a reservation but they were running a bit behind and we were told to wait at the bar. The bar was equally packed and there was initially no seat available, but a bar manned by Devon Espinosa definitely calls for some cocktail orders. This bar seems like the bar to be, as we ran into quite a few people we knew here. The cocktail list, as well as the food menu, are listed as a list of ingredients, with the main one in bold. Mezcal, scotch, rum, and so on.

We started with some drinks at the bar while waiting. Our two drinks were well balanced, with the mezcal being the more interesting:
mezcal, lemon, apple cider, cinnamon ($13)
scotch, lemon, ginger, clover honey, angostura bitters ($13)


The server suggested ordering 3-4 dishes per person. We ended up with ten total including dessert for three people. The dishes never failed to be interesting and different, and all in all they were done well.

charred avocado, hen of the woods, whipped fish sauce, mushroom chicharron ($11)

A new combination of familiar ingredients - a crowd pleaser.

brussels sprouts, pig ears, house-cured lardo, apple ($10)

Photo by The Kick It Spot

I believe brussels sprout no longer qualify as a healthy vegetable dish in most restaurants. Certainly not here, covered in a sheet of lardo. The star of the show, though, was really the crispy pig ears.

spaghetti, giant squid, hazelnut-ink pesto, piment d'espelette ($14)

The hazelnut ink pesto sits below the chewy "spaghetti" made from squid, waiting for you to mix it and cover the spaghetti with the black ink.

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