Road Trip Dining - Susan Feniger's STREET

Ah, Los Angeles... the home of countless famous restaurants and restaurnateurs.  One of those famous restauranteurs who is very hot at the moment, is Susan Feniger.  You may have seen her on Top Chef Masters on Bravo.  You may have read her cookbooks.  You may have seen her on the Food Network.  She is also the owner of several  restaurants in and around LA including several Border Grills and STREET.  We chose to try out STREET and see how it rated against Dallas restaurants.

The Street concept is fairly simple, small plates and snack sized dishes inspired by Susan's discoveries as she travelled around the world looking for culinary inspiration.  " From Moscow to Mumbai, Buenos Aires to the Bayou, savory bites explode to life in the STREET kitchen, all infused with Susan's unique style and passion."  The restaurant, located in Hollywood, is quite small, but with a decent sized courtyard where all of the action occurs and where the best people watching is found.  All of the enhanced body parts that you would find in the Park Cities but with the added bonus of the plastic, over the top personalities of the aspriring actors/actresses.  The perfect venue to take advantage of the LA weather.



Laundry Day Fritters

Berbere Fries

We, being the bottomless pits that we are, tried virtually every item on the menu.  Pigfest if you will.  Here are some of the stand outs:
   - Laundry Day Fritters made with Red Beans and Rice, Hot Sauce Crema, Andoulle Sausage and Scallions.  Dandy.
   - Berbere (an Ethiopian Spice of Chili Peppers, garlic, ginger, dried basil, koraima, rue, white and black pepper and fenugreek) Spiced French Fries.
  - Mung Bean Pancake, a Korean influenced dish made from Scallions, Kimchi and Shitake mushrooms.
   - The Daily Pizza make with Broadbean Hummus, grilled Treviso, Ratatouille and goat cheese. 
 

Pizza

Mung Bean Pancake

Every item was created to challenge your palate with the unfamilar, and every dish that we tried was a home run.  Outstanding.

How do Dallas restaurants match up?  Dallas restaurants, if you are willing to eat steaks, Tex-Mex, burgers or southern style cuisine, are world class (if you can call a burger world class).  However there is so much more out there that Dallas has not even begun to discover.  Tastes, flavors and textures that +90% of our citizens would spurn as being inedible because it is unfamilar keeps us firmly mired in mediocrity.  Look around, challenge your palate, you may be surprised by what you find.

Susan Feniger's STREET
742 N Highland Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://www.eatatstreet.com/index.html