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Fig pizza

In honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Osteria La Buca is donating a portion of its proceeds earned through the end of October to the Susan G. Komen Foundation to support breast cancer research. Because many of the restaurant’s friends and family have been affected by this disease, they decided to team up with Komen and painted the exterior of the eatery pink to draw even more attention to the cause.

So you have one more week to eat here for a good cause, or go anyway because the food is good! Some of the dishes I enjoyed at a recent media dinner were a pizza with multi-colored cherry tomatoes, figs, a leafy green (kale, I think) and mozzarella cheese; asparagus spears topped with parmesan and a fried egg; osso buco risotto; and tiramisu.

Tiramisu

Asparagus spears with parmesan and egg

Note: This meal was hosted.

This is the first post from ShopEatSleep contributor Houri Parsi, a long-time friend and budding food blogger.

I discovered this new restaurant on Beverly Boulevard a couple of months ago and kept finding myself coming back, if only for the cute waiters and sophisticated owners. Eventually, I invited my friend Maya to have dinner with me there so she could write about it on her blog. But then, because I am a) an over ambitious control freak, and b) an overambitious control freak, I suggested that I write it myself as a guest blogger. So, with much ado, here is the review of one of my new favorite dining destinations in Los Angeles.

To start things off, let me tell the regular ShopEatSleep readers a little about me. Unlike this blog’s author, I am not a fan of Los Angeles. I’m from San Francisco, which makes me bougie enough to say things like, “No thanks, I only smoke in Paris…,” and, “I make it a point to go Europe once a year, and I always stop in New York on the way.” My smug preference for cities with smug dining options makes L.A. a frustrating sea of places that require an hour of research to find and 40 minutes of promising your friends on the Westside that you will give the two hours of their life back to them if they could please just meet you east of the 405.

Then…Della Terra fell into my lap. It fills the void for a spot between a welcoming sidewalk café and a fancy place where you want to match your clutch with your heels. And since I know Maya is always watching the price points for her in-this-economy readers, I should mention that it’s a classy place you can go to without breaking the bank. With the exception of the steak au poivre, which clocks in at an impressive $27, everything else on the menu safely sits between $10 and $20. And most of it is consistently good.

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The L.A. mini chain Pitfire Pizza is about to get just a bit bigger with a new location in Culver City, and even though it’s not officially open for business yet (official word has it opening in about a week), the food is already pretty solid. I guess that’s easier to do when you’ve had some practice at your North Hollywood, downtown and West Los Angeles locations. But the Culver City location has a new kind of pizza oven, so there!

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Eggs Benedict

Last week, Pasadena’s La Grande Orange Cafe, which is opening a new location next week in Santa Monica, invited a bunch of food writers/bloggers to “brinner,” or breakfast for dinner. The special menu (you can’t actually order breakfast food for dinner right now, though some dishes may be added to the dinner menu in the near future) included eggs Benedict with the cafe’s signature English muffins, lemon-ricotta pancakes and huevos rancheros.

I had the egg-white omelet with turkey, tomatoes and avocado, which I found nice and light, though there was a bit too much parsley. The eggs Benedict I tasted had great flavor, with the sourness of the sourdough English muffins a great touch. My favorite dessert of the myriad the restaurant gave us to sample was the cucumber sorbet – it was refreshing.

The cafe is adding a pizza parlor in a space adjacent to its patio. As of last week, the space was used as storage for some of Santa Monica’s furniture, but the restaurant says the pizza will be ready to go some time this fall. Pizza will be served from the get-go at the Santa Monica location, and they’ll also be selling packaged English muffins there, too.

More photos after the jump