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L.A. Market, Chef Kerry Simon’s restaurant at the JW Marriott hotel at L.A. Live, is now being helmed by Chef de Cuisine Nona Sivley of Gordon Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen” fame. The restaurant’s menu reflects Sivley’s Southern roots with a California flair, ending up with mixed results. There were some dishes here that I loved, but there were also some that missed its mark.

What I loved:

This gnocchi and lump crab appetizer was unique and absolutely delicious. The gnocchi was pillowy, and the addition of kumquat and micro basil was a pleasant surprise and nicely complemented the truffle parmesan cream sauce.

Gnocchi

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Let me preface this post with this statement: This restaurant is in Marina del Rey. Unless you live in Marina del Rey or really close to it, you probably don’t frequent the area much. I know I don’t. But I may start now that Vu Restaurant has opened at the waterfront Jamaica Bay Inn, which just underwent an extensive makeover.

Vu (pronounced “view”), which just opened this month, turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me, despite some hiccups at the bar (make sure head mixologist Jolie Klein makes your drinks, and you’ll be golden). The food’s origins are all over the map, literally — there’s Asian, Italian and good old American, among others — and even some molecular gastronomy thrown in. A bit confusing, but somehow it works. Here are some of the highlights from my dinner there last week.

The pork belly sitting on a crispy cake of grits and topped with root beer gelée was my favorite bite of the night. As Lindsay William-Ross, editor of LAist, noted, the flavors were reminiscent of chicken and waffles. I liked this because the root beer wasn’t overpowering but lent just the right amount of subtle sweetness to complement the dish.

Pork belly on crispy grits topped with root beer gelée

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Allez cuisine!

That’s kind of how I pictured the special appearance of Ludovic Lefebvre at The Foundry on Melrose‘s Bluesy Tuesday Southern food night last week — a battle of Iron Chefs duking it out over gourmet fried chicken, Ludo v. The Foundry’s Eric Greenspan, who was in fact a contestant on Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef. What we diners got was more of a delicious pairing of two very different styles of fried chicken that complemented each other rather than threw down against each other. Though both Ludo and Greenspan brought it, as they say…in the parlance of our times.

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