The passion and wild herbs of a Tuscan chef

Los Angeles Times

3 days ago

A meal in Tuscany's Valdichiana. Plus, L.A.'s best new Armenian restaurant. Avner Levi's cherry-topped hamachi crudo. The chicken Caesar wrap comeback. And the best wedding gifts for restaurant lovers. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes.
Most of the time we travel to escape our everyday lives, to experience something new. But sometimes we travel to return to something familiar.
I've been returning to the same part of Italy, an Umbrian town where it's easy to slip across the A1 into Tuscany, for more than 20 years. For many of those years I've made my way to Osteria La Vecchia Rota in Marciano della Chiana, a small fortress town between Arezzo and Siena.
Two things bring me back. Certainly, there is the food, intensely local pastas and roasted meats you are unlikely to find in any of the thousands of Italian restaurants that exist in the U.S.
And then there is the proprietor, Massimo Giavannini, who appears before you in a burgundy-red chef's apron and matching chef's hat that, in contrast to the stiff toques favored by classically trained French chefs, flops jauntily to the side — a sign of friendliness and approachability.
You can order from a printed menu, but most of the time, if he is not handling a rush of orders in the kitchen, Giavannini — who has called himself 'the innkeeper with a passion for organic produce' — prefers to describe the dishes for you in his distinctive raspy voice. These are the moments you realize you have found yourself in the hands of a passionate cook, one who wants you to understand what is special about the ingredients that will go into your food.
'You know pesto,' he said on one visit, 'but our grandmother and grandfather made another pesto. We make it with selvatica mint [or wild mint], good garlic, good oil, pine nuts and walnuts.'
He explains that the portulaca, or purslane, which sauces his tortelli, is critical to the region in summer — for people and for animals — 'because inside the leaf it's like water ... it's important for energy, to cool off.'
Of the black truffle-topped ricotta gnudi I always order, he says, 'Ours are green because they are made with ... '
He struggles with the English word and then smiles big when I ask, 'nettles?'
'Yes!' he says. We have done this information exchange before and I love it every time. Often, I'll learn something new, but mostly I like being in his now-familiar presence.
Of course, it was my late husband and this paper's previous restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, who first brought me and our kids — and then our friends — to La Vecchia Rota thanks to his obsession with trying as many places in the guidebook Osterie d'Italia, put out by Italy's Slow Food organization. I didn't see it in this year's guide, but at one point La Vecchia Rota — specializing, as its website says, in 'the now-forgotten cuisine of the Valdichiana' — was awarded a 'snail,' the guide's highest ranking for restaurants that epitomize Slow Food's cook-local ethos.
Last month, a big group of us gathered in the piazza outside the restaurant, where tables are set out in the summer for al fresco dinners. Plates of our favorite pastas were passed around, including one of hand-cut squares of dough sauced with pears and Pecorino cheese and another made with Tuscany's big-bulbed garlic known as aglione di Valdichiana, then platters of chicken 'made the way it used to be,' roast pork, onions cooked in the ashes of the wood-fired oven and some of the best potatoes I've ever eaten.
We may have been a group of outsiders with no actual roots in this land, but after being fed here by Giavannini year after year, this corner of Tuscany has started to feel a bit like home.
Ever since I shared a meal with critic Bill Addison early in his research for this week's review of Tun Lahmajo in Burbank, I haven't stopped craving the Armenian restaurant's many meaty and cheesy breads, stews and roasted potatoes hand-mashed at the table. Since then, I've tried to get other people to come try what Addison calls 'L.A.'s best new Armenian restaurant' — in part because Tun Lahmajo serves dishes that go beyond the classic repertoire of charcoal-grilled meats and sides we've come to love in Southern California. I wasn't always successful. Maybe now, with Addison's official blessing on the place, I can persuade my friends to come along.
'A trio of friends — all from L.A.'s Armenian community, and all high school dropouts — scraped together $900 in 2017 because they believed that their Nashville-style fried chicken stand was the future,' writes Food's reporter Stephanie Breijo. 'Now Dave's Hot Chicken is worth $1 billion.'
Breijo describes how Arman Oganesyan, Tommy Rubenyan and Dave Kopushyan (a former line cook at Thomas Keller's now-closed Bouchon Bistro in Beverly Hills) went from an unpermitted pop-up in an East Hollywood parking lot to the central figures in 'one of L.A.'s most astounding small-business success stories' after being acquired in June by private equity firm Roark Capital.
It's a classic L.A. story — one more national fast-food chain born in Southern California. Of course, Dave's is not the L.A. restaurant that popularized hot chicken in Southern California. That would be Howlin' Ray's started in 2015 by Johnny Ray Zone. He gives full credit to the Black cooks of Nashville, who started bringing the fire to fried chicken, especially the family behind Prince's Hot Chicken, started in the 1930s by Thornton Prince after an angry lover tried to get her revenge on the philandering entrepreneur with an overdose of spice on his fried chicken. (The name of the woman who made that first fuming batch seems to have been lost to history.) Angelenos have access to the Prince legacy through Kim Prince, who partnered with Dulan's on Crenshaw owner Greg Dulan to start the Dulanville Food Truck.
Back in 2020, columnist Jenn Harris made hot fried chicken with Prince and Zone for her Bucket List video series. It still makes good watching.
Cento Raw Bar has become one of L.A.'s hottest new restaurants of 2025. Its chef, Avner Levi, came to the Times Test Kitchen recently for our 'Chef That!' video series to show us how he makes hamachi crudo, fresh jalapeños and an unusual but delicious addition of sweet cherries. Watch Levi break down half of a hamachi into two filets and then transform the fish into a perfect summer appetizer in this video. Then try the recipe for yourself. It's a wonderful summer dish.
Reporter Lauren Ng talked with Shibumi chef-owner David Schlosser about his decision to close the Kappo omakase-style restaurant on Saturday. 'In the end of 2023 to 2024, things really flattened out,' he said. 'The staff is the same, the recipes were the same. The only thing that wasn't the same was people just weren't coming in.'
And in another loss for downtown L.A., Verve Coffee Roasters has closed its Spring Street location, the first shop it opened in Southern California. 'Like many businesses in downtown L.A., we saw lasting changes in foot traffic patterns that deeply affected day-to-day operations,' a Verve spokesperson told Ng in an email. 'The level of consistent foot traffic simply didn't support what is needed to sustain the cafe in a high-overhead environment like downtown.' Its other L.A. locations remain open.
Chef Michael Mina's Mother Tongue in Hollywood has also closed, and Cabra, the Peruvian-inspired restaurant from Girl & the Goat chef Stephanie Izard at downtown L.A.'s Hoxton hotel is closing on July 31.