LudoBites 4.0

LudoBites

Scallop with almond purée, pickled grapes, capers, curry oil, and cauliflower ice cream

By Noah Galuten

By the time the rest of the city has heard about your dinner, they are already too late.

It's the middle of April in Downtown Los Angeles, in that stretch of 9th Street where the city goes dark, vacant, and uncomfortably quiet once night falls. Surrounded by shuttered lunchtime cafés and empty office buildings, with free street parking readily available on every block (hey, it’s not all bad), there is one small pocket of unmistakable energy. Inside a small space with wooden tables and brick walls, something is very, very alive.

Every table is filled, with guests already waiting just inside the door for their reservations. Servers in black t-shirts whisk through the cramped space delivering brightly colored, visually stunning dishes to the sound of West Coast hip-hop. Camera flashes go off in every corner, sometimes taking pictures of the room itself, sometimes of the open kitchen (mere inches from the dining room), but most often, of course, of the food. A bowl of bright, mint-green broth with curled-up balls of escargot and edible purple and yellow flowers is quickly ushered to a table of visibly excited bloggers, cameras at the ready. From the kitchen, an athletic, dark-haired man in his mid-30s swears at one of the chefs, mumbling something incomprehensible in a thick French accent, before grabbing the plate and finishing the dish himself. He is Ludovic Lefebvre, and in the months of April and May in 2010, his restaurant LudoBites was the toughest reservation in the city. But now, completely by design, it no longer exists.

The latest incarnation of LudoBites (it's actually LudoBites 4.0) took place at Gram & Papa's on 9th and Main Street. It is a pop-up restaurant, a limited engagement serving dinner in a location that ordinarily only offers lunch. The menu is almost completely different from one LudoBites to the next, with constant tweaks and changes each night as well. The exciting nature of his food, which mostly plays with modern personal twists on classic French cuisine, is the major draw here, but it's not the only one. The element of surprise plays a factor, as does the exclusivity of a small restaurant with a limited engagement: the idea that if you didn't eat there that exact night, you could miss your only chance at a transcendent dish that would never exist again. For the modern food audience, it is a chance to be a part of something special, an experience shared only by an exclusive group of food bloggers and aficionados. By the time the rest of the city has heard about your dinner, they are already too late. But another draw, of course, is chef Lefebvre himself.

Lefebvre began training professionally in France at the age of 13. He trained with some of the nation's best chefs, and at 19, in order to fulfill his military requirement (which no longer exists in France), he was selected as the personal chef for the Minister of Defense. So while other young men were training on an army base, Ludo was cooking. "It was great," said Lefebvre. "I had a chauffeur for me, a driver. I was shopping at all the expensive stores for vegetables. The Bon Marché, which is like the Dean and DeLuca for Paris. Only the best for the minister. It was a great experience."

After his military stint, he went back to working in French kitchens, but wanted to move to the states. "I’d never been to the United States before," he said, "but I guess it was because of watching Baywatch on TV. I picked L.A. and I don’t know why. The beach, the girls, California. I was looking to discover a new flavor." By choosing Los Angeles, of course, he had no shortage of new and exciting cuisines to draw upon.

Lefebvre went on to cook and make a name for himself at two highly regarded and very expensive restaurants in Los Angeles, L'Orangerie and Bastide. While cooking at L'Orangerie, he met his wife Kristine, who now runs his public relations, endorsements, and seemingly the restaurant itself. Her Twitter account (@FrenchChefWife) has become the nerve center of LudoBites. It is the first place bloggers and patrons look for information on the next incarnation, menu changes, and table openings, and is very often where they go to express their feelings about the previous night's meal. This level of instantaneous communication, this interplay with the online community, is actually what makes LudoBites work at all. While many other chefs and bloggers have a love-hate relationship, with the Lefebvres, it is mostly love.

"If you don’t change with the times," said Kristine Lefebvre, "you’re gonna die. But I embrace [bloggers]. If we continued to serve the crowds he served at L’Orangerie, they’d all be dead now. It’s great to see the young generations."

Ludo agrees. "I know some chefs that don’t want that, but they should be open. Everybody wants pictures of food, people want memories. I take pictures at the museum, so why not the restaurant?" For Ludo, it is an opportunity to look at something new that is happening and take advantage of it, rather than be hindered by it. "The bloggers made LudoBites. They created it. I came up with the menu."

Yet no matter how charismatic Ludo is, no matter how dialed into the new generation, none of this would work if the food wasn't good. Fortunately for all of us, it is. Using only the freshest ingredients Ludo creates dishes that are innovative, but also deeply comforting and accessible. Scallop with almond purée, pickled grapes, capers, curry oil, and cauliflower ice cream seem like too many flavors for one plate, yet somehow they form something wholly cohesive. His "squid carbonara," which replaces the pasta itself with impossibly tender squid, is completely new, but also entirely familiar. The ham soup, which includes Guinness and cornichons, is exactly what you long for on a long winter night. Red snapper ceviche, on the other hand, with heirloom tomatoes, jalapeño, red onions, and Meyer lemon paste, is a staggeringly refreshing dish that you could potentially eat every day for the rest of your life.

But until he finally manages to open a full-time restaurant, you won't be able to eat these dishes at all, let alone every day. Some of them may vanish, never to be heard from again – dishes existing only in memory, and of course, the dozens of online photos. But that, it seems, is part of the allure.

LudoBites is a limited engagment. For more information on the next iteration, please visit www.ludolefebvre.com/ludo-bites.

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