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Thursday, February 16, 2012
La Condesa opening in Los Angeles next year
And the news just keeps on coming.
Just a day after La Condesa pastry chef Laura Sawicki was lauded in Food & Wine’s inaugural list of best new pastry chefs, the owners of the hip interior Mexican restaurant downtown have announced that they are adding a third restaurant in Los Angeles.
Jesse Herman and Delfo Trombetta opened La Condesa at Second and Colorado streets in Austin in 2009, and in 2011, the team expanded to Napa Valley with a restaurant of the same name that is also under executive chef Rene Ortiz and Sawicki.
Herman says that they were actually looking at opening in Los Angeles first, but they got sidetracked by the opportunity to move into a space in St. Helena, Calif. “Napa has actually opened a lot of doors for us,” Herman says.
Each location has a different design and menu, but with the same spirit as the original location in Austin. “We spend a lot of time making sure (the menu and space) are adapted to the area where they are,” he says.
The third La Condesa is scheduled to open in Los Angeles at 127 S. La Brea in early 2013.
As an East Coast native, Herman says that he’s always been enamored with California, but he also sees the “huge market” for the kind of interior Mexican that Ortiz specializes in.
As for the under-construction Thai restaurant on South First Street, Herman said that construction, which has doubled the size of the previous structure, is coming along nicely, but he didn’t have a timeline for completion. (He did assure me, though, that there will be almost 50 parking spaces when it’s all said and done.)
Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez for the Austin American-Statesman.
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Barley Swine rounds out GQ’s 10 best new restaurants list
In what has turned out to be a big week for Austin food scene, GQ has just come out with its list of the best new restaurants in the country, and Bryce Gilmore’s Barley Swine came in at No. 10.
Gilmore is in good company: Grant Achatz’ Next and Michael Voltaggio’s Ink are in the top three. Barley Swine is the only Texas restaurant to make the list.
“The name itself is reason to be wary, combining as it does two movements as ubiquitous and smothering as melted cheese on enchiladas: craft beer and pork fetishism,” writes GQ editor Brett Martin. “And at first glance, Barley Swine looks like any number of places that have embraced some blend of small-plate aesthetics, farm-to-table piety, and neo-carnivore swagger. But the food proves just how mature these movements have become.”
Photo by Julia Robinson for the Austin American-Statesman.
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