Horses

Dispatch from LA: Can a restaurant marred by controversy survive? (Yes, and it’s better than ever.)

I’m writing this on a plane ride from San Francisco to New York on the heels of what feels like a very long trip to California. I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, and thematic for this newsletter, I hope if nothing else, the food was luxurious and bellies were filled to the brim.

I had a mostly uneventful Thanksgiving, but I’d prefer the same ol’ ritual to anything too crazy… I think. My one regret is not eating more of the bourbon pecan pie that we ordered from Manresa—because pecan pie is my favorite dessert ever—though while I think my beloved bakery can do nothing wrong, their take on the pie, with a deeper, more liquid filling, wasn’t my favorite. I can’t believe I need to wait another year to eat pecan pie again.

(Oh, and my contribution was a celery salad. It proved to be pretty unpopular among the Thanksgiving spread, but whatever. I liked it. Everyone else just didn’t understand the vision.)

Prior to returning home for Thanksgiving though, I had a different sort of homecoming in Los Angeles—returning for my first Homecoming game since I graduated college. There’s nothing quite like the discomfort of baking in the sun at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to make me feel like a kid again… and of course by that I mean just a few years younger than I am now.

Beyond the game though, which USC just barely won (fight on forever), I stayed with my dear friend Chloe and spent a long Sunday enjoying my favorite part of LA: the sunshine. I walked through a farmers market, where I marveled like an idiot at all the beautiful California produce that I miss when I’m on the East Coast, ate the most amazing breakfast burrito from Great White, and spent an embarrassing amount of money at the Melrose Trading Post.

The key to a great breakfast burrito is in the potato. And tater tots are superior.

Los Angeles is an endless parade of places to be seen: I posted photos of myself posing with friends at La La Land Kind Cafe on Instagram, a portal to a time when taking photos for Instagram was of paramount importance and an all-day activity. My friend Jessica and I waited for an hour outside to be seated at Sunday Gravy, during which we were plied with free wine, and I had an almost-run-in with an old friend. (She saw me, but I didn’t see her.) And my friend Camryn and I went to Jon and Vinny’s on Fairfax Avenue. That’s self-explanatory, I hope.

So when every place in LA is saddled with clout and celebrity and gossip, what power does it have to elevate any one restaurant into stardom? No power… I think. Take Horses for example, which perhaps experienced the biggest of all scandals in recent restaurant news memory. (I learned about it through my New York-based coworkers. That’s gossip going across the country, baby!)

I had always wanted to go to Horses, but could never get a reservation. And then immediately after all hell broke loose… Well, why would I want to go? But human memories are fickle, and a few weeks before I went to LA, I noticed that my friend Max—who also went to school with me in LA—was wearing a Horses hat and he informed me the the restaurant was just as good, if not better, than it was at its height, pre-scandal.

So, on a dark Wednesday evening, Lauren and I arrived in an even darker restaurant and sat at a bar illuminated only by sparsely distributed wall sconces and table-top candles. I had the Horses’ Vesper, which had fig-infused gin along with the normal ingredients. It came ice cold and only subtly figgy; I think fig martinis are trending, I keep seeing them on menus! After a few sips, we were led to another room, where we were seated in (another) dark corner against a booth.

Resy describes the restaurant as Californian, though it’s not the type of Californian where carbs are replaced with cabbage. Instead, it’s classics like a Caesar salad, a cheeseburger and fries, carrot sticky toffee pudding and the not-so-secret off-menu baked spicy vodka pasta—which is what Lauren and I ordered.

Their Caesar salad is stellar, made with endives instead of lettuce. The overly generous coating of dressing, cheese and breadcrumbs on top of each individual leaf, combined with the more robust texture of an endive, gives it a heartiness that most salads don’t have. It borders on too much, and I’d recommend sharing it with more than one other person, but it’s a salad that pushes the boundaries of what Caesar can be without actually straying too far from the path.

After our appetizer plates were cleared, our server dropped off a four-pack of crayons, and we immediately started drawing on the paper that lined our table. We tried to write upside down to pass each other messages, and played a few games of Horses-themed (the restaurant, not the animal) hangman and tic-tac-toe. Lauren and I remembered old tricks picked up in elementary school, like drawing the “cool S” or a pig to the tune of a song.

Lauren and I first met as 18-year-olds, way past the phase when we were drooly kids armed with markers and crayons and safety scissors. And as we passed the hour it took them to bring us our first main (time flew by), tipsy from the booze, I marveled at how I had never “played” with Lauren before in our six-year-long friendship. And maybe without Horses and their questionably slow service, we would have never gotten to, and I would have never learned how to draw Mickey Mouse from her. Think about all the important people in your life — do you know what their tic-tac-toe strategy is?

(If you too wonder what the fuck happened to playtime now that we’re adults, I love the work that my friend Ella Katz is doing over at her account Taller Toddlers.)

And when the spicy vodka pasta finally arrived, I was disappointed that there was no more space for me to keep drawing. Coming off the heels of Jon and Vinny’s—the best spicy vodka pasta IMO—I thought the Horses take on the dish was great but not exceptional. Baking the pasta did give it that crunch that lasagna edges have, which I enjoyed, but I think the sauce could have been creamier and spicier. The cheeseburger, which came shortly after, was heavenly, with a thick, juicy patty, cheddar and thin slices of raw onion squished between two pillowy brioche buns. It was truly phenomenal. (Though, I thought the fries that it was served with were soggy.)

Finally, though Lauren had a movie to make after the dinner, which had now dragged on for two hours, we squeezed in the carrot sticky toffee pudding, and I’m so glad we did. Famously, I love carrot cake, and while this was more “toffee” than carrot, this pudding was made richer paired with the cognac ice cream, and yet the hot and the cold balanced each other out and it didn’t feel too heavy at all. It was sweet in the way that hurts your teeth just a little bit, but gives a type of full-body comfort that you just can’t turn away.

And rarely being able to see Lauren, I loved this leisurely meal that I got to spend with her at Horses. The food was mostly good and sometimes exceptional and sometimes disappointing, but being stuck at a table with nothing but blank paper and four crayons? That made the entire meal beyond worth it and memorable.

Do with that what you will. I think I’m going to get into making friendship bracelets again.

Bite It!

Oh what a scandal can do for a restaurant… Horses is bookable on Resy and it’s not hard to snag a reservation. Just note that they’re closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.