Jonathan Gold. You will occasionally see a yogurt-smeared duck-heart kebab speckled with pomegranate seeds — the soft, luscious flesh is quite unlike the grizzled things you may have encountered at other local restaurants — or even a handful of simply roasted duck wings.
I haven't encountered a platter of gizzards, duck tongues fried with basil or boiled webs with sea cucumber, but I suspect I may have just come on the wrong days. When Wilcox comes across a resource as precious as Liberty ducks from Sonoma, he tends to use all of it. There is something admirable about that.
You may have been in this restaurant space before, possibly when it was the very good pizzeria Osteria Nonni, more probably during its run as the bistro Canelé, which was the Eastside's favorite romantic spot for years. It is still long and narrow, lighted with dim Edison bulbs and dominated by an open kitchen. You will not infrequently hear an entire P-Funk album on the sound system. There is a small but lovely list of mostly natural wines — I love the funky, stony stuff from Bichi, a cult producer from Tecate, Mexico, whose flavors sometimes seem to fuzz out like an Eddie Hazel solo.
Bowls of vegetables and chickpea salad line the counter — Wilcox, a Gjelina veteran (as is general manager and fellow owner Guy Tabibian), apparently dreamed of opening an informal pintxos bar like the ones he loves in San Sebastián. Most of the hidden back of the restaurant is devoted to the massive loaves of bread he bakes every day — when you accidentally spot the jar holding the muffin-size seed of his levain, it feels as if you have run across a Horcrux, or maybe an Infinity Stone from the Marvel Universe. Wilcox confesses that he tends to bring some of the levain along with him when he travels, just in case something happens to the restaurant.
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