What would a trip to southern California be without dining in Beverly Hills?
Sunday evening after a hard day at the beach and shopping on Rodeo Drive, having been turned away from Spago for lack of a reservation, my gracious host Kyle selected one of his favorite BH restaurants, The Stinking Rose.
Stinking rose? That doesn't sound like a very nice place! Well, for those of you not up on your culinary culture, "the stinking rose" is the nickname often given to garlic, that internationally ever so popular but ever so pungent member of the allium family, cousin to onions, shallots, and leeks.
The decor of the Stinking Rose is quite ecclectic. Here, you can see some of the private dining tents in the middle of the main dining room. All kinds of odd things hung from the ceiling, including little hot air balloons and biplanes.A sort of gift shop fills up the entry area by the combination cash register/maitre d' stand where they sell a plethora of pepper and garlic sauces both used in the restaurant and from other sources.
Different kinds of art were painted mural-style on the walls, some serious (a reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling scene of Adam touching the hand of God), some pop art (an Andy Warhol-esque painting of multiple Campbell's Soup cans, though rather than tomato, the soup is garlic), and kitchy (the painting below with Kyle of southern California "scenes").
Of course, the thing that makes The Stinking Rose unique is the menu: every item on the menu contains garlic.
We started with a couple of shared appetizers, the bagna calda and the garlic spinach fontina fondue. A plate of soft garlic rolls accompanied the food. The bagna calda is a little skillet of roasted cloves of garlic sauteed in olive oil and with just a touch of anchovies added. The roasted cloves are very soft and spreadable and of course the roasting makes the flavor very mild.
They served the fondue in a little au gratin dish and there were several large pieces of garlic Melba toast.
Both of the appetizers--as was most of the food--were liberally sprinkled with chopped fresh parsley; parsley is believed to help stop "garlic breath" (old wives' tale, but people still think it). We also had a jar of a very hot and pungent minced garlic and parsley sauce on the table to spice things up.
Our next course, since we were in California, was salad in the service Californien style. Kyle had a chopped Caesar salad (the recipe for traditional Caesar salad contains a couple of cloves of smashed garlic) and I had a Stinking Rose house salad (mesclun greens) with garlic walnut dressing.
There were so many tempting entrees from which to choose! As it turned out, Kyle ordered the roasted rabbit with olives and garlic in olive oil garlic sauce, accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes made green by the addition of chopped parsley. Aside from the usual inconvenience of small bones, he thought the rabbit was quite good. He's not a great fan of olives, but he found these olives to be quite palatable.
I ordered "Silence of the Lamb Shank with chianti glaze and fava beans." Yep, that's the name of the food. It, too, was accompanied by green garlic mashed potatoes (delicious, by the way). The large roasted lamb shank was studded with slivvers of garlic; it was quite tender, mild flavored, and very good. I should have liked more fava beans, though; considering that many Americans of European stock have previously-undiscovered severe allergies to fava beans (a Middle Eastern staple), perhaps they were limiting the quantity so as not to have any incidents.
With dinner, we drank a big bottle of their house 2004 Stinking Rose Chianti, which was actually quite good for a chianti.
I have some Kody Pose pics of Kyle which I don't have uploaded to Flickr just yet, so come back tonight after I add them.
Dessert is where things got particularly interesting.We both ordered the "Gilroy's Famous Garlic Ice Cream" with caramel mole sauce. Yes, indeed, a garlic flavored ice cream. It really wasn't too bad, although up to this point in the meal, I'd not yet had a garlic aftertaste and the ice cream gave me (but not Kyle) that aftertaste. Mole sauce is a traditional Mexican sauce made from unsweetened chocolate and dried red peppers, and with the addition of the sweet caramel made quite a nice complement for the garlic ice cream.
The Stinking Rose is more than just an oddity or tourist attraction. The food is actually very nicely done and I certainly wouldn't hestitate to come back here again. The only problem they have in the restaurant is their serving staff isn't very well trained. One typical example is when we both had finished our first glass of wine, the waitress came up and asked if we wanted another drink, then noticed the bottle of chianti, and said, "Oh, I guess not...you have your bottle of wine," and then walked off without pouring us more wine! So, our meal was partially self-service Sunday night. On the whole, though, it was a very pleasant experience.
