The menu at people-watching hangout the Ivy, open since 1980, is unfocused enough that it works in the restaurant's favor. But did you really come for the food?
But the restaurant, which came into its own during the rise of growing celebrity obsession in the ’80s and ’90s, remains a rite of passage for a certain set of Angelenos, and an essential part of the evolution of dining in the city.It still has an electric energy about it and an ineffable sense of “Let them eat cake” — I had more fun people-watching here than anywhere in recent memory. As for the menu, well, it’s unfocused enough that it kind of works in the restaurant’s favor.
Generally, you should lean toward seafood and simplicity. It doesn’t get much simpler than the grilled vegetable salad, which a server said has been on the restaurant’s menu from its beginnings. It arrives at your table as a plate of chopped greens and vegetables — asparagus, zucchini, avocado, corn, tomato, scallion — unfussily prepared. It’s fresh, clear and direct. Crab cakes are small but ample: meaty fried pucks without too much filler.
The best people-watching at the restaurant, though, comes in the form of catching snippets of other conversations, which is pretty easy to do given that tables are packed together fairly tightly. During one meal, my dining partner and I spent a chunk of the evening eavesdropping on surrounding tables like we were characters in “The Conversation.” The gems came quickly: “He was making $5,000 a set. Like,money.” From a different table, I heard, “I mean, I’m a psychologist. I’m a woman of science.
Fried chicken had a similar problem — the meat had been well taken care of, as it was hot and juicy, but there was little taste to the exterior. There was also no skin on the chicken, or at least none that I or my dining partner could discern, which left the dish feeling like a plate of big chicken tenders. A plate of Wagyu carne asada arrived with some fantastic tortillas but the meat came across as a fairly boilerplate piece of skirt steak.
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