Two Visits To Majordomo

Though David Chang's Majordomo opened roughly five years ago, I never had a chance to eat there.  First of all, until the pandemic, reservations were nearly impossible to obtain, and I'm not one to wait in line for food, be it an hour's wait at a restaurant, or having to fight to get a reservation to eat at the restaurant two months later.  And that aside, I would have preferred to share the meal there with the entire family, but I believe the maximum group they would accommodate was six persons.

However I recently noticed that post-pandemic reopening, there have been no problems getting reservations at Majordomo, so on just a few days notice I was able to get a reservation for two just days before my birthday in August, so why not?  Although Majordomo is located in what is technically Chinatown, it's in the far northern portion on a street I never heard of and obviously had never been, just a short ways from Lincoln Heights, with no signage visible from the street, so I wasn't absolutely sure that I was there until I made the last turn into the patio.  We got the latest available reservation at 6:30pm, but were delayed by traffic and other matters and arrived a half hour late.  When we called ahead about our dilemma they said there would be no problem, except that we would have to vacate by 8:30pm, which was fine with us.  Strangely, however, when we arrived at 7pm the restaurant was still half empty, even though there were no 7pm slots open when I made my original reservation.

The food was excellent from the get go.  The bing with eggplant and pine nuts was terriffic.

The heirloom tomato salad was out of this world.  Never thought something so basic could be so good.

I hate mushrooms, but the buzz about the mushroom crispy rice was so good that I ordered it anyway.  And it was as good as advertised.

The grilled striped bass was actually not as good as the first three dishes, but it was still quite good.

And the cocktail.

Interestingly, there were still some empty tables even when we finished.  Afterwards we took a peek at what the surrounding buildings looked like.  Certainly an area in transition.

The August meal was so enjoyable that we returned three months later for Mrs. Chandavkl's birthday.

 

This time we had the beef shank bing.  The beef was a little too spicy for us but the bing was great.

 

The little gem salad with panko, bonito flakes, trout roe, anchovies and miso dressing was a crunchy delight.

 

The innocuous sounding boiled chicken was a true delight.  A whole chicken was slow boiled and served two ways.  First was the white meat served with chicken flavored rice, sort of a spicy version of Hainan chicken.  

 

The rest of of the chicken was rendered into chicken noodle soup with a hand cut Korean noodle that was very reminiscent of biang biang noodles.

 

Thanks to the friendly people at the table next to ours, we also were able to sample the short rib fried rice, a derivative dish of the whole plate short rib.

And as a birthday surprise, they also ordered the coconut rice pudding for us.  Such nice people!

Once again, the restaurant never did fill up completely.

 

A Night At The Bonaventure

Since the early 2000s, perhaps the premiere venues for Chinese banquets, particularly wedding banquets have been two Hilton hotels, the Universal City Hilton and the San Gabriel Hilton. The San Gabriel Hilton as a Chinese banquet site is logical given its location in the San Gabriel Valley.  The Universal City Hilton is less intuitive but can be traced to the ownership of the hotel by Taiwanese interests, plus a history of Chinese wedding and other banquets dating back to the 1980s at the fancy Fung Lum Restaurant in Universal City.  

Of course, if you are going to host Chinese banquets on a regular basis, it makes sense to have a Chinese kitchen in-house.  And if you have a Chinese kitchen, it's probably also a good idea to have to have a regularly operating Chinese restaurant in the hotel, which both the Universal City Hilton (Cafe Sierra) and the San Gabriel Hilton (Trinity Restaurant) have on premises.  So it is against this backdrop that I encountered the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as a Chinese banquet venue.

I first learned of the Bonaventure's Chinese banquet facilities five years ago when I was invited to the annual dinner of the Southern California Chinese Lawyers' Association, at which there was a nice quality Chinese banquet.  I had wondered whether the banquet had been produced in-house or via an outside provider, but got nowhere with my inquiry.   So when I was invited to this year's SCCLA banquet at the same venue, I decided to dig a little bit deeper.  This time I found a one line blurb on the hotel’s wedding facilities website that says a traditional Chinese banquet is available.  Interestingly the website also noted to capability for Kosher, Indian and Persian wedding banquets, with the qualification that these are outside catered, giving the implication that Chinese banquets were prepared in-house.

Consequently, I was looking forward to a nice meal comparable to that at the 2017 SCCLA banquet.   We arrived late, so there were just scraps left from the appetizer plate.  Then came the beef with vegetables, which was a tasty dish.

 

However, things quickly went south.  The honey walnut shrimp was gruesome.

Here's the Chinese fried chicken with shrimp chips.  It would seem impossible to wreck shrimp chips, but these were soggy and bland.

The vegetable plate was a delicious as it looks.

And the grand prize went to the salt and pepper fish, which was like eating cardboard.

 

At this point I stopped taking pictures.  This was an absolutely laughable, terrible Chinese banquet.  My son did clear one thing up.  He spoke with a Chinese bartender who has worked Bonaventure Chinese banquets for many years and confirmed that the food is catered externally. (I do remember in the 1990s that the Bonaventure was Taiwanese owned at the time, and there was a nice Chinese restaurant there called Mandarin Cove, which was succeeded by Mandarin West, so there was once a Chinese kitchen in the hotel, which would explain the continuing banquets.)   But if one wondered how a Chinese kitchen could turn out such an awful meal, the answer is that it didn't.  Of course, now the question is how a professional caterer could put together a disaster like this.  And in any event, the Chinese banquet availability at the Bonaventure has been the best kept secret in town, and clearly needs to stay that way.