Openaire is a light-filled atrium restaurant on the second floor of the Line Hotel in Koreatown. Review by piescarcega.
, the newish poolside restaurant that replaced Roy Choi’s Commissary at the Line Hotel in Koreatown, is no exception.
You are paying a premium to dine in one of the loveliest rooms I’ve sat in all year: a tall, light-filled greenhouse canopied with a jungle of cascading greenery. The view is of Ktown skyscrapers and stylish strangers drinking glasses of Loire wine at long marble communal tables. The aquamarine glow of the hotel pool is in your peripheral vision. The restaurant is as noisy as it is pretty, thrumming at most hours with music and conversation.
At Openaire, Citrin only briefly alludes to the flavors of the neighborhood — as when a sauce of garlic, brown butter andLine cook Jesse Tovar, left, listens in as executive chef Richard Archuleta and chef partner Josiah Citrin chat while preparing the mushroom-crusted salmon in the kitchen at Openaire restaurant.
There are some beautifully calibrated dishes: Tuna tartare, served with a bowl of elegant, wispy sweet potato chips, is a round, citrus-bright cake capped with a custardy layer of avocado mousse. Swollen lobes of corn agnolotti break open in a gentle slosh of sweetness and butter. A whole branzino steamed with ginger and soft herbs is succulent and fragrant.
But then, in a rude turn, come the letdowns, and they are pronounced: There’s a soggy prawn toast, a rubbery shrimp cocktail and a dish called crispy suckling pig that turns out to be a crab-cake-like preparation of shredded pork with a strawberry rhubarb XO sauce. The most disappointing thing about the dryish pork cake, which is topped with a messy heap of citrus slaw, is the yawning gulf between what you expect and what turns up at the table.
More to the point, hotel food can be a hard sell, but the challenge is magnified in a restaurant-dense neighborhood like Koreatown. Why constrain yourself to a hotel salad when you are surrounded at every turn by a dizzying constellation of cafes, restaurants, bars and food-centric mini-malls?
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