Critics’ choice: New looks for the old vanguard

Spago Beverly Hills; Sirio Ristorante; Nobu Malibu  

Spago Beverly Hills Los Angeles

Wolfgang Puck still has it, said Jonathan Gold in the Los Angeles Times. Thirty years after his original Spago transformed L.A. “from a Le and La sort of town into the world capital of casually elegant dining,” the dean of celebrity chefs has found a way to renew his flagship’s standing as a serious culinary destination. A recent makeover has erased Spago’s fun-loving origins: Designer Waldo Fernandez has rendered the room sedately modern, “taking a death ray to the encrusted layers of kitsch” and surrounding diners instead with pale walls and museum-quality art. To keep pace with less accomplished but hotter chefs, Puck has filled the new menu with modernist flourishes and Japanese delicacies. His talent-packed kitchen now offers “a persuasive sashimi of Japanese tai drizzled with ponzu,” as well as food that is more than food—like a mollusk sampler that resembles a tide pool, and acorn-shaped potato nibbles that arrive hanging from a small tree. Oneness may be lacking in the new vision, but that doesn’t prevent this Spago from wrapping every patron in a familiar cocoon—a place where “you forget that the world exists for anything but your pleasure.” 176 N. Canon Dr., (310) 385-0880

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