Without getting too much into the history of the origins of this restaurant, the food here generally was just OK for me. The crispy shrimp is what everyone wants to get. The shell is super crispy, crunchy, and delightfully edible. It’s comparable to the Cantonese style salted pepper shrimp with shell. However, this also has a tangy sauce on the outside of it. For me, it was a little TOO tangy, but some people at my table love it.

For this month, it was TRUFFLES. I’ve never eaten a full blown truffle set meal. At $250 a pop and 600 consecutive phone calls over a span of 2 hours, I was able to get this reservation. Coupled with wine pairing, the meal was superbly awesome. Note for 2022 migration: this is an old post from my other defunct blog. This has 1 Michelin Star. I remember that after this dinner, I was getting tired of blogging all my Maude meals.

This is my 5th visit to Maude in 6 months. I guess I have the pleasure of doing this because I don’t have many financial responsibilities. This month’s tasting features pears, and again it did not disappoint me. I love pears, and I was curious in seeing how the chef uses it in his dishes. Note for 2022 migration: this is an old post from my other defunct blog. This has 1 Michelin Star.

This is the month for tomatoes. I generally love tomatoes. They can come in so many different sizes and textures, such that it makes it very tasty. I will say that the meal for me did not disappoint. We ended up getting the wine pairing which was about $70 extra. According to my buddy, the wine pairing was excellent throughout the meal and complemented the foods very well. I’ll just take their word for it.

The feature for Maude this month is corn, and it was way more awesome compared to last month. I like corn a lot, so I went in with some expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed. It really sucks to get reservations here. To get this particular reservation I called about 100 times in a given hour. If you look on my cell phone bill, you will see at least 60 5-second calls to them coupled with 40 some calls from a desk phone.

This could very well be my last post for food for a few weeks. Doing a special restaurant each week is getting rather grueling right now. I’ve decided to soften the blow, so I’ll go to Maude each month for the remainder of the year. This is #26 of 52 (or 26?) of my 2014 LA food expedition. For this month, the special ingredient is berries. Like my rhubarb meal that I went to 2 months ago, I was expecting this to be similar in that every dish would have strong presence and usage of some berry.

What was so interesting about Maude was how each month has a different ingredient theme. I like this approach. Not only can you choose what you want to eat, but it also is cool to not have to think about what to order since the entire menu is a tasting menu. This so far is probably my favorite upscale LA restaurant (possibly attributed to the star of this month … rhubarb).

As a borderline 2 month anniversary of my abysmal attempts at eating a LA restaurant every week, I decided to try out this place called N/Naka in Palms. The owner of this kaiseki-style restaurant, Chef Niki Nakayama, is very meticulous with the menu and presentation in her dishes. Reviewers like to compare this place to Urusawa (a very high end Japanese restaurant which is on my list before the end of the year), and they also often say the food is by far the BEST Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles.

Melisse is one of those restaurants in Los Angeles that was on my must-eat list along with Urasawa and Providence. Los Angeles has relatively very few fine dining restaurants that I’ve enjoyed, so I have very high expectations for this particular occasion. I’m hoping I won’t be disappointed as I also wanted to show my mum what kind of foods I’ve been eating outside of the valley. Fox W, a well known Foodspotter, also joined me for this and provided pictures.