A Feast Fit For Any Holiday – Ocean Prime

Posted on by Diversions LA

It started with oysters and Piper-Heidsieck in the late afternoon, and concluded with delightful desserts after sunset. Our dining experience at Ocean Prime earlier this month was a feast perfect for the holidays – or any day you feel like celebrating the joy of excellent food, letter-perfect service, and a setting that serves as a mini luxury vacation.

Located in the heart of Beverly Hills, Ocean Prime’s LA-area outpost offers a choice of an elegant indoor dining space and bar area bathed in honey-colored light, or an airy patio warmed by a row of fire pits and subtle overhead heat lamps. We chose the latter, in a quiet booth made more private by greenery behind and on the sides of our seats.

The restaurant’s October seafood month theme featured oysters. Ours were on the half shell,  and paired with the new Essentiel by Cameron Mitchell Champagne from Piper-Heidsieck.

The champagne features a glowing dark golden color, a fine bubble, and taste of pears, blackberry and honey. Piper-Heidsieck has only partnered with a handful of on-premise venues and sommeliers globally due to its unique creative processes, with Ocean Prime being one of those chosen. It is available at 17 of the 18 restaurant’s locations across the the U.S., including Beverly Hills.

While the oysters and champagne were perfect, as twilight rushed in and lit up our view of Wilshire Boulevard, we continued our experience with one of the terrific specials that the restaurant is offering. This was their multi-course early-bird dinner, available from 4-5:30. The choices are beautifully prepared, and we tried a variety of menu items, agreeing that each of our different selections were exceptional.

I began with one of the most nuanced of the copious number of Caesar salads I’ve had over the years. Yes, there was a lovely balance of crisp Romaine lettuce, flavorful brioche croutons, and best of all, a not-overbearing Parmesan garlic dressing.

My companion chose the lobster bisque, made with a rewarding amount of butter-poached lobster. A few spoons of the rich but surprisingly light broth was enough to convince me that the chef had us in good hands.

My main selection: sea scallops, plump, large, and juicy in a lively citrus vinaigrette. They were accompanied by a truly delicious Parmesan risotto studded with English peas that subtly combined a creamy texture with garden-fresh flavor.

My side was the truffle mac & cheese, which offered a variety of cheeses that afforded a compellingly earthy taste combined with the truffles – truly an amazing take on classic comfort food.

My dinner partner chose the eight-ounce filet, which she pronounced perfectly prepared to order with Cabernet jus. It rested on a gouda potato cake and chili-seared spinach.

Her side was the zesty jalapeno au gratin, a meal in itself.

Did we have take-homes? Yes. But that did not mean we forgot about dessert. The crowning finish to our prix fixe was a choice of five layer carrot cake or warm butter cake. I chose the latter, which came with a lovely berry compote and a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream.

My dining partner picked the carrot cake, a personal favorite, well-topped and girded with an airy take on cream cheese frosting with a bonus of fragrant lemon curd on the side.

Beverages: we began with cocktails as elegant as the location. Mine was the Smoked Old Fashioned, a favorite drink of mine. Like Caesar salads, I’ve tried many over the years,  and this was a stand out. Crafted with Angel’s Envy rye whiskey, House Demerara syrup, angostura & orange bitters, and redolent with charred cherry wood smoke, it was exemplary. My companion chose a favorite of her own, the Hot & Dirty Martini. Olive oil invused Belevedere Vodka was matched with ripe Castelvetrano olives filled with Calabrian chili blue cheese. She pronounced hers letter-perfect, too. We finished with some house-brewed coffees.

There was only one thing that would have made the dining experience even better – making a return visit the next day. We will have to remedy that soon. Major kudos to executive chef Jonathan Milan and general manager Yurii Barajas.

Fine dining afficiandos take note, along with the exception early prix fixe menu, and of course a stellar regular menu, on Sunday evenings, a two-course Surf & Turf special is available, featuring a starter choice of French Onion soup, Caesar or house salad and a main course that combines the restaurant’s 8-ounce filet with a choice of three seafood entrees: Shrimp Scampi, the Oscar Styler with lump blue crab and bearnaise, or a lobster tail.

Foodies – come feast around and find out more about the terrific menus at Ocean Prime.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis

 

 

 

Feel the Beat: Robert Standish is Beyond Rhythmic

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Robert Standish is ready to rock your vision with a vibrant new series, opening at Costa Mesa’s Martin Lawrence Galleries. The powerful punch of this exhibition expands on his previous series, Rhythmic. Equally impassioned and intense, his latest series, New Works on Canvas, throbs with visceral color and bold gestures. Working in acrylic, the often large-scale works essentially invite viewers to dive into a seemingly swimmable sunset.

The artist creates images that evoke exorbitant floral displays and kaleidoscopic flow. His images are as compelling as neon reflecting on a rainy night street and as tangled as a tropical jungle of gemstones and fireworks.

Some works are on fire with their own inherent radiance, which others shimmer with an opalescent quality, as in the delicate, madly crowded flowers of “Bloom.” Still other images remind the viewer of feathers, perhaps an Amazonian parrot with wild wings, as in the artist’s “The Mind’s Eye.” More restrained are the almost pristine flowers floating in slow motion against royal blue in “Floriography.”

The abstract artist describes his work as being about transcendence, and his paintings have been described as a form of “transcendent expressionism.” It’s a fitting description for their high energy and luminous shine. The thick, emotive surfaces. often crackle with energy. While the brilliant colors of Standish’s palette could clash in other hands, these works have a harmony that quiets their core.

Essentially, these images are rainbows on adrenaline overload, singing to the senses – but they’re also balanced, containing a moment of silence within the rush of paint.

 An interesting aspect of Standish’s work is that he was preveiously a photorealist painter. That precision and fine hand is still quite visible, but his palette knife and brush painting has been transported into something more mutable, what he calls a motivation of “random rhythmic color bursts, abundant paint, and most importantly a request for Divine guidance.”

Terming his current work as spontaneous, Standish says that his move into the abstract was driven by a desire to “paint differently [than in] ego driven and deliverable style.” The boldness of his work is an apt outgrowth of color field painting and abstract spiritualism, both of which he describes as inspirational influences. His largest inspiration however is “the creative force all around us.”

It may be that force which inspires his fluidity and his graceful precision, which often implies a captured, liquid motion.

As he connects with the zeitgeist of his creative force, Standish makes sure the force is with you, too, as he weaves his light saber colors into a shimmery glow.

The Los Angeles-based artist has works in the permanent collections of LACMA, at the Weisman Foundation, MOAH, and the Crocker Art Museum, among other collections.

New Works on Canvas will debut Saturday, November 18th at Martin Lawrence Gallery,  3333 Bear St, Costa Mesa, CA, with Standish in attendance. The exhibition will be on display through mid-December,  ready to uplift those flagging spirits even during stressful times and the chaotic holiday season.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist and gallery

Get Your Zen On

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With Zen Psychosis: Anatomy of a Dream, at CSULA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, the lustrous pinhole photography of Osceola Refetoff melds with the theme and written words of Shana Nys Dambrot’s lyrical book of the same name.

Curated by Mika Cho, the exhibition makes strong use of Refetoff’s hypnotic pinhole images, many of which were published in the book Zen Psychosis, whose poetic/surreal dream memoir aesthetic is aptly brought to real life (is it real? Or just a dream) in the exhibition. The book mutably blends Refetoff’s evocative visuals with Dambrot’s prose.

Both ask you to recall what do our dreams look like – both in the hidden world of sleep and if they should appear in the waking world. Perhaps they most closely resemble Refetoff’s large-scale Kinematic pinhole, “Whale Spotting,” shot in Antarctica, or the mix of Claymation and live-action stop motion animation swirling through the artist’s short film, “The Savage Sleep.” Also the stuff dreams are made of: sculptural images culled from the photographic artist’s collection of found objects, including an adorable black cat; and of course, the hypnotic words that propel readers into a dream state when reading Dambrot’s book.

Like Refetoff’s mysteriously magical pinhole images themselves, the exhibition is blissfully seeped in surrealism and respectful wonder at the natural world, of which dreaming is an intrinsic part. The pinhole process requires long shutter times, as images are shot thru a tiny pinhole instead of a lens; likewise, both exhibition and book require of viewers a slow survey of the strange beauty that surrounds us – the stuff of dreams.

Just as the Eurythmics sang in the fever dream years of the 1980s, “Sweet dreams are made of this/ Who am I to disagree/I travel the world and the seven seas/Everybody’s looking for something.”

Should that something be a trippy beauty, or a porthole to some other ArtWorld (or even this one), get your Zen on while you can.

The gallery is located on the CSULA campus in the Fine Arts Building. The exhibition will have a closing reception with a reading and book signing by Dambrot Tuesday November 14th from 6- 8 p.m.; it runs through the 16th.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by gallery

Artist A.M. Rousseau Offers Tribute

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Exploring a Lifelong Passion: Small Pieces We’ve Collected Over the Years is a tour de force of lovely art shared and curated by Southern California artist A.M. Rousseau. The works presented in an impressive single day exhibition at bG gallery November 5th, are part of a collection that she and her late husband pursuied as a part of their enduring, shared passion for art.

Their assembled collection reflects their deep committment to art and fellow artists – and to their belief in nurturing a sense of community within the art world. The tribute paid to artists is joined with another sort of tribute – that to Rousseau’s late husband Duvall Hecht.

Displaying over 50 distinctive artists, each serves as part of an engaging art tapestry that offers insight into the artists and the spirits of their collectors, as well.

According to Rousseau, the timing for this exhibition was “about community, the artist community.  I think like many of us, I have a lot of works of art that my husband and I purchased or that came to us through gifts or trading with other artists. It has been a joy to collect this work, and while it can hang in my house, after my husband passed, I had the impulse to share it with the other artists and anyone else who might be interested. ”

The single day extravaganze of art began as what she envisioned to be simply a “small fun project. Maybe I would have a dinner party and invite the artists. It daily grew larger when I realized there were over 65 pieces, and if I wanted to show the pieces I would need to find an exhibition space – which led me to bG Gallery in Santa Monica.”

As to the collection itself, Rousseau reveals that to assemble it “my husband and I looked for things we loved that fit within our budget, but we would also try to support wonderful work in shows where things otherwise did not sell. Of course, we could only ever buy small pieces, but we wanted to support artists when possible. We found many works on paper which we always meant to frame but ended up sitting in drawers for too long.” This formed part of the impetus for the show, when she says she decided it would be meaningful to have “all of them framed and put them together for an exhibition in memory of all the great times we had looking at art together and going to shows. It gave me a lot of happiness just knowing how much he would have loved this project.”

Rousseau has also assembled an inclusive, intimate catalog about the works. “The catalog was put together by myself, and I wrote the text in it. That was also a really enjoyable part of putting this show together. I loved looking closely again at many of the pieces and writing what I felt about the work.”

Despite the large scale nature of the exhibition, she relates that she has no other plans after the show regarding the works. “I don’t plan to sell anything. It might be nice to have it travel. I really would love to give it away somewhere to an organization or a place that would want it.”

Asked to select a favorite work, she stresses that “It’s hard to say what either of our favorite pieces are as really, we loved them all. It’s like having a favorite child. How could you pick?”

But that said, when pushed she relates “I have to choose the one called “Our kitchen, Peck Dr., Beverly Hills, CA.” by Virginia Sackett. As I wrote in the catalog, this is a work that was in my husband’s mothers’ possession for 50 years, and I have now owned for 30 years. I think it is an exceptional piece, and I have looked at it many times thinking about the person who created it.”  Making this piece exceptionally personal, Rousseau adds “It was made by my husband’s mother’s maid who worked in the kitchen that is portrayed in the picture. Obviously, if is possible to decipher the essence of this painting, it’s a kitchen the artist appeared to love. She was a woman whose artistic abilities were likely entirely unrecognized during her lifetime, excepting this one picture, framed by her employer, and preserved by her employer’s children, finally coming into my possession. I can’t say enough about how much I love this painting and I know my husband did too. While the talent of this artist might not have been acknowledged, I am grateful for this painting that allows us to know her.”

As both an artist herself and a collector and curator, Rousseau asserts that what she most wants readers to know about the exhibition and her view of collecting art, is this: “There is great joy in creating collections of work on very small budgets, and sharing work with the community of artists is an honor and a privilege. Supporting artists in whatever way possible can have lasting importance.”

Don’t miss seeing this lovingly collected, cherished, and well-curated exhibition. There will be an opening reception Sunday, November 5th from 4-7 p.m. at bG gallery, and Rousseau will be present to offer her own insights and experiences, as well as offering her comprehensively compiled catalog of the artworks for viewers.

bG is located at 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica #12 in Bergamot Station.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by A.M. Rousseau