Here Are Five Great Deals

Much more than a restaurant week, Dine LA is celebrating its 15th anniversary with 15 days of specially priced menus at more than 350 Los Angeles restaurants in October. As always, Dine LA showcases everything from small independent restaurants to outposts from global hospitality empires. You can use Dine LA to check out a fine-dining spot that’s on your bucket list or for an over-the-top lunch or for a generous family-style meal that might result in leftovers you’ll be happy to have the next day. Here are five of the best deals you can enjoy from October 6-20.

Dinner at Charcoal Sunset

Prolific chef Josiah Citrin (who’s also offering Dine LA menus at Mélisse, Citrin, Charcoal Venice, Openaire, Dear John’s and Dear Jane’s) has opened a sexy Sunset Boulevard outpost of his live-fire restaurant. Charcoal Sunset, steps from the West Hollywood Edition hotel and near many other restaurant and nightlife hot spots, can satisfy your steakhouse cravings but is also a lot more than a meatery.

Charcoal Sunset’s $55 Dine LA dinner menu is a tremendous deal that features starters including Citrin’s standard-setting cabbage baked in embers along with smoky grilled chicken wings and hamachi with tomato aguachile, stone-fruit pico and radish. Guests can choose between an arugula-and-friseé salad or a hearty collard green salad (with yams, pickled onions, aged cheddar, lemon-caper vinaigrette and breadcrumbs) that’s Charcoal’s inspired answer to the ubiquitous kale salads so many other restaurants serve.

Main courses are J-1 marinated prime sirloin, Ōra King salmon and coal-roasted cauliflower. A side dish of lemony potatoes is another Citrin signature. Pâte à choux with Valrhona chocolate, dulce de leche mousse and raspberry is a sweet and luxurious finish.

Lunch or dinner at Sichuan Impression

At the sleek new Alhambra location of Sichuan Impression, chef Lynn Liu (who’s also doing Dine LA dinner at her excellent 19 Town in City of Industry) is offering a terrific $69 meal deal that feeds three to four people. This is a mala master class with mouth-numbing family-style dishes (available for lunch or dinner). Choose your own adventure with four courses that could include the offal-good couple’s sliced beef in chili sauce, spicy wontons, stir-fried chili pork trotters and Sichuan Impression’s best-in-class boiled fish with rattan pepper. Cool down your palate with a draft beer and an ice jelly dessert, both of which come with your bountiful San Gabriel Valley feast.

Brunch at Lavo Ristorante

New executive chef Luca Maita (who was born in Sicily and cooked in LA at Nonna and 1212 before joining Tao Group Hospitality’s Lavo Ristorante) is offering an indulgent $35 brunch that starts with your choice of pastry from the restaurant’s sfogliatella cart and a freshly squeezed juice. Then choose between main courses like a lemon ricotta pancake, a prime burger (with truffle pecorino, Calabrian passata, insalate verde and truffle fries) or linguine alla carbonara. Dessert options include gelato and bomboloni.

Plus, Lavo, which also has a $65 Dine LA dinner menu, recently launched its aperitivo hour for refreshing after-work hangouts. On Monday-Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m., guests can come by for $12 Aperol spritzes, $9 wines and small plates like oysters, fried olives and wagyu meatballs that are purposefully much tinier than Lavo’s showstopping one-pound meatball. There’s also a cheese and salumi plate with selections from The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills.

Dinner at Spoon & Pork

Raymond Yaptinchay and Jay Tugas specialize in modern Filipino comfort food that they like to pair with natural wine. So at both their Silver Lake and Sawtelle locations of Spoon & Pork, they’re offering one of the most comforting dishes in Los Angeles: their version of sinigang, which is a tangy tamarind-and-tomato soup with ribs, bok choy, eggplant, okra, radish and green beans. (A to-go deli container of this wonderful soup got us through multiple days of the pandemic.) You’ll definitely want to spoon some sinigang over your side of jasmine rice. Order the Dine LA deal and you also get your choice of frizzled brussels sprouts, patatas bravas, chicken chicharron or shrooms salpicao. The $35 dinner includes a glass of white wine. Or come for the $25 lunch and get the same meal with calamansi juice instead of wine.

Lunch at Yardbird

Yes, you should absolutely go to the Beverly Center for fried chicken. Yardbird, the 50 Eggs Hospitality Group’s Southern-food destination that was born in Miami and has also expanded to Las Vegas, Dallas, Washington D.C., Chicago, Denver and Singapore, is offering a $35 Dine LA lunch with a glass of sparkling wine and your choice of deviled eggs, a fried green tomato BLT or an iceberg wedge salad before your main course of chicken and waffles. (You can also order a country Cobb protein bowl or grilled blackened salmon for your entrée instead, but, again, the main reason to visit Yardbird is the juicy and flavorful fried chicken.) For dessert, there’s key lime pie or deep-fried Oreos.

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