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Saturday, October 1, 2011

lolita's lust


In an uncharacteristic display of brutish masculine derring-do, perhaps brought on by one too many afternoon lattes, L brought his proverbial foot down last Saturday evening & dragged J out to Lolita's Lust. Lolita's Lust, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Why do we visit you so rarely?

Could it be the prices? Not that it is super expensive, but the experience isn't opulent to the point where you become immune to the sting of the bill. Could it be the seating crap shoot? The front room is nice, but the back room which houses the majority of tables always reminds L a little bit of the type of musky basement where you find naked men dancing to The Fall with their tackle tucked between their legs. Could it just be the name, which, let's face it, is irredeemably naff, conjuring up images of those 70s coffee table books fusing sex & food with photographs of piles of strawberries & cream nestling between pert bosoms.


Anyway, we called ahead, got a nice booth by the wall of wine & enjoyed some splendid cocktails.





































J skipped a starter & contented herself with the complimentary bread & garlicky bean dip, which was nice without being the type of tasty that makes you approach random strangers in the street, grab them by their lapels & scream into their faces "Oh my God, you have to try the bread & garlicky bean dip at Lolita's Lust! In fact, why aren't you there right now? What's the matter with you? Are you crazy? Sorry if I got spittle on your face by the way."





L started with the lobster dumplings & mushroom salad with miso chile sauce, a plate so consistently delicious that it has led him to make several less successful lobster related choices over the years at other restaurants, chasing the high of these gorgeous dumplings & their lip smacking accompaniment. Having read David Foster Wallace's celebrated essay "Consider the Lobster", L does accept that boiling a creature alive to enhance the consumer's pleasure is an act of unnecessary & frankly unjustifiable cruelty. However, so good are the lobster dumplings at Lolita's Lust that if the waiter had told L that getting them to his plate necessitated the boiling alive of a random human in some sort of karmic exchange program, L would have been like, "yeah whatever, can we have some more bread too please when you have a moment?"



































L went with the filet of beef with gorgonzola cream. J chanced her arm with the lamb shank braised with caramelized onions, red wine reduction & feta. We shared a couple of sides too; the feta scallop potato & the sautéed field & wild mushrooms. We can say for certain we thoroughly enjoyed it, but some nagging doubts remain. Dig, if you will, the picture. It's 1969, you're at the Fillmore having ingested a heroically large dose of LSD & you're watching Jerry solo his way through a 40 minute version of Dark Star. Sure it's amazing, but is it actually amazing or is it just the drugs? In this tortuous analogy, the mind altering hallucinogens were the feta & gorgonzola sauces that made the bad stuff (the mushrooms) tolerable, & the good stuff (everything else) incredible.

Throughout dinner a collection of 80s classics rearranged into jazzy cocktail standards played at a surreptitious volume. We're fully aware of how horrendous that sounds, but it was at least nice to go somewhere with a commitment to mood after so many restaurants where the i-pod is left on shuffle. Adding to the soporific air was the lighting, which would plummet at irregular intervals still darker & darker. We skipped desert, because by that time, it was so dark in there, you wouldn't have been able to make out the photo anyway & ultimately we live to please you dear reader. If you can't share in our vanilla creme brulee then we would just as soon go home instead & eat some chocolate on the couch while we watch X Factor & ponder just what the hell is up with L.A Reid & his bizarre head movements.

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Lolita's Lust - Chinchilla Lounge on Urbanspoon



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