Jonathan Gold Talks Peruvian at Picca

You knew this one was coming. Today, The Goldster checks out Picca, and while he loves the restaurant's "handsome, airy room," he seems slightly let down by parts of the menu: "Zarate, probably the most prominent Peruvian cook in the U.S. at the moment, obviously is doing something right. Yet a lot of the menu feels clunky in ways that he should be able to control — the indifferently fried fish in the jalea, the glorious mixed-seafood dish of the port city Callao; the overreliance on spicy, oily emulsions; the overdressed sea bass tiradito. Most of all, there's what I suspect the kitchen thinks of as its great invention — the reinvented causas, originally a simple dish of cold mashed potatoes layered with things like avocado, chiles and crab, but here repurposed into a kind of Peruvian nigiri sushi, precisely molded oblongs of room-temperature spuds with spicy yellowtail with wasabi-marinated tobiko, or eel with avocado, or scallops. Mashed potatoes aren't seasoned sushi rice and never will be. The earthy flavors detract from rather than enhance the raw fish, and the texture feels instantly wrong." [LAW]

The Elsewhere: Drink Eat Travel visits SmithHouse, Eat LA hits Toranoko, kevinEats at Rivera, OCR tries Mozza, Midtown Lunch lunches at Jang Tou Bossam, and Refined Palate dines at Villetta.