Jonathan Gold Doles Out a Tough Rose Café Review

This week, Jonathan Gold takes a look at the relatively recently revamped Rose Café in Venice, the late 1970s institution that was acquired by Sprout Group (Bestia, Otium, Republique). Formerly of Superba and Catch & Release, chef Jason Neroni brings his Italian cooking to the table at the Rose, with Jonathan Gold praising the pepperoni pizza drizzled with honey and exceptional charcuterie.

However, much of the review is rather critical, with the Times critic bringing down dishes like the Besha Rodell-approved sugar snap peas and the chef's pastas:

Neroni is well-known for his pasta, particularly his creamy, lightly smoked bucatini carbonara and his spaghetti in a miso-enhanced cacio e pepe. He was one of the first chefs in Los Angeles to embrace what has become a dominant style of stiff, grainy house-made pasta. (Dried pasta is almost always better bought than made —” make your own tagliatelle, but buy your penne.) And the pasta here, even the eggy pasta used to make the English pea agnolotti, tends to be distracting: tough, dry, soggy on the surface but barely cooked through. A dish of spaghetti with Dungeness crab and local uni should be luxurious, almost sybaritic. It isn't. [LAT]

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The Elsewhere: Darin Dines has a series of hits and misses at Little Sister Downtown, Gastronomy Blog enjoys a delightful date night at Racion, and The Offalo recounts his lunch and dinner experiences at Hanjip.