Celebrity chef and recurring Top Chef judge Graham Elliot has been shooting around Los Angeles the past few months, and it’s all in service of season two of Bravo TV’s digital series Going Off the Menu. The show is a behind-the-curtain look at some of Los Angeles’s most popular underground (and often illegal) restaurants, from Koreatown-adjacent barbecue stops to private homes filled with funky French cheeses.
The first trailer for the upcoming digital series is now available online (and above), and you can spot some of the secret places Elliot takes celebrities like Lance Bass to. There’s the hard-to-miss Lucifer smoker from Ragtop Fern’s barbecue, a pushcart filled with French delicacies from Laurent Quenioux, the hidden hallway of Birds & Bees in Downtown, and the backdrop of sun and sand that is Salazar in Frogtown.
From the looks of it, plenty of local chefs even got in on the action, including Chris Oh of Seoul Sausage (seen walking into Tinfoil Liquor & Grocery) and Nguyen Tran from Starry Kitchen and Button Mash who ... well he’s in a space suit of some kind, and he pops out of a trunk. Honestly, that all seems on brand for Tran, who normally attends food festivals with a megaphone and a full-body banana suit.
Of course, there is no shortage of underground food to enjoy in Los Angeles these days. Not only has Instagram become one of the most reliable ways to discover backyard operators and street food finds, but the city’s prodigious network of taco trucks, secret pop ups, and one-off chef’s nights has been going strong for years.
Bravo’s Going Off the Menu premieres Monday, May 8. Audiences can watch the show online or through the Bravo Now app apparently, with this season slated for a run of five episodes.
