Bombo

Los Angeles, April 10, 2015—

ONE OF OUR PLEASURES is following friends and acquaintances as they move through their careers. Among them, the fellow you might be able to make out at the far right on the other side of the counter, working at his new-fangled steam kettles in his brand new restaurant.

It's Mark Peel, who we first knew many years ago when he worked at Chez Panisse, and whose cuisine we enjoyed as often as we could after he'd opened a restaurant called Campanile in Charlie Chaplin's house on La Brea in Los Angeles.

That was a while back, too. Then, a couple of years ago, he sold the place. Next time I enjoyed his food it was at an installation in the Los Angeles airport. Then today we had the pleasure of lunch at Bombo, opened only two weeks ago in the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, at the foot of Angel's Flight.

If you zoom in on the photo you might be able to read the menu. From it I chose the fried chicken, which came as three generous portions of breast meat, well breaded and deep-fried very crisp, served with a nice chopped salad and a cone of thick-cut oven-fried potatoes. Mark's cooking has always been full of flavor, and that hasn't changed. This place is fun.

Afterward we drove out to another LA market, the one at Fairfax in Hollywood, for coffee and cake at Short Cake, which I wrote about a month or two ago. The cake had a perfect texture, moist and light, and was flavored with pistachios and tangelos, with a sort of Bavarian cream between layers and butter cream frosting; and with it a superb cappuccino made with coffee from Santa Cruz's Verve roastery.

Dinner: light, of course; we were going to a play tonight. (A superb performance of Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro, funny as hell and pretty true to the original as far as I can tell.) We found a decent local Italian with a nice bar, where we shared a plate of fusilli aglio-olio and a salad, and basta così.

Martini; Pinot grigio

•Bombo, 317 S. Broadway, Los Angeles; Short Cake, 6333 W. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, 323-761-7976; Nikki C's, 470 S. Rosemead Blvd., Pasadena, 626-792-7437