Extreme Eating

Last night I ate at The Bazaar, a restaurant at the SLS Hotel. How can I explain this place? If you were to take the movement for sustainable living - eating healthy and local, driving a Prius, living within in a budget and generally approaching the world with modesty and humbleness - and wanted to stick your thumb up the movement's ass through the vehicle of a restaurant: The Bazaar is what you would get. If a midwestern tourist wanted to see the hedonistic, unsubtle, in your face, side of Los Angeles and be a pig for an evening in order to feel weird and sick and violated the next day - and it had to be a restaurant in a hotel -I'd recommend the Bazaar. Here's why:

At the bar, all the drinks cost $16 except for beer. If you want liquor, you can buy a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for $330. I order a mojito. It takes the bartender 6-7 minutes to prepare the drink from scratch. It's got the freshest ingredients. She tastes it before serving. It's damn good.

We get seated and order the chef's menu where they select the food dishes to serve you. The style is Tapas - but it's like extreme Tapas - they want you to really feel the flavor and be shocked by every dish. We start off with a caviar wrapped is a crisp with some creamy cheese like substance. Very good. Very soft. Next are sweet potato fries with a yogurt dip that was light and fluffy like meringue. Later dishes included various olive-concoctions to cleanse the palette, cured prosciutto from some rare pig that eats acorns, a tomato bread spread, a salty ceviche wrap, a couple heavy lamb and beef tasters, a cotton-candy foie gras...no joke, a goose liver wrapped with a little cotton candy, grilled onions with passion fruit, raspberries with king crab, a lobster piece accompanied by lobster juice heated up and served like a shot of espresso, and I know I'm forgetting some others.

To drink we got the white sangria, a forest of fruits in a jar with some clear liquid (was this vodka?). They bring out a nice bottle of sparkling wine and poured it into the jar. It was good.

I remember thinking we must be nearing the end of the meal and they brought out six more dishes. After my second trip to the bathroom I bump into the waitress and she says - only one more dish before desert! Oh, and desert is three different dishes - a chocolate cake on a crispy shell and now, I'm forgetting the others (we consumed a lot of food and alcohol).

Without a doubt, this was one of the more insane meals of my life. And I've eaten raw shellfish with soju with South Korean fisherman and bull testicles with cowboys. There was something about the artwork of monkey's dressed as pre-WW1 German army officers and the cases of crystal and the old movies playing on screens underneath the bar tables that made this place feel like halfway between a David Lynch movie and a happy hour at an upscale Spanish Tapas restaurant.

Memorable to say the least.