Comfort us with cassoulet. Also, Thanksgiving prep begins, TGI Fridays struggles, Helms Bakery reopens and La Casita Mexicana gets sweet and spicy. Plus the full lineup for next month’s 101 Best Restaurants in L.
A. reveal party. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.
A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes. How to build a proper cassoulet David Campigotto , studded leather bands around his wrists and black chef gloves covering his hands, tenderly smooths the mound of white beans piled high in earthenware cassoulet pots lined in a row on the counter at L.
A.’s Chi Spacca . Hidden beneath the beans are a complex strata of carefully arranged duck legs, pork ribs, sausage, pig’s trotters, pig skin and more beans, a construction nearly identical to what Campigotto creates at his restaurant Chez David in the town of Castelnaudary, known in France as the father in the holy trinity of cassoulet.
(The son is Carcassone; the holy ghost is Toulouse.) What emerges from the oven several hours later is cassoulet as most of us have never seen it, with a beautifully burnished mahogany, almost black crust and not a bread crumb in sight. It’s certainly something Chi Spacca owner Nancy Silverton had never seen until she came across Campigotto’s cassoulet when he was doing a dinner series at Paul Kahan ‘s Publican in Chicago.
“I thought, cassoulet — great! I’ve had pork and beans with bread crumbs on top and I love it,” Silverton says when she described her first loo.
