Nearly a year ago, French-born chef Farid Zadi detailed to us his mission to reinvent North African cooking. Today the chef sends word about his plans for Eat. Good. Clean. Food, the new Culver City restaurant and market he plans to soft-open on Venice Blvd. with his wife and fellow L.A. Weekly online contributor, Susan Park, and partner David Haskell. Zadi writes, “The restaurant will have a cozy, mom ‘n’ pop feel. That is if you’re mom and dad are really great cooks who’ve traveled a lot and have an international group of friends who are also great cooks.” How will that translate to your plate?
The restaurant, housed in the Cake Divas space, will actually be three unique spaces. The two frontal areas will be a take-out-heavy market component selling prepared French foods, freshly baked breads, cookware, and assorted Gallic products (what one might even call an epicerie), with cafe seating, while an alcove will host a boucherie and charcuterie section. Behind a Moorish door, the rear enclosed patio will be saved for special events and private dining, or if this baby proves popular enough, for extra seating.
The team, who recently formed like Voltron under the name FOB/BOH3, will also use a secondary kitchen as the new home of Ecole de Cuisine culinary arts and pastry arts cooking school program, once the current occupants vacate “in a few months.”
The restaurant will only serve lunch through September (from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.) to start, with a menu that brings U.S. diner and French brasserie cooking together in dishes gourmet comfort recipes like a roast beef with mashed potatoes using high-grade meat and a proper au jus, with the spuds getting the full-on French butter-up. “The carrots will baby carrots (real ones, not the carved horse carrots available at supermarkets) that are cooked à l’étuvée,” Zadi writes.
Breakfast and dinner will follow in October, along the same lines, with brasserie-style dinner menus and a mash-up of French and U.S. flavors in the morning. Weekends look the most likely to see Zadi’s Northern African reinvention at play, as they will be held for special menus and events that celebrate global cuisine, with the first one dedicated to Korean cooking, complete with his mother-in-law’s (who Zadi says is “really like my own mother) white summer radish kim chi and Park’s fried chicken. There will also be an open-air market in the adjacent lot.
Overall though, Zadi says he just wants to go back to what the name suggests, good, clean, basic cuisine prepared correctly. “We want to see solid cooking back on the plate even it’s for simple things like slow roasted corn,” He offers. “You have that on the menu, it should really be slow roasted so that it’s sweet and tender.” You can get a better idea of what Zadi and team will be cooking over at Eat. Good. Clean. Food. on its website.
Eat. Good. Clean. Food., 9626 Venice Blvd, Culver City.
