When Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, the chef-owners of Animal, rented the tiny Fairfax Avenue space for their noisy neighborhood bistro, the owners of the property—who run the kosher Schwartz Bakery next door—perhaps not surprisingly included a kosher-related clause in their leasing agreement. What’s surprising was that the stipulation wasn’t about offending religious sensibilities, but about competition: Under no circumstance were Shook and Dotolo to tap into Schwartz’s customer base by preparing any of their food according to Jewish dietary law.
“It’s funny, right?” said Shook on a day when he and Dotolo—both Florida émigrés who appeared in the Food Network’s docu-series Two Dudes Catering—had no less than three different kinds of bacon curing in their refrigerator. In fact, their flyer-sized, tiny-print menu reads like a full-on salute to the glories of trafe. There’s a pork chop with wax beans, squash, and lipstick peppers; a house-smoked pork belly with lentil and butter-bean salad; and a side dish of slab bacon with their take on Southern fried chicken—fried quail served with creamy grits, long-cooked chard, and maple jus. The pork ribs have divided foodie L.A. There are fans of the sugary, tender slabs, and there are those who can’t get into the almost Trader Vic’s–like Polynesian sweetness. At the bottom of their melted petit basque starter are a couple of thin circles of spicy chorizo.
For dessert, there’s a chocolate crunch bar topped with crumbles of Nueske bacon that sounds sort of bull-in-a-china-shop, but it actually works. There’s also chocolate pudding, and a strawberry and blueberry crisp. (But if you’re in the mood for a “whole cake,” you’re out of luck: According to Shook, that breaks another one of their landlord’s unusual by-laws.)
It’s anyone’s guess what the surrounding Orthodox Jewish community makes of the fact that the unmistakably woody scent of cooking bacon now spills daily out onto Fairfax Avenue and competes with a bakery- and delicatessen-filled street whose signature fragrance for the last 60 years was made up of fresh cookies, challah, knishes, vinegary pickles, and peppery pastrami. Shook’s claim that “pork touches everything here” is so true that it should be immortalized in needlepoint, framed, and then hung on Animal’s otherwise unadorned walls.
Animal 435 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles (323-782-922; animalrestaurant.com)
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