About Horses
On Sunset Boulevard in the stretch between Hollywood and West Hollywood, Horses occupies a small room that has generated an outsized amount of conversation since it opened — and consistently delivered on the promise of its reputation. This is a restaurant where the cooking is serious and the scene is real, two qualities that Los Angeles dining often presents as mutually exclusive. Horses refutes that entirely.
The kitchen operates in what might be called modern European bistro mode: French technique applied to American ingredients, executed with the kind of precision that makes deceptively simple dishes reveal their ambition. The Caesar endive salad, dressed with anchovy and a hand-made dressing, is the benchmark for how good a salad can be when the kitchen takes it seriously. The striped trout with beurre blanc is the kind of dish that makes visiting food writers rethink their assumptions about the current state of Los Angeles cooking — the beurre blanc is flawless, the fish perfectly handled, the whole thing arriving as though it took no effort at all.
The vodka rigatoni is the city's most talked-about off-menu item: requested rather than printed, available most nights, a masterclass in the vodka sauce as a vehicle for extraordinary pasta-making. The cheeseburger — served late, available to regulars who know to ask — has the kind of specificity that suggests it was tested hundreds of times before landing on the menu. The seasonal pastas change with what interests the kitchen, which is the correct approach.
The room transforms as the evening progresses. Dinner service is lively and energetic; by ten o'clock the neon bar in the back has taken on a particular glow and the crowd has shifted toward the kind of creative industry types who populate the best Hollywood evenings. The music gets louder. Orders for the vodka rigatoni and late-night cheeseburger increase. Wednesday through Saturday the kitchen is open until one in the morning. This is not incidental to the Horses experience — it is the point of it.
