Much of Sunday was spent stumbling through LA Weekly’s Gold Standard, an event featuring some of Los Angeles’ top eateries as deemed by Pulitzer prize-winning critic Jonathan Gold.

The four-hour eatfest was priced at $60 a pop, and was held at a Smashbox Studios, in an area normally congested by Melrose hipsters (so imagine throwing even more bodies on the map. Like Disneyland on a summer Friday). I’ve been to a handful of food festivals that just weren’t worth spending the cash, and this thankfully wasn’t one of them. Most restaurants took great care in preparing their nibbles, and quite a few of them lived up to their hype, making enough of an impression on me to come back and dine in their brick-and-mortar establishments.

And the best part: The main draw was Gold had given us his foodie blessing. All restaurants were handpicked by him. So instead of spending the next 30 days canvassing Los Angeles for Gold’s top picks, they had assembled in a location and had essentially come to us. It was all worth sitting in two hours of traffic, fighting for parking on two-lane streets and getting ceviche all over my boots. I’ll be back next year.

Some of my favorites:

Where was the crowd at Drago’s booth? It’s citrus panna cotta (main photo, top) was as beautiful to look at as it was to eat. It was largely being ignored for the blood orange coolers served at Sona’s booth, which, by the time I had my hands on one, was watered down because the chefs were running out of juice.

Alain Giraud of Anisette served bamboo skewers of duck l’orange (above), each with a crispy, citrus-soaked crouton. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

Clam paella with bacon from Ciudad — oh, how I love thee. This was one of the first booths to greet patrons, and the dish set a happy tone for the rest of the afternoon. Ciudad also had a virgin mojito that went better with the chicken wings from Kyochon than with the paella. The chicken wings, otherwise known as chicken candy and crackfood, were bananas amazing. It has been 13 hours since I’ve first tasted them, and they’re all I can think about. I’m almost nauseous with my want for these chicken wings.

Fusion fanatics (myself included) stood in a 25-minute line for crisp pork belly with Kimchi served by the boys at Animal. No complaints for the long wait, with some people grabbing dishes and hightailing it back to the end of the line for more. I guess you can’t go wrong with pork belly, right?

And last but not least: Chicken mole tacos, tamales and ceviche from La Casita Mexicana. It makes me wish I had my own Mexican grandma to lovingly scold me into following the cardinal rule: “No eating tamales without salsa.”

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. I hope you will humor me in reading!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:37 pm and is filed under At the table, Restaurants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.