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CampanileNew Colonist Restaurant Review
At Campanile, every detail is perfect, right down to the table condiments: home-made raw sugar cubes for your coffee, and flake salt with spoon and ramekin rather than that iodized stuff in a shaker. These people are fanatical about food. The service is carefully attended to as well. Guided by the deft hand of maître-d' Jacques-Daniel Perwin, service is attentive and polite. Waiters and waitresses are intelligent, observant, and approachable. They have no qualms about answering questions, explaining ingredients, or making competent recommendations.
These people are fanatical about food. On one evening, I fell in love with a custard & date tart. "How long will this be on the menu?" I asked Jacques. He shrugged. "Until the date tree in their yard stops bearing fruit for the season." Their regular lunch and dinner service is not enough. On Mondays, Campanile also offers a prix fixe Family Dinner, a three-course meal served family style. The periodic Wednesday Night Chef's Menu features seasonal tastes. Thursday evenings are "Tartine Nights," when Nancy Silverton serves up quick, imaginative sandwiches, such as the marinated artichoke with ricotta and salsa verde, for the patio and bar. On Saturday and Sunday, they provide an outstanding brunch menu with such delights as fried polenta with seasonal fruit compote or "eggs in a hole," two eggs nested in holes made in slices of olive bread then pan fried. By the way: the chickens in Peel and Silverton's yard contribute eggs to the restaurant. Fanatics. Go figure.
Campanile Text and photos ©2000 by G.Stephanie Morey
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Campanile is one of those restaurants that cares more about food than about fashion. Its seasonal menu addresses freshness, preparation, and attention to locally available ingredients. Husband and wife team Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton are fanatical about food and have been offering well balanced, savory menus for ten years. Positioned on the edge of La Brea Avenue's Gallery Row near the Miracle Mile, Campanile is located in a early 20th century building built by Charlie Chaplin. A distinctive bell tower that rises above the building gives the restaurant its name. It was originally built around a large, open front patio, which Peel and Silverton covered to create one of three vaulted dining rooms. The patio dining room is open and, thanks to an enormous skylight, airy and sunny during the day. The middle dining room has an American bistro feel with closely positioned tables and a view of the kitchen action. The back room is dark and romantic, carpeted and quiet. There are also two small private dining rooms upstairs. In the same building is the retail outlet of the famed La Brea Bakery. This is no mere coincidence: the bakery is co-founded and managed by Nancy Silverton. As a result, the ubiquitous table bread found in other restaurants is replaced by slices of their crusty, chewy, flavorful artisan loaves.
Campanile's cuisine is sometimes described as "fusion," but that may be far too inadequate a term in this case. Most fusion kitchens in L.A. seem merely to establish a sort of "détente on a plate" rather than harmony. Campanile combines French Provençal and Italian methods with local ingredients seamlessly. You suspect, rather than know, that various influences are at work. Even when they explore Latin American or Asian influences, the result seems somehow natural and easy, and sometimes playful. On my last visit I enjoyed a creamy, lightly spicy fennel soup drizzled with olive oil, and a baked tuna steak on a bed of warm buckwheat noodles, accompanied by broiled red onion quarters and cherry and pear tomatoes. Baking the tuna helped create a light crust on the outside and was a pleasant departure from the inevitable LA process of charcoal-grilling or sesame-crusting the fish. The vegetables were a sweet counterpoint to a slightly-spicy sauce, and the noodles balanced the overall texture.
Dessert at Campanile is a transcendent experience. Ms. Silverton is an award winning pastry chef and her La Brea Bakery is considered the finest artisan bakery in California. This particular evening I had a tangy baked apple positioned on a puff pastry disk and floating in a likewise tangy cider-based sauce; the experience can only be described as "bliss." The genius here is using the tangyness as a guard against the abundant sweetness, thus preventing a cloying dish.