March 19, 2015

Even newcomers to Los Angeles sense how the klieg lights are shifting in a different direction. Especially when it comes to what’s happening in restaurant kitchens around downtown. 

“It’s an exciting time to be here for the change that L.A. is going through,” said chef Sara Kramer, who moved here from New York City just last year. 

After intensive efforts by civic boosters and city officials, downtown is finally heating up in earnest. Bon Appetit magazine selected Alma, on Broadway, as its best new restaurant in the U.S. for 2013. Meanwhile, a walk today through historic Grand Central Market provides a glimpse into the evolution that’s continued briskly since Wexler’s Deli began slinging its house-cured salmon and praised pastrami about a year ago. 

Things also look pretty different in the Arts District, farther east downtown, where controversies over urban-planning issues such as gentrification, parking and density remind us that cities aren’t static places and that even some of our oldest neighborhoods go through growing pains. 

For people who love food, these transformations mean a more varied and delicious landscape. Here are four businesses operated by enterprising young Jews who have a stake in the latest chapter of downtown L.A. dining. 

Madcapra

Kramer decided to leave her restaurant post at Glasserie in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for a welcome change of scenery, relocating to her boyfriend’s hometown of Los Angeles. She came to L.A. without a firm restaurant plan in place, and now aims to open Madcapra, a falafel and Middle Eastern food stand, in Grand Central Market by late spring with business partner and fellow chef Sarah Hymanson.

“It feels like there’s a lot of momentum now, and we’ve had a lot of opportunity come to us after we started looking,” Kramer explained about her arrival in Southern California.

Kramer’s almost exclusively vegetarian, “vegetable-forward” menu will showcase California produce. “We’ll source things locally,” Kramer said, “because it’s the responsible thing to do, and it’s also more delicious.” 

But don’t look to Madcapra to replicate the experience of eating on the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. 

“It’s not going to be traditional in the slightest,” she said. Instead, Madcapra will use “falafel as the platform, but it’s also not about building ourselves as an Israeli or Middle Eastern brand. It’s about modernizing the idea of a falafel sandwich.” (Crowds at the recently opened Dune, in Atwater Village, demonstrate how a contemporary take on falafel has an eager audience.) 

Food served at Madcapra’s 14-seat stall will explore how there’s “so much in Middle Eastern and eastern Mediterranean food to work with, that there’s a broad palate. We want to do that area of the world justice,” Kramer said.  

As for the mysterious name, Kramer explained, “Madcapra was inspired by a particular goat that Sarah and I kept around as our sort of ‘spirit animal.’ ” Since capra is Latin for goat, “one day it just clicked with the word ‘madcap,’ and it stuck.”

317 S. Broadway; madcapra.com

Clark Street Bread

Zack Hall of Clark Street Bread rose to the top of the city’s best bread offerings soon after he began baking out of his West Hollywood apartment last year. Having left his career as a musician to pursue a new, all-consuming passion by apprenticing at Proof Bakery in Atwater Village and Kenter Canyon Farms, Hall embraces a style of artisanal bread baking that requires stamina and discipline in order to craft his naturally fermented dough (i.e. made without commercial yeast or any chemical additives) using grains from Central Milling and Pasadena’s Grist & Toll. 

Zack Hall of Clark Street Bread

This is not your father’s bread factory, although it might have been somewhat like your great-grandfather’s baking business in the old country. 

He began working out of Grand Central Market late last year — first on a pop-up, then on a permanent basis — to keep up with demand for his wholesale clients, which include restaurants Petit Trois and Trois Mec, and decided to add the small retail component. Clark Street Bread’s output is currently approximately 250 loaves per day, which means Hall and his four employees always sell out of the baguettes, miche, whole-wheat loaves, variations on egg-loaded brioche, Danish rye and whatever other special breads might be offered daily from 10 a.m. on. (He tries to have about six varieties available for retail sale.) You might be able to snag a loaf if you get to  Melrose Place farmers market early enough on Sundays; the breads are also available at a handful of other select retailers.

A Beverly Hills High School graduate, Hall grew up attending Stephen Wise Temple, had a bar mitzvah and traveled to Israel. Now he’s managing the intense pressures of running his business (“it’s harder than I ever thought,” he said), as well as handling the climate quirks that come along with Grand Central Market’s physically open environment. (Being able to control factors of temperature and humidity typically makes bakers’ lives easier.)

Although his current location in the market affords him visibility, Hall also looks forward to expanding his business westward, closer to the neighborhoods in which he grew up, in the near future. For now, however, Clark Street is in terrific company with the old-time market stalwarts and newcomers. 

317 S. Broadway; instagram.com/clarkstreetbread, https://www.facebook.com/clarkstreetbread

The Springs

Going from growing up in a deli-owning family outside of Cleveland, to establishing a career in theater, to opening up an extensive wellness center complete with a raw vegan restaurant in Los Angeles sounds like a chapter pulled from the next phase of the Jewish-American experience that not even Saul Bellow could have conjured. In the case of Jared Stein, who spent much of his youth working with his father and relatives at Corky & Lenny’s Deli in Woodmere, Ohio, it’s simply his life story. 

Today, inside the former paper distribution warehouse that’s now The Springs on Mateo Street in the Arts District, customers can take a yoga class, have colon hydrotherapy or a hot-stone reflexology session, and enjoy a raw vegan meal prepared by its executive chef, Michael Falso. 

Stein’s personal dietary conversion began one summer at the Union for Reform Judaism’s Goldman Union Camp Institute in Indiana, when he opted for the vegetarian meal track. What his parents assumed was a phase ended up being anything but.

He then earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drama at New York University and lived in Manhattan while traveling the country as a musical director. It was while touring with the musical “American Idiot,” based on the music of the band Green Day, that Stein and his partner, Kimberly Helms, also a theater professional on tour with the show, fell in love with Los Angeles and, specifically, the Arts District. 

Kimberly Helms and Jared Stein (inset) are owners of The Springs

They set their sights on combining various holistic streams under one large roof. “Why aren’t all these things in one place?” Stein recalled asking. 

At the same time, he stays connected to his former professional life by keeping a baby grand piano and other instruments in a corner at The Springs for live music events several nights a week. “I get that fix,” Stein said.

So, what do his parents make of his quintessentially Southern Californian business that’s a long way from a traditional Jewish deli? 

“They thought I was crazy, but they’re so supportive, and they’re amazed” at the outcome, Stein said. His enthusiasm for clean and conscious living has even rubbed off on them somewhat — they’ve adopted a pescaterian and overall healthier diet.

608 Mateo St.; thespringsla.com

Ori Menashe’s next project 

Ori Menashe already helms Bestia, one of the hottest restaurants in Los Angeles since he opened it with L.A. restaurant macher Bill Chait in late 2012. By the following year, he already publicly announced plans to open a Middle Eastern concept somewhere near Bestia in the Arts District. 

Menashe’s new menu will reflect the flavors he grew up with in Israel (where his family relocated after he was born and had lived in Los Angeles for a few years), as well as his parents’ Georgian and Moroccan heritages. 

“I cook Middle Eastern food at home — that’s my comfort food. Italian food is, too, but I don’t know — Middle Eastern food is just natural to me,” Menashe told the Los Angeles Times. 

He won’t currently disclose additional details, but the restaurant is slated to open this fall.