Luxury Life & Style

DINE delicious diversions by Bonnie Graves Café Pierre Retracing Sandy Paths Mr. Sexton was a bachelor for a long time. As a bachelor, he rented a fabulous if dilapidated, old house one block off the water in Manhattan Beach for nine long, blissful under-market-value years. I thought of those years recently as he and I and the Petite Gourmande strollered along the Strand. It was one of those postcard-perfect September Saturdays, when everyone’s tan is just so, and the kids are still intoxicated with first- week crushes and back-to-school fashion. It was early, we were hungry and Baby had emerged from her wee beach tent nap in a similar frame of mind. On a friend’s recommendation, we headed towards Café Pierre. Sandwiched between the packed Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (what is the highly-addictive substance in that fat-free vanilla latte?) and a raucous sports bar, we found this landmark Manhattan Beach restaurant. Café Pierre recently celebrated its thirtieth year with an interior renovation and menu revamp that aims to keep loyalists happy while attracting a new crowd. This is a tricky balancing act, and while Chef/Owner Guy Gabriele succeeds on some levels, pleasing everyone sometimes results in a muddled message. As a chef with Provençal roots and Italian genes, Gabriele boldly showcases southern French classics like moules frites avec sauce Poulette alongside a bistecca alla Fiorentina and tripe done up Tuscan-style. These items appear on a menu page labeled “Café Pierre Originals,” while an entire separate page entitled “Market Menu” jumps off into a culinary mash-up that leaves the diner a bit dazed. Spicy Tunisian lamb Merguez? Kobe-style pork chop? Coriander-crusted ahi? It’s fun to play in the kitchen, but to offer twenty around-the-world appetizers and eighteen entrées (before daily specials!) in a restaurant of this modest size is simply over-kill, and also presents a potential freshness conundrum. Similarly, the wine program needs some serious pruning so that the fantastic treasures hidden in it can actually be discovered. I work in the wine business, and I had a lot of trouble locating all the wines being poured by-the-glass and was utterly baffled by the schizophrenic nature of the products included. Again, the desire to please everyone results in way too many boring, distributordriven California “blah” wines that almost, but not quite, obscure bonanzas like the 2005 Châteauneuf-du-Pape from Vieux Télégraphe clocking in at an unbelievable $56 per bottle. This last item was featured as part of November/December 2007 Luxury Life & Style 83

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Luxury Life & Style

Editor's Note Carte Blanche Home Interview The Arts Seen in the South Bay Give Drive Fashion People Spotlight Travel The Cellar Dine Vacation Properties Coda

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.