Review: Aren’t restaurants the smallest? A former Melrose cafe makes the case

For decades, Stir Crazy was a coffee shop, a business nestled among the endless interconnected restaurant, retail and office buildings of Melrose Avenue, interrupted only by cross streets.

Dino Trucco took over the place in 1994, ripping out the Formica tile decor of the previous occupant, Java Man, and installing thick wood paneling to surround the clean lines of his cabin-like tables.

After that time it remained indoors for about 30 years.

McLean Kasnoff grew up in Los Angeles and was a fan of Stir Crazy. Over the years, the espresso has been served without a recipe, never quite reaching a third wave moment. Its interior has become rough and tumble as a refuge for generations of writers amid the mists of stories lost beneath its roof, unfinished or unfinished.

But something about the store’s size and value of community struck a chord with Kasnoff, so much so that he approached Mackenzie Hoffman with the idea of ​​opening a restaurant there. Two hospitality professionals have been working through the pandemic at Jill Bernheimer’s exquisite wine shop, Domaine LA, just down the street.

In 2022 they approached Trucco, who decided to retire. Together with music industry veteran Harley Wertheimer as a third partner, they signed a new deal and attempted to change everything about Stir Crazy except its name.

The result: minimalist space, maximum impact. A heating upgrade that delivers form and function. A casual Euro-Californian menu. An incredible wine program led by Hoffman. The year the trio moved in, an old sanctuary was reborn with a new spirit.

Small restaurants occupy a special psychology in cities, especially one as endless as Los Angeles. I’m not thinking of noisy dives that equate crowding and claustrophobia with exclusivity, but of small sanctuaries where we feel safe. Rooms that shelter our body and mind from the big world for a few hours.

In its new configuration, the Stir Crazy kitchen area covers 500 square meters. Eight side tables, including an aubergine-coloured banquette, seat 25 people. Square white oak panels decorate the lower half of the walls. Double lamps with wraparound shades hang above them, and artworks – sketches, portraits, prints – are hung neatly or placed unframed.

What the details of the summary don’t understand are the sensitive dimensions. There’s a sweetness to communal bubbles here. It speaks to the parts of our brains that once loved hunting in a tree house or building a fort out of blankets under the furniture; only now we adults huddle around cozy tables with fancy plates and Alsatian Silvaner furs on our plates.

Another comforting element regarding restaurant kitchen proportions: menus and glass lists are concise. Less thinking, less worrying.

The amount of food is about a dozen. Some might be suitable as open starters or appetizers. Start with a crispy round of Iberico ham and Parmigiano-Reggiano, a juicy cipollini onion dip with French fries, and a beautiful plate of anchovy fillet studded with hazelnuts and topped with green tarragon sauce. If you’re a light eater, you can order and finish a round of these with gusto.

Dig a little deeper and the options appeal to a crowd of Los Angeles diners: seasonal, local ingredients, a friendly fusion of Italian, Japanese and Korean flavors. With summer just around the corner at dinnertime, blackberries add a delicious twist to tuna tartare with shaved fennel. Nectarines paired so well with brown butter and shiso on a raw rockfish dish that the fish was almost redundant. Pearls of fregola sarda were satisfyingly surrounded by moist, basil-scented ratatouille.

There was also a lovely fireplace and a sculpture of a bean that had squeakers and plants in it. I prefer them lightly cooked (my southern roots are showing) and served around the beans so the pickles can drizzle over the lemon fool and bottarga.

The kitchen team, led by Carolyn Leff (who worked with Hoffman at the short-lived Onda in Santa Monica), keeps several perennials in rotation. Among them is a celery salad with walnuts, goat cheese and raisins, which beautifully blends sweet and savory, soft and crunchy. For the main course, a light German sausage sourced from Deli Mattern in Orange County is served with a mound of creamy potato salad topped with Kewpie mayo and a healthy dollop of mustard.

Both dishes are downright delicious and the kind of combinations I can eat once a week. That’s the point.

And order as a drink together: German pinot blanc, herbs and peach? A fresh and citrusy trebbiano from Abruzzo? An Austrian Zweigelt that puts the cherry right in the middle? Except for dessert wines, the selections are usually less than 10 items. This is enough because the staff will ask you the right questions about your tastes and understand the recommendations in an unusual way.

This is Hoffman’s apartment, and he writes one of my favorite wine lists in Los Angeles. Pages filled with endless lists of information about manufacturers and years would overwhelm or bore most of us. I’m looking for a way, something that makes me question. For example, Hoffman adds subtle and interesting comments about the availability of certain bottles: “last call,” “new,” “restock.” Why are they popular, special, or available now? These are little clues to get the diner talking if they want to, and something beyond the usual approach of asking, “What kind of wine do you like to drink?”

Hoffman compares the choice to have 300 bottles in a restaurant of this size to displaying his record collection. “I brought together all these artists, these producers, these farmers, because I started working in restaurants when I was 18,” he said in an interview. “It’s a different way of telling stories. A winemaker can only make 30 to 40 vintages. If I’ve followed someone’s work for 10 years, I’ve seen almost a third of their life’s work, I’ve seen a third of their life’s achievements.”

Talk to Hoffman long enough and you’ll learn that his wine mix is ​​based on a few buzzwords of the moment: natural, biodynamic and low-intervention. He shows up at the table with two or three bottles to describe the styles, draw attention and watch for reactions. He remembers what you love when you return.

That is to say, the restaurant has an increasing number of permanent employees. We accept odd shifts, Monday through Friday. Parking across the Melrose Corridor is rather tortuous on weekdays, plus it seems bravely civilized to give restaurant workers the day off on Saturdays and Sundays.

Part of the reward of the Stir Crazy scale is also a sense of material mood swings: calmer and cooler at the beginning of the week, more bottles and excitement at the end of the week. Maybe a dish falls into the fall ingredients. Maybe the dark white has been sold out in Switzerland and instead you’re drinking an original Central Coast Chardonnay with hints of salty almonds.

In such a small place everything is important.