LAMILL Coffee Boutique

• Cuisine(s): Fusion
  Hours: Sun-Thu 7am-10pm, Fri-Sat 7am-11pm
  Price: $$
• Payment Types: All Major Credit Cards, MasterCard, Visa, American Express
  Features: Patio/Sidewalk Dining, Takeout
  Serving: Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch
• Alcohol: Beer/Wine
  Reservations: Not Accepted
  Parking: Lot Available, Street

Description

In recent years, L.A. has seen a lot of fascinating new restaurants open, but the most interesting of them all may be a coffee shop in the restaurant-starved heart of Silver Lake, a place whose menu is designed by Providence's Michael Cimarusti and Adrian Vasquez, and whose owners are devoted to the cult of coffee in the same way that a chapel might be dedicated to its saint. Still, the chandeliered coffee shrine is more bourgeois than a lot of Silverlakistas might prefer, and passersby sometimes glare at the Bugaboo-pushing, Pilates-toned, Prius-driving La Mill customers, as if they were personally responsible for the boutiquing of the neighborhood. As you finish off the last bites of a Tasmanian sea-trout carpaccio, eggs en cocotte with fresh Dungeness crabmeat or a $12 ham-and-cheese sandwich, you may concede the point. Even I have trouble wrapping my mind around coffee savant Eton Tsuno's excitement about what he terms “savory notes? and what you might call coffee that tastes like Campbell's tomato soup. (A small wine list would be nice.) But the food, molecular-gastronomy-tinged stuff, is easily the most exciting cooking at this price point in Los Angeles, including a hanger steak with an impossibly complicated watercress purée. Desserts - liquid-center lollipops and s'mores with lemongrass cremeux - are basically straight out of the Providence playbook. If you needed further incentive to visit La Mill, there are now french fries, cooked with the same attention to detail as its potato chips. See full review.