Winston and I decided to explore Culver City tonight and discovered it has many cool places. Culver City deserved more frequent visits.
We started the evening with dinner at La Dijonaise. It's a cute little cafe at the corner of Washington blvd and Helm.
The french onion soup was really good. The onions were hearty, with just right amount of saltiness. The cheese are lightly toasted on top but definitely melted, which made for lots cheesy stringy fun but probably an appalling sight. I'd imagined French Onion Soup being a bad dish to order on a date. Since Winston and I already know each other for a decade (scary, isn't it?), we thoroughly enjoyed the soups and all its cheesiness. This is definitely one of the best french onion soups I had. I was pretty much full after the soup as it was unexpectedly hearty (yum!).
Pricking the meat out of the shells is one of the thing I greatly enjoy about savouring escargots. The escargots came in the typical 6 holed escargot tray. Unfortunately, the shell was already gone and despite being soaked in the butter and pesto sauce, the escargots was rather bland. The complementary bread was pretty good, so I put the escargots on top of a piece of bread and added salt to make the escargots a bit more flavorful.
The Quiche Lorraine was very moist, though I think the dish would be better if added spinach. The salad green accompanied the Quiche was lightly dress with vinaigrette; it was delicious. Since I was already full from the soup, I only ate half the Quiche but I did managed to finish the salad.
Winston's research indicated that La Dijonaise is known for its desserts, so we shared a chocolate mousse cake. It was good but did not wow us like we anticipated it.
Overall, I really like La Dijonaise as the food is pretty decent (really good french onion soup) and the price is very good (entree from $7-$20). I probably will go back and try more of La Dijonaise dishes.
Across the street from La Dijonaise, there is an Asian fusion restaurant called Beacon. It seem very chic and there are many things on the menu that caught my interest. Beacon is now on my list of restaurants to check out.
After dinner, we walked around downtown Culver city and added another place to the list of places to check out: Bottle Rock (for good wines and tapas). We ended up at the wine bar, Vinum Populi, next to Ugo Cafe (good value Italian restaurant).
I love Vinum Populi's approach to wine tasting. There are 4 sets of vending machine style wine dispensers around the bar, 3 for reds and 1 for whites, each set has ~10 different bottles of wine. To sample wine, insert the prepaid card into machine reading slot (price listed on each wine dispenser, ranging from $1 to $6 per 1 oz sampe), put the glass under dispenser, push the botton and 1 oz of sample is shoot into the glass. Additional wines can be order from the bartender (e.g. an 1 oz sample of a 1927 dessert wine for $3.75). And I am not the only one who think Vinum Populi is cool; the place only been open ~4 months but it is already packed. This is a great way to sample wines that maybe out of budget (several samples cost >$100 per bottle).
Whitney is the one who told me about Vinum Populi and he joined us in wine tasting. We drank, we chatted, we gossiped, we people watched, we sang birthday song to some guy name Brook (whoever he is) and ate homemade cake from some girl that baked the cake for Brook. It was great fun!
To visit places in Culver City:
Beacon
Bottle Rock
