After years of wandering in the French culinary landscape, Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne have ventured south with Caldo Verde, their new project in the Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel. Laid-back and light-filled, the restaurant channels an Iberian vibe with a curvaceous Deco horseshoe bar that wouldn’t be out of place in Lisbon, and tiles creeping from the floors to the walls and pillars. Caldo verde is, of course, a filling and delicious Portuguese soup, and that’s a proper metaphor for Goin’s seasonal menu, with winter chicories and orange, kale and faro, braised beef cheeks caçoila, as well as her own elevated version of caldo verde, teeming with rock crab and mussels. Styne takes the wine program south but sticks to her aesthetic, always walking the line between classical and cool, assisted by Beverage Director Michael Scribner. The list is deep in bottlings from Rioja and the Douro, classics (Vega-Sicilia, López de Heredia) and slyly adventurous (Raúl Pérez, Bodegas Antidoto) and boasts one of the larger selections of mencía bottlings in the city.
Caldo Verde is part of our Top 30 LA List of 2023. Read the whole story here.
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2023.
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