Welcome to the organic zeitgeist. In order to open a restaurant in Los Angeles you have to make sure you advertise yourself as organic, healthy, tasy, and fun. None of these tell you anything about the food, they’re just complimentary adjectives to bolster your yoga lifestyle. When Wal-Mart is considered a leader in organic produce, you know the very meaning has been diluted. A corporation that works to lower national wages, destroy unions, and avoid health care for its employees is not organic. It’s footprint, in fact, is massive and destructive. Therefore, when looking for a place to eat these days I tend to raise an eyebrow at anyplace that bills itself as organic and has the decor of a Seventh Generation detergent bottle. Bloom has set up shop in an emerging part of Los Angeles – emerging from auto body shops, section 8 HUD housing, and bars on the windows. (I suppose this is the new area to watch for real estate.) The menu offers a wife variety of salads with useless descriptors like “gorgeous” and “amazing”, but thankfully also includes actual incrediets such as their Asian pear and blue cheese salad or the grilled skirt steak salad. I had the turkey chili, which was flavorful and didn’t taste like something out of a vat. My wife had the Bloom Gorgeous green salad and ignored the edible flowers that I guess were the gorgeous element, and we shared the brie, wild mushroom and fig jam sandwich while our dining companion had the burger. While my chili was tasty and fine, the cornbread was super, loaded with jalepenos. My wife’s salad was pretty good – I liked the dressing, but she found it simply whelming. The sandwich was definitely on the right flavor track, but it felt incomplete. The seeded bread should have been toasted, with some melt to the cheese. It was served as a cold sandwich and we all agreed it would have been a much better Panini. The burger looked wonderful, and I begged off having a bite opting to come back and have it all to myself. We dipped our perfect fries in the green aioli and swooned. Dessert was a must and I have to admit the homemade fudge was satisfying, but not earth shattering. I think I need a little more tectonics to my fudge and this one didn’t quite shake it. I’ll go back for the burger, the prices were certainly fine for the quality of ingredients. The busboy was a little too eager to clear our plates so the last quarter of our crushed mint lemonades were gone after we got up to look at the dessert case. Our waiter was acceptably playful, thin, hair-gelled, and queer. There’s a bbq-shawarma-rotisserie joint just down the street that was beckoning me back to the area, so perhaps I’ll cruise back to West Pico again. Dinner for three, with two desserts, was fifty bucks.
(323) 934-6900, 5544 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles