Besha Rodell sits in stunned silence, pondering a dish of turnips and brown rice at Allumette, "Miles Thompson's musing on the end of winter and the coming warmth," what she calls, "an outrageous plate of food" for something that could have been "something you'd get for lunch at a very austere, vegan yoga retreat." So it goes at the new Echo Park restaurant, where the 25-year-old chef's cooking is called "cerebral, exacting, exciting, avant-garde." "Much of his food astonishes," Rodell writes, pointing to several dishes that "throw you off guard in the best possible way," like a sturgeon surrounded by pickled and sweet huckleberries and Szechuan pork dumplings topped with "fat salmon roe." And even though she often wants to edit the chef's creativity, no less when "all this inventiveness goes overboard and the results are just straight-up bizarre" (like in a mousseline-bleeding ravioli), you can still feel the critic's excitement over the chef, who is "making food that's slightly staggering in its inventiveness and quality" and who "miraculously manages to pull it all together." Three stars
