SAAM at The Bazaar

The SAAM at Bazaar by Jose Andres is well known for its take on molecular gastronomy. It’s located in the SLS Hotel off of La Cienega near West Hollywood. It’s filled with your typical pretentious and superficial Hollywood crowds. If you can get past that, there are 2 restaurants here of note: the regular restaurant where you can order tapas and the SAAM restaurant where it’s a 22 course prix fix taster. Since I’m more than likely to not go to the same high end restaurant again, I decided to go big.

Note for 2022 migration: this is an old post from my other defunct blog. Unfortunately this restaurant closed in 2017. I remember this was one of the first starts of satiating my gourmand syndrome.

Ambiance

The ambiance for the SAAM section is quite different than the other one. SAAM is definitely more intimate and quieter giving you a good experience where you can talk softly and hear each other.

Let’s just get straight to the point. How was the food?

Food

1. Kavir Kir Royale. It was hard to remember the words coming out of the host’s mouth, but I just remember some type of white wine with caviar like balls that pop when you press them with your tongue against the top of your mouth. This tastes exactly how the picture looks like.

2. Beet & Yogurt. This was a little strange. It looks like one of those Taiwanese pastries where the outside is bread and the inside is some sort of cream. However, the outside on this is actually crispy. The beets on the side was very subtle in flavor. The yogurt resembled sour cream but not as thick. Taste wise, it was ok. The most interesting part was perhaps the texture of the outside and the sour yogurt. It also was a slight mess to eat since it literally collapsed when I picked it up.

3. Oyster and Jamon. There is jamon cream, crouton, cilantro, and some fresh lime for the citrus all served in a single tasting spoon. This was quite delicious. The oyster was fresh and tasty. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where it’s from.

4. Seabeans in Tempura. This was as underwhelming as what you see in the picture. The black parts of the picture was actually a reduced sauce that has a sour kick to it. The tempura batter was very light, and the seabeans were very small.

5. Parmesan Macaron. This was delicious. The breading was made from parmesan, so you can imagine the whole thing tastes like eating a chunk of parmesan with the macaron texture. The insides was some sort of cheesy sauce that is probably also parmesan. It was a little salty, but I definitely appreciated and enjoyed this.

6. Jose’s Combination. This is some sort of cured meat similar to prosciutto with caviar in the middle and a type of green herb. You simply wrap the meat around all the guts and eat it in one swoop.

7. Patatas Bravas. The outside is made from potatoes and deep fried. I don’t remember what the white pearls are, but red flakes are chili pepper spices. This was interesting in that it reminded me of eating a bag of BBQ potato chips.

8. Chicken Skin & Cigala. The bottom is a crispy piece of chicken skin. The meat is cigala, which is a Norway lobster. There’s some green foam on top and a small sauce on the bottom, both which I have no idea what they are. This was very good. The chicken skin was cooked to perfection, and the cigala naturally has flavors that made it go well with the skin and the foam.

9. Not Your Everyday Caprese. This is basically a caprese salad with liquid mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, croutons, and basil. The host gives you a big spoon which he suggests that you scoop everything up and eat it all at once.

10. Crispy Nigiri. This is a piece of sashimi, which I don’t remember the fish, on top of some crispy chip. I was indifferent with this because it’s hard to impress me with sashimi types of concoctions.

11. Truffle Mushroom Rice. I hate mushrooms. I really do. However this was definitely doable and quite frankly surprisingly good. I love the truffle oil giving the salty kick. The mushroom flavor wasn’t overpowering. Lastly, the rice is cooked risotto style, so this really is truffle mushroom rice risotto. It was very good.

12. Chipirones. This is basically baby squid. The baby squid was glazed with some sort of sauce and grilled heavily. This was slightly salty, but the squid was definitely very tender.

13. Banh Mi. Yes, this is a vietnamese sandwich served with a twist. The meat is actually wagyu beef, but everything else is your standard banh mi ingredients. The bread was very good and soft. I despise the banh mis where the bread tears the top of your mouth.

14. Carrot or Scallop. This was the chef’s take on deciding if something was a carrot or scallop. The fun part about this is trying to guess if you are eating a carrot or a scallop. The scallops are covered in a carrot puree. There is a slight hint of sesame in the carrot puree. This was good despite how simple it may appear.

15. Mirugai. This is basically a geoduck clam. The geoduck clam has a long tongue coming out, so this is its long tongue thinly sliced up. The green sauce is some sort of oyster and radish puree. I vaguely recall one of the hosts saying there was green tea in it. I actually did not enjoy this much. The sauce was a little off putting, and I normally don’t care too much for geoduck.

16. Wagyu & Mushroom Escabeche. I still hate mushrooms, but I generally like wagyu beef. The sauce has some vinegar to bring some sour to the meat. The wagyu beef unfortunately had some tendons in it. It was tender but chewy, so I expected a lot more from this dish.

17. Philly Cheesesteak. This was Jose Andres’ spin on a philly cheesesteak. Inside that big piece of hollow bread is a lot of melted gooey cheese. The meat was smokey but very sparse. This was actually really salty for what it was. I could do without the bread and cheese and would have desired more meat.

18. Japanese Baby Peaches. The baby peaches actually are the green balls. At first, I ate each piece separate. The white balls were incredibly salty as well as the breaded croutons. The peaches by themselves were good. I decided to take all the components and combine them into 1 spoon. With 1 gulp, all the flavors complimented well and was perfectly proportionate.

19. Dragon’s Breath Popcorn. I don’t have any pictures of this, but I will briefly describe it. They serve cubes of popcorn and throw it into liquid nitrogen. After it’s soaked in the liquid nitrogen for a minute, they give it to you on a spoon and ask that you immediately eat it and breathe out with your nose. You then see the smoke come out from your nose which is a funny and interesting novelty.

20. Frozen Apricot Timbale with Amaretto. This was really good. The apricot cylinder tastes like sorbet. Inside this cylinder is a gooey amaretto lava. It pours out just like a chocolate lava cake. The white ball is a scoop of ice cream.

21. Dessert Desert. You might be wondering what the hell is this. It’s chocolate ice cream with a bunch of random cookie crumb materials which basically resembles the desert. There’s not much to this. It’s like going to a frozen yogurt bar and mixing in candy and cookie crumbs with ice cream.

22. Sexy Little Sweets. The last course is a plate of candy. Unfortunately, I did not take pictures in time as my party demolished the plate in under 10 seconds. From what I recall, there were 3 sets of sweets. The first was 4 cubes of chewy gummy candy. Two were passion fruit flavored, and the other two were raspberry. The passion fruit was good. Next, there was 4 small chocolate candy rectangles. One was flavored with green tea. The other, I didn’t care for. Lastly the third set was chocolate shells with liquid chocolate in the middle. Sadly, I don’t remember what they were, but they were all very sweet. I enjoyed the passion fruit gum candies the most.

Lastly, I ordered a set of cotton candy foie gras. This is what a lot of patrons want to tell their friends about. To be blunt, I wasn’t impressed. The cotton candy was supposed to be sweet, but it was almost non-existent in flavor. The foie gras was a small cube, but it was very creamy. It was ok for the $5/stick that was spent.

Final Verdict

In the end, my experience at Bazaar SAAM was delightful minus one nuisance. It was a 4 hour dinner @ $125 per person. Service, as expected, as prompt and courteous. The food was not plentiful, but it was enough to keep you filled because of all the water or alcohol you sipped on. The ambiance was quiet and intimate minus one problem. There was a rowdy group of 8 idiot east coasters who were there for their friend’s birthday. They were obnoxiously loud and drunk. One woman in their party had the sharpest voice I’ve ever heard, and it pierced my ears every time she talked. I wanted to ask the hosts to quiet that party down, but my party told me not to.

As a newbie to the high end chef’s tasting culinary experience, I’ve only eaten at 2 other restaurants excluding this one so far: Momofuku Ko and Eleven Madison. This met my expectations which is about equal to Eleven Madison ($195) but worse than Momofuku Ko ($125). I’d say I enjoyed about 75% of the dishes served today. I normally hate mushrooms, but this actually made me ok with it. I haven’t had the regular Bazaar food, but I imagine it would be just as creative and good if you didn’t want to shell that much for this. For Los Angeles tasting menu restaurants, this should be on your list.

Revisions

1. Nov 5, 2022 - Migrated post from old blog site.
2. May 20, 2012 - Initial revision.