After nearly two brutal years fighting for its survival, the soul of Los Angeles dining remains resilient. First Line of an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled These are the 101 best restaurants in L.A.
I think that one can get a good meal, a really good meal, in any city in the US with a population of over, say, 10,000. I’ve – well, Michele, really – had a super goat vindaloo taco in Fredricksburg Texas (population 11, 245), the best beats – fresh, fresh, beets with smoked cashew butter – I’ve ever had were in Bentonville Arkansas (pop 49,467), I’ve even had a perfect French Onion Soup in Boulder, Utah (270), but, what they don’t have is depth. San Francisco has depth, in San Francisco, one can get a superb meal at a restaurant whose main feature is that it is close to the movie no matter where the movie theater is. That’s not the case in most cities, but it is also true for LA and we were going to Malibu (which is close enough to LA to call it LA if you’re from the Bay Area).
So, as Michele was making plans to go to the Getty Villa for her birthday, she chose Malibu Farms Restaurant for the lunch before because it is close to the Getty. Just a regular good restaurant, not one of the 101 best restaurants in LA according to the LA Times, just an average LA – which, means super good almost anywhere else – restaurant serving fresh, organic, food. Michele and I split a raw, purple, Brussel sprout salad and the daily steak flatbread special and sat at an outside table, looking over the calm Pacific, finally soaking up some sun and warmth.
As an aside, Malibu Farms Restaurant was started by Chef Helene Henderson who, improbably, is a Black woman from Sweden. She started with cooking classes in her backyard which turned into a popup on the Malibu pier where she met Meir Teper who, along with Robert De Niro and Nobu Matsuhisa, founded Nobu Hotels and Restaurants. Henderson credits Teper with mentoring her success which is considerable as she now has restaurants in Newport Beach, Montecito, New York, Miami, Cabo, and Tokyo with one opening soon in Tiburon. End aside.
The center of our trip to the Getty Villa is – duh! – the Villa. Neither one of us had been to the Getty Villa and we didn’t know what to expect but what we got was still surprising. It was billed as a recreation of the Villa of the Papyri which was buried in ash from the eruption of Vesuvius and, I think, the awkward entry is designed to mimic walking around a recently uncovered ruin. For me, it doesn’t work and I didn’t take any pictures. And I don’t think I was the only one as there are signs explaining why the entry staging was a good idea which does seem a little defensive.
In 2017, while staying with Michele’s cousin Marion, Michele and I visited the ruins of a real Roman villa in Southern France. It was fascinating and frustrating; fascinating because it was a peek into the lives of people – very rich people, granted – who lived more than sixteen hundred years ago and frustrating because it was only a peak. The Getty Villa touts itself as a re-created Roman country home but, once inside, it becomes obvious that this is a modern building with a Roman villa facade. While there is no place to see what a Roman bath – or toilet, or kitchen, for that matter – is like, the place is full of Greek and Roman art.
I am no judge of ancient Greek or Roman and the “I know what I like” test doesn’t work because almost all of the Greek and Roman art, especially Roman marble sculpture, looks pretty much the same to my untrained eye. I don’t mean to say that Greek and Roman art looks the same, they don’t. Greek art seems to be about the idealized. The idealized human body or a God who is sort of idealized by definition. In The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes postulates that consciousness is the result of language and only developed after civilization. He thinks that, until the very end, the action in the Iliad takes place by men who think the voices they hear in their heads are actually voices from The Gods. I don’t buy the theory but it is obvious that most, if not all, Greek art does not represent individuals in the same way that Roman art does.
But it is hard for me to tell one Greek sculpture from another in terms of quality. With that disclaimer, Getty started collecting in the late 1930s and it seems to me that the Louve and the Met in New York – the two places I’ve seen the most ancient art – had been collecting for a long time. Obviously, Winged Victory and The Three Graces were already gone.
At the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville Arkansas, the viewer is directed around the museum on a – more or less – chronological path, at the Getty Villa the different periods are in different rooms, and the rooms, themselves, seem to be in a random order. The first floor is generally Greek and the second floor all Roman. With the floorplan map, we were able to plot a chronological path through the Greek galleries which meant we saw the earliest Greek gallery first. It was completely different from anything I’ve seen before – or remember seeing before – and a very pleasant surprise.
Unlike Greek art, most of the Roman art seemed to be of individuals. Each piece was different but, after a couple of hours wandering around, they began to lose their individuality.
After spending the day at the Villa, we had dinner in our room and got up the next morning to drive home. At the beginning of our drive, we had what is, unfortunately, becoming too common a California experience, a fire in the hills. Fortunately, we also had what ha become another California experience, great tacos in Santa Barbara.
