By Eliza Fisher | HuffingtonPost.com
Celebrity chef Ludo Lefebvre is settling down. Well, sort of.
Lefebvre and his wife, Krissy, have just finished filming their new series on the Sundance Channel, Ludo Bites America. The couple toured the country, bringing Lefebvre’s pop-up gourmet meals to cities from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Redondo Beach.
Now Lefebvre is coming back to his adopted home, but like always, he’ll be on the move. Lefebvre operates LudoBites, a “touring restaurant” that “plays different parts of Los Angeles,” according to his website. He does short term residencies at different restaurants, and operates a food truck. While the experience is brief, the food has gotten rave reviews. LA Weekly’s Pulitzer Prize winning food critic, Jonathan Gold, is a huge fan, while the LA Times has reported that LudoBites “has LA on a culinary string.”
This time, LudoBites–dubbed “007” for the stint–will set up shop at Gram & Papa’s downtown, Tuesday to Friday nights from August 3 to September 10. There will be 10 slots available each night, for a total of 2,420 seats. Online reservations with OpenTable will become available on July 14 at 4 PM. Hopefully this time the influx of demands won’t crash the reservation system! The LA Times reports that the last LudoBites popup garnered over 150,000 searches on OpenTable for the 1,616 reservations available. Even with the crashes, all reservations were gone within an hour.
007 will serve twelve to fifteen tapas-style dishes that blend the cuisine of Lefebvre’s native France with the American flavors he experienced on the road. “The menu is going to change often,” the chef tells the LA Times. It will be “modern and playful, a take on traditional French dishes and dishes from ‘Ludobites America’ like ‘pig’s head, cheddar and barbecue gelée’ or ‘red chile-grilled octopus’ and ‘tortillas soup.’ ” “I’m 40 now and am still looking for my style,” Lefebvre says, so more recipes are sure to come. His endless energy and motion have become his trademarks–we just hope that he stays put in LA for a while.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/22/ludobites-returns-to-la-a_n_882487.html
