Professor Gourmand — Erven Reboots, in spectacular fashion (CLOSED)

You will remember how excited I was after my first meal at Erven. A new vegan restaurant in downtown Santa Monica producing some of the most exciting vegan food imaginable. Fried date pickles with Sumatran curry, pine nut and maple. Shredded cabbage pancake with braised eggplant, chili hoisin. Beer battered tofu sandwich with slaw, thick pickle and manchamantal. I said I was going to go back until I had tasted everything on the menu, And I did, with the intention of cataloguing everything Erven had on the menu. But the problem was that it takes a long time to get from Sherman Oaks to Santa Monica by public transportation. Even longer to get back if it’s after 9 PM, and if I wanted to hang out with the staff, almost impossible. So after a menu change, I gave up on the place for a while once I had had everything on that menu. It just seemed too far to go to revisit a familiar set of dishes, no matter how wonderful it was. But during my absence, my friend Damien, a bartender who had worked with Nick Erven at Mess Hall, told me that Chef Nick was a wizard with seafood. “If only,” I thought.

And thus it was that I read at Eater Los Angeles that Award-Winning Vegan Restaurant Erven Adds Meat and Dairy to the Menu. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had a problem, and I knew “Meat” meant “fish” as well. And did it ever! I made a reservation immediately, and it was as if I had been away for a couple of weeks, not three months. The menu was significantly revised, but the fried dates were back on it and there were a few seafood options as well (I’m nominally a pescatarian at this point in my life).

The dates. Wow, had I missed the dates. This is what I said about them the first time:

Fried date pickles with Sumatran curry, pine nut and maple. Also pickled onions and a lime wedge. Fried, yes, and I could pick out the curry and the maple, and the dates were just delicious — sweet, but not too, and in a really nice batter. Just excellent.

Next, Chef Nick sent me out a brace of Wellfleet Blue Point oysters with pickled onions and a special sauce. I had had some Kumamotos the previous night and these were just as good — briny from the Atlantic Ocean and tasting like salt water, as they were supposed to.

That was followed by Hamachi. Yes, every restaurant worth its salt in Los Angeles has a Hamachi crudo dish on the menu, but this — Hamachi, nectarines, burrata, honeycomb in a tomato gazpacho — remarkable. The burrata provided just the right amount of richness to this ceviche of fish and fruit, and the honeycomb gave it an unexpected but not unwelcomed sweetness. I could eat this dish every night too.

And for my main course, salmon with chorizo and corn. Okay, not a thoroughly new concept, but SO well executed. As the menu says, salmon with chorizo, corn chowder, basil dumplings and smokey tomato. Pretty much the kind of salmon dish that makes everyone else’s salmon, well, boring.

No dessert tonight, but an excellent, excellent excellent meal. No reason not to go back the following Friday either because transit put me at Ventura and Sepulveda in time for a night cap or two at Woodley Proper. As luck would have it, it was the first night of the summer edition of Dine LA. Here’s what the Eater.com map of the 20 Best DineLA Dinner Deals, Summer 2017 had to say:

While Santa Monica’s Erven is no longer vegan-only, the eatery is still a welcome place for non-meat eaters to dine during dineLA, with dishes like charred avocado with macadamia tahini and Thai-style burritos with tempura sweet potatoes. Only now carnivores have the option of salmon with chorizo to satisfy meaty cravings.

So yes. Three courses for $29. The Charred California Avocado with macadamia tahini, chile-garlic salsa and pomegranate. Amazing. The Avocado Board uses Dine LA to promote avocados the point where three of the dishes on Bellwether’s 12 dish menu include avocados. This is one of the best presentations of an avocado I’ve ever seen in a restaurant and I’m guessing you can tell how good it tasted just by looking at it. Vegan.

That was followed by a Thai Style Burrito filled with fried rice, tempura sweet potato and cabbage, topped with lime cream and sitting in a tom yum gravy. Yes, it’s a big burrito — sometimes when I dine alone I receive a plate of food that’s designed for two people to share, and that makes sure I don’t leave hungry. Excellent fusion dish, and Chef Nick is really good at these (I remember a cavatelli dish in a tom yum gravy from a previous menu). He could put the tempura sweet potato in the appetizer section and that would be fine too. Also vegan.

Dessert wasn’t exactly as it’s stated on the Dine LA menu. Out came a piece of chocolate cake with chocolate ganache on the side, peanut butter ice cream, a bruléed banana and some marshmallow fluff meringue which had been torched. Delicious. Not vegan.

Dine LA goes on for another five days. Erven will be there for much longer than that.

Erven. 514–516 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 260–2255, Lunch 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily; dinner 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sun.-Thurs., 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Beer, wine and cider. http://ervenrestaurant.com/ Tell them Professor Gourmand sent you.

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