LudoBites, the daring pop-up restaurant venture of Los Angeles chef Ludovic “Ludo” Lefebvre, is getting ready to take over its next location. After invading a bakery twice, and conquering an art gallery/cafe, he’s thinking small.
On Feb. 13, for one day only, Lefebvre will be in his smallest kitchen ever — a food truck — at the L.A. Street Food Festival in downtown Los Angeles.
I like to think I played a small part in this coup, bringing this Michelin star chef in alongside the Cool Haus ice cream sandwich makers, the Grilled Cheese Truck, the Flying Pig and others. Talking to festival co-founder Shawna Dawson some weeks back I suggested getting a chef to do a pop-up truck, specifically Lefebvre, given his interest in the transitory food establishment. Lefebvre jumped at the chance.
So next week the pop-up veteran will get to try his hand at another hot dining trend, food trucks. Working on the fly is nothing new to Lefebvre: at LudoBites at BreadBar bakery and Royal/T art space, Lefebvre’s brought his “bistronomy” (affordable high end French cuisine) to those lucky enough to get a reservation. Cooking on a truck, however, is something altogether new, and he’s excited about it.
“I can cook anything,” says Lefebvre, “Michelin star quality cuisine is what I like to do … and yet what does everyone ask for? Not classic French dishes mixed with modern techniques — but fried chicken!”
So fried chicken it will be.
I tagged along as Lefebvre and his wife, Kristine, recently researched their food truck options at a downtown food truck depot. The chef couldn’t wait to get aboard to check out the kitchen: one small fry cooker, a griddle and a small prep counter. Lefebvre was confident it would work. The larger issue was who would drive this 20-foot kitchen on wheels? “I’m front-of-house at LudoBites,” said Kristine. “And you are in the back in the kitchen.” She took the driver’s seat of the brand new air-conditioned Mobi Munch truck that is being specially wrapped in the bright red LudoBites rooster logo for the event.
Lefebvre is at a crossroads of sorts. Keep doing pop-ups? Open his own restaurant? He becomes quite tetchy talking about it. “I don’t know what is going on in my head, I try to figure out,” he says in his accented, abbreviated English. “I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do. Finding a space is not easy, you know. It’s got to be just right.”
From ‘Top Chef Masters’ renown to painting
Lefebvre who grew up in the town of Auxerre in the Burgundy region of France, trained in that nation’s finest restaurant kitchens, mentored by four of the greatest chefs, Marc Meneau, Pierre Gagnaire, Guy Martin and Alain Passard. (Asked whether he’d ever move back, he said, “It’s a peaceful life, but it would be boring.”) He was lured to Los Angeles in 1996 to work as the executive chef at the now-shuttered L’Orangerie and later moved to Bastide. He quickly made a name for himself, racking up a James Beard nomination for the Rising Star Chef Award and five stars from the Mobil Travel Guide at both restaurants. Most recently, he became famous on “Top Chef Masters,” where he was the telegenic chef whose thick French accent was subtitled.
Lefebvre’s creativity extends to painting — and he hung his artwork at BreadBar and Royal/T during LudoBites’ runs. His subject, not surprisingly, is food. A self-portrait titled “Happy Chef,” shows a grinning chef in a large toque and whites brandishing a knife and a whisk. The chef is surrounded by stars, symbols and initials that match the French chefs he trained under — MM, PG, AP and GM — and a large red question mark about to be pierced by an arrow.
“It’s a lot about my life,” he says of the painting. “Where I start and what happened in my life. It’s all about my mentors. The day when I came to L.A. in ’96 for L’Orangerie. After I talk about Bastide. It’s interesting. I did this big thing on the painting. It’s cut and stitched. What happened is that I got really hurt at Bastide by the L.A. Times. [Restaurant critic S. Irene] Virbila break me. I was the first chef in L.A. to do molecular cuisine, and Mrs. Virbila don’t get it back then. Now she get it and give Bazaar four stars. It hurt me then, and it hurt me now. I put that on my canvas. And then I get my five-star Mobil. I get better. It’s a story about how I feel about cooking. Now I’m a happy chef.”
Hype follows Lefebvre’s fried chicken
But there is that big red question mark near the happy chef. Yes, LudoBites in pop-up settings afford him a great deal of creativity and flexibility — if not riches. It is fun to whip up a restaurant for two weeks or four weeks. He’s been spotted front of house taking orders, chatting with guests, even clearing tables. So what if the food runs out when Pulitzer-winning LA Weekly critic Jonathan Gold arrived for his reservation? When that happened, Lefebvre cooked up some fried chicken in the spirit of “the show must go on.” Gold, in turn, called it one of the best meals he had that year.
LudoBites’ dearth of fine-dining trappings hasn’t turned people off. Quite the reverse. The 13 dates in December at Royal/T sold out instantly. Food blogs, Facebook and Twitter went into overdrive. “Did u get your res @chefludo?” they tweeted. The interest was overwhelming, so much so they stopped taking reservations amid claims by Lefebvre that @FrenchChefWife — the Twitter handle of his accomplished wife — had overbooked every night.
The hype took a toll on Lefebvre, who suffered from the chef’s equivalent of writer’s block during the menu-planning phase for LudoBites at Royal/T in December. “The expectation of customer means I need to be creative,” he said at the time. “And come up with some great new ideas. And it’s not easy you know. Last week I can’t cook. I cannot get any ideas. I’m freezing on my menu for two weeks now. I have no idea. I have nothing. Nothing. Nothing!”
The bar was high. His menu for LudoBites’ summer ’09 incarnation at BreadBar featured an abundance of truffles, oysters, foie gras and caviar at a surprising $40-ish prix fixe. The night I sat at the counter in the commercial bakery, I sipped a deconstructed Bloody Mary, followed by a rich foie gras miso soup with radish. A delicate tuna sashimi with sushi rice ice cream and sashimi togarashi arrived for an entree. And dessert? I passed it up. But it was a chocolate cupcake topped with a foie gras Chantilly creme drizzled with a maple and balsamic reduction and then sprinkled with tiny maple candied bacon and almonds. I regret skipping it to this day and hope it will reappear on a future menu.
No wonder then Lefebvre appeared a little overwhelmed by the expectations — others’ and his own — a few months later. He desires to do many things, which means he resists doing one thing long term. “I could do a restaurant seven days a week, but it could get boring. I want my freedom to create.” He likes change. Movement. “To be consistent as a chef is so difficult. A dish can’t always be consistent.”
Contemplating a restaurant
Part of the thrill of LudoBites is its ever-changing menu. It might be scallops in brown butter with pineapple and squid ink powder. Or bread soup with Gruyere marshmallow. Veal with udon, kombu dashi, mushrooms and sesame seed miso. Marinated hanger steak with a mole zacatecano learned from teenage food blogger Javier Cabral’s mother. Though the dishes resurface, each meal feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “It’s common at LudoBites,” says Kristine Lefebvre, “for customers to run the menu, basically order one of everything.”
{sidebar id=18}That will be easier on Feb. 13 at the L.A. Street Food Festival, where dishes top out at $5, and Lefebvre’s menu will consist of nothing but fried chicken, sure to be more than finger-licking good.
But what happens after the food truck goes back to its parking spot? Another LudoBites pop-up? Surely, L.A. restaurant-watchers keep saying, he will open his own restaurant in the near future.
Restaurants are a delicate mix of art and commerce. In a reflective moment, Lefebvre acknowledges this and says he is looking for a front-of-house business partner to balance his passions. Eternal pop-ups are what Peter Pan would choose. Lefebvre seems ready to grow up.
Lucy Lean is the editor of Edible Los Angeles. She has worked as a magazine writer and editor at Talk magazine in New York City, edited books about world cinema for the British Film Institute and appeared in the BBC’s “London Girl Lucy Lean Meeting Her Friends for Lunch.”
Photos: Ludovic ‘Ludo’ Lefebvre portait at top by Max Wanger. Ludo and Kristing Lefebvre at their food truck, by Lucy Lean. “Happy Chef” painting by Kristine Lefebvre. Cupcake by Eugene Lee.
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