Restaurant Review: A Pair of Star Chefs Converge at Onda in Los Angeles

Gabriela Cámara’s plate is full. She runs Contramar and Entremar in Mexico City, Cála in San Francisco, and earlier this year took a position on Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Council for Cultural Diplomacy. She is as busy as she is talented, both as a chef and as a placemaker. Ever been to Contramar on a languid afternoon? Its tables fit together like so many tiles in a mosaic, each covered first in an immaculate white cloth, then in a flotilla of glow-in-the dark aguachiles and gravity-defying cakes. It is a scene.

You could say the same about Sqirl, Jessica Koslow’s microchip of a café. The lines-down-the-block L.A. restaurant, spun off from a preserves line, defined an emerging genre when it opened in a sliver of Silver Lake in 2012. Koslow commands outsize influence in L.A. and beyond. That jam-splattered ricotta toast you’re eating in Indianapolis or Albuquerque or Raleigh most likely owes its existence to Sqirl, a trickle-down cerulean sweater of the restaurant world.

Koslow’s expansion plans have had more folds and unfolds than origami. She expected either Tel (aborted by its principal investor after years of planning) or take-out market Sqirl Away (in the works since at least 2013) to be her sophomore project. But instead, here she is, working expo in a navy jumper at Onda, the 110-seat restaurant she opened with Cámara in Santa Monica’s posh Proper hotel in October. And here we are, drinking an elixir of aged Barbadian and Jamaican overproof rums, cream sherry, and mole from a ceramic blowfish. The tiki-inspired cocktail, called Mole + Butter, manages to be both harsh and vapid, and costs $18.

Cámara, who recently moved back to Mexico City to start her position with the López Obrador administration, is not at Onda this night, early in the thirstily anticipated restaurant’s existence. What began as a thoroughly chronicled partnership between her and Koslow has evolved into more of a “consultancy,” she said in an October Bon Appetit story, a term she now calls “not accurate and out of context.”

“It does feel overblown,” Koslow says of the incessant dissection of the business relationship. The chefs are collaborating fine, she insists, and Cámara is flying in twice a month. But when Cámara says, “The idea is the restaurant won’t need either of us to run,” you can hear Koslow wince on the other end of the phone.

“I don’t think it can be that way for me,” she says.

Flavor can be skin deep

Onda’s Instagram star, the inside-out turkey al pastor quesadilla, is a surprisingly homely thing seeping grease onto its oval plate. To make this overwrought colossus, chef Balo Orozco, a Guadalajara native who’s cooked at both Sqirl and Cála, melts mozzarella and Parmigiano in a pan and sets a tortilla into the bubbling goo. The cheeses harden to create a crisp exterior shell that has the toasted cheddar-y flavor of Cheez-Its. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but that taste overpowers everything else inside the quesadilla, smothering the flavor of the tortilla, the annatto-rubbed turkey thighs, the oyster mushrooms, the grilled hoja santa.

Whatever imbalance exists in Koslow and Cámara’s partnership, there are more pressing concerns, both baked into Onda’s DNA—even with a packed house, the dark, drab Wilshire Boulevard space has all the charm of a concrete parking garage—and in the culinary minutiae, like the thin horchata and odd absence of heat in the guacamole crushed with fermented jalapeño.

Topped with fresh sorrel, the fried whole bream arrives on a plate of equal size. There’s no space to push the greens (which you definitely want to eat with the fish; it’s sour and lovely) off to the side so you can debone the fish, and really, there’s no space to debone the fish, either.

At least the fish tastes really good. The flesh is moist and fatty and balanced by the lemony sorrel and charred jalapeño salsa. There should be a crunch from a tapioca-starch cocoon, but after frying the fish gets plated and drenched with that salsa, undoing the textural contrast the kitchen just went to the trouble to create. Given the extensive testing and development that went into Onda, how did no one consider this?

Plan ahead for a happier meal

You can have a great meal here. It just takes some cherry-picking. Or rather, kelp-picking.

The fried fronds of Pacific seaweed erupt from a bowl like an abstract floral arrangement. They wear the sheerest coating of masa batter, that tan coating and the olive-green kelp conspiring to camouflage the meaty anchovies and rounds of Meyer lemon hiding inside the thicket. It’s a fritto misto by way of Southern California and of Mexico—two places that were one place before 1848—and it works not just conceptually but technically. The fry is ethereally crisp. There’s no grease and plenty of salt. Salsa verde bleached with house-made crema, affecting an herbier aioli, makes perfect sense as a fatty dip.

Despite the not-hot guacamole, you should order the chips and dips for the other three dips: a smoky maroon salsa tatemada; that lush house-made crema, here tie-dyed with an emerald oil made from papalo, a Latin herb that’s like mint crossed with cilantro; and a lilac-gray puree of Suncoast Farms black beans. Where those beans appear on the menu, they’re described “silky,” which feels like Onda is trying to subconsciously influence your opinion before you even eat them. But no—these beans are silky. The silkiest.

The dips chaperone a basket of blue-and-gold tortilla chips. Big and half-moon-shaped, they’re like broken dinner plates, and supplied by Kernel of Truth tortilleria. Kernel also supplies the fried tortilla underpinning the trout tostada, a setup involving sauerkraut, avocado, buttery trout, and a corsage of flowering cilantro. It’s like something you’d find at a Jewish deli on the Baja Peninsula.

Chef Orozco grinds heirloom Mexican corn into masa for all of Onda’s fresh tortillas and sopes. Four to an order, the sopes cradle shreds of jackfruit bathed in his fiery mahogany mole, a 54-ingredient elixir favoring warm spices (cinnamon, clove) and toasty chiles (ancho, guajillo). The former arrive snuggled in a cloth—warm, tender, deeply aromatic, and ready to bundle up chunks of koji-marinated roasted sweet potato. You’ve seen the sweet-potato-as-entrée thing before, at Cála (where it’s presented with bone marrow salsa negra) and elsewhere, but Onda’s version is especially delicious. Ferocious salsa macha, soothing crema, and mint turn what could be a one-note sugar-spud into a tornado of flavor.

Pastry chef Jess Stephens, an ex–New Yorker formerly of the Modern and Empellón, manipulates ice like Princess Elsa. Her sorbets are frozen poems: verdant hoja santa, sparkling pink grapefruit, the extraordinary sweet-and-funky tepache, spun from fermented pineapple brew. Like pulverized jade, a dome of herbal cucumber ice inset with cilantro buds is the first layer of the raspado. You excavate the bowl with your spoon, pulling up many-textured treasures: jammy figs in fall or guava pulp in winter, smooth crémeux whose soft almond flavor comes from the soft kernels hiding inside cherry pits.

Have this meal, leave happy. Some other bits of advice: Speak up when a host sits you all the way in the back of the room, facing a concrete pillar. The nonalcoholic Cara Cara Orange, a foamy pineapple-and-citrus Creamsicle, is the brightest drink on the brainy but unfulfilling cocktail list. Bring plenty of money.

Onda means “wave” in Spanish, but one might wonder if sand is the more appropriate analogy. They shift, lengthening and disappearing. Which side of the tidal equation Onda winds up landing on depends less on the Koslow-Cámara partnership and more on the place finding a rhythm and tightening its loose ends.

“Restaurants are live creatures,” Cámara says. “They grow and find their identity in time.” The question is, given the star power and high expectations of Onda’s chef-owners, how long is the public willing to wait?

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