Review: L.A.’s most polarizing restaurant returns after four years. Is its outlandishness worth the splurge?

No restaurant in the history of Los Angeles has been dissected, derided and defended like Vespertine, the modernistic experiment housed in the four-story Culver City building called “Waffle” by its architect, Eric Owen Moss. From the outset in 2017, chef Jordan Kahn approached food as abstraction: a procession of dishes shaped in alien, sculptural forms, served over four or more hours. Deliciousness was not always entirely the point.

“This is the obsidian mirror,” says a server. A top layer of black gel conceals smoked mussel cream mixed with mussels, salted plum and minced water chestnuts, with a sheen of roasted kelp oil over the surface.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

His intent was to disrupt — to feed diners in the context of performance art, incorporating theater, music, painting, dance and even perfumery. Some fancy restaurants hand out granola on the way out the door; Kahn often presented a small vial of his own fragrance.

Vespertine’s out-thereness, coupled with an initial price of $250 per person before drinks (now it’s $395 per person), seemed designed to court debate: Was it too weird, or not weird enough? How far could one push emotional discomfort in the fine-dining realm? Were these unidentifiable plates an eat-the-rich gag? After so much extraterrestrial folly, would we long to finish the night with a hamburger like Anya Taylor-Joy’s character in “The Menu”?

A server pours the vinaigrette over sweet prawns and gooseberries. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Almond and wild onion cream is topped with tiny flowers and herbs. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Kahn’s talent was obvious. Among the enigmatic powders, pastes and restructured vegetables obscuring recognizable seafood and meats, the compositions revealed disciplined technique and uncanny but compatible combinations. Most everyone clung to their love of the snack that kicked off the meal: a savory cookie of burnt onion and black currant buried beneath edible flowers. It was simply, mercifully enjoyable.

These days, pleasure far more defines the second coming of Vespertine, where Kahn’s heart more readily informs his intellectual cooking.

To get here, he had to make it through a global health crisis. Vespertine closed at the start of the pandemic, when Kahn and his team shifted into making some of the most creative takeout in California, including meals that traced the chef’s Southern and Cuban heritages.

After four long, economically battering years in Los Angeles, Vespertine returned in April. While sticking to his abstractionist principles, Kahn also has allowed himself to humanize many aspects of the dining experience. Dinner holds down-to-earth rewards; unfiltered delights balance cryptic intrigues. The pace has been trimmed to an evenly paced, never-dull three hours.

Jordan Kahn, chef of Vespertine, with his wife, Zara Ziyaee Kahn.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

What remains most unchanged, even with some reconfiguring, is the setting. Moss’ moody, futurist structure exists to conjure your favorite science-fiction comparisons. Its shape, I realized this year, reminds me of the Death Star play set that was my big Christmas gift in 1978. In July, at our first meal back inside in a half-decade, a colleague and I joked that the sunset views through the gridded walls of glass were giving “3 Body Problem” spooky star system vibes. In November’s darkness, I’m thinking a location scout should swing by for a presumed second season of HBO’s “Dune: Prophesy.”

The Culver City building called “Waffle” by its architect, Eric Owen Moss, houses Vespertine.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

A new configuration inside the reopened restaurant is arranged with tables for two guests.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

No matter where the backdrop leads your imagination, the evening begins with a trip in an elevator. Up two floors, the doors open to the kitchen where Kahn, unmissable in his charcoal fitted apron and asymmetrical haircut, greets you with sincerity in his eyes.

Head down a flight of stairs to the dining room, where most of the tables have been arranged as love-seat banquettes. A couple of two-tops have been planted center stage, and they feel to me as if I’m dining on display in an aquarium. I’d prefer the snugger arrangement, particularly if my partner has joined me. The repetitive, tonal music washing over the space creates an aural sense of privacy, but you need to be close to your companions to hear them.

The current menu begins with an oblong ceramic tureen of sorts that suggests a wide-open oyster shell. It holds a pale landscape of petunia petals, arching horseradish-flavored crisps and segments of large Weathervane scallops caught in Alaska. They conceal a reduction of passion fruit juice and aji amarillo. The rule of Kahn’s food is: Plunge your utensil to the lowest depths to catch all the elements.

Coturnix quail with heather and sacred pepper and oat porridge bread with quail fat.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Something about the flavors conveys “ceviche,” giving your mind a place to anchor. The contrasts please. The petals rustle. The astringency piques the appetite. This is a welcoming start.

Next comes a far more rustic, free-form ceramic filled with a cream made from almonds and wild onions, flecked with fresh peas, fermented split peas and yuzu rind and covered with tiny flowers and herbs, among them lemon thyme. To serve such a springlike creation as this in the heart of fall is a declaration: Kahn cooks to his own seasons. He soothes with these gentle tastes, coaxing us to trust the journey into his worldview.

We segue to a visual stunner: a block of ice, surrounded by a juniper wreath that smells of Christmas, hollowed out to hold a small portion of sweet prawns and tart, popping gooseberries in nectarine vinaigrette.

The evening’s fourth of 14 courses — presented in smooth, heavy bowls as glossy as raven’s wings — cements for me the differences in the former and present iterations of Vespertine.

“This is the obsidian mirror,” says one of our servers. He reels off a spiel about the dish’s inspiration, involving “peoples of ancient Mexico” staring into crystals as a “path to divination,” then details the dish’s ingredients. A top layer of gel, as black as the vessel, conceals smoked mussel cream mixed with mussels, salted plum and minced water chestnuts. A sheen of roasted kelp oil over the surface creates wavy colors, like a rainbow shimmering across an oil slick.

My first thought upon sight is, “Oh no. Not again.”

I’m flashing back to 2017, when dinner’s opener was a granite bowl covered with a veneer, almost a skin, resembling sharp onyx geodes that hid fish suspended in labneh. No one could parse these ingredients without guidance. Instead, the server only murmured “hirame,” a Japanese word for halibut, before gliding away. It was infuriating. So was the oily film the off-putting mixture left on my tongue.

Back in the present, my tablemate and I are far happier. We’ve been given gigantic mussel shells, polished shinier than new pennies, to scoop out the contents. The first sensations are textural, soft and slick but not cloying, with occasional crunch. Flavor-wise, my closest association is smoked shellfish pâté overlaid with gelée, but refashioned in ways most of us could never conceive.

It’s wonderful, and gone in a few bites, which feels exactly right. A little mystery lingers.

The sense of unfolding surprise is part of the fun of dining at Vespertine. I’ll say the mussels’ smokiness ushers in a throughline of warm flavors that extends into a sequence of fish, quail and lamb.

For dessert, you’ll be escorted downstairs to the ground floor, which has a suspended, room-spanning plaster sculpture that looks like dinosaur vertebrae hanging in the Museum of Natural History. Kahn will tease savory and sweet through more courses than you might expect, tipping fully to the latter in a final rendering of layer cake that only he could devise.

Reinforcing the more tangible joys are the hospitality staff. Previously the front-of-house tenor felt cold, almost hostile, in its opaque ceremony. These days the crew are given rein to express individuality. Cody Nason, director of service, has a life force this restaurant needed. His job includes overseeing the beverage program, which understandably highlights pairings to best complement Kahn’s one-of-a-kind conceptions. Whether he’s mischievously crowing about six bottles of highly allocated Burgundy he got his hands on, or describing a juice made from redwood shoots (there’s some California sense of place!) for the unusually thoughtful nonalcoholic options, Nason is the evening’s best reminder: Great performance art incorporates interplay and humanity.

In a time of deep economic uncertainty in Los Angeles, when scores of community-centered neighborhood restaurants have buckled in the last year, a surge of sky-high fine dining appears on the horizon. The latest version of Vespertine precedes the just-opened 2.0 of Aitor Zabala’s tasting-menu fantasy Somni, which relocated to West Hollywood. They’ll be followed by Seline, Dave Beran’s return to tasting menus after the closure of his groundbreaking Dialogue in Santa Monica; Ki, a 10-seat counter in Little Tokyo in the works by Ki Kim, who made his impressive introduction to the city with Kinn; and Jaca, a leap into the tasting-menu genre for Daniel Patterson and Keith Corbin, the pair behind Alta Adams and Locol.

Will these would-be luminaries find their needed support among the moneyed class? Impossible to predict. But on the subject of Vespertine: I used to tell connoisseurs with the inclination and capital to make a reservation so they could form their own opinion of such a polarizing restaurant. Now I’ll tell people: Go for the outlandishness and for the pleasure.