TRADE SHOWS
Shop & Dine
The trade show circuit is a tough circuit. It’s New York for a couple of nights and then off to Los Angeles. In between there are stops in Dallas and San Francisco. Roaming the country can be a challenge, but it helps to treat yourself to a great dinner or a shopping spree after seeing the latest fashion collections.
With that in mind, we have some of the latest on where to shop and dine in the country’s major trade show cities.
Los Angeles
Coco Laurent
707 S. Grand Ave.
(213) 623-0008
A little bit of Paris has parachuted into downtown Los Angeles.
Coco Laurent is one of the newest additions to the ever-growing hip downtown LA restaurant scene. But this time, the cuisine has a French vibe, and the chef, Guillaume Jouvet, was imported from Paris to take over the kitchen.
Everything from the décor to the menu is French. If you closed your eyes and looked at the bistro chairs and tables lined up on the outdoor patio, you could swear you were in France, maybe smoking a Gaullois cigarette and sipping a café au lait.
The man behind the menu may be Jouvet, but the man behind the creation of Coco Laurent is Vincent Terzian, one-time owner of the Crocker Club at Fifth and Spring streets, also in downtown Los Angeles.
Terzian picked the perfect corner for his new, 7,000-square-foot eatery, which has high ceilings, walnut walls and a large wrap-around limestone bar. Coco Laurent is right across the street from Bottega Louie, a very popular establishment that pioneered the revival of downtown’s upscale restaurant scene.
The menu at Coco Laurent is all things French with a hint of American dishes. For example, you can dine on beef bourguignon or opt for a cheeseburger. There is Basquaise chicken or a 10-ounce rib-eye steak.
Lunch is heavy with salads, such as a hot goat-cheese salad or a niçoise salad. No French restaurant would be worth its name unless it served French onion soup, which Coco Laurent does.
Brunch includes French toast (naturally), quiche lorraine with leeks, crêpes Suzette and a variety of egg dishes.
This restaurant keeps late-night hours. It is open until 11 p.m. on most nights and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. No sidewalks roll up here at 9 p.m.
One important fashion note: The uniforms worn by the wait staff were designed by local downtown LA designer Christine Arce of Frou Frou.
Topshop Topman
The Grove
189 The Grove Drive
(323) 938-1085
London-based Topshop Topman opened its fourth U.S. location and only West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in February.
The grand opening kicked off with a collection of clothes curated by actress Kate Bosworth.
Covering 25,000 square feet in a well-trafficked part of The Grove, one of the city’s best shopping centers, the vast store has something for both men and women. It could be clothes, shoes, jewelry or other accessories.
Topshop Topman’s selection of clothes comes in a European fit (read “slimmer”) and with an on-trend vibe. The brand has clothing from Unique, its seasonal London Fashion Week selections, several designer collaborations, and Boutique, the brand’s premium limited-edition line. Also in stock are the brand’s Leigh Jeans, which come in all different colors inside the Denim area.
One of the outstanding details of this store is the free personal-shopping component, which includes special VIP dressing rooms and a lot more attention.
Topshop Topman is an institution in England, having opened its first London flagship store, at 90,000 square feet, at Oxford Circus in 1994. It is now determined to spread the word around the world.
San Francisco
1601 Bar & Kitchen
1601 Howard St.
(415) 552-1601
The culinary landscape of San Francisco reaches far and wide, but there aren’t many restaurants that can boast a menu with a Sri Lankan twist.
The recently opened 1601 Bar & Kitchen fills that void. Located near the Mission District/Hayes Valley area of trendy eateries and shops, 1601 Bar & Kitchen has a casual, industrial-space vibe with hardwood floors, spartan white furniture, track lighting and big windows.
The eatery, open only for dinner, is the brainchild of Brian Fernando, whose Sri Lankan ancestors have stepped in to influence his menu. Fernando is a tried-and-true chef whose career was launched in the salty tapas bars of Granada, Spain, where he formed his love for small plates of appetizers.
Later he worked at the venerable Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., famed for its organic, locally grown ingredients and California cuisine. Then, for 10 years, he was in the kitchen at the French restaurant Le Papillon in San Jose, Calif., where he spent the last four years as chef de cuisine.
Creating his first new restaurant, Fernando envisioned a place where people could hang out several times a week. The menu is concise and consists of small plates that need to be stacked to fill you up.
Examples of the small plates on the menu include local halibut ceviche with preserved cucumber and coconut milk and cilantro, mulligatawny soup with chicken confit and pickled black mustard seeds, and roasted quail with chai spice and toasted buckwheat and almonds.
Right now the restaurant only serves beer and wine (75 different labels), but the eatery eventually hopes to expand to a full bar.
Aether Apparel
489 Hayes St.
(415) 437-2345
www.aetherapparel.com
You could easily say you won’t find another store like the Aether store, located in Hayes Valley, anywhere else in San Francisco—or in California for that matter.
It is an architectural gem made from three 40-foot cargo containers stacked one on top of the other. They were torn apart and reconstructed under the guidance of architectural firm Envelope A + D. The look is sleek with a custom glass-encased lounge in one corner of the second story. Inside, reclaimed oak floors were used to give the space a spare, industrial look. A belt-driven dry cleaner–style conveyor system transports apparel around the store.
Aether specializes in performance apparel made of technologically advanced fabrics shaped into outerwear, knits and swimwear for both men and women. For women, there are tank tops, hoodies, pullovers, sweatshirts, leggings, skinny sweatpants and shorts.
For men there are polos, T-shirts, Henley tops, sweatshirts, beach pants, shorts and scads of outerwear.
Aether’s Los Angeles headquarters on Melrose Avenue are equally as design-driven as its San Francisco store, which is the company’s first free-standing outpost.
Taking retail to another level, Aether has a mobile store housed inside an Airstream trailer outfitted with reclaimed hardwood floors and custom-made furniture. It has been traveling around the country.
Dallas
FT33
1617 Hi Line Drive, Suite 250
(214) 741-2629
It’s hard to put a tag on Matt McCallister’s cuisine. Even he has a hard time describing it. He just calls it “Matt’s style.”
But anyone who has dined at the newly opened FT33 will find that his menu of new American cuisine is like none other. And the menu is constantly changing. So if you ordered it on a Wednesday, it is unlikely you will be able to get the same dish days later.
McCallister is a self-taught chef whose first job at the age of 15 was in an Italian-style restaurant called Guido’s. Working at various restaurants along the way, he quickly rose up the culinary ladder before opening his highly touted eatery in the Design District of Dallas.
The décor of the medium-sized restaurant is barnyard industrial with a casual feel. There are stone-colored walls, weathered I-beams on the ceiling and filament-bulb lighting.
The menu is compactly edited with six appetizers, six main dishes and six desserts that are as exotic as an ostrich in Texas. McCallister is constantly inventing new dishes guaranteed to tantalize the taste buds.
A recent menu had some out-of-the-ordinary creations such as an appetizer of ricotta dumplings, spicy duck meatballs, wild onion, pea tendril and ricotta salata. Main dishes include short ribs with horseradish gremolata, cardoon, artichoke, favas and bone marrow.
Desserts are equally as complicated. It’s not just plain panna cotta but lemon-grass panna cotta with citrus, mint and white chocolate.
Y & I Clothing Boutique
3699 McKinney Ave. #411
(214) 522-0775
This well-curated boutique is the brainchild of two high-school friends who went their own way when their careers took them to separate coasts. But they remained in contact all those years, sharing their love for clothes, music and gossip magazines.
Feeling they would make good business partners, Robyn Sribhen White and Robin Boesch launched their first Y & I Clothing Boutique in the Marina district of San Francisco in 2006. With a success under their hat, they branched out to their home state and opened a store in Austin and then to Dallas this last summer.
The idea behind this retail concept is to have a wide variety of California- and Texas-style clothing that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
The store’s spare décor makes it easier to concentrate on the wide selection of dresses, pants, tops and accessories. There are lots of options from Joe’s Jeans, C&C California, Sanctuary Clothing, Yumi Kim, Willow & Clay, Ella Moss, and John and Jean.
The two owners have also developed their own private line of wallet-friendly clothing that keeps up with fashion trends.
New York
Empellón Cocina
105 First Ave.
(212) 780-0999
This new creation by chef Alan Stupak has gotten a lot of ink in the local magazines and newspapers of New York. Reviews have been so positive that the restaurant was on the list of the James Beard Foundation’s “Best New Restaurants of 2013.”
The East Village haunt is the sister restaurant to Empellón Taquería, also a Stupak creation, in the West Village. But the menus are quite different. Empellón Cocina has more small dishes and a smattering of tacos while Empellón Taquería hits the taco trail pretty heavily.
If you are expecting Mexican cuisine similar to what you would find in Latino-heavy California or Texas, forget about it. Stupak does his own interpretation, which is unlike any other Mexican cuisine you will find north of the border.
Guacamole is not just guacamole but mashed-up avocado with hints of pistachio or infused with sea urchin. Starters include roasted carrots covered with mole poblano, yogurt and watercress. Of course there is ceviche, but this is made with razor clams rather than fish. Another intriguing starter is squid mixed with mole sauce, potatoes and chorizo mayonnaise.
On the taco side of the menu, you can’t go wrong with the sea-scallops tacos that come with caramelized cauliflower and a caper-raisin emulsion. Not too many people are serving short-rib tacos with pickled cabbage and mustard-seed salsa, an ode to German cuisine.
Like many great chefs, Stupak began his love for cooking as a teenager, when he convinced a restaurant owner he was older than he really was and got a gig as a prep cook at the age of 12 in his native Massachusetts. He later won a full scholarship to the Culinary Institute of Art. Eventually, he ended up as the pastry chef at Clio in Boston. But pastry was not enough, and Stupak took his culinary talents and expanded into Mexican cuisine with a twist.
Massimo Dutti
689 Fifth Ave.
(212) 371-2555
Zara stores seem to be in every major U.S. city, but its more-upscale sister store, Massimo Dutti, had been a stranger to this country.
That changed last October when Inditex, the Spanish parent company of both store chains, carved out a space for its first Massimo Dutti store in the United States.
The emporium wasn’t too hard to set up. The space had been a prime Zara location on Fifth Avenue, but it is now filled with a selection of sophisticated but classic styles that won’t deplete your bank account.
The new Massimo Dutti store, a brand that some compare to Banana Republic, is large, encompassing three floors and 13,670 square feet. The staff is attentive, even passing out small bottles of water to dehydrated shoppers, who often linger longer than they had expected.
The décor is elegant with hardwood floors underneath your feet and rich colors along the walls.
The collection of men’s and women’s attire is reminiscent of a time of well-dressed Spaniards walking down the streets of Madrid or Barcelona. Sweaters tend to be made of fine merino wool, shirt dresses made of silk, and summer pants made of linen. Denim jeans sell for under $90.
This is the only Massimo Dutti store in all of New York, so take advantage of it.
Las Vegas
Hakkasan
MGM Grand Hotel & Casino
(702) 891-7888
Nobody does spectacular like the people in Las Vegas. Think of the Bellagio hotel with all those gushing water fountains doing aquatic dances to the strains of smaltzy music from the 1950s and 1960s.
Or the Mandalay Bay, with its various sandy beaches and swimming pools, one of which has a wave machine to simulate the ocean.
Now the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino is topping the restaurant scene with the recently opened Hakkasan, a five-story complex with four nightclub lounges and one modern Cantonese restaurant, helmed by Executive Chef Ho Chee Boon.
Four years in the making, this 80,000-square-foot palace replaces the former Studio 54 at the MGM.
The décor is all Chinoiserie with latticed woodwork situated in the right places to give guests their private dining space.
The menu is billed as contemporary Chinese cuisine. Appetizers include jellyfish and imitation-shark-fin salad. Main dishes vary from spicy sautéed chicken with eggplant to cod with champagne and Chinese honey. Then there is the braised whole abalone with oyster sauce and prawns with black bean sauce.
Hakkasan is a chain born in London in 2001. It has eateries in New York City, Miami, San Francisco, Mumbai, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Now Las Vegas is on that list.
Coterie
515 E. Fremont St.
(702) 685-7741
This new boutique is in an unusual spot. It won’t be found on the tourist-popular Las Vegas strip. Instead, it is in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, which is undergoing a major renaissance now that a new performing-arts center has popped up. Zappos.com has plans to move its headquarters to the area in October.
Coterie was launched last summer by Sarah Nisporos, who has years of retail experience as a buyer at Fred Segal. Her take on fashion is to be hip but bohemian at the same time.
That is evident just by trying to find this unusual outpost. The store is located in a former check-cashing store whose sign was never removed.
Nisporos encourages people not only to shop but to drop in to chat, plug in a computer or share an idea. She says hearing about what people want most in life helps her dress them.
The clothes found in this casual space, decorated like a comfy living room, are not your run-of-the-mill labels found in most Main Street stores. But it is not about the weirdest either. Nisporos said it is all live-work-play apparel that covers every event. Labels include Lauren Moshi, LNA and Viereck.
Miami
Khong River House
1661 Meridian Ave.
(305) 763-8147
You can take a vicarious journey to the north of Thailand by stopping off at the Khong River House, a delectable restaurant named for the Mekong River, which starts in Tibet and flows through China, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
John Kunkel, the man behind the restaurant, spent nearly four years in northern Thailand, studying martial arts, before he returned to Florida to start his own small chain of restaurants, housed under the 50 Eggs business group.
Khong River House, once occupied by the eatery Miss Yip, has a rustic vibe. It is decorated like an Asian farmhouse with tall ceilings layered with corrugated zinc panels. Bare light bulbs hang from the ceiling as well as wicker birdcages.
Kunkel has turned the kitchen over to Executive Chef Piyarat Potha Arreeratn (also called Chef Bee). Chef Bee has infused the menu with everything great from the northern region of Thailand. That includes an array of tasty noodle dishes at only $14. There is a thin rice noodle stir fry with minced pork, crispy tofu, chives and dried shrimp; a Burmese egg noodle with local vegetables; and an udon-noodle stir fry.
Traditional dishes include a northeastern-style chopped pork salad, a northeastern-style jungle stew that consists of thinly sliced chicken on a red chili paste and curry broth served with long green beans, Thai eggplant and lemon basil leaves, char-grilled Thai eggplant with stirred fried pork, and a northeastern-style jungle stew that has thinly sliced chicken, long green beans, Thai eggplant in a curry broth ($20).
The restaurant was one of the finalists for the James Beard Foundation’s “Best New Restaurants of 2013.”
Alchemist
1109 Lincoln Road
(305) 531-4815
Shopping at the new Alchemist clothing store on Lincoln Road is like taking a tour of avant-garde modern architecture in Miami Beach.
Owners Roma and Erika Cohen hired architect Rene Gonzalez to come up with some wild ideas for a store, located on the ground floor of a parking structure. Gonzalez also decorated the first Alchemist clothing store, located on the building’s fifth level, with floor-to-ceiling windows for an open-air look.
This new Alchemist fashion outlet is more like a cocoon with foam-wrapped ceilings and walls. The saw-toothed walls are accentuated by hidden LED light bands whose colors appear and disappear. The center of the store is dominated by eye-piercing bright-green plastic couches in a wild geometric shape designed by Zaha Hadid.
The store’s selection of clothes is on the high end from designers such as Rick Owens, Céline, Dries Van Noten, Lydia Courteille and Givenchy. In this new center of retail chic, the Cohens have branched out and added skincare products, fragrances and books.
