4 Restaurants to Try This Weekend in Los Angeles: August 1 | Eater LA

"Mei Lin’s sophomore effort in Los Angeles (we’ll consider her casual restaurant Daybird more of a 1.5) comes in the form of 88 Club , a striking, moody affair with just a few dozen seats and an almost secret side lounge for cocktails. The entire look and feel are incredibly lovely, well-detailed, and luxurious, like a high-end restaurant hidden away in a Singapore or Bangkok hotel that only the well-heeled know about. Thankfully Lin’s restaurant, a partnership with restaurateur Francis Miranda, is easy to access right from Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills. The service is polite and helpful without being too much. In fact, “not too much” could be the theme here. All the dishes are balanced and refined to a near razor’s edge, meant to delight without pizzazz. Lin herself said the menu was “no thrills” and “what you see is what you get,” and I’m perfectly fine with that in an age when we’ve moved beyond rainbow bagels and Instagram bullshit. Starters are modest and refreshing, like a dressed chrysanthemum salad or mung bean jelly noodles. Singaporean fried noodles don’t carry the heady spices of something in a hawker center, but doused with Lin’s chile oil they’re hard to stop eating. The shrimp toast, gorgeous and hefty in the hand, is a must-order. I pined for more of the tangy sweet and sauce sour beneath the fried sea bream, fresh herbs balancing the fish. Across the board, portions and flavors are modest but reveal layers of pleasant complexity, like the blackened edges of char siu iberico pork. I’ll even swoon over the desserts, like the mango sago topped with sweet dollops that resemeble Dippin’ Dots ice cream. The pro-tip here is to go with four people to reduce the costs and maximize dishes to order; we paid about $100 before drinks, tax, and tip, but the price could easily balloon to $200 a person with lots of cocktails. I’m excited to return to 88 Club and try the rest of the dishes, like the kung pao scallop, but for now, I’ll happily marinate in my first visit knowing that Mei Lin, arguably one of the most talented chefs in Los Angeles right now, is back with a full service restaurant." - Eater Staff