I blame my Hindu upbringing for my aversion to uncooked beef (and sometimes any beef). But I am also someone who has been a fan of Big Macs since I was in the single digits, so this dietary predilection is less on God, more on me and my lack of appreciation
for meat in its raw form.
I don’t mean rare — I mean that even the most prime cut of beef is wasted on me unless it comes with a spread of banchan, a gloss of black pepper sauce, or a medley of bells and whistles that turns it into a flavor bomb. The notion of that prime cut raw? With no adornment save for a wobbly raw egg yolk and a couple of capers? Tantamount to Fear Factor for me. For years, the only dietary restriction I offered at restaurants, when asked, was “no raw beef,” though not without a degree of shame. Shouldn’t a food writer like this? What did I not get?
Then, in March, I found myself at the Ojai Food and Wine festival. Nini Nguyen stood beneath a tent layering shrimp chips with perilla leaves and a slice of something darkly pink and herbaceous. Beef carpaccio. I had one without thinking. Then another. Here was the flavor bomb I had been craving, a vehicle of spice, heat, and citrus that just so happened to be driven by thinly sliced raw sirloin. All told, I came back for Nguyen’s Bò Tái Chanh five times, fully aware that I was violating my own groundless rule. I didn’t care, though, anymore. In fact, I was happy to be a hypocrite. The world of raw meat had finally opened up to me, or I to it.
Was spice and citrus the secret? Maybe: I’m similarly smitten with the chile and fish sauce–rich beef tataki at Holy Basil in Atwater Village. But the version that I keep coming back to, and a place that has filtered into my regular rotation this summer (see also: Doto), comes from Henrietta in Echo Park — a deli by day, an amber-lit neighborhood fixture by night. The beef tartare toast remixes conventional beef tartare — it’s subversive, kind of punk. Owner Max Lesser considers Henrietta’s rendition a gateway drug to the dish. “If you don’t want to eat raw beef, I’m not going to force you to eat raw beef,” he says. “But if you’re a little on the fence and I can get you to try this, there might be a lightbulb moment.”
What hits you first is the tartare’s vessel — warm sourdough, funky, crusty, and blackened at the edges, a hunk that begs to be bitten into. Then there’s the oomph of romesco, earthy and acidic, a sauce that waltzes with hand-chopped top round as deftly as a Dancing with the Stars professional partner. Pickled squash adds a vinegar pop that lights up the palate; dots of crema temper the heat brought on by the charred chiles that gives the romesco its punch. A shower of shaved scallions and you’ve got a Summer Solution, the type of dish you crave when it’s too hot to cook and one that exceeds what many home cooks — me, for sure — would attempt on their own.
“It’s everything I want this restaurant to be, in a dish,” says Lesser. “Recognizable but special.”
A former server who cut his teeth at the Publican in Chicago and Chi Spacca in L.A., Lesser, for a long time, saw his work in restaurants a side hustle to his Hollywood aspirations. “It was a job to pay the bills while I was struggling as a writer and an actor, and getting really pissed,” he says. The pandemic served him a reckoning. “What I missed was the restaurants,” he says. “I wasn’t auditioning. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t doing anything. I just missed being in restaurants.”
Henrietta, which opened in November 2025, is the kind of place that Lesser longed for in Los Angeles. New parents mingle with seasoned regulars; Lesser often walks patrons through the menu himself, coursing out plates of market lettuce — L.A.’s answer to Via Carota’s famous salad, and dare I say better than its East Coast cousin — Zuni-inspired chicken, and potatoes that pay homage to Jonathan Waxman’s crispy fried spuds from Barbuto. And, of course, the beef tartare toast, conceived of by Cosmo Gross, a restaurant consultant Lesser worked with at the Publican.
“He got it in one take, like Jay-Z,” he says of Gross and the toast. “He nailed it.” In Lesser’s opinion, it’s all about the romesco: roasted red pepper, an “almost burnt” Fresno chile, almonds, macadamia nuts, and “a shit ton of really good red wine vinegar,” all pulverised so that the ingredients mesh without melting into one another. “It’s chunky, and I think that texture plays really well in a tartare,” says Lesser.
It’s not just for summer — it’s on the menu permanently. It would be an overstatement to say that the beef is an afterthought, but it’s not the star, and maybe that was my issue with beef tartare all along — it needed to be part of a greater whole, not the main event. In any case, for as long as the heat holds, you can find me at the counter of Henrietta quietly reveling in my personal rebellion: my summer hyperfixation meal that I don’t have to say goodbye to when the season ends.
