Toast & Rice is a new Korean-Venezuelan fusion eatery curated by renowned chefs Marcos Spaziani and Louis Huh.
Toast & Rice is located at Gramercy Wilshire in the heart of Koreatown, Los Angeles.
Spaziani is a tenured chef and fan-favorite participant in the Bravo reality TV show “Below Deck” and Huh is a long-time collaborator, business partner and former executive chef of Taste on Melrose. The duo co-operate the casual dining restaurant Lou’Mar in Beverly Hills.
Toast & Rice features some of the duo’s most praised ingredients like chef Louis’s white secret sauce, aji verde and ever-tender borracha brisket.
In addition to signature ingredients, Toast and Rice’s fusion menu makes it a likely success amongst koreatown locals.
When asked about Toast & Rice’s niche Andrew Jin, chief operating officer at Toast & Rice, referenced community demographics as an important component.
“The niche I guess for us is [since] we are in Koreatown and Los Angeles actually, the dominant race here is hispanic. Koreatown is now a mixture of a lot of people, but still the dominant two races here are the Hispanic and the Asian community. Since we are in Koreatown, the niche we are trying to fill here is to blend their food together. A lot of us are half and halves, a lot of kids and friends are either half hispanic or half asian and they are trying food from both places so why not put them together. I think that’s the niche we are trying to go for……”
The spicy bulgogi toast was an unexpected journey.
In between two large fluffy sweet milk bread slices live eggs, American cheese, corn, pickles, cabbage and chef Louis’s white secret sauce is drizzled over the top.
For the first few bites the secret sauce’s creaminess steals the limelight, but later the other ingredients are allowed to shine.
The cheese infused with corn, crunchy cabbage and spicy bulgogi all become much more prominent and create a multi-layered eating experience.
The Borracha Brisket Bowl features the chef’s signature brisket that’s slow glazed for six hours with an undisclosed assortment of Asian and South American spices, red ginger, green onion, pico de gallo and caramelized onions.
There’s also two stunning sauces, the aji verde sauce and spicy habanero sauce, that are a meticulous balance of spice and sweetness.
In addition to both dishes, we ordered the butterfly pea tea lemonade, which looked like a magical potion, cucumber mint lemonade, and sparkling blueberry lemonade which was blended to order.
Although the menu only features very specific iterations of the same dish, when Jin was asked what fans of Toast & Rice could expect in the near future, he shed some light on this potential issue.
“I think in the near future what you can see is some kind of change in the menu. Already the chefs are thinking of what else to do in the menu. We don’t want to just have a couple of menu [items] and just leave it at that. They want to always bring something else to the table because a lot of the people are going to be able to try all of our food at one point but we always want to pump out a new type of cuisine or meal so that everyone can try it…..”
Written by Jason Escobar | Illustrated by Rina Shin