July 28, 2012|By Jonathan Gold | Los Angeles Times Restaurant Critic

When friends tell you about Next Door by Josie, the first thing they mention is the popcorn. And the popcorn’s pretty good — a small pail of caramelized crunch, lightly flavored with beer and bacon grease, neither as Cracker Jack-esque as the bacon popcorn at Tar & Roses nor as spicy as the cashews with caramelized bacon at Freddy Smalls.

If you’re keeping score at home, Next Door by Josie was probably first on bacon popcorn — practically a pioneer — although it opened just last fall in Santa Monica. It’s version is almost delicate somehow, holding its own in the world of bacony snacks. If you were going to choose a bacon popcorn for its ability to harmonize with a glass of cru Beaujolais, this would be the one.

The restaurant has also distinguished itself with its pickle jars stuffed with vinegared peppers, baby carrots and cucumbers; suave deviled eggs garnished with crisp shreds of rendered duck skin; and piles of barbecued potato chips. When you slide onto a barstool for a hot dog and a glass of Racer 5, it is easy to imagine yourself at any of the scores of gastropubs clotting the Los Angeles avenues these days, settling in for a couple of innings of the Dodgers game on the bar TV. Everyone around you in the sleekly modern dining room is gnawing on tiny pork ribs or eating chili with sour cream and handfuls of grated cheese, even as you power through a mound of the supremely porky rillettes.

Next Door by Josie is the annex of Josie, the elegant restaurant renowned for its game dishes and its farmers-market-intensive cuisine (it just celebrated its 10th anniversary). Josie’s chef and owner, Josie Le Balch, is Los Angeles restaurant royalty, a second-generation chef who began her career cooking alongside Mark Peel and Wolfgang Puck at the old Ma Maison, was chef at Saddle Peak Lodge and the old Venetian restaurant Remi, and is well-known for dishes like trout with squeaky-fresh pole beans, pork belly with watermelon and roast venison with wild rice and pecans. Josie is where you go for a refined short rib tagine or a tomato tart not for … French fries seasoned with industrial quantities of pepper.

But 2012 is 2012, and it is gastropubs and small-plates restaurants with lines curling down the block. Even in Paris, chefs are supplementing their grand palaces with places to stop by for a few oysters, a slice of boar terrine and a glass of Chinon. We have short attention spans; it is hard enough for most of us to commit to a three-page magazine article, much less an entree.

The menu at Next Door by Josie has forgone the usual appetizers and entrees for small snacks and bigger snacks, big plates and sides. If you like the sliver of mushroom quiche Josie serves as an amuse bouche, you can have a slightly larger wedge of it here. If you enjoy Josie’s salads, you will find happiness in Next Door’s careful compositions of perfectly ripe nectarines with Parmigiano-Reggiano and piles of arugula, or slightly undercooked quinoa with grapefruit and toasted hazelnuts. If you come to Josie because of the precise vegetable cookery, you will adore the dish of barely poached haricots, asparagus and super-sweet cherry tomatoes in a light broth flavored with lemongrass — the best thing I have ever tasted in any of Le Balch’s restaurants.

You don’t even have to commit to a whole glass of wine. The standard unit of measurement here is the half-pour, although the rustic country wines on the list — Paco & Lola’s Albariño, Henry Fessy’s Juliénas, Fontanafredda’s Barbera Briccotondo — are mostly the kind of wines better suited for joyous drinking than for sipping.

When ordering Next Door, you should probably ask yourself whether a dish you have in mind might be reasonably enhanced by the attentions of a French-trained chef or whether it might not. Both the chili and the ribs are relatively dry and bland, for example, while a po’ boy, a special one night, benefited from an excellent mayonnaise and the careful frying of the fish. While the cheeseburger’s superstructure collapsed after a bite or two, the shrimp and grits were chefly: zapped with umami but not extravagantly, flavored with smoky bacon, slightly crisped but not overcooked. The grits were from the Allen Brothers catalog, creamy yet firm.

A steak? Of course. You can get a thin, well-salted pan-seared ribeye, generous in area — just what you are hoping to get in a bistro when you order steak frites. Pasta? It’s a crude but effective mass of penne tossed with cream, cheese and crunchy bits of smoked hog-jowl bacon imported from Burger’s Smokehouse in the Ozarks.

But the half roast chicken is ordinary — golden and crisp-skinned enough certainly, but a little juiceless from its trip through the oven. On the other hand, the sloppy joe of roast pork with fried rapini and sharp provolone (an interpretation of the sandwich made famous by Tony Luke’s on Philly’s South Side) is gloriously pungent and delicious.

Restaurants, like life, can occasionally be mysterious.

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Next Door by Josie is the new kid on the Pico Boulevard block after opening its doors last September between 24th and 25th streets. And as the name suggests, it is located right next to Josie Restaurant, which has been a mainstay in the Pico Neighborhood since 2001.

The two restaurants are inter-joined by way of the kitchen, which has been an interesting learning curve for the kitchen staff, according to owner Josie Le Balch.

“It’s been a little bit of a balance of a dance that we do,” Le Balch said. “We’re doing fine dining on the one end at Josie and then we’re doing casual dining on this side and there is a lot of crossover with some of the products. It’s been non-stop.”

A quick glimpse at the menu and you’ll see you’re going to be in for a completely different experience from the fine-dining at Josie.

For instance, the small snacks section features “beer and bacon caramel corn,” “deviled eggs with duck crackling,” and even a “house pickle jar.”

The bigger snacks and appetizers are a little more main stream with dry rubbed pork riblets, Allen Brothers’ grits with molasses-glazed bacon and spicy shrimp, and a wedge of wild mushroom quiche (Le Balch’s father’s recipe) with mixed greens.

The American-inspired charcuterie bar has a selection of five cured meats and five cheeses that’s priced $5 for one, $14 for three, or $21 for all five.

The cured meat selection includes Edward’s Country Ham (Surry, VA), Burger’s Attic-Aged Ham (California, MO), Creminelli’s Mocetta (Salt Lake City, UT), Creminelli’s Salami Calabrese (Salt Lake City, UT), and Bauernschinken (Glendale, CA).

When it comes to the cheeses, the choices include Shaft’s Ellie’s Vintage Blue, Cow’s milk (Rocklin, CA); Fiscalini’s Vintage Bandage-wrapped cheddar, Cow’s milk (Modesto, CA); Cowgirl creamery’s Red Hawk, Cow’s milk (Petaluma, CA); Bellwether farms’ San Andreas, Sheep’s milk (Sonoma, CA); and Cypress Grove’s Bermuda Triangle, Goat’s milk (Arcata, CA).

There is also a soup and salad selection where quality isn’t sacrificed when it comes to quantity. The sloppy roast pork sandwich is a beast in size with fried rapini, aged provolone, and garlic mayo ($14). For a lighter sandwich, try Mai’s Duck Confit ‘Bánh Mì’ with pickled daikon and cucumber (also $14).

Le Balch said Next Door by Josie had been well received because she said it was a place anyone could go for some charcuterie, a glass of wine, or a full on meal.  READ MORE…

Wow, what a year! Japanese kaiseke, American gastropubs, Southeast Asian flair, smart molecular gastronomy, a kick-ass brunch and a fabulous return to glamour—2011 proved to be a terrific year for new restaurants in Los Angeles. Rising stars like The Spice Table’s Bryant Ng and Night + Market’s Kris Yenbamroong went head-to-head with seasoned heavyweights such as Wolfgang Puck and Josie Le Balch. With so many outstanding choices this year, narrowing the year’s best new restaurants to a list of merely 20 was difficult. But here it is.

By the Tasting Table (Enjoy this story from our archive, originally sent to TT members on 11/8/2011.)

The dudes in suits, the ladies who lunch, and the bottles of Burgundy lining the walls might make you think otherwise, but believe this: Next Door by Josie, the two-month-old Santa Monica restaurant run by Josie Le Balch, is a sports bar.

We present, as Exhibit A, the two flat-screen televisions set high over the full bar, the tables set in such a way that nearly every seat has a good view.

Exhibit B: The menu, which includes such dishes as homemade BBQ potato chips, wild-game chili, and hot dogs with kraut and “ballpark mustard.”

The deviled eggs ($6) are a good example of how Le Balch can enliven a thankless bar snack: Resting on a pile of pickled beets cut into neatly shaped batons and scattered with duck-skin cracklings, it’s a rich, biting dish that begs for a beer.

You won’t care who’s winning if you happen to be eating the roasted pork sandwich (pictured; $14). Soft slices of meat and piquant aged Provolone are complemented by rapini that, in an inspired touch, has been deep-fried to a crisp. The greens’ crunch is a welcome texture in a soft sandwich that is indeed, as the menu states, “sloppy.”

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I saw the best chefs of my generation employed by gastropubs; Racer 5, wild game chili, dry-rubbed riblets with their calico slaw dragging themselves through the steel seats at dawn looking for artisanal grits, molasses-glazed bacon, with New Orleans spiced shrimp, beer-and-bacon caramel corn. “Yes, it is that good,” she says, yearning for the harissa-rubbed watermelon salad, pork belly, cilantro; the homemade Fritos; the dense, dry-aged prime beef burger with cheddar, Thousand Island and mysterious bun #4. Sweet potato fries, or shelling beans with pesto vinaigrette? Attic-aged country ham from Burger’s in the Ozarks, also Burger’s jowl bacon with penne and cream; bauernschinken from Schreiner’s in Glendale (it’s a kind of smoky ham); wet roast pork sandwich with crisply fried rabe and provolone, like a South Philly sandwich with an extra dimension or two — and booze-cured salmon. Those French chefs (Josie LeBalch is a second-generation French chef) know something about charcuterie, about brandied chicken liver mousse, about the importance of having Chinon and Crozes-Hermitage by the glass for when the Saison Rue is just too much. Reservations? Not accepted! Lots of TV screens, on which to watch the Lakers, if the Lakers one day return.

Photo by: Tatiana Arbogast

Ten years after opening her eponymous restaurant in Santa Monica, tonight chef Josie Le Balch opens Next Door by Josie right beside it, inter-joined by way of the kitchen. We took a peek inside this afternoon to find Le Balch and crew a lot calmer than expected, amid a polished space of concrete floors, dark wood tables and chairs, walls hung with corks and horizontal bottles of wine, and a gleaming bar. Le Balch says it looks even better when the sun goes out. What will you be eating here?   READ MORE…