The plein-air plate: Monet at the Royce in Pasadena

Painter Claude Monet may best be known as a founder of the Impressionist art movement, but the Frenchman was also a serious gourmand. The Royce restaurant at the Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena created a special lunch inspired by Claude Monet on Saturday -- one of a few experiential meals the storied hotel has hosted lately, including a foie gras dinner last month with D’Artagnan owner Ariane Daguin. Next at the Royce will be "Gastronomy in the Garden" in August, an outdoor dinner in the chef's organic garden.

On Saturday, chef David Féau created four courses inspired by and dedicated to the life and work of the painter. Artist Nori Green, whose tapestries are on display at the Royce, started the afternoon with a lecture on Monet's life at Giverny, relaying anecdotes of his famous lunches, where "Monet was the only one allowed to cut the meat."

Féau's "Green on Green" (pictured above) was an homage to Monet's "The Waterlily Pond: Green Harmony," 1899, with legumes, peas, flowers and a dark sauce made of kale and a lighter sauce made of asparagus. The thin spears of asparagus were arranged to resemble the bridge in the painting.

The Royce at the Langham Huntington, 1401 S. Oak Knoll Ave., Pasadena, (626) 568-3900.

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-- Jenn Harris
twitter.com/jenn_harris

Photo: Chef David Féau's "Green on Green." Credit: The Royce at the Langham Huntington.

Serge Gainsbourg + a wine tasting

You love "L'Anamour," and you love a glass of rouge. The two come together at the "Gainsbourg Soiree" wine tasting and silent auction at the Pacific Design Center on Nov. 4. 

Los Angeles Wine Tasting and Here Is Elsewhere gallery are paying tribute to the French singer with an exhibition of photographs of Gainsbourg and a French wine and cheese pairing.

Photographs by artists and friends of Gainsbourg will be on display; artists also have been commissioned to present their own interpretations of Gainsbourg, who died in 1991. Works are from Frank Habicht, Kami,  Vanessa Atlan, Tom Recchion, Jules Muck, Robert Schwan, Remy Bond and more, curated by Yann Perreau (director of Here Is Elsewhere) with Timothee Verrecchia (producer of "Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited" and curator of Gainsbourg exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo and New York).

7 to 9 p.m. Nov. 4.  Tickets are available online, $64 (until midnight Wednesday, $48). For more info, email info@lawinetasting.com.

Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., Here Is Elsewhere Gallery, B231 (2nd floor). 

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Photo: Cover of "Gainsbourg Revisited" (Universal)

Pacific Standard Time tasting menu at the Getty

"Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980" opened at the Getty Center this month. To coincide with the exhibit, Getty Restaurant chef Mayet Cristobal has created a prix-fixe tasting menu that represents food in Los Angeles, dubbed Five Decades of Food and Culture, and highlights locally sourced food and wine. You can eat your way through the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s. Hello, fondue. 

On the tasting menu: 1940s chicken liver and bacon paté with brandied cherries, watercress and pecan raisin bread; 1950s poached lobster and asparagus casserole with crispy potato, shaved truffle and American caviar; 1960s steak Diane with fingerling potatoes, caramelized onion, wild mushrooms and Bloomsdale spinach; 1970s "Brie fondue" (puff pastry baked Brie) with brioche, orange marmalade and balsamic; and 1980s "mud pie," a coffee sabayon with chocolate crust and dark chocolate ganache. The cost is $70 per person ($92 with wine paring). 

The Getty Restaurant is open for dinner Saturdays only, but a prix-fixe lunch is also available daily. It's $34 per person, $46 with pairings. On the menu: "Waldorf Salad" with bibb lettuce, Granny Smith apples, dried cranberries, walnuts, celery and creamy cider dressing; braised beef au jus, Yukon Gold whipped potatoes, pearl onion, baby carrots and rainbow chard; and butterscotch pudding with salted caramel and Chantilly cream. 

1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 440-6810, www.getty.edu. 

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Photo credit: Getty Center

Survival cooking demo at High Desert Test Sites workshop

Artists Danielle McCullough and Gabie Strong will lead a sun-print cyanotype-process workshop, "Blast Site: A Workshop for Conjecture," on Nov. 12 at the High Desert Test Sites headquarters in Joshua Tree.

The workshop explores survival in the high desert, primarily grounded in post-apocalyptic science fiction, plant guides, archaeological archives and 20th century art history. The day's itinerary includes a guided hike through Blast Site, a cyanotype-process printing demonstration using sunlight and materials gathered from the desert floor, a survival cooking demonstration and a barbecued vegetarian lunch.

The lunch is part of an overall arts experience, incorporating native vegetation. Mushrooms marinated in a homemade vinegar and desert aromatics will be seared on hot rocks in a fire pit and served on mesquite flour flatbread, with pickled nopalitos, homemade yogurt and pinion seeds. Alcohol-based tinctures and teas derived from an assortment of local desert plants will be served to workshop attendees too. 

Registration for the workshop is $120 per person. Highdeserttestsites.com.

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Photo credit: Gabie Strong and Danielle McCullough, Blast Site: A Monument for Future Failures, 2011. Cyanotype fabric, painted leather, slipcrete, silver, ash, paint, pallets, wood, 16mm film with pen and ink,  and 16mm projector. Installed in at Shangrila, New Moon exhibition, Joshua Tree. Photo courtesy of Gabie Strong.

Nicholas Knudson knows a chimu when he draws one

Nicholas Knudson sat in front of a chalkboard sign on the sidewalk directly outside Spring for Coffee on downtown Spring Street on a recent afternoon. Wearing Ray-Bans and a baseball cap, the 31-year-old strawberry-blond artist dipped into his box of Crayola chalk and got to work drawing a fantastical animal that looked like an emotive pink-beaked raptor.  

It looked related to the creature on a chalkboard in front of Two Bits Market on 5th Street and the thing Knudson calls a “chimu” on a wall at Chimu, the Peruvian restaurant that faces Angel's Flight on Hill Street. (Chimu refers to a pre-Inca Peruvian culture, but "nobody knows what chimu is," said Knudson. "It sounds like an animal. It's kind of like a wide-eyed lizard thing eating a bowlful of food and looking like he’s gonna enjoy it.") The raptor thing at Spring for Coffee had the same big, sad eyes and wrinkly-skinned face as the others. And Knudson drew all of them.

"I just ended up with a piece of chalk in my hand one day and Ken [Yoshitake, the co-owner of Spring for Coffee] said, 'You should draw on my board,'" said Knudson, a regular at the tiny cafe. That was a year ago and now he refreshes the chalkboard with a new drawing semi-regularly. "I only do signs where I like the people. Either I have a friend there or I get a good barter. I gotta like what they’re doing."

See more of Nick Knudson's drawings here; a selection of his work is available for purchase at Spring for Coffee, 548 S. Spring St., Los Angeles.

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Photo credit: www.nicholasknudson.com 

To market, to market with a rooster tote bag

Remember Elizabeth Graeber who self-publishes "An Illustrated Guide to Cocktails"? She now has a tote bag for sale on Etsy printed with her drawing of a rooster. Just the thing to tuck in a couple dozen eggs from the farmers market or stash groceries from the supermarket. And it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, just $15, plus $3 shipping, for an original artwork on a bag. 

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Photo: Elizabeth Graeber