Chef Tin Vuong and his team at Blackhouse Hospitality have opened Bluegold and LSXO at Huntington Beach’s Pacific City. Blackhouse is a prolific operation with restaurants scattered from downtown Los Angeles to Hermosa Beach. This marks the chef’s return to Orange County. Before he became a big deal in L.A., Vuong began his career at the St. Regis Monarch Beach and Sapphire in Laguna Beach.
Two restaurants in one, Bluegold is a 250-seat steakhouse and seafood grill (plus oyster bar, kettle steam bar, sandwich shop and pizza specialist), while LSXO is a posh, 28-seat parlor that serves Vietnamese cuisine in a semi-secret back room that recalls colonial Saigon.
Although worlds apart, both restaurants operate out of the same kitchen. Both are beautiful. And while both are good, LSXO is better in most respects, with one big caveat. Here’s how the two opposing concepts stack up.
Bluegold
The atmosphere: Grand and spacious, Bluegold has all the trappings of a contemporary steakhouse. Wood tabletops are uncovered, but they are adorned with luxurious cotton napkins, fine china and heavy silverware. A standard rock soundtrack plays softly in the background, barely perceptible. A bar occupies the front half of the dining area.
The service: Waiters are novices but friendly and well-intentioned. The young sommelier, who apprenticed at Marche Moderne, likes to invite guests to step into his walk-in wine cellar to discuss potential selections. And the amiable, hard-working manager is always deep in the trenches alongside his staff.
The food: The first thing you’ll notice about the menu is how vast it is. There’s a section for pizza, a section for oysters and raw seafood, a section for steaks, a section for steam kettles, a section for cheese and charcuterie, plus more than 15 appetizers and a dozen sides. With more than 75 items, the menu is too vast for its own good. When the restaurant fills up, the kitchen can’t handle it. “I’m really sorry for the delay,” says our waiter one night. “The kitchen has shut everything down for a few minutes because they have too many orders.”
As a result, some dishes are good, some are disasters. The safest bets are the steaks and chops from the wood-fired grill. But while I have enjoyed two very nice steaks here, nothing has risen to the level of quality or finesse that I have experienced at this same chef’s Steak & Whisky in Hermosa Beach.
The skillet-roasted chicken is fantastic, as is a salt-roasted beet salad. And there’s a lovely butter lettuce salad with avocados and a tarragon dressing that vaguely reminds me of green goddess.
The thin-crust pizzas are reputable, and the french fries are flawless.
But then there’s the spongy, overly gelatinous octopus and a wretched paella. The latter, a mess of watery rice and overcooked fish, is genuinely inedible.
Bottom line: Although very good in many regards and when the kitchen isn’t particularly busy, this sadly is not the best restaurant in Vuong’s portfolio.
LSXO
The atmosphere: Posh and intimate, LSXO lives up to its clandestine mystique. It feels like a secret room inside a colonial Saigon mansion, decorated with mismatched rattan and leather chairs, area rugs and vintage photographs. Four stools snuggle against a bar that looks like the backside of an upright piano. A soundtrack of old-school hip-hop – Run-DMC, Eminem, Biz Markie, DJ EZ – blares from the speakers. The walls shake and the floors vibrate as diners are assaulted with unapologetic refrains filled with racist and sexist slurs. It feels like they’re trying a little too hard to be cool.
The service: Given the dining room’s intimate size – and despite the vulgar music – service tends to be charmingly attentive. Moist finger towels are offered when you sit down, and when you’re done, the bill is presented in a tiny envelope that’s been sealed with wax.
The food: Of the thousands of Vietnamese restaurants in Orange County, nobody else is cooking Vietnamese food with such elegance and finesse as this. The menu here, just like Bluegold’s, is absurdly vast – more than 50 dishes. Consistency does not appear to be a problem on this side of the kitchen.
Green papaya salad with beef jerky and chilies is spectacular. The nem nuong cuon (grilled pork spring rolls) are as good as Brodard’s. And while some dishes hew closely to grandmotherly recipes, others reveal the chef’s tattooed rebel spirit.
Veal sweetbreads are fried to a crisp and served in a broth meant to evoke the flavors of bun bo Hue, a classic spicy noodle soup made with pig’s blood and trotters. It’s a risky move but brilliant.
Pork is braised in coconut milk and served like a wet, soupy stew with boiled quail eggs. Chicken sausage is wrapped around stalks of lemongrass and grilled. Lamb “satay” so tender you could chew it without teeth is served in a curried broth with noodles and hericots verts.
The only things on the menu at LSXO that aren’t good are desserts. They’re the same as those served in Bluegold, and every single option is dreadful. And none is even remotely Asian.
The chocolate cake is dyed blue and topped with gold leaf. It looks and tastes like something a 5-year-old might craft from Play-Doh. Sadly, that’s how it tastes, too.
Pecan coffee caramel cake comes in a cylindrical shape that looks like it was baked in a tin can, which would be cute if it weren’t so dense and heavy and nondelicious. Lemon meringue pie is strangely thick and gooey and headachingly sweet. And what passes for cheesecake is too gummy to swallow.
Bottom line: Vietnamese cuisine is clearly Vuong’s passion, and there is no one else cooking food like this in Orange County. The menu is immensely exciting. It is unfortunate that LSXO doesn’t have its own desserts, though. And it is even more unfortunate that the music has to be so ridiculously obnoxious.
Contact the writer: bajohnson@ocregister.com or Instagram @bradajohnson
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
