Axe Restaurant

This weekend my father and I went to Los Angeles for a quick weekend getaway/college tour and obviously, we were itching to eat at some of the best hipster locations in town.
Thankfully one of my dad's coworkers had a list of about 4 or 5 restaurants stacked up, so the issue was really just deciding where to go.
I decided we should try out this super cute, simplistic restaurant called "Axe". Pronounced "ah-shey", it comes off as a pretty pretentious institution....but apparently axe (or ah-sheyyyy) is a Nigerian word meaning "good blessings", used before eating meals. So that justified the cockiness of the name. 




Now, lets get down to the real business of this post: the food.
As soon as we walked in, I looked around and just about every table was noshing on this amazing looking piece of bread, rolled up, with different dips on the side. Immediately I knew...WE ARE ORDERING THIS. It was love at first sight.
I searched for it hard on the menu and ordered it right off the bat; it was a starter of grilled flatbread and spreads- including hummus, greens marmalade, shallot yogurt, muhumara, and roasted eggplant.

As soon as it arrived, there was a maddening rush to get a picture of the dish before our mouths were able to eat it. My dad especially, was very, very hungry. It was a little bit of a stressful experience to eat it just because it was that good. Both of us wanted to eat it all, but we couldn't. So it was a quick paced race to finish the flatbread and spreads. The entire time, my dad just kept repeating "wow" every other minute. 

It was quite a scene.

Axe does most of their dishes tapa style, so we ordered a few (probably a few too many) more things. We honestly could've been fine with just this flatbread starter and the salad, but there was too much good stuff on the menu to pass up. 

(*disclaimer: please excuse the extremely crappy quality of my iPhone food photos...the flash really does these dishes no justice whatsoever)....

This was the fresh dungeness crab salad with lettuce cups, avocado, cilantro, chili and lime dressing. 

Above, we have the sake marinated, grilled all-pasture filet of beef on the left

and grilled local squid with braised beans and aioli

 This dish I'm saving for last because it was my favorite (besides the flatbread). These were roasted beets with shallot cumin yogurt, cucumber mint relish, and toasted pistachios. Oh man it was soooo good. Both the beets and our amazing flatbread starter had very Moroccan/middle eastern vibes in their flavors. I really enjoyed the way the cold creaminess of shallot cumin yogurt paired with the usually weird taste of the beets; and then the toasty crunch from the pistachios! heaven. 

To conclude, let's just take another look at the flatbread dish, from a different angle. 

You're welcome.