Week's End at Cliff's Edge

Zach and I are finally beginning to settle into the beginnings of a routine out here, and one of the nicest parts is having dinner or a drink at the bar of our favorite neighborhood restaurant, Cliff's Edge, which is conveniently located right across the street from where we live.

We usually go on Friday nights, when we're feeling the weight of the long workweek, and an hour or two there is just the right amount of decompression to send us gliding into the weekend.

Although the restaurant has an incredible outdoor garden—which is where we sit when we bring friends or family, at least when the smokers are not out in force—we've taken to spending our time there at the convivial bar. We've befriended a couple of the regular Friday-night bartenders, a transplanted-from-New-York actor and a philosopher-writer, and we've probably spent more quality time with them over the past several months than we have with any one of our friends out here. (Such is the way of Los Angeles that you can go months without seeing your dearest friends. In one extreme case, we hung out with an old pal at Sundance that I hadn't seen at all, and Zach had seen just once, since we were here on vacation a year ago.)

Cliff's Edge also has great food. I'm partial to their rigatoni with wild-boar ragu (yes, really) and tend to default to that despite lots of other yummy stuff on the menu.

One of the most surprising things about the restaurant is that it's virtually invisible from the street. The entrance is at the far end of the small, gated valet-parking lot, and there's no sign other than an easy-to-miss placard on the valet stand. I first went there after reading about it in the Zagat guide and then realizing, from the address, that I must have walked by it dozens of times without ever seeing it. The garden is entirely out of view until you walk through the entrance, and the effect, enhanced by flickering candles that light the path, never fails to charm a first-time visitor.

A few weeks ago, on my birthday actually, we decided to have dinner there. When we walked into the parking lot on our way to the front door, we noticed that the ground had been strewn with rose petals. For a moment, I thought perhaps this had been Zach's doing, but then the valet clued us in: the restaurant had been rented out for the evening for a wedding. We had really been looking forward to an evening there, maybe even out in the garden, and were sorely disappointed.

But we couldn't hold a grudge when we realized what an amazing setting the bride and groom (or bride and bride, or groom and groom) had chosen, and what a memorable evening they and their guests were about to have.