Spark Woodfire Grill and My Little Cupcake

Spark Woodfire Grill

This week is restaurant week where you can get bargains at certain restaurants for specific lunches and dinners in LA. I know they also do this in Milwaukee. BK looked at the restaurants that were listed and mentioned Spark which is close to our house and we have never been there. However, they did not have a special for lunch but we decided to go there anyway.

Spark is a rather small, white tablecloth restaurant on Ventura Blvd. near the CBS Studios. It was fairly busy when we arrived which was close to 2:00. There was a large table of young people who obviously worked at CBS. There is a special lunch menu – 10 items which are $10 or less each. Although I wasn’t terribly excited about going there, my mind changed drastically. Our attentive busboy brought and refilled our Diet Cokes regularly. He also gave us wonderful, crusty bread with an olive tapenade which was good but we both felt the Gaucho Grill has one that is better. Too bad that restaurant is no longer in Studio City.

I chose ½ turkey panini with a cup of their special soup - Ribollita Soup which is described as a hearty vegetable based soup made with borlotti beans, kale, prosciutto and parmigiano cheese. I asked for the soup before the sandwich since I like to have my soup first. I didn’t think I would like it because I don’t care for Italian spices but this thick soup didn’t have any of those flavors. It was delicious. The half sandwich had turkey, watercress, tomato, roasted tomato pesto and asiago cheese on their crusty bread. I really liked this sandwich with my only complaint being that one of the pieces of bread was turned the wrong way and kept falling off the sandwich. Then I realized that it was probably an end piece put on incorrectly when melting the cheese. I didn’t mind but some may.

BK chose one of their lunch specials of the day – a BBQ chicken pizza. The pizza is cooked in a wood fired oven. It is a very thin crust but the crust is not crispy. It is soft and when we ate it, we folded it like you would a tortilla and the taste was wonderful. It had plenty of chicken, onion, excellent cheese and a good BBQ sauce. She was very happy with her choice and I enjoyed a piece as well. I definitely will return and next time, maybe have the $10 eggplant parmigiana. There were many choices and Spark is now on my list of very good places to go.

My Little Cupcake

As far as good places to go, My Little Cupcake is NOT one of them. After lunch, we went to Bed, Bath and Beyond. Then we drove back to this cupcake place that we had passed when we were too full to think about eating anything. However, give us an hour and we are ready again. My first impression was not favorable. The interior was not appealing to me. I looked at the cupcakes and saw very few choices, like 6, although there are many listed on the board. Also, the cupcakes were not nearly as attractive as many other places except for one. This one looked like a mountain of chocolate. We asked about it and were told it was a chocolate cupcake with a mound of homemade marshmallow covered in a hard chocolate. This was for me. BK couldn’t pass that one up either and so we got two of those, one peanut butter and one white cupcake with white frosting (definitely not for me).

When we got home, I took out my chocolate delight which I had to eat with a fork. The first thing I noticed was what looked like grease on the inside of the paper cupcake holder. Not a good sign. The outer chocolate was quite good and sweet. The mound of marshmallow was excellent. The chocolate cake was dry and tasted stale. After we threw away the cake part, Bonnie tried the white one. That one didn’t have grease inside the cupcake holder, had frosting that was OK but again the white cake was dry and tasted stale. She hasn’t tasted the peanut butter one but we do not hold out high hopes for that either. If you can’t make and serve moist, fresh cake, whatever is on the top is irrelevant to me. There are many excellent cupcake places. My Little Cupcake is not one of them.