At Saffy’s in Los Angeles, go with the flow—and order extra flatbread.
Reservation paralysis in Los Angeles—a city known to most for harboring glamorous celebrities, and a city known to me for harboring my favorite birria tacos just a seven-minute drive from my most-treasured tum kha noon at Amphai Northern Thai Food Club—is understandable. It’s a city I feel familiar with; I’ve lived there for stints. But I am most certainly not New York City-levels of familiar with LA. And it’s a city that contains many overlapping sub-cities within its bounds. (Take, for instance, the rooftop bar at newish Beverly Hills pasta hotspot Funke, where a woman of indeterminate age recently posted up beside my bar stool to order a cocktail with Chopin vodka and then loudly dictated a voice-to-text message that said, “Thirty five dollars for a Cosmo? Never in my life, honey.”) So on a recent weeknight when, tasked with finding an appropriate venue for me to meet her new boyfriend, my sister landed us at the sort-of-carefree, sort-of-fancy Middle Eastern restaurant Saffy’s, I was only relieved I didn’t have to make any choices. It left me free to grill Nick—though about what exactly, jet lag promptly purloined from my hazy memory (I’d flown there straight from Ireland)—and to enjoy the spoils of the official grill. In particular, an olive-oil soaked hyper-crunchy flatbread that came like a handful of chips tucked into a shallow bowl of coconut turmeric mussels I would’ve sipped directly from had I been alone. A hummus topped with a ful medames-adjacent stew, served with challah sliced so thick it might as well have been attached to a corgi, rendered my interrogation silent. Little discs of falafel in a shallow pool of tahini were green in flavor and appearance once broken into, and I wanted to curl up beneath the laffa that came splayed over the lamb and beef shawarma so much like a duvet, it had to be mocking me.
Saffy's, 4845 Fountain Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90029.