L.A. restaurants making a comeback?

LAT critic Irene Virbila has seen a batch of innovative restaurants opening up, in spite of the not-so-wonderful economy.

Instead of treading the tried and true, L.A.'s restaurateurs and chefs are experimenting with the wild and crazy, with pop-ups, crossovers and new genres. This year's crop of new restaurants includes sandwich shops, noodle joints, izakaya, wine bars, far-flung cuisines, wood-burning-oven specialists, plenty of communal tables and oddball bar concepts. Diverse doesn't begin to describe what's happening now.

Some of this might be fueled by the food truck revolution, which was really spawned in Socal, and some of it - I'm thinking of the pop-ups - might be the result of young chefs with lots of ideas and limited financing. Whatever the reason, it's a small reminder of the 80s, when L.A. was arguably the nation's hottest, most creative restaurant scene.

We've seen French chef and food-show star Ludovic Lefebvre collaborate with Animal chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo in an all-foie-gras dinner designed to stick it to those who want to outlaw the traditional fattened duck or goose liver. Lefebvre remains the highest-profile pop-up chef, probably in the country, with brief sold-out tenures at various kitchens around town and a truck making the rounds with his fried chicken. He's even brought the Ludo truck to Vegas, but not to Place Concorde in Paris yet. The Animal boys opened a second restaurant devoted to seafood called, for no good reason, Son of a Gun, and decorated it with old buoys and nautical stuff from Dotolo's grandfather's attic.