Hotel stories straight to your inbox:

Hotel Restaurant Review: Seven Thirty at Nine Thirty at the W Westwood

Go To The Hotel's Web Site Where: 930 Hilgard Avenue [map], Los Angeles, ca, United States, 90024

March 23, 2007 at 9:38 AM | 0 Comments

The other week when we reported on an episode of MTV's "scripted drama" The Hills in which the "cast" dined at the NineThirty restaurant at the W Westwood, a hotel worker wrote in to us that MTV's editing crew had got the story wrong. The foursome ate an entire meal, not just dessert, and spent about two and a half hours in the restaurant with one of the best servers on hand.

Perhaps sensing our skepticism at W service, we were invited to try out NineThirty for ourselves. And we, always in the mood for food and drinks, accepted the invitation.

So last night we pulled up to 930 Hilgard Avenue (get it?) for a 7:30 reservation. We walked carefully up the lighted blue steel steps at the hotel's entrance and made a quick left in the lobby towards the restaurant.

Now back in the day, when the W Westwood was only a year or two old, you would enter the hotel and be greeted with a darkly lit lobby and a bar right in the center of the room. Imagine arriving after a long flight at 10pm to find a loud party happening in the lobby?

Fortunately, the hotel has undergone a series of renovations so that when you first step into the hotel, it's still dimly lit (W-style) but the front desk and concierge are brightly lit stations to your right, the bar Whisky Blue and NineThirty are to the left, and a Living Room (W branding, not ours) greets you in the center with a curtained off sitting area just before the elevators. Now, that's more like a hotel.

MORE on Nine Thirty with pictures

Celeb Spotting:
When we sat down at NineThirty we were immediately distracted by a loud, throaty voice which turned out to belong to none other than Janice Dickinson. Thankfully, she was wearing jeans and not pulling a Britney anywhere. However, she did grab some flowers from a vase off the bar and then realized she left her purse underneath a table. Welcome to Los Angeles.

Since we're not in the business of restaurant reviews, we'll try to guide your through our experience at NineThirty without causing too much pain.

The Facts:
The all-organic menu at Nine Thirty was designed to appeal to the Californian palette, which we guess is healthy but have you noticed all the burger joints in this town? Executive Chef Jack Yoss, the man behind the menu, has done time at Wolfgang Puck restaurants in both Vegas and San Francisco and most recently, last year he was nominated as one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs in America.

The restaurant decor is the work of the Yabu Pushelberg, a Canadian design firm, who mixed dark and light woods throughout the room, then framed it with exotic woven screenings made of rattan and coconut shells. Yet the focus of the room is the 12-foot white sandstone bar (from which Janice pilfered flowers) which we tried to snap a picture of but our flash was not cooperating.

What's For Dinner:
Onto the menu: For wine we chose a Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, although the cocktail menu of girly martinis was appetizing. We strongly dislike seafood so we skipped over the first four seafood starters listed on the menu and selected a Heirloom Baby Beet Salad ($13) with aged feta, fennel, arugula and pine nuts. For our main course, we actually selected another starter, the Prime Beef Tartar ($16) and added a side of Pommes Frittes ($8) as our comfort food (We know, you can't take us anywhere.) The entrees included more seafood options such as wild king salmon and striped bass, along with other gourmet fare like the confit sonoma duck leg, beef short rib and a half chicken.

How It Went Down:
We quite enjoyed the food, maybe not as much as MIX, given that we don't dine on organic food much. And the service was very attentive--they took off the quail egg from the tartar dish and recommended a truly delicious bread pudding topped with coffee ice cream for dessert.

The place actually reminded us of the fare at Wilshire, a hot Westside organic-menu restaurant that was a celeb fave about a year ago. One complaint however, is that it's quite loud in there. And not just because Janice Dickinson set a bad precedent. It just seemed as if the talking was amplifed somehow, particularly from the dudes at the table next to us. But perhaps we were just surprised that there were so many people here on a Wednesday.

Whiskey Blue Bar Scene:
Then we got a tour of the revamped Whiskey Blue, a Rande Gerber bar. We had popped into this bar about two months ago and we kicked ourselves for not having our camera. The first part of Whiskey Blue is the Red Room, with hand-painted red canvases (from Morocco!) wallpapered to the walls. There's a long bar on the right and waist-high wooden totems in the center for you to rest your drink and scope out the scene.

In the back, there's the blue room (more hand-painted canvases on the wall, this time a sky blue) a VIP section with indoor cabanas and a smallish dance floor, both in line with the whole Moroccan ambience. For a Wednesday night the bar was tame, full of older businessmen (who offered to take our picture--again, Welcome to Los Angeles) and a few couples. But this place does get livelier on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays when the back room opens and a DJ spins some tunes.

Final Word:
All in all, we were pretty impressed with our insider's look at the W Westwood nightlife. Like we mentioned before, the place had come along way since 2002.

Yet never one to trust a PR person's shtick, we accosted some girls in the bathroom for their take on the dining experience and luckily for the restaurant, they liked NineThirty. One girl was grumpy that: "The proportions were small and expensive" but she said the food was "really good. I really like it here." Then when we asked if they were staying at the hotel, they replied they were visiting from New York but not staying here. Which we in turn asked: "So how did you hear about this place?" The other girl replied: "We saw it on The Hills." Go figure, MTV's vicious fake reality circle appears to be complete.

Insider Tip: If you plan on eating here, make sure you validate your parking ticket which gets you three hours for $5 or else you could get stuck paying over $20.

Full Disclosure: They picked up the dinner tab. Thanks NineThirty.

: / /

Author Photo: juliana by juliana

0 Comments

Return to » Hotel Restaurant Review: Seven Thirty at Nine Thirty at the W Westwood

Leave a Comment

Not yet a member? Click here to become a member.
Already a member? Login below:

Nickname:

Password:

Send us a tip