Culinary
Zach’s Café
10820 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
818/762-4225
REVIEWED BY DON HART
In the eternal battle to find quality food while dressed for the beach or a basketball game, most fast food places shrink from the task. Sure, the kids will go for junk food and careless parents will accommodate their immature tastes, but really healthy ingredients, menu choices, and respectful cooks aren’t to be found in a happy face drive-through. So instead of clowning around at one of these standards for American food, you have to take a moment to find those places that can offer casual quality cuisine.
I’m here to make it easy today. Maybe you’re up for a visit to Universal, ABC, NBC, Warner Bros. studios or one of the many other entertainment industry locations in Studio City. Then welcome to Zach’s Café, with simple but far superior food than most quick stops or even many slow relaxed eateries. Maybe you need to get a healthy recharge after a day out at the park or the beach, surviving on hot dogs and chips.
Zach’s eclectic ‘California Italian’ style offers a menu running for pages of salads, soups, pasta, seafood, chicken, pizza, sandwiches, burgers, desserts, and vegetarian fare. The vegetarian menu alone offers 18 items, and that doesn’t include the 13 salads! Only the largest, fanciest pizza tops $20; most dishes come in under $10 and everything is available at their fast pick-up window, or you can, like myself, sit down for a leisurely trip through their many choices. This ain’t white table cloths and candles, but I’ve had much worse with the fine linen thrown in. Zach’s is a t-shirt casual way to eat well, although owner Albert let us know that their main source of income is white tablecloth banquets and meetings as well as catered events. Now, while some of you may want a critique of the burgers and pizza, forgedaboudit. I was there for better fixin’s. I passed the pick-up window and the standard kids’ food, and my companion and I lay back and feasted on 9 different dishes, all available in small portions or dinner-sized.
The meal began with thick doughy bread made from the same healthy concoction as the pizza base is. It was really good, and only willpower will keep you from filling up on the thick chewy pieces. One of the owners, Albert, is himself vegetarian and wants to offer healthier food, as well as information to show the quality of their items. The dough is no different, with an entire page available to show you its fine grain ingredients, and the full list of nutrients you receive by eating this. I counted over 25 vitamins and minerals, as well as good fiber from just this very tasty dough alone!
And then we got Adam’s Baby Greens Salad. With a fruity dressing, a light dusting of Feta cheese, and apples and candied walnuts, this was a salad so light it almost floated in the breeze, and my partner and I said we could eat it every day. Super! We wanted to try an appetizer that was a completely different balance to the floating salad, so we ordered their fried calamari. The little calamari avoided the all too common oiliness, or overly breaded crust of many other establishments’ calamari and swam down our throats happily.
Then, we started off on the main meal voyage. The first stop was vegetarian “Chicken Pasquale.” This mushroom, sun dried tomato, roma tomato, caper, bell pepper bow tie pasta was a good light beginning. The soy ‘faux’ chicken was both flavorful and of a good consistency. While it did a good chicken imitation, it had its own distinctive taste, which was very good, as was the whole dish.
This was quickly followed by another vegetarian dish, Steph’s Pasta toss, another tasty amalgamation, this time of artichokes, mushrooms, parmesan cheese, penne pasta, with a garlic herb butter sauce topped with tomatoes and scallions. Score another for Zach’s.
The next round brought us real Chicken Scallopini. The chicken had a great flavor and consistency, though the almost Japanese style light coating was a little too mushy. It lay on a bed of linguini scattered with garlic, capers, steamed broccoli florets and all in an oil lemon juice sauce. I actually enjoyed the vegan imitation better.
We wanted to try at least one of their seafood dishes and went with the Shrimp with sun-dried tomatoes. The whole was better than its parts, as the snow peas, tomatoes, shallots, garlic and basil on angel hair pasta made the tasty but mushy shrimp, as a whole, better than the shrimp could have alone. As a big fan of shrimp, this was their biggest disappointment, and yet I nonetheless enjoyed the whole dish and left not a lick on the plate.
We moved on to a superior choice, the goat cheese and mushroom lasagna. This was a really distinctive Zach’s dish, far lighter than most lasagnas and brimming with wonderful flavors. Mushrooms, garlic, scallions, shallots, Marsala wine, mozzarella, white cheddar and Romano cheeses, and the goat cheese cream sauce makes this one of Zach’s best dishes and something definitely to put on your ‘to get’ list.
With our little remaining gastrointestinal space, we wanted to find out if Zach’s eclectic offerings could include a good Asian style dish. So Thai chicken pasta was chosen. While it was a bit too oily, it was a clear bow to Thai flavors and lightness, and the many little pieces of chicken found a good home to float in. It was calmly sweet.
Now, no meal, at least for me, is complete without dessert, so we let Albert choose the tiramisu for our sweet ending. Mmmmmm! More please. Up to the quality I tasted in Italy and clearly the way to finish a fine dinner. With all the extra luggage we transported out the front door in our bellies, we could have ridden a tandem wheelbarrow to my car, but I was more than satisfied, since food at these prices is usually only a small step above Jack and Carl’s McBurger Queen, but Zach’s is a big step up. So if you find yourself in Studio City in shorts and a sundress, and maybe even towing a few kids, Zach’s offers far healthier food and everything you could ask for at all levels of tastes and interests. Next time I may try Zach’s pizzas, but there are still 50 other menu items I have to try first. Zach’s offers good wine and alcohol choices on a separate menu, as well, so go expecting food with the grown-ups. Chow!
