Review: At the Southern-style Hatchet Hall, Jonathan Gold finds good times, then takes home great leftovers

The morning after my last meal at Hatchet Hall, I cooked steak hash with the remnants of the big rib-eye. I seared the soft, gingerbread-scented chunks of winter squash in a bit of olive oil. I let the slices of grilled sweet onion, zapped with garlic and anchovy, come to room temperature. And almost as an afterthought, I reheated most of an order of buttered cabbage, mostly to free up a bit of room in the refrigerator. Hatchet Hall is one of the most formidable leftover producers this side of a kebab parlor, at least if you are powerless against vegetables — it is hard to leave the restaurant without an armload of cardboard boxes.

The squash and the hash were pretty spectacular — lovely marbling and a glaze of chimichurri gave a nice edge to the smoky richness of the steak. But it was that homely bowl of cabbage, pretty much ignored the evening before, that became a source of awe.

How could lightly cooked greens develop such complex sweetness? How did a tiny scattering of cumin seeds produce such a penetrating topnote? Did the cooks among us really need to sauté our cabbage with quite that much butter — the amount of butter involved was truly formidable — or was the secret Hatchet Hall’s peak-season farmers market produce? The cabbage was gone. I snuck into the kitchen and scraped the last of the cabbage-flavored butter from the bottom of the takeout carton.

Hatchet Hall is the neo-neo-Southern restaurant of chef Brian Dunsmoor, a sprawling former coffeeshop tricked out with dark woods and masculine wallpaper, flanked by a big patio on one end and a tavern called the Old Man Bar on the other. It has shaken the renovated-coffeeshop vibe of the gastropub Waterloo & City when it had the space a couple of years ago — a first-rate bourbon selection will do that to a restaurant — but it is still pretty informal; a boozy party in process. If you are open-minded, you will be steered to a tiny-production pét-nat or another natural wine that you have never seen before and probably will never see again. The roster of old fashioneds at the Old Man Bar is bigger than the entire menu at some bars, and Hatchet Hall is progressive enough to include a whiskey flight as an option on its list of cocktails. You are here to have a good time.

Dunsmoor’s brand of American cooking has been a fixture in Los Angeles since his Venice pop-up with Kris Tominaga a few years ago. The two went on to open the Hart & the Hunter in the Melrose Avenue Palihotel and cook for a bit at Ladies’ Gunboat Society before Dunsmoor opened here at the end of last year. A Dunsmoor restaurant can be counted on to have excellent Southern breads — the hot rolls here, topped with sesame-like benne seeds, are crisp and light; the cheesy skillet cornbread is as dense and caloric as deep-dish pizza. Country ham is likely to show up here not just as a snack to nibble with drinks but in a vinaigrette or a mess of greens.

There are shrimp heads here, dredged in flour and fried crisp, and blackened curls of octopus tentacle with grilled radicchio and a lump of lemony mayonnaise. Chop steak comes as a beef tartare topped with fried oysters — I could swear I’ve seen a recipe from James Beard or somebody, although I can’t track it down at the moment — and it is both delicious and uniquely American. The braised mushrooms on fluffy spoonbread, kind of a Southern corn soufflé, would pass muster at any Charleston dinner party.

The restaurant has leaned more toward its grill in the year since it opened, and even Duns-moor has hinted that he wants to move away from shared plates toward what sounds less like Nouveau Boardinghouse than an ambitious modern steakhouse menu. (The kitchen shows much more finesse now than it did a month after its opening.)

And the center of meals at Hatchet Hall may well be its big slabs of animal — that big bone-in rib-eye perhaps, or maybe a pork chop with mushrooms and lard smoked in the big wood grill; a sautéed veal chop in a Madeira-laced chanterelle cream with fried sweetbreads; or a lovely roasted whole game hen served with soft garlic on grilled country bread.

But the whole point of the place does seem to be its vegetables — a chiffonade of Brussels sprout leaves tossed with pecans and slivers of Asian pear; new potatoes roasted with beef fat; tiny white beans with escarole and chunks of smoked sausage; and roasted pumpkin with roasted pumpkin seeds and bits of blue cheese.

You too are going to order that transformative bowl of buttered cabbage. You too are going to lose track of it among the many dishes on your table. And you too may belatedly discover its glory, hiding in its box behind a leftover lamb shank the next morning. I kind of envy you that moment.

Hatchet Hall

Brian Dunsmoor’s Culver City restaurant knows its vegetables — and its bourbon.

LOCATION

12517 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 391-4222, hatchethallla.com.

PRICES

Snacks $4-$11; small plates $11-$29; vegetables $8; large-format meat $26-$99; desserts $11.

DETAILS

5:30 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. Sun.-Wed., 5:30 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. Thurs.- Sat.; Old Man Bar, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. nightly. Credit cards accepted. Full bar. Valet parking.

RECOMMENDED DISHES

Chop steak with fried oysters, Brussels sprouts with pecan vinaigrette, buttered cabbage, braised greens with country ham, mushroom-crusted pork chop, cookie plate.

MORE FROM JONATHAN GOLD

Jonathan Gold’s 10 best dishes of 2016

Jonathan Gold goes on a holiday tamale crawl across L.A.

Jonathan Gold didn’t expect a Nick Erven vegan restaurant, but it might be L.A.’s best vegan dining