Foie gras in cotton candy

The Bazaar by Jose Andres takes playing with your food to a whole new level. Here, you’ve got cotton candy, Wonka-esque taste sensations and ample squeals and giggles. I was lucky enough to be invited to check out the year-old funhouse of food at the uber-slick SLS Hotel on La Cienega Boulevard last night.

Rojo dining room

I had stayed away from this much-talked about restaurant all this time because it was much-talked about. All that hype, it looked too clubby for my tastes and didn’t The Hills film a couple of episodes here? Any venue that makes me stress out about my wardrobe is not for me. But the allure of a hosted dinner overrode any fears I had about getting looked up and down.

The restaurant’s entrance is guarded by a pig statue and separate from SLS’s lobby. And since it’s so dim in the venue, you can barely make out Bar Centro in the space past the hostess stand. I instinctively flinched at the clubby darkness of it all but fortunately there was no booming bass blasting out over speakers, no gaggles of long-tressed haute girls in clubwear. Rather, there were businessmen, casually dressed tourists and the after-work set. I was safe.

Now, the restaurant is sectioned into two rooms that are more like themes in their divergent atmospheres of casual festive (Rojo) versus formal Zen (Blanco), or really, fun date versus “I really want to impress this girl” date. We were seated in Rojo which is next to the kitchens whose sounds were muted by the din of the diners.