One of the best salads, a tasty composition of grilled asparagus, shishito peppers and hemp-seed-crusted tofu, is vegan enough to bring a smile to Woody Harrelson's face. I like to order it with a few slices of La Española's superbly sanguineous blood sausage on the side, which gives the salad the balance it needs.

Neal Fraser has long been a bwana of complexity in fourth-stage Los Angeles restaurants, rarely content to settle for one garnish where three will do, mixing so many national idioms on a plate that his customers are never quite sure whether they are reading a menu or looking at a departures board at LAX. Los Angeles is a complicated place, and Fraser's cooking tends to reflect this.

But you don't go to BLD for an aesthetic experience — you go to eat supper. And freed of the formal requirements of the destination-restaurant menu, Fraser turns out to be a genius as a short-order cook, churning out exemplary, drippy hamburgers made with ultraprime Wagyu beef and even juicier burgers made with Berkshire pork, moistening sandwiches with aioli, using smoky house-made ketchup where he can and Heinz 57 where he must, greasing home fries with La Española's chorizo, and dropping coleslaw bombs like a 40-year fry cook with canola oil in his veins.

To civilians, a pork-shank sandwich is a pork-shank sandwich, no matter how closely the braised meat may resemble decent Carolina barbecue or how sharp the grainy mustard troweled onto the roll may be. To a chef, the pork-shank sandwich — and the superrich short-rib sandwich, and the al dente cavatelli pasta tossed with shrimp and mascarpone and whatever vegetables may be lying around the kitchen — is a staff meal raised to a high level of art, the kind of cheap-ingredient food that cooks make for each other when they think nobody else is paying attention. Chefs prefer chewy, gamy hanger steaks to filet mignon, because you can really taste the meat. A chef is delighted to griddle a giant scoop of crab salad and slap it on a grilled hamburger bun, because back-kitchen overkill can be the best kind of luxury. Unless you work in a restaurant, this is the kind of food you rarely get to taste. But in Los Angeles, this is what we get to eat after the show.

BLD, 7450 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 930-9744. Open daily 8 a.m.–11 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. AE, MC, V. Dinner for two, food only, $26–$66.

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