Last year, a group of Alta Journal staffers and contributors gathered at the venerable Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood. While sipping a smooth Vieux Carré that came with a mini-carafe that was effectively a second pour, I perused the parade of old-school entrées on the menu: steak tartare, oysters on the half shell with a tart mignonette, Caesar salad, and probably half a steer’s worth of beef cuts.
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Two more rounds of drinks into the evening, one of my dining companions spotted something no one had thought to order: jellied consommé. There’s old-school, and then there’s what amounts to cow-flavored Jell-O. One dare led to another and it was decided that I would order it, and not just because, at $9, it was one of the least expensive items on the menu.
We summoned a waiter, who quickly came back with a plastic cup of a chilled, jiggly brown mass topped with what appeared to be crème fraîche. Everyone stared in anticipation, ready to roar in laughter, as I shoveled up a massive scoop.
It was…delicious?!
Maybe it was the booze, but I swore to everyone that the jellied consommé was filling, flavorful, and perfect. No one took my invitation to skim off a dollop, alas, so we began to speculate about who might actually order this item. They had to be of the generation that considered aspic a food group, right?
The waiter told me that few customers ever ordered jellied consommé but that the recipe had recently changed. So that’s why I found myself one sweltering Saturday inside Musso & Frank’s kitchen as executive chef J.P. Amateau prepared it for the week.
“So you were the guinea pig!” he said with a loud laugh when we got to his mise en place. A burly, matter-of-fact talker, Amateau took over the kitchen in 2010 with the blessing of Musso & Frank’s owners and a mandate to update the eatery’s offerings—but not too fast.
For the old-schoolers, change doesn’t come easy, Amateau explained over the roar of fans that futilely tried to dissipate the heat. But something had to be done.
Amateau slowly began to tweak the ingredients and preparation of certain recipes. “I didn’t want to violate the integrity of Chef Jean,” Amateau said, referring to founding chef Jean Rue, who created the menu back in 1919.
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Some of these entrées have been on Musso & Frank’s menu almost since the restaurant opened and are probably available nowhere else in Southern California today, like lamb kidneys, a favorite of Charlie Chaplin’s; calf’s liver with onion; oyster stew. And, of course, jellied consommé.
What needed to change, I asked? “It was consommé in a cup,” Amateau bluntly replied, as he prepared to show me the tweaks he’d implemented that led to the dish that surprised and excited me.
An induction cooktop heated two pots. The bigger one was where Amateau was cooking down his fortified beef broth with neck bone, a slightly caramelized onion, tomato, thyme, and star anise. The other pot held chicken stock spiked with shallots and a bouquet garni—sprigs of thyme, parsley, and bay leaf tied together with a white string.
To the sides were bowls of pre-diced short rib and vegetables that would give the jellied consommé its bulk. But wait: Did something change?
“When you came, I was still playing with it,” Amateau told me with a smile. Turnips, he thought, could give it a sharper taste.
As everything cooked, he dunked gelatin sheets into an ice-water bath until they broke down into translucent lumps that looked like jellyfish. Amateau put them into the fortified broth and whisked away. A warm, luscious fragrance filled the kitchen as he filled six tumbler glasses halfway with the veggies and short rib, then carefully ladled the broth over them to about a finger below the brim. The finished product looked like a savory Manhattan.
“You don’t want to put them in the fridge too fast,” Amateau explained. As they sat out a bit, he grabbed an already prepared jellied consommé from a lowboy fridge and added a dollop of cream on top and some Italian parsley and offered it to me.
It was as delightful as I remembered. The parsley’s brightness, the crispiness of the veggies, the star anise’s kick—it was like a continental take on pho. Although Amateau can prepare it in a way that the veggies and meat are layered throughout the tumbler, I like them pooled at the bottom, with the gelatin serving as an appetizer to the main course of the short rib and veggies.
The best part of the dish was the novelty that made me want to order it in the first place: its chilled, chewy essence was unlike anything I’d had before. There’s a reason why jellied consommé was such a hit in our great-grandparents’ generation: it’s a light, unlikely antidote to summer.
Amateau told me that Musso & Frank sells about 14 jellied consommés every week. Before I could express my disappointment at Los Angeles’s unadventurous eaters, Amateau pointed out that that’s “twice more than what we used to sell.” He’s also gotten positive feedback, with regulars understanding that “modernizing something can be good.”
I agree. Which means that next time, I’ll try the lamb kidneys and hope Chaplin would’ve enjoyed them.•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
