Why Norah Is The New Celeb Hot Spot

What's up guys? Leslie Robbins here for Young Hollywood, about to take you behind the scenes of one of West Hollywood's hottest spots, Nora. I am joined by the owner and restaurant tour, Rohan Tawer. Now tell me, why do you have two titles? Can't we just call you owner?

There's two types of ownership in in the restaurant business. There's what I call the absentee investor and then there's what I call the restaurant tour. And the restaurant tour, I think, you know, in this day and age is few and far between. And he's someone that works in the restaurant that is, uh, you know, he understands the day-to-day operations. Uh, you know, he's a true restaurant man as as Bastich would call it. And I I see myself as a true restaurant man as opposed to someone who just provided money for for a business.

You're from India. You opened a restaurant in Bombay. What makes you open a restaurant here in Los Angeles?

I actually was not, you know, initially destined to be in the restaurant business. I worked with my with my father, uh, who's in the tile business. Completely unrelated. But it was sort of, you know, it's the third generation business. It was sort of expected of me to go back and and learn the ropes and and then eventually take over. I you know, I did try it. I spent three years working with him and I and I wasn't passionate about it. So, an opportunity came up to take over a restaurant space and I just kind of went for it.

So, this is the place to be. Huge celebrity following. Who's been here?

Well, we've had Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel came in one night. Jessica Alba and Cash Warren came in one night. Seth Rogen was in here with his family. Quite a few people who who just really appreciate what we're doing. And of course, you know, proximity helps because we're we're in the neighborhood. This is our dining area. Um, the beautiful high-top tables created over there by by custom design by Thomas Shoes. And then, uh, this lighting as well was all custom designed by by Shoes and and manufactured to spec. A lot of interest in this area. People love to to sit in sort of what they call the main room. Yeah. Um, and we have a little lounge in the front. This this little area in the front opens up in the evenings and and we call it sort of our our our like drinking garden. The bar is beautiful. It's a very popular spot to have drinks. People love coming in here for drinks. We've got a great cocktail program. Most importantly, we get stuff quickly. So, you know, we have a cocktail program, but it's not too precious.

That's the key. A fast drink. A good drink but fast.

Exactly. Welcome to our kitchen. This is uh the heart and soul of the restaurant. And uh right here is our executive chef, Mike Luts.

How do you do? Pleasure to see you. Thank you. Thanks for coming.

This is your home away from home, right?

This is. I spend more time here than I do with my actual family.

Your cornbread is very, very popular. People talk about it. You know that. It's that thing that everybody gets when they come to North.

And as you can see behind you, this is the size batch we do daily. What we have here is corn in butter. We go in with the eggs and then once the eggs are fully incorporated, we're going to add our wet ingredients, which is some cream and some buttermilk. Once we incorporate all the wet ingredients, we don't want to overmix it because cornbread, much like a biscuit or something, wants to be nice and light. So these are all of our dry ingredients, flour, a little sugar, a little cornmeal, just some baking soda and baking powder. This is just regular butter. It's going to coat the skillet. It's going to keep the cornbread from sticking. And then we're going to do two scoops per cornbread. And we're going to bake these for about 12 minutes. So now we're going to make a Yoki dish while we wait for the cornbread to bake. The sauce itself just gets tomato and and onion and that's it. We have a little Fresno chili, which is like a red jalapeno. Our fresh tomatoes that I told you about. Yes. I'm going to add some of these scarlet runner beans. We're going to add a few castrol olives, which are an Italian olive. And then we're going to cook our Yoki. Uh this is boiling and salted water. And we use a very straightforward Yoki recipe.

So you're saying you print new menus every day? That means the menu changes.

Yeah, like we work with a lot of things. Like we bring in um whole animals. We're always sourcing the freshest product from the farmers' markets. So um that sort of thing requires the menu to change constantly.

Sexy. A little bit spicy from the chili. You get the freshness of that summer tomato sauce. Sexy, sexy, sexy. This is perfection. Thank you. I got to blow on it. I'm blowing on it. I know. Cheers, friend.

Cheers. Once again. Thank you so much for coming.

Amazing. And I'll take those two cornbread to go. Thank you.

You got it.