Grub StreetLos Angeles

• New York
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco
• Chicago
• Philadelphia
• Boston

Juice bars are a little bit like cupcake shops, in that they're trendy enough to keep on opening up around here, even if everybody we know is a little more hung up getting stuffed with boar ribs, goat poutine, IPAs, and alpaca burgers. And just like cupcakes, fresh juice even has its own celebrities, like nutritionist Kimberly Snyder, who gained fame for reducing the frame of Good Day L.A. host Jillian Barberie and has stars like Fergie and Drew Barrymore jocking her Beauty Detox Solution. On November 14, Snyder is opening her first smoothie shop, Glow, offering "wellness shots," organic coffee and tea, detox cleanses, 100% organic smoothies, and cold-pressed juice to Melrose. Will it help turn our kind from greasy-fingered fat people into svelte starlets? Maybe, if only...um, well, no, probably not. But juice-heads will most likely be stoked on the spot.

Glow, 7473 Melrose Ave. West Hollywood.

Jonathan Gold notes both the hits and misses to be had at Laurel Hardware. Sadly, we've mostly experienced the latter, but the critic endures the obscene crowds of trend-bots for the cooking of Chimu and Lazy Ox vet Mario Alberto, who is "fond of long-braised off-cuts and deep acidity... a complex palette of chiles, seasonal fruits and exotic herbs." Unable to pin down any connection in the culturally capacious dishes other than the chef's vast imagination, Gold says "Sometimes the intermarriage works" as in an "almost cinematic" scenario of fresh corn kernels sauteed in truffle butter with Parmesan and an Artic char on spatezle. Of course, "Sometimes it doesn't," he notes, citing an apple and arugula salad that tastes "more like dessert" and a Hanger steak "marinated into submission." But Alberto's lamb belly is back in business and Gold dubs the restaurant "a useful place" for the late-night crowd that brings a bit of the Sunset Strip onto Santa Monica Blvd. "If you stay up late and enjoy cocktails with dinner," he urges, "it can be a good place to know." [LAT]

The plot thickens in the sexual battery allegations surrounding Cee-Lo Green, the cat-stroking singer and judge on The Voice. While still keeping mum on the name of the restaurant in question, TMZ now reports that the sick story began at a Downtown sushi destination, where Cee-Lo is accused of slipping a female date a drug last July, foiling the star's first line of defense that he hasn't been to the restaurant in question for three months.

It turns out that many of L.A.'s notable kitchen workhorses are really just dreaming of the day they can make their own pasta. Recalling the latter-day leads of chefs like Jason Neroni, Victor Casanova, and Alex Reznik, recently liberated Rustic Canyon chef Evan Funke is taking the former Beacon space in the Helms Bakery complex to open Bucato, which the L.A. Times calls a "pasta laboratorio."