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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
The passion and wild herbs of a Tuscan chef
A meal in Tuscany's Valdichiana. Plus, L.A.'s best new Armenian restaurant. Avner Levi's cherry-topped hamachi crudo. The chicken Caesar wrap comeback. And the best wedding gifts for restaurant lovers. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. Most of the time we travel to escape our everyday lives, to experience something new. But sometimes we travel to return to something familiar. I've been returning to the same part of Italy, an Umbrian town where it's easy to slip across the A1 into Tuscany, for more than 20 years. For many of those years I've made my way to Osteria La Vecchia Rota in Marciano della Chiana, a small fortress town between Arezzo and Siena. Two things bring me back. Certainly, there is the food, intensely local pastas and roasted meats you are unlikely to find in any of the thousands of Italian restaurants that exist in the U.S. And then there is the proprietor, Massimo Giavannini, who appears before you in a burgundy-red chef's apron and matching chef's hat that, in contrast to the stiff toques favored by classically trained French chefs, flops jauntily to the side — a sign of friendliness and approachability. You can order from a printed menu, but most of the time, if he is not handling a rush of orders in the kitchen, Giavannini — who has called himself 'the innkeeper with a passion for organic produce' — prefers to describe the dishes for you in his distinctive raspy voice. These are the moments you realize you have found yourself in the hands of a passionate cook, one who wants you to understand what is special about the ingredients that will go into your food. 'You know pesto,' he said on one visit, 'but our grandmother and grandfather made another pesto. We make it with selvatica mint [or wild mint], good garlic, good oil, pine nuts and walnuts.' He explains that the portulaca, or purslane, which sauces his tortelli, is critical to the region in summer — for people and for animals — 'because inside the leaf it's like water ... it's important for energy, to cool off.' Of the black truffle-topped ricotta gnudi I always order, he says, 'Ours are green because they are made with ... ' He struggles with the English word and then smiles big when I ask, 'nettles?' 'Yes!' he says. We have done this information exchange before and I love it every time. Often, I'll learn something new, but mostly I like being in his now-familiar presence. Of course, it was my late husband and this paper's previous restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, who first brought me and our kids — and then our friends — to La Vecchia Rota thanks to his obsession with trying as many places in the guidebook Osterie d'Italia, put out by Italy's Slow Food organization. I didn't see it in this year's guide, but at one point La Vecchia Rota — specializing, as its website says, in 'the now-forgotten cuisine of the Valdichiana' — was awarded a 'snail,' the guide's highest ranking for restaurants that epitomize Slow Food's cook-local ethos. Last month, a big group of us gathered in the piazza outside the restaurant, where tables are set out in the summer for al fresco dinners. Plates of our favorite pastas were passed around, including one of hand-cut squares of dough sauced with pears and Pecorino cheese and another made with Tuscany's big-bulbed garlic known as aglione di Valdichiana, then platters of chicken 'made the way it used to be,' roast pork, onions cooked in the ashes of the wood-fired oven and some of the best potatoes I've ever eaten. We may have been a group of outsiders with no actual roots in this land, but after being fed here by Giavannini year after year, this corner of Tuscany has started to feel a bit like home. Ever since I shared a meal with critic Bill Addison early in his research for this week's review of Tun Lahmajo in Burbank, I haven't stopped craving the Armenian restaurant's many meaty and cheesy breads, stews and roasted potatoes hand-mashed at the table. Since then, I've tried to get other people to come try what Addison calls 'L.A.'s best new Armenian restaurant' — in part because Tun Lahmajo serves dishes that go beyond the classic repertoire of charcoal-grilled meats and sides we've come to love in Southern California. I wasn't always successful. Maybe now, with Addison's official blessing on the place, I can persuade my friends to come along. 'A trio of friends — all from L.A.'s Armenian community, and all high school dropouts — scraped together $900 in 2017 because they believed that their Nashville-style fried chicken stand was the future,' writes Food's reporter Stephanie Breijo. 'Now Dave's Hot Chicken is worth $1 billion.' Breijo describes how Arman Oganesyan, Tommy Rubenyan and Dave Kopushyan (a former line cook at Thomas Keller's now-closed Bouchon Bistro in Beverly Hills) went from an unpermitted pop-up in an East Hollywood parking lot to the central figures in 'one of L.A.'s most astounding small-business success stories' after being acquired in June by private equity firm Roark Capital. It's a classic L.A. story — one more national fast-food chain born in Southern California. Of course, Dave's is not the L.A. restaurant that popularized hot chicken in Southern California. That would be Howlin' Ray's started in 2015 by Johnny Ray Zone. He gives full credit to the Black cooks of Nashville, who started bringing the fire to fried chicken, especially the family behind Prince's Hot Chicken, started in the 1930s by Thornton Prince after an angry lover tried to get her revenge on the philandering entrepreneur with an overdose of spice on his fried chicken. (The name of the woman who made that first fuming batch seems to have been lost to history.) Angelenos have access to the Prince legacy through Kim Prince, who partnered with Dulan's on Crenshaw owner Greg Dulan to start the Dulanville Food Truck. Back in 2020, columnist Jenn Harris made hot fried chicken with Prince and Zone for her Bucket List video series. It still makes good watching. Cento Raw Bar has become one of L.A.'s hottest new restaurants of 2025. Its chef, Avner Levi, came to the Times Test Kitchen recently for our 'Chef That!' video series to show us how he makes hamachi crudo, fresh jalapeños and an unusual but delicious addition of sweet cherries. Watch Levi break down half of a hamachi into two filets and then transform the fish into a perfect summer appetizer in this video. Then try the recipe for yourself. It's a wonderful summer dish. Reporter Lauren Ng talked with Shibumi chef-owner David Schlosser about his decision to close the Kappo omakase-style restaurant on Saturday. 'In the end of 2023 to 2024, things really flattened out,' he said. 'The staff is the same, the recipes were the same. The only thing that wasn't the same was people just weren't coming in.' And in another loss for downtown L.A., Verve Coffee Roasters has closed its Spring Street location, the first shop it opened in Southern California. 'Like many businesses in downtown L.A., we saw lasting changes in foot traffic patterns that deeply affected day-to-day operations,' a Verve spokesperson told Ng in an email. 'The level of consistent foot traffic simply didn't support what is needed to sustain the cafe in a high-overhead environment like downtown.' Its other L.A. locations remain open. Chef Michael Mina's Mother Tongue in Hollywood has also closed, and Cabra, the Peruvian-inspired restaurant from Girl & the Goat chef Stephanie Izard at downtown L.A.'s Hoxton hotel is closing on July 31.
Los Angeles Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Why a Mexican restaurant is among the first places you should eat in Copenhagen
Finding great Mexican food in unexpected places. Losing the city of L.A.'s oldest restaurant. A guide to the vegan ice cream boom. The Italian potatoes that changed Jenn Harris' mind about fat fries. And 'some guy on Tripadvisor.' I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. As Angelenos, we don't think twice about eating Mexican food one day, Thai food the next and Korean food the day after that. Weekend breakfast with friends is as likely to be Chinese rice porridge as it is a plate of buckwheat pancakes or chilaquiles. In fact, we rarely bother to break down our dining choices by cuisine. It's more, let's go get some ramen or birria or boat noodles. But when we travel, we tend to eat more conservatively. With limited time in a new place, we usually stick to what we perceive as the food of the country we're visiting. Trying to find decent Mexican food in Italy, for instance, while not impossible, isn't easy in a country that prizes the joys of hyper-regionality. You take a risk ordering pasta alla carbonara (a seemingly simple dish that's hard to perfect if you don't take your time with the guanciale) outside of Rome or tortellini en brodo in any Italian region other than Emilia-Romagna. And yet, when I landed in Copenhagen late last month, with all the glories of smørrebrød and cutting-edge Nordic cuisine to explore — including two places in the city (Noma and Geranium) named at different points the No. 1 restaurant in the world on the World's 50 Best list — the first place I headed was a Mexican restaurant. Of course, the restaurant, Sanchez, is no ordinary Mexican spot. The owner, Rosio Sanchez, was the head pastry chef for Rene Redzepi at Noma for five years before opening her first Copenhagen taqueria, Hija de Sanchez, in 2015. She briefly returned to collaborate with Redzepi on Noma's 2017 Mexico pop-up in Tulum. If a real-life version of 'The Bear' character Marcus (Lionel Boyce) had been sent to Copenhagen for pastry chef training at the world's best restaurant in 2014, Sanchez likely would have been his mentor, not Will Poulter's character Luca. Indeed, Sanchez appears in the series' chef-packed Season 3 finale talking about why she loves to cook. And one of Sanchez's former chefs, Laura Cabrera, has risen to lead her own kitchen at the zero-waste restaurant Baldío in Mexico City. When I first ate Sanchez's Mexican cooking in 2016 at Hija de Sanchez, I was immediately struck by the skill of her tortilla making, not easy in a place where masa is not readily available, and the way she was able make food that felt completely Mexican while incorporating Danish ingredients — a fjord shrimp taco, for instance, or gooseberry salsa. Never mind that as she told Margy Rochlin in this paper during a 2017 guest chef appearance at the L.A. Times Food Bowl with Sqirl's Jessica Koslow, some of her first customers in Copenhagen called tortillas 'pancakes.' Or that when she saw Danes eating tacos with a fork and knife she had an illustrated and nonjudgmental 'how to eat your taco' poster made. Since those early days, Copenhagen eaters have taken to her tacos. There are now five Hija de Sanchez taquerias across the city. But Sanchez was not solely interested in exploring tacos. At the end of 2017 she opened Sanchez, a restaurant that elevates Mexican cuisine while still keeping it approachable. In its current form, the restaurant offers a five-course tasting menu for the rough equivalent of $82 with the option of an even more affordable three-course meal for about $59. If you want still more, you can add extra courses — such as an oyster with a sauce of habanero and sea buckthorn, or a slender bean, sheep cheese and cured egg burrito. The oyster was a good, bracing start. And lime-cured langoustine ceviche, served aguachile style, with a verde sauce and fermented tomato water, kept the freshness going. But it was the salbute, with a jolt of intense corn from the puffed fried tortilla and layers of deep, complex flavors from chicken cooked in recado negro sauce, made with charred chiles, plus grilled bladderwrack seaweed in place of lettuce, a quail egg and a drizzle of habanero-árbol chile oil that showed how Sanchez is combining tradition, local ingredients and her own new way of approaching Mexican food. Monkfish cheek, marinated al pastor style, beautifully charred and served with herbs on a lightly charred lettuce leaf came next. It all led to carnitas tacos that we assembled ourselves with freshly made tortillas, herbs, salsa, pickled jalapeño and onion, plus, because this is Copenhagen, green sea buckthorn. The night's most memorable dish, however, was dessert. The menu's description was understated: chocolate mousse. But what is usually a satisfying but unexciting dish came out with a ring of salsa macha, crunchy with pumpkin seeds and preserved ancho chiles, a layer of whipped cream and, for good measure, roasted kelp and drips of olive oil. The mousse itself was made chocolate from Chiapas and hid a nugget of more chiles underneath. The spicy and sweet flavors felt both old and new. It's the kind of dish that shows that Mexican cuisine even thousands of miles away from Mexico itself is still evolving. Now if only we could get Sanchez to open a branch of her restaurant here in L.A. It's been a tough week for L.A. restaurants. Karla Marie Sanford reports that Cole's French Dip, which opened in 1908, making it the city's oldest restaurant, will close its doors on Aug. 2. 'By the time the Olympics get here, all these mom and pops will be gone,' said Brian Lenzo, senior vice president of operations for Cedd Moses' Pouring With Heart, which took over the downtown L.A. restaurant in 2008. 'Hopefully it's a wakeup call for the right people to step up and figure out a plan.' Another downtown loss: David Schlosser announced that his rigorous Japanese-focused restaurant Shibumi — last year he recreated a 1789 Japanese banquet — will permanently close on July 19. Senior food editor Danielle Dorsey reports that Alisa Reynolds' soul food bistro My 2 Cents, on The Times' 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. list, will close on July 31 after 12 years on Pico Boulevard. Reynolds plans to focus on catering, pop-ups and collaborations. And Lauren Ng reports that Melody, the Virgil Village natural wine bar that hosted many pop-ups during its nearly 10 years in business, will close this weekend, though owner Eric Tucker will open a temporary 'Bar Band-Aid' pizza spot on July 16 until the Craftsman bungalow space can be sold. But there are some signs of resilience even in this tough climate. Ng spent time at the recently reopened El Gato Night Market, which shut down for two weeks after ICE raids heated up in Los Angeles. Though more than half of the market's 70 to 80 vendors had not returned in the first days of the reopening and business was slow at first, the crowds started to return after a few days. 'Vendors, many of whom worry for their safety and the future of their businesses, show up for work out of necessity,' Ng writes, 'but also to provide comfort and familiarity for customers, most of whom are Latino and often bring their young children.' Meanwhile, when Maria Sanchez, known on social media as 'Maria la de los Burritos,' was asked to leave her usual burrito-selling spot outside a Home Depot after ICE raids started happening, she was undeterred. She packed her gold-foil-wrapped burritos in the trunk of her car and found eager customers at construction sites. Her carne asada burritos typically sell out in 30 minutes. Contributor Madeleine Connors profiles the maker of these internet-viral burritos that are also doing some good for L.A. workers. Restaurants handle negative customer feedback in different ways. Some, as this sign seen outside the burger bar Sliders in Copenhagen, embrace it. The invitation: 'Try the worst sliders some guy on Tripadvisor has ever had in his entire life alongside enjoying our 'terrible service.' ' It certainly got my attention. If I hadn't already filled up on smørrebrød, I would have stopped in for a 'lamb za'atar spectacular' or 'decadent Dane' (beef patty, melted Danish cheese, caramelized onions and pickled apple) slider.
Los Angeles Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The perfect summer corn fritter to welcome you back to downtown L.A. restaurants
Returning to downtown L.A. restaurants after the curfew. The spirituality of red Fanta. 'The most exciting place to eat in the South Bay in recent memory.' And a Crunchwrap Supreme plot twist. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. I was happily eating a light lunch of poached chicken with an array of radishes, tarragon mayonnaise and buttered milk bread toast dusted with sea salt when our friendly and attentive waiter, just four days on the job, walked up holding a plate of sunshine: three beautifully fried corn fritters with flash-fried basil, a wedge of lime and a mound of salt for dipping. There was a dish of chile sauce too, but the corn's sweetness, salt and herbs were all I needed on the day before the official start of summer. I was at chef Giles Clark's Cafe 2001 with the editor of L.A. Times Food, Daniel Hernandez, and every table in the place was filled. The cafe's big brother restaurant, Yess, from chef Junya Yamasaki, was boarded up at the front entrance facing 7th Street — the dinner-only spot closed during the recent downtown L.A. curfew — but we saw activity in the kitchen when we peeked through the glass blocks on the side of the restaurant and were hopeful that Yess would reopen that night. As columnist Jenn Harris wrote this week, the seven-night curfew left downtown L.A. streets empty: 'All along 2nd Street, the windows and doors were hidden behind plywood. ... The frequently bustling Japanese Village Plaza, where shoppers dine at a revolving sushi bar and stop for cheese-filled corn dogs, was desolate.' Now there are tentative signs of recovery. 'Hours after the curfew was lifted Tuesday, downtown started to show signs of coming to life again,' Harris wrote. 'Just before 7 p.m., a line began to form at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo ... known as much for the perpetual wait as it is for its steaming bowls of tonkotsu ramen. It was a hopeful sight.' Yet, as Harris also reported, Kato, the three-time No. 1 restaurant on the L.A. Times 101 list, whose chef, Jon Yao, was named the best chef in California at this week's James Beard Awards, 'was still looking at a 70% drop in reservations for the upcoming week' after the curfew's end. 'The direct impact of the media's portrayal of DTLA being unsafe, which it is not, has impacted Kato,' Ryan Bailey, a partner in the restaurant told Harris. Certainly downtown is frequently portrayed, 'as a sometimes dodgy place to live and work.' But 'despite myriad challenges,' reported real estate specialist Roger Vincent this week, 'downtown L.A. is staging a comeback. ... Occupancy in downtown apartments has remained about 90% for more than a year ... slightly higher than the level before the pandemic. ... In fact, the downtown population has more than tripled since 2000, reflecting a dynamic shift in the city center's character toward a 24-hour lifestyle.' On Tuesday night, I met reporter Stephanie Breijo at Hama Sushi, another Little Tokyo spot where the wait is usually lengthy, and was able to get a spot at the sushi bar by arriving before 6 p.m. The place quickly filled up behind us. Though some were at Hama to support downtown, many came to pay their respects to the memory of recently deceased owner Tsutomu Iyama. Breijo will be reporting on the life and legacy of Iyama in the coming days, but on Tuesday night the longtime staff was on top of its game, serving affordable but excellent sushi, without gimmicks as Iyama intended. Two days later I was at Cafe 2001, which has become one of my favorite — and most useful — restaurants in the city, open all day and into the evening on weekends. In our recent brunch guide, I wrote about Clark's red-wine-poached egg, my partner, John, swears by Clark's caponata, and deputy food editor Betty Hallock loves 'his versions of a quintessential yoshoku icon, the Japanese potato salad ... [sometimes] kabocha pumpkin and puntarelle with blood orange and fermented chiles [or] a verdant pea and potato salad with lemon-y pea tendrils.' But my current favorite Clark dish? Those light and crisp corn fritters. They were the perfect welcome back downtown gift after a tense week of closed restaurants. 'I've ... had customers come in and tell me, 'The American dream doesn't exist anymore.'' That's Evelin Gomez, a juice bar worker at the Carson location of Vallarta Supermarket, speaking with reporter Lauren Ng. Ng checked social media accounts and conducted interviews with people in grocery stores and restaurants founded by immigrants and the children of immigrants about what they are witnessing with the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement actions in Southern California. The independent-minded Casa Vega owner Christy Vega, who supported Rick Caruso over Karen Bass for mayor in the most recent election, 'has been an outspoken critic of ICE,' Ng wrote. 'I protested in honor of my Mexican immigrant father, Rafael Evaristo Vega, and the very people Casa Vega was built on since 1956,' Vega wrote on Instagram of her attendance at a 'No Kings' protest. 'I will always remember my roots and ALWAYS fight for the voiceless immigrant community.' Some restaurateurs, as Stephanie Breijo reported, have been coordinating grocery handouts and deliveries for those fearing being swept up in ICE raids. 'We understand the feelings that are happening in our community right now, even if we are legal,' said Xochitl Flores-Marcial, a partner in Boyle Heights' X'tiosu with its chef-founders, Felipe and Ignacio Santiago. 'Even if we have documents, that doesn't exempt us from the danger that so many people are facing right now and in our culture.' Meanwhile, assistant food editor Danielle Dorsey, put together a guide to 15 different food fundraisers and events to support those affected by ICE actions. Many are happening this weekend. The young and ambitious staff at Vin Folk — with two alums of Aitor Zabala's Somni leading the team of chef-servers — charmed columnist Jenn Harris during her visits to the Hermosa Beach restaurant created by chefs Kevin de los Santos and Katya Shastova. 'The dining room crackles with the hopeful, earnest energy of a start-up company, ripe with possibility,' she writes in her restaurant review published this week. 'And with food that has all the technique and precision of a tasting menu restaurant with less of the fuss, it is without a doubt the most exciting place to eat in the South Bay in recent memory.' Some of the dishes she highlights: a savory tart that could be 'a love child of mussels in escabeche and pot pie'; headcheese toast, 'a loose interpretation of the patty melt at Langer's Deli'; pritto, 'a take on Taiwanese popcorn chicken'; 'exceptionally tender' beef tongue, 'an homage to Shastova's childhood in rural southern Russia,' and a risotto-style interpretation of Singapore chili crab. Vin Folk is also nurturing a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs: 'Staff are trained in multiple positions, both in and out of the kitchen,' Harris writes. 'Everyone helps with prep, then De los Santos and Shastova [place] members in positions where they may be strongest.' 'We are teaching them,' Shastova tells Harris. 'You go through everything because we believe it's important to learn every single detail of the restaurant if you want to have your own one day.' In her latest Grocery Goblin dispatch, correspondent Vanessa Anderson examines why strawberry red Fanta — 'known as Fanta nam daeng, or 'Fanta red water'' — is seen in so many Thai shrines or spirit houses, many of which are set up at local grocery stores and restaurants. 'Much like those on this earthly plane, the way to a spirit's heart is through his or her stomach,' Anderson reports. 'In the past when we would do offerings to ghosts, it would be an offering of blood,' Pip Paganelli at Thai dessert shop Banh Kanom Thai, tells Anderson, who concludes that 'the bubbly strawberry nectar has since replaced animal sacrifice.' Paganelli, Anderson adds, also posits that red Fanta's 'sickly sweetness ... is beloved by ghosts because of just that. Most spirits have a sweet tooth.' The anniversary none of our social media feeds or TV news anchors will let us forget this week is the release 50 years ago of Steven Spielberg's 'eating machine' blockbuster 'Jaws.' But columnist Gustavo Arellano has another anniversary on this mind this week — the debut 20 years ago of Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme. 'The item has become essential for American consumers who like their Mexican food cheap and gimmicky,' he wrote this week, 'which is to say, basically everyone (birria ramen, anybody?)' The plot twist is that Arellano, author of 'Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America,' had never actually eaten a Crunchwrap Supreme until this month. And when he finally did try it? Let's just say it lacked the crunch he was looking for. I'll let you read his column to find out why he prefers the bean-and-cheese burritos and Del Taco. Bonus: Arellano references Jenn Harris' 2015 story and recipe for a homemade Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme, to be enjoyed in the comfort of your home, without the 'bad playlists, scratchy paper napkins and fluorescent lighting' of a fast food restaurant. I think hers would have the crunch Arellano seeks.
Los Angeles Times
26-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Altadena is slowly ... very slowly ... reopening for business
Altadena's slow reawakening. Plus, mole 3,675 days old and counting, L.A.'s hardest reservation, Festival of Books cooks and lots of restaurant openings. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. Ever since the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, I've been on the lookout for signs of recovery. I often drive up Lake Avenue where so many small businesses burned, leaving twisted steel frames and slumping walls. This is a neighborhood I used to walk. It's not far from my home in north Pasadena, and just two days before the Eaton and Palisades fires began I spent part of that Sunday afternoon enjoying an excellent cappuccino in the color-splashed back garden of Café de Leche's now-destroyed Altadena location. As I wrote in January, the fire came 'at a particularly vulnerable moment for a food community that was in the midst of renewal' with 'a fresh generation of small-business owners ... starting new businesses or reviving old ones.' One of those businesses was Altadena Beverage & Market on Allen Avenue. It survived the flames but its owners, Kate and Adam Vourvoulis, lost their home in the fire. Week after week I would drive by the superette, looking for the plastic goose mascot that always signaled that the shop was open for business. Along Lake Avenue, I've been watching for activity at David Tewasart and Clarissa Chin's Thai restaurant Miya, where I loved the khao soi and crispy snapper, and at Leo Bulgarini's gelateria and Italian restaurant Bulgarini. These business owners also saw their homes burn while their restaurants survived. But surviving the flames, as former Times reporter Cindy Carcamo wrote in late January, doesn't mean the businesses can easily reopen. 'We're not a winner at all in any of this,' Bulgarini told Carcamo. 'You've lost your home so you've lost your sanctuary, and you really have lost your business right now because it's not going to be around for a while.' He estimated that with so many of customers displaced, his business, at least in its Altadena location, would be 'pretty much dead for at least a year.' And yet ... there are small signs of progress. Army Corps of Engineer teams have made headway in the debris cleanup, though many, many homes await their turn. And while the green Servpro vans that popped up for smoke and ash remediation are still a common sight, they're not quite as ubiquitous. Most heartening, a few businesses have begun to open their doors. Last month, Maggie Cortez's popular restaurant El Patron began serving its classic Mexican American dishes again. I stopped by last Friday for fish tacos and found the sunlit restaurant busy at lunchtime. It was good to be among my neighbors. Yet there were two conflicting scenes out the picture glass windows lined with colorful papel picado banners. Through one window was greenery from a pocket park untouched by the flames, but across the street, on the block where the pizzeria Side Pie used to be, the fire's wreckage revealed itself like an open wound. Then, the very next day, I spotted something new when I was leaving Armen Market on Allen Avenue (owner Armen Gharibi managed to open quickly after the fire, with only a minor noticeable glitch one day when the credit card connection wasn't working). The goose was loose. The plastic bird wasn't in its frequent resting spot along the sidewalk across from Armen; it was perched on the wood bench outside Altadena Beverage & Market. I walked over and found the store up and running. 'We couldn't have imagined how much would change and that it would take 100 days and so many tears and so much uncertainty to come back,' read the shop's most recent Instagram post from this week announcing a May 3 reopening celebration. 'We weren't sure if we wanted to. We were scared. Our whole future was uncertain. But your support and words of encouragement pushed us forward.' It's true that some of the shelves and one of the refrigerator cases were nearly empty. No Maury's bagels yet. But there was some tempting dishware from the shop's still-closed sister business, Zinnie's Table. When I asked if they would be getting any Bub & Grandma's bread deliveries soon, they said they'd already started and had sold out for the day. I'll be back this weekend for bread and maybe some bagels. Plus, I've got my eye on a colorful confetti-patterned cutting board that could go well with my new kitchen cabinets. I know the goose will be waiting. Is mole better aged and rich or young and tart? This was one of the questions we contemplated this week at the sold-out residency of Enrique Olvera's acclaimed Mexico City restaurant Pujol at his L.A. outpost Damian in the Arts District. Olvera is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Pujol, which, as Food's Stephanie Breijo recently wrote, is closed in Mexico City until May 5 for a quick remodel of the restaurant's terrace. (At Olvera's taqueria Ditroit behind Damian, a more casual pop-up, Molino el Pujol, will run through Sunday, but know that there will probably be a long line.) On the menu Tuesday night, the first of the nine-day dinner series that ends April 30, were several dishes from Pujol's past, including an avocado flauta with shrimp, and skewered baby corn coated in a coffee mayonnaise flecked with chicatana ants. One of my favorite dishes of the night was pulpo en su tinta, with a blackened octopus tendril wrapped around a silky mash of incredibly flavorful ayacote beans. But the plate everyone was waiting for was the mole madre, aged and maintained like a sourdough starter for more than 10 years — or 3,675 days and counting on Tuesday night. Our server told us that some 90 kilos of the mother mole was flown to L.A. from Mexico City. The inky-dark sauce had several layers of complexity, including a smoky backnote. In the center of the circle of mole madre was a smaller circle of burnt orange mole nuevo. Only about a week old, it was made with several fruits that gave the sauce an intriguing tartness. No protein was served on the plate. Instead you took freshly made hoja santa tortillas and swiped it into the sauce scarpetta-style. It was hard to decide which I liked better. All I can tell you is that by the end of the course there was barely any sauce left on the plate. This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Come see us at our Food x Now Serving booth near the cooking stage on the campus of the University of Southern California. We've got a great line-up of cookbook and food authors coming to the booth, including memoirist Laurie Woolever ('Care and Feeding') and Found Oyster chef Ari Kolender ('How to Cook the Finest Things in the Sea'). Some of the chefs on the cooking stage include Fat + Flour chef Nicole Rucker, Milk Bar's Christina Tosi, Kogi's Roy Choi and 'Top Chef' star Brooke Williamson. Speaking of 'Top Chef,' I'm interviewing the show's head judge, Tom Colicchio, and host Kristen Kish onstage Saturday at 4:30 p.m. And senior editor of Food, Danielle Dorsey, is talking with Sarah Ahn ('Umma: A Korean Mom's Kitchen Wisdom'), Michelle T. King ('Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food') and Steve Hoffman ('A Season for That: Lost and Found in Southern France') about their memoirs at 3 p.m. on Saturday. Check here for the full lineup of food-related book happenings at the festival.
Los Angeles Times
12-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
It's too late to tariff the globalization out of American cuisine. More chili crisp, please
Tariff fear and loathing. The $40 Dodger dog, $100 a box for avocados and remembering Hal Frederick. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. There's been a lot of talk lately about tariffs and the Ford F-150, the hugely popular pickup truck made with 'parts that come from over 24 different countries,' as the Wall Street Journal documented in a widely viewed video. 'No car,' says the narrator, 'not even a U.S.-built Ford F-150, is 100% U.S.-made.' The American car has been globalized. The same could be said of the American palate, which has been shaped by far more than 24 different countries. Let's put aside the many 'all-American' grocery store products that unknown to most consumers use ingredients from other countries, such as apple juice concentrate, Vitamin C or ascorbic acid and vanillin from China. Because even if those exports were cut off in a Trump administration executive order, you can't tariff or deport away Americans' globalized food cravings. Consider one condiment that is becoming increasingly integral to American cuisine: chili crisp. The star condiment in countless TikTok videos — so many chili crisp eggs! — is readily available at Walmart, Costco, Target, Kroger stores and other mainstream supermarkets. And not just in the so-called 'international' section. It's increasingly stocked in the salsa and hot sauce aisle, often right next to Huy Fong Food's sriracha sauce and its many imitators. The rise of chili crisp follows Americans' progression from ketchup to Tabasco sauce to salsa and ever-hotter chile sauces. Back in 1991, Americans for the first time spent more on salsa — 'a retailing category that includes picante, enchilada, taco and similar chili-based sauces,' wrote Molly O'Neill in the New York Times — than they did on ketchup. 'The taste for salsa is as mainstream as apple pie these days,' the president of market research company Packaged Facts Inc. told O'Neill. Then came sriracha sauce, which first emerged in Thailand during the 1930s and is now so popular here that periodic shortages of the sauce cause panic buying. Two different women are credited with its origin, either La-Orr Suwanprasop or Thanom Chakkapak, using a recipe from her father Gimsua Timkrajang. What is certain is that Vietnamese immigrant David Tran popularized the sauce through his rooster-emblazoned Huy Fong Foods brand founded in 1980 here in Southern California, making sriracha the true Angeleno's ketchup. (Note that Huy Fong's sambal oelek was the secret ingredient in Jonathan Gold's Hoppin' John, though he considered sriracha an acceptable substitute.) Chili crisp, sitting right beside the sriracha in the condiment caddies of so many Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants across Southern California, wasn't far behind in gaining popularity. As columnist Jenn Harris wrote last year during a now-settled trademark dispute over the term 'chili crunch' (the term is now free to be used by any brand), many of us came to know chili crisp in our own homes through the Lao Gan Ma or 'Old Godmother' brand started in China by Tao Huabi and prominently stocked at 99 Ranch and other Chinese grocery stores. In a 2015 taste test of hot sauces (from Tapatío to habanero) for this paper with former food editor Amy Scattergood, Gold, Harris and chef judges Roy Choi and Alvin Cailan, Lao Gan Ma's chili crisp was the winner. 'It has texture. It has sweetness, heat, fermented complexity and a deep toasted-onion flavor,' Gold wrote. 'It is like a three-course meal in a spoon.' Since then, many L.A.-area restaurants have started making their own chili crisp — during the pandemic, I relied on the version made by Yang's Kitchen in Alhambra, picking up a jar along with fresh produce and other grocery items they were then stocking, including blocks of Meiji tofu. But the person who is credited with bringing chili crisp into mainstream grocery aisles is Jing Gao, who started her Fly By Jing brand in 2018. Gao's sauce costs a bit more than typical Chinese brand but people noticed the quality, and she was an excellent marketer for the sauce, getting it into the hands of prominent chefs and other tastemakers who spread the word — with the purpose, she has said, of 'evolving culture through taste.' Last year, when deputy food editor Betty Hallock persuaded Gao to create a chili crisp-inspired Thanksgiving menu — because chili crisp turns out to be a wonderful addition to the American holiday table — she reported that more than 2 million jars had been sold nationwide. Of course, one of the things that makes Gao's chili crisp so good is the sourcing of her ingredients. And those ingredients come from China. Which means that Fly by Jing, as Gao posted this week on Instagram, has been 'highly impacted by the trade war that's currently happening.' As of Thursday, she said that her growers and producers in China are facing tariffs of 160%. 'That's compared to about 15 percent before all of this began.' Even so, she wanted her customers to know that she is holding firm: 'We continue to prioritize the sourcing and manufacturing of our core sauce products in my home town in Sichuan. The integrity of our ingredients, their specific provenance and the craftsmanship of our products are highly local to Sichuan and will continue to be. These ingredients — from the fermented black beans ... to the highly prized tribute peppers, the erjingtiao chilies, the cold-pressed roasted rape seed oils — cannot be grown anywhere else. They're integral to the deep and complex flavors of our products and this will not change.' All of this comes after she lowered the price of her chili crisp so that it would be accessible to more consumers. So she's starting this tariff season with less of a cushion than she had before. What could get Gao and others like her through this is the fact that there is a high demand for her product. 'Over the last six years, as a result of our growth and investment into a global supply chain, we've made an indelible mark on the international aisle of the grocery stores. ... We have fundamentally changed and diversified the palates of millions of Americans and we believe that these bold and complex flavors are universal. And once you expand your palate there's no going back. Bold and diverse international flavors are what Americans want. And they're here to stay.' No matter how high the demand for bold and complex flavors, however, satisfying these cravings isn't going to be easy for the Southern California chefs and restaurateurs who helped shape those tastes. 'We are freaking out,' Billie Sayavong of the Westminster Laotian spot Nok's Kitchen told Harris in her story this week about how restaurants plan to handle the tariffs. 'In just the last week,' Harris wrote, 'the restaurant's meat and seafood invoice increase by 30%.' Shaheen Ghazaly's Kurrypinch in Los Feliz uses Sri Lankan cinnamon sticks 'in at least 80% of the dishes on the menu,' Harris wrote. 'It's what gives Ghazaly's seeni sambol, the caramelized onion relish, a distinct, subtle, almost citrusy cinnamon flavor.' This month, his 'weekly grocery order jumped from $1,800 to $2,600.' 'Thai Nakorn in Stanton relies on a specific coconut cream from Thailand to make its curries, as well as Thai Jasmine rice and a long list of herbs. There's a unique Thai crab fat, fermented Thai crabs and Thai shrimp paste in the crab papaya salad,' said Harris. Linda Sreewarom, 'whose aunt opened the original Thai Nakorn in Orange County in 1984,' told Harris, 'To change the recipes completely and try to find different brands of all these things made in the U.S. is impossible.' As Caroline Petrow-Cohen and Malia Mendez reported in a broader story on how the tariffs will affect the economy of Southern California, the higher cost of produce grown in Mexico and other countries has already made things harder for small businesses. 'It's going to hurt a lot,' said Riyad Ladadwa of Diamond Fresh Farmers Market. 'I've never in my life seen avocados for $100 a box.' 'What does 'America First' mean when applied to the restaurant industry?' Harris asked in her column. 'What cuisines are considered American and who gets to decide? ... Without immigrant food culture, what is American food?' In the introduction to 'The Gourmet Cookbook' published in 2006, editor and former L.A. and New York restaurant critic Ruth Reichl put it simply: 'The history of American cooking is the history of immigration.' Our palates have been globalized and we're not going back. Also: Will tariffs kill your favorite affordable wine? Patrick Comiskey talks with Lou Amdur, owner of Los Feliz' beloved Lou Wine Shop about the tariff's effects on 'comfort zone' wines. 'Wines that we are currently are selling for $30 and might be doable for a weeknight, for some people it will no longer be doable at $40,' Amdur said. 'Wines that people would grab unthinkingly at price X, now that there's a 20% tariff, suddenly it's no longer unthinkable.' And for those who think they can escape tariffs by buying American, Amdur says not so fast: 'I love all these glib Monday morning quarterbacks who just say, you know, 'Just switch to California wine.' I do carry a fair amount of California wine, and I sometimes have New York wine, but they don't really understand the economics of the wine. It's not like there's going to be a one-to-one replacement.' Brad Johnson, founder of the recently closed Post & Beam, wrote a lovely appreciation of Hal Frederick, the trailblazing Venice restaurateur and owner of Hal's Bar and Grill, who died April 2 at 91: 'Tall, handsome and elegant, Frederick, a former actor, maintained a nightly presence at Hal's. He moved from table to table, never overstaying, and everyone sought his greeting. There is a fine art to being a restaurateur, and Frederick fully embraced the role.'
