customer

Netflix on Wednesday touted a surge in popularity for its low-cost streaming plan with ads, as it looks to tap into the lucrative the world of brands.

The streaming giant said it now has more than 190 million monthly active viewers watching ads through a plan that costs $7.99 a month. The lowest cost ad-free plan costs $17.99 a month.

In May, Netflix said it had 94 million monthly active users watching ads through the cheaper plan. That translated to roughly 170 million monthly active viewers, the company said at the time.

However, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company is now using a different methodology to measure its audience watching ads, making exact comparison’s difficult.

Netflix now defines monthly active viewers as customers who watched at least 1 minute of ads on Netflix per month. It then multiplies that by the estimated average number of people in a household. Previously, Netflix had measured monthly active users based on the number of Netflix profiles watching content with ads.

The streamer said its previous measurement didn’t illustrate all the people who were in the room watching.

“Our move to viewers means we can give a more comprehensive count of how many people are actually on the couch, enjoying our can’t-miss series, films, games and live events with friends and family,”wrote Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising in a post on the streamer’s website on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Netflix executives said the growth in ad viewers was in line with their expectations.

“We are very satisfied with where we are at,” Reinhard, said in a press briefing. “We think there is a lot of opportunity to grow on this plan around the world, and we’re going to continue to make sure that we are offering our customers a great experience and a great buying experience on the advertising side.”

Netflix began its foray into ad-supported streaming in 2022, after it received pressure from investors to diversify how it makes revenue. Previously, Netflix mainly made money through subscriptions and for many years had been ad-adverse.

The company said last month it was on track to more than double its ad revenue in 2025, but did not cite specific figures. Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters said in an earnings presentation in October that the ad revenue is still small relative to the size of the company’s subscription revenues, but advertisers are excited about Netflix’s growing scale.

“We see plenty of room for growth ahead,” Peters said.

On Wednesday, Netflix said it is expanding its options for advertisers, including demographic targeting in areas such as education, marital status and household income.

Netflix also said it has partnered with brands including brewing company Peroni Nastro Azzurro in ads for its romantic comedy series “Emily in Paris,” and tested dynamic ad insertion with programs including WWE Raw this quarter and will offer that feature in the U.S. and other countries for NFL Christmas Gameday.

Many streamers have been increasing the cost of their subscriptions in order to become more profitable. Earlier this year Netflix raised the prices on plans.

Millions of YouTube TV subscribers could miss “Monday Night Football” on ESPN and ABC News’ election day coverage as the blackout of Walt Disney-owned channels stretches into a second week.

“Monday Night Football” features the Dallas Cowboys battling the Arizona Cardinals. In addition, several important political contests are on Tuesday ballots, including the New York City mayor’s election, gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, and California’s Prop. 50 to decide whether officials can redraw the state’s congressional map to favor Democrats.

Disney on Monday sought a temporary thaw in tensions with Google Inc. after the two sides failed last week to strike a new distribution contract covering Disney’s television channels on Google’s YouTube TV.

“Despite the impasse that led to the current blackout, we have asked YouTube TV to restore ABC for Election Day so subscribers have access to the information they rely on,” a Disney spokesperson said in a statement Monday. “We believe in putting the public interest first and hope YouTube TV will take this small step for their customers while we continue to work toward a fair agreement.”

A Google spokesperson was not immediately available for a comment.

ABC’s “World News Tonight With David Muir” is one of television’s highest rated programs.

More than 10 million YouTube TV customers lost access to ESPN, ABC and other Disney channels late Thursday after a collapse in negotiations over distribution fees for Disney channels, causing one of the largest recent blackouts in the television industry.

The two TV giants wrangled for weeks over how much Google must pay to carry Disney’s channels, including FX, Disney Jr. and National Geographic. YouTube TV — now one of the largest pay-TV services in the U.S. — has balked at Disney’s price demands, leading to the outage.

YouTube TV does not have the legal right to distribute Disney’s networks after its last distribution agreement expired.

“We know this is a frustrating and disappointing outcome for our subscribers,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement last week. “We continue to urge Disney to work with us constructively to reach a fair agreement that restores their networks to YouTube TV.”

YouTube has said that should the outage stretch for “an extended period,” it would offer its subscribers a $20 credit.

Spanish-language TelevisaUnivision-owned channels were knocked off YouTube TV in a separate dispute that has lasted more than a month. Televisa has appealed to high-level political officials, including President Trump and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.

Last year, after Disney-owned channels went dark on DirecTV in a separate carriage fee dispute, Disney offered to make available to DirecTV subscribers its ABC coverage of the sole presidential debate between President Trump and then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

DirecTV viewed ABC’s offer as something of a stunt, noting the debate would be streamed. DirecTV countered by asking Disney to instead make all of its channels available.

That fee dispute resulted in a 13-day blackout on DirecTV, one that was resolved a few days later.

Heightened tensions in the television industry have led to numerous blackouts.

In 2023, Disney and Charter Communications were unable to iron out a new contract by their deadline, resulting in a 10-day blackout of Disney channels on Charter’s Spectrum service. A decade earlier, Time Warner Cable subscribers went nearly a month without CBS-owned channels.

Programming companies, including Disney, have asked for higher fees for their channels to help offset the increased cost of sports programming, including NFL and NBA contracts. But pay-TV providers, including YouTube have pushed back, attempting to draw a line to slow their customers’ ever-increasing monthly bills.

More than 40 million pay-TV customer homes have cut the cord over the last decade, according to industry data. Many have switched to smaller streaming packages. YouTube TV also benefited by attracting disaffected customers from DirecTV, Charter Spectrum and Comcast. YouTube TV is now the nation’s third-largest TV channel distributor.

More than 10 million YouTube TV customers lost access to ESPN, ABC and other Walt Disney Co. channels after contract talks broke down Thursday night in one of the largest television blackouts in recent years.

The Disney blackout was set to begin by 9 p.m. Thursday, interrupting “SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt” on ESPN and “9-1-1: Nashville” and “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC.

The two TV giants have been wrangling for weeks over carriage fees for Disney’s channels, including FX, Disney Jr. and National Geographic. YouTube TV — now one of the largest pay-TV services in the U.S. — has balked at Disney’s price demands, fueling the dispute that spilled beyond Thursday’s deadline for a new deal.

Without an agreement, Google-owned YouTube TV no longer had legal rights to distribute Disney’s channels.

“We know this is a frustrating and disappointing outcome for our subscribers,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement. “We continue to urge Disney to work with us constructively to reach a fair agreement that restores their networks to YouTube TV.”

Should the outage stretch for “an extended period,” YouTube said it would offer subscribers a $20 credit.

The blackout highlights heightened tensions in the television industry.

Programming companies, including Disney, have sought higher fees for their channels to help offset the increased cost of sports programming, including NFL and NBA contracts.

But pay-TV providers such as YouTube have pushed back, attempting to draw a line as customers grow weary of ever-increasing monthly bills.

They don’t want to lose subscribers to a rival service or have them drop their subscriptions. More than 40 million pay-TV customer homes have cut the cord over the last decade, according to industry data.

Disney becomes the latest TV programmer to allege that Google has been throwing its weight around in contract negotiations.

People close to the Burbank entertainment giant accuse YouTube TV of refusing to pay market rates for Disney’s popular channels or accept terms accepted by other pay-TV distributors. Disney has clinched deals with six other pay-TV companies this year, including the nation’s largest channel distributors, Charter Spectrum and Comcast.

“Unfortunately, Google’s YouTube TV has chosen to deny their subscribers the content they value most by refusing to pay fair rates for our channels, including ESPN and ABC,” Disney said in a statement. “Without a new agreement in place, their subscribers will not have access to our programming, which includes the best lineup in live sports – anchored by the NFL, NBA, and college football, with 13 of the top 25 college teams playing this weekend. With a $3 trillion market cap, Google is using its market dominance to eliminate competition and undercut the industry-standard terms we’ve successfully negotiated with every other distributor.”

Since August, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp., Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Spanish-language broadcaster TelevisaUnivision have all complained that YouTube TV was trying to use its clout to squeeze them for concessions now that YouTube TV has become so popular with consumers.

Ultimately, Fox and NBCUniversal negotiated new distribution contracts with Google without having their channels going dark.

Univision wasn’t as fortunate; its channels have been off YouTube TV for nearly a month.

YouTube TV, for its part, has alleged that Disney was the one making unreasonable demands. The San Bruno, Calif.-based platform cited recent agreements it reached with NBCUniversal and Fox..

“Last week Disney used the threat of a blackout on YouTube TV as a negotiating tactic to force deal terms that would raise prices on our customers,” YouTube TV said in a statement. “They’re now following through on that threat. … This decision directly harms our subscribers while benefiting their own live TV products, including Hulu + Live TV and Fubo.”

Both Disney’s Hulu service and Fubo compete with YouTube TV by offering packages of many of the same traditional channels.

YouTube has alleged that Disney is using the blackout to steer disaffected YouTube TV customers to Disney-owned streaming services after the Burbank company lost subscribers who canceled following the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension last month.

The two companies’ fraught dealings extend beyond the negotiations.

Last spring, Disney’s former distribution chief, Justin Connolly, abruptly exited to take a similar position at YouTube TV. Connolly had spent two decades at Disney and ESPN and helped devise the company’s distribution strategy. Disney sued to block the move, but a judge allowed Connolly to take his new position — putting him on the opposite side of the negotiation table.

It’s unclear how long the impasse might last.

A separate distribution fee dispute between Disney and DirecTV last year resulted in a 13-day blackout of Disney channels for customers of the El Segundo-based television provider. In 2023, another ugly tussle led to Disney channels being dropped from Charter’s Spectrum service for 10 days.

News and sports fans might quickly notice the absence of their favorite channels.

They could miss college football on ESPN and ABC as well as a “Monday Night Football” game between the Arizona Cardinals and Dallas Cowboys.

ESPN is scheduled to televise a University of Miami-SMU football game on Saturday.

(Jason Allen / Associated Press)

Disney’s ABC stations, including KABC-TV in Los Angeles, and the network’s affiliate stations around the country also will be unavailable on YouTube TV.

That means viewers could miss local newscasts, “Jeopardy,” “Wheel of Fortune,” “Good Morning America” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

YouTube TV launched in April 2017 for $35 a month. The package of channels now costs $82.99.

Walt Disney Co. is alerting viewers that its channels may go dark on YouTube TV amid tense contract negotiations between the two television giants.

The companies are struggling to hammer out a new distribution deal on YouTube TV for Disney’s channels, including ABC, ESPN, FX, National Geographic and Disney Channel. YouTube TV has become one of the most popular U.S. pay-TV services, boasting about 10 million subscribers for its packages of traditional television channels.

Those customers risk losing Disney’s channels, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles and other ABC affiliates nationwide if the two companies fail to forge a new carriage agreement by next Thursday, when their current pact expires.

“Without an agreement, we’ll have to remove Disney’s content from YouTube TV,” the Google Inc.-owned television service said Thursday in a statement.

Disney began sounding the alarm by running messages on its TV channels to warn viewers about the blackout threat.

The Burbank entertainment company becomes the latest TV programmer to allege that the tech behemoth is throwing its weight around in contract negotiations.

In recent months, both Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. and Comcast’s NBCUniversal publicly complained that Google’s YouTube TV was attempting to unfairly squeeze them in their separate talks. In the end, both Fox and NBCUniversal struck new carriage contracts without their channels going dark.

Univision wasn’t as fortunate. The smaller Spanish-language media company’s networks went dark last month on YouTube TV when the two companies failed to reach a deal.

“For the fourth time in three months, Google’s YouTube TV is putting their subscribers at risk of losing the most valuable networks they signed up for,” a Disney spokesperson said Thursday in a statement. “This is the latest example of Google exploiting its position at the expense of their own customers.”

YouTube TV, for its part, alleged that Disney was the one making unreasonable demands.

“We’ve been working in good faith to negotiate a deal with Disney that pays them fairly for their content on YouTube TV,” a YouTube TV spokesperson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Disney is proposing costly economic terms that would raise prices on YouTube TV customers and give our customers fewer choices, while benefiting Disney’s own live TV products – like Hulu + Live TV and, soon, Fubo,” YouTube TV said.

Disney’s Hulu + Live TV competes directly with YouTube TV by offering the same channels. Fubo is a sports streaming service that Disney is in the process of acquiring.

YouTube said if Disney channels remain “unavailable for an extended period of time,” it would offer its customers a $20 credit.

The contract tussle heightens tensions from earlier this year, when Disney’s former distribution chief, Justin Connolly, left in May to take a similar position at YouTube TV. Connolly had spent two decades at Disney and ESPN and Disney sued to block the move, but a judge allowed Connolly to take his new position.

YouTube TV launched in April 2017 for $35 a month. The package of channels now costs $82.99.

To attract more sports fans, YouTube TV took over the NFL Sunday Ticket premium sports package from DirecTV, which had been losing more than $100 million a year to maintain the NFL service. YouTube TV offers Sunday Ticket as a base plan add-on or as an individual channel on YouTube.

Last year, YouTube generated $54.2 billion in revenue, second only to Disney among television companies, according to research firm MoffettNathanson.

The dispute comes as NFL and college football is in full swing, with games on ABC and ESPN. The NBA season also tipped off this week and ESPN prominently features those games. ABC’s fall season began last month with fresh episodes of such favorite programs as “Dancing with the Stars” and “Abbott Elementary.”

ABC stations also air popular newscasts including “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight with David Muir.” Many ABC stations, including in Los Angeles, run Sony’s “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”

“We invest significantly in our content and expect our partners to pay fair rates that recognize that value,” Disney said. “If we don’t reach a fair deal soon, YouTube TV customers will lose access to ESPN and ABC, and all our marquee programming – including the NFL, college football, NBA and NHL seasons – and so much more.”

A first taste of L.A.’s new Maydan Market. Plus, eating in this town for $50 or less, a cookbook of gravestone recipes, allegations of racial discrimination at a popular L.A. cafe … and how Diane Keaton liked to drink her favorite wine. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Market of dreams

Chefs Rosio Sanchez, left, and Laura Flores Correa of Copenhagen’s Sanchez and Hija de Sanchez, sample mole-sauced turkey legs from Lugya’h at Maydan Market.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Many of us have favorite places to take out-of-town guests — restaurants, hiking trails and idiosyncratic spots like the recently reopened Museum of Jurassic Technology that show our friends and family why we love L.A.

For years, I’ve brought friends to Mercado la Paloma, the food hall and cultural center that is home to Gilberto Cetina‘s Holbox, the seafood counter that was our L.A. Times Restaurant of the Year in 2023 and last year was awarded a Michelin star. These days, there’s always a line for Cetina’s exquisite seafood plates, including his octopus taco with squid-ink-stained sofrito. While one person in your group waits to order at Holbox, you can find many other things to bring to your table at the mercado — unbeatable cochinita pibil and more Yucatecan dishes (try the papadzules or a refreshing agua de chaya) from Chichén Itzá, founded by Cetina’s father Gilberto Sr.; Oaxacan nieves or ice cream flavored with mamey, tuna (cactus fruit) or especially leche quemada (burnt milk) from OaxaCalifornia; and Fátima Juárez‘s gorgeous quesadilla de flor, with orange squash blossom petals spilling out of the blue corn tortilla like sunshine at her masa-focused restaurant Komal (one of Bill Addison’s picks on his 101 Best California Restaurants list).

This week, however, I tried a new place when Rosio Sanchez, the Copenhagen-based chef I wrote about in this newsletter a few months ago, said she was coming to L.A. for the Chef Assembly conference and two collaborations, one that took place Wednesday with Jordan Kahn at Meteora and another that is happening all day Sunday at Enrique Olvera and chef Chuy Cervantes’ downtown taco spot Ditroit with Yia Vang of Minneapolis’ Hmong restaurant Vinai. Sanchez wanted to meet someplace for lunch, but had just tried Komal at the Mercado la Paloma and had even been to Thai Taco Tuesday at Anajak Thai, one of my other dependable suggestions for wowing visitors. I had to change my usual game plan.

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Chef-founder Rose Previte details the bevy of vendors and dishes at West Adams’ cross-cultural new food hall.

Fortunately, our intrepid woman about town Stephanie Breijo had been telling me all about Maydan Market in anticipation of its recent opening in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood, across the street from a branch of chef Kat Turner‘s Highly Likely. In addition, Breijo made a hunger-inducing video showing off the live-fire-based restaurants at the heart of the market founded by Rose Previte, whose Maydan in Washington, D.C., is devoted to the cuisines of the Middle East and was among the Top 40 restaurants chosen in 2024 by the Washington Post’s recently unmasked critic Tom Sietsema.

Here in Los Angeles, Previte wanted to open a food hall centered on hearth cooking from different cultures. That not only means new branches of her Maydan restaurant and Compass Rose cafe, but Afro-Mexican Guerrerense cooking at Maléna from Tamales Elena founder Maria Elena Lorenzo; Yhing Yhang BBQ from Holy Basil chef Wedchayan “Deau” Arpapornnopparat, serving charcoal-grilled Thai chicken, seafood and duck, and a space for emerging chefs that is currently featuring Melnificent Wingz from Melissa “Chef Mel” Cottingham.

Most of the places so far don’t open until 5 p.m. — I spotted Arpapornnopparat prepping some fantastic-looking chile sauces for his dinnertime barbecue that I am eager to try. But lunch operations are slowly getting underway and on Thursday afternoon we were lucky to find Alfonso Martinez of Poncho’s Tlayudas fame at Lugya’h, his new post in the market. In addition to tlyaudas — which Addison, in his 2022 review of Poncho’s called one of his “this is the Los Angeles I love” dishes — Martinez is serving dishes from Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte at Lugya’h.

Mole-covered turkey leg with a black bean tamal from Alfonso Martinez’s Lugya’h at Maydan Market.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

With Sanchez and her chef Laura Flores Correa, best known as Laurita, I was able to try a turkey leg sauced in a dark, rich “mole de bejed” with a black bean tamal on the side. The meat was incredibly moist, perfect with the tamal. We also got bowls of foamy Mexican cacao-flavored atole, which came with brioche-like Oaxacan pan de yema.

A slice of tlayuda with chorizo, grilled tasajo and the blood sausage moronga from Lugya’h at L.A.’s Maydan Market.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

And even though the current plan is to serve tlyaudas only during dinner, we were able to try one with three meats: chorizo, beautifully charred on the edges from the fire; a slice of grilled tasajo, and a link of moronga, one of the best blood sausages I’ve ever eaten, from a recipe, as Addison writes, handed down as a wedding gift from the father of Martinez’s wife Odilia Romero. She was helping out at the market this week, though is anxious to get back to her work advocating for Indigenous migrants in L.A. That might not be easy once word spreads about the deliciousness of Lugya’h’s food.

Alfonso Martinez, right, and Odilia Romero, who have expanded their Poncho’s Tlayudas operation to Maydan Market under the name Lugya’h.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Indeed, each of the places Previte has curated is certain to draw a crowd. I’m looking forward to bringing more friends and trying them all.

If you think $50 a person sounds like a lot for dinner …

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s crazy that $50 per person is now considered a cheap sit-down meal.”

“The fact that LAT is suggesting $50 a person is somehow a ‘win’ is pretty crazy.”

Those are two reader comments on our 50 under $50 guide to restaurants where it’s possible to eat for $50 or less a person — including tax and tip. Which actually means finding items on the menu that cost $38 a person to account for an approximate 10% sales tax and 20% tip. We thought it was important for you to not get hit with charges that traditionally are not reflected on most restaurant menus.

To those readers who say $50 a person is too much to spend for a nice sit-down dinner, we agree. But all over the city — and in so many parts of the country — it’s increasingly difficult to get dinner at a non-fast-food or fast-casual restaurant for less than $50. Indeed, some of our finest restaurants charge $500 and even more than $1000 a person once you figure in wine or sake pairings.

This kind of pricing, which accounts for luxury ingredients and livable salaries for members of the kitchen and dining room staff that provide world-class service, puts many of our most acclaimed restaurants out of reach for the majority of Angelenos. That’s why we thought it was important in these tough economic times to come up with a guide to more affordable restaurant choices. We weren’t only going for “cheap eats.” Our entire Food team searched the city for a range of places that, as senior Food editor Danielle Dorsey wrote, “must be open until 9 p.m.” (so a true dinner spot), “doesn’t have to offer table service, but must [have] seating available to enjoy your food on-site” and where “you must be able to order at least two menu items, whether that’s a starter and a main, an entree and a dessert, or a large plate and a cocktail.”

The restaurants we chose ranged from the casual but highly acclaimed Sonoratown, which has what our critic Bill Addison says is “the Los Angeles food item I have consumed more than any other” (the $12.50 Burrito 2.0) to strategic ordering suggestions at star chef spots such as Dave Beran‘s Pasjoli and Bestia from husband-and-wife chefs Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis. In between are affordable date-night places, including Cody Ma and Misha Sesar‘s Persian spot Azizam, the buzzy Cal-Italian Beethoven Market
and Propaganda Wine Bar in the Arts District. We’re always looking for more suggestions. If you have a favorite affordable place, tell us about it in the story’s comment section.

Also …

• Stephanie Breijo spoke with archivist and social media personality Rosie Grant about her new cookbook “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” which as the title implies, is a collection of recipes that decedents or their loved ones treasured so much they had them etched on their tombstones.
• Breijo also broke down the allegations of racial discrimination at the L.A. restaurant Great White and Gran Blanco “after intensifying social media videos claim that Great White segregates customers based on ethnicity and race, which its owners and some employees deny.”

And finally … ‘slug it down’

Diane Keaton in 2023.

(Raymond Hall/GC Images via Getty Images)

In memory of the great Diane Keaton, let’s raise a toast to her unforgettable movie roles and personal style with what she called “the only wine that I love.”

“It’s called Lillet,” she said in an Instagram video she made back in 2022 with a similar unconventional approach to ice that Stanley Tucci demonstrated his viral negroni video from 2020. After adding many ice cubes to a large yet elegant tumbler, she fills the glass with Lillet and adds a wedge of lemon, instructing her followers to “slug it down” without the addition of the usual tonic or sparkling water. Apparently, Keaton was not a spritz kind of gal. “And if you don’t like it,” she said to her viewers, “that’s fine with me. I’ll just drink all this myself.” Sounds like she knew how to live.

Standing behind a lectern emblazoned with the words “Cutting Utility Bills,” Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law last month a package of energy bills that he said “reduces the burden on ratepayers.”

Tucked into one of those bills: a paragraph that could allow Southern California Edison to shift billions of dollars of Eaton fire damage costs to its customers.

Among other things, the bill allows Edison to start charging customers for any Eaton fire costs exceeding the state’s $21-billion wildfire fund.

“I was shocked to see that,” said April Maurath Sommer, executive director of the Wild Tree Foundation, which tracks state government actions on utility-sparked fires. “It’s effectively a bailout.”

Other amendments in the 231-page bill known as SB 254 helped not just Edison, but all three of the state’s biggest for-profit utilities, further limiting the costs that they and their shareholders would face if the companies’ equipment ignited a catastrophic wildfire.

Previous legislation championed by Newsom, a 2019 bill known as AB 1054, already had sharply limited the utilities’ liabilities for wildfires they cause.

Staff in the governor’s office declined a request for an interview. In a statement, Daniel Villasenor, a spokesman for Newsom, called SB 254 “smart public policy, not a giveaway.”

Newsom’s staff noted that the state Public Utilities Commission would later review Eaton fire costs, determining if they were “just and reasonable.” If some costs billed to customers were rejected in that review, Edison shareholders would have to reimburse them for those amounts, the governor’s office said.

According to the legislation, that review of costs isn’t required until all Eaton claims are settled, leaving the possibility that customers would have to cover even costs found to be unreasonable for years.

“That will be expensive news to a lot of people,” said Michael Boccadoro, executive director of the Agricultural Energy Consumers Assn. “It is unfortunately what happens when major policies are done in the final hours of the Legislature with little transparency.”

Damages for the Eaton fire have been estimated to be as high as $45 billion — which could greatly exceed the $21-billion fund.

Homes in Altadena lay in ruins after the Eaton fire.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Sheri Scott, an actuary at Milliman, told state officials in July that insured losses alone range from $13.7 billion to $22.8 billion. That estimate doesn’t include payments to families who were uninsured or underinsured, or compensation for pain and suffering.

The bill allows Edison to issue bonds secured by new payments from its electric customers for Eaton fire costs that can’t be covered by the $21-billion fund.

Kathleen Dunleavy, an Edison spokeswoman, said the company supported the bill’s language because the bonds secured by customer payments provide a lower cost of borrowing than if the company used traditional financing. “Every dollar counts for our customers,” Dunleavy said.

“There are a lot of variables here,” Dunleavy added. “The investigation is ongoing and there is not an estimate of the total cost of the Eaton fire.”

Newsom’s office noted that under the amendments the utilities won’t get to earn a profit on $6 billion of wildfire prevention expenditures. Customers will still have to pay for the costs, but they won’t be charged extra for shareholders’ profit.

Since early this year, Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric had been lobbying Newsom and state legislative leaders, urging them to bolster the $21-billion fund because of concerns it could be exhausted by the Eaton fire’s extraordinary cost.

Videos captured the Jan. 7 inferno igniting under a century-old transmission line that Edison had not used for 50 years. The wildfire swept through Altadena, destroying 9,400 homes and other structures and killing at least 19 people.

Edison now faces hundreds of lawsuits filed by victims. The suits accuse Edison of negligence, claiming it failed to safely maintain its equipment and left in place the unused transmission line, which lawyers say Edison knew posed a fire risk.

“We’ll respond to the allegations in the litigation,” Dunleavy said, adding that the company inspects and maintains idle lines in the same way as its energized lines.

Even though the government’s investigation into the cause has not been released, Edison announced in July that it was starting a program to directly pay victims for damages.

The company has also begun settling with insurance companies that paid out claims for properties they insured in Altadena that were destroyed or damaged.

Limiting Edison’s liability for Eaton fire

The utility is expecting to be reimbursed for most or all of the settlements and the costs of the fire by the $21-billion wildfire fund that Newsom and lawmakers created through the 2019 legislation, according to a July update Edison gave to its investors.

The first $1 billion of damages is covered by an insurance policy paid by its customers.

After state officials warned that the Eaton fire could deplete the state fund, Newsom said in July he was working on a plan to create an additional fund of $18 billion.

Two days before the Legislature was scheduled to recess for the year, three lawmakers added complex language to SB 254 to create what Newsom called the new $18-billion wildfire “continuation account.” Before the bill was amended, consumer groups had been supporting it because it aimed to save electric customers money.

The late amendments required the Legislature to extend its session by a day to meet a state constitutional rule that says proposed legislation must be public for 72 hours before a final vote.

“It’s impossible to believe that legislators could have understood all of this in 72 hours,” Maurath Sommer said. She noted that Newsom’s 2019 law, AB 1054, was introduced and quickly passed in a similar manner. “And it is clear now how poorly that effort fared in achieving the claimed objective of protecting public safety.”

Boccadoro said he believed the amendments were added to a bill favored by consumer groups to give it “some political cover.”

Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), one of bill’s authors, said she believed utilities needed protection from wildfire liabilities because of a legal doctrine in California known as inverse condemnation, which makes them responsible for damages even if they weren’t negligent in starting it.

“This is the best possible deal for ratepayers as we navigate the truly devastating impacts of the climate crisis,” Petrie-Norris said of the legislation. The other two authors — state Sens. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park) and Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward) — did not respond to requests for interviews.

After the bill passed, both Edison and PG&E praised its provisions in presentations for investors.

Edison called the bill “a key action” that demonstrated lawmakers’ support of its “financial stability.”

The amendments added to the protections that utilities gained in 2019 through Newsom’s AB 1054. At that time, PG&E was in bankruptcy proceedings. It had filed for protection after its transmission line was found to have ignited the 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed most of the town of Paradise.

PG&E explained in a September presentation that before Newsom and lawmakers changed the law in 2019, utilities that wanted to pass fire damage costs to customers “bore the burden of proving” that their conduct related to the blaze was reasonable and prudent.

Newsom’s 2019 law changed that standard, PG&E said, so that the utility’s conduct was automatically deemed reasonable if state regulators had granted the company what the law called a safety certificate.

Since 2019, the state has regularly issued the companies these certificates — even when regulators find maintenance and safety problems.

Edison received a safety certificate less than a month before the Eaton fire, even though it had thousands of open work orders, including some on the transmission lines in the canyon where the fire started.

To get a certificate, the utilities must submit a plan to state regulators for preventing their equipment from sparking fires. They also must tie executive pay to the company’s safety performance, with bonuses expected to take a hit when more fires are sparked or people are killed.

Even though Edison failed at key safety measures last year, The Times found that cash bonuses for four of its top five executives rose. The company said that was because of their performance on responsibilities beyond safety.

With a safety certificate in hand, Edison told investors in July that the maximum it would pay for the Eaton fire under the law’s limit was $3.9 billion, a fraction of the expected costs. The utility said the wildfire fund would reimburse it for all the costs, unless an outside party can raise “serious doubt” that it had not acted reasonably before the fire.

The SB 254 amendments also clarified key language in the 2019 law — clarifications that Edison told investors in September were “constructive for potential Eaton fire losses.”

That language allows utilities that cause repeated major wildfires within a period of three years to reduce what they must pay back to the fund for a second fire if they are found to have acted imprudently.

“This certainly does not seem to encourage utilities to stop causing fires,” Maurath Sommer said of the provision.

Edison’s Dunleavy dismissed concern about the provision. “Safety remains our top priority,” she said.

Campaign contributions to Newsom

The three utilities have long been generous political donors to both Democrats and Republicans in California, including to Newsom and current legislative leaders in Sacramento.

Edison, for example, gave $100,000 to Newsom’s campaign last year to pass the mental health initiative known as Proposition 1.

This summer Edison gave $190,000 to the state Democratic Party, which is helping Newsom campaign for Proposition 50, which would redraw congressional districts.

Newsom’s staff didn’t respond to questions about the contributions.

Dunleavy said that the company’s political donations are not charged to customers. She said Edison gives contributions to politicians who share its commitment to “safely serve our customers.”

Newsom said in 2019 that the bill capping utilities’ fire liabilities would “move our state toward a safer, affordable and reliable energy future.”

He and lawmakers said the law would make the public safer by requiring the utilities to do more to prevent fires, including aggressive tree trimming and the installation of more insulated wires.

Even though the utilities have raised electric rates to charge customers for billions of dollars of fire prevention work, their electrical equipment continues to spark blazes.

According to Cal Fire statistics, if the Eaton fire is confirmed to have been ignited by Edison’s transmission line, at least seven of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires would have been caused by the three utilities’ power lines. Two of those utility-sparked fires happened after the 2019 law passed.

Edison’s lines ignited 178 fires last year — 45% more compared with 2019. The company attributed last year’s increase to weather conditions that created more dry vegetation.

The governor’s staff said they disagreed with claims that the legislation reduced utilities’ accountability. They pointed to a measure in the 2019 law that requires a utility to reimburse the wildfire fund for all damages from a fire if its actions are found to constitute “conscious or willful disregard of the rights and safety of others.”

Advocates for utility customers have repeatedly said they believe that standard is too high to keep California utilities from causing more fires.

“Instances of utility mismanagement could easily fall short of the ‘conscious or willful disregard’ standard yet nonetheless cause a series of catastrophic wildfire events,” wrote the commission’s Public Advocates Office in a filing soon after the 2019 law passed.

The cantina on Tatooine in the first “Star Wars” film. A Greek taverna on a layover in Miami. A mermaid’s womb. Every friend I take to, or even ask about, Cento Raw Bar and its fantastical design has a knee-jerk one-liner at the ready.

The wildest new bar in Los Angeles

Walk into the West Adams space adjoined by an awning to Cento Pasta Bar — both conceived by chef Avner Levi — and the first sight of the curving walls will spin anyone’s mind. They look plastered with a mixture of stucco and meringue, smeared like a frosted cake in progress, that’s meant to evoke the shimmer and shifting light of a Mediterranean cave. A three-sided seafoam-green bar anchors the room, girded by tall white chairs with metal backs patterned in a snail’s spiral. Details fill every corner: rounded, sculptural pillars and pedestals; a blue-tile floor mosaic resembling a pond; pendant sconces in shapes that remind me of the “energy dome” hats worn by the band Devo in the 1980s.

A mosaic moment in the dining room of Cento Raw Bar.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

The effect leans more toward trippy than transportive. As one stop during a night out for a drink and a stopgap plate of seafood or two, I’m into it.

Idiosyncrasy is welcome right now

Maybe in another era I would gawk once and move on. But in times like Los Angeles is living through, in a half-decade that has begat one trial and horror after another, the operators of new restaurants, particularly those in the highest-rent districts, tend to default to conservative choices. Menus full of comforts familiar to whatever cuisine is being served. Atmospheres easily described as “pleasant.” The decisions are so understandable, and given a particular neighborhood or desired audience perhaps it pays off economically. Familiarity is a priority to many diners. Hospitality workers deserve stable incomes.

Culturally, though? The restaurant pros who can’t stomach the status quo, who go regionally specific or deeply personal or brazenly imaginative, are the forces who inspire cities toward creative rebellion. Thinking about this, I found an article from 2011 by former Times critic S. Irene Virbila about the year’s restaurant openings. The nation was burrowing out of the Great Recession at the time, but the roster of emerging talents mentioned by Virbila would wind up shaping the 2010s as the decade that landed Los Angeles on the global culinary map: names like Bryant Ng, Josef Centeno, Nyesha Arrington, Michael Voltaggio, Steve Samson and Zach Pollack.

She also pointed out Ludo Lefebvre, who in 2011 was still in pop-up mode before launching his defining restaurants Trois Mec (felled by the pandemic) and Petit Trois. Maybe it’s a sign that this week Lefebvre came full-circle with a new occasional pop-up series he’s calling Éphémère.

Point is, we could use more extreme individualism in restaurants right now. I appreciate the obsessiveness from designer Brandon Miradi, who has the title of “creative director” at Cento Raw Bar and who counts Vespertine, Somni, the Bazaar at SLS Beverly Hills and Frieze Art Fair as previous projects. Note the spiraling ends of the silverware, matching the chairs, and the ways napkins too are rolled into a tight coil. He managed to find colored glassware in geometries that register at once as retro and postmodern.

Cento Raw Bar, the sibling cocktail and seafood bar to chef Avner Levi’s pasta restaurant, features an all-white interior.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Maybe no surprise, but the TikTok-magnetic vibes keep the bar full of young, beautiful groups — Angelenos or visitors modeling their best L.A. looks, who can say. In June, about a month after the place opened, a friend and I were sitting at one of the low tables and she pointed over to the bar: The women seated in the high stools all came in wearing stilettos that were now dangling half off their feet. Panning this shoe moment could have been a montage sequence during a Carrie Bradshaw voiceover in an early season of “Sex and the City.”

What to eat and drink

Perhaps to fully center or to balance Miradi’s visual extravaganza, the food and drink options are quite straightforward. A few cocktails do wink right into the camera, among them a play on a Screwdriver made with SunnyD (which the menu calls “Sunny Delight,” the branding name I also remember from my Gen-X childhood). Most are mainstays: a classic escapist piña colada, a spicy margarita, an Aperol situation spiked with mezcal. The bartenders listen kindly when I request they stir my dry gin martini well.

A martini at the bar of Cento Raw Bar.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Seafood towers, served on undulating green-glass plates designed by Miradi, are stylish and modest in size and arrive as two levels for $83 or three levels for $97.

A buddy and I recently split the smaller one, neatly polishing off a handful of tiny, briny oysters along with scallops served in their shells, some bouncy shrimp and a couple meaty lobster claws. We had shown up to Pizzeria Sei without a reservation — because scoring one at a prime hour is maddening, and so I take my chances as a walk-in — and were told the wait was an hour and 15 minutes. Cento Raw Bar was a 12-minute drive away, ideal for one round of drinks and pre-dinner shellfish.

On another occasion, I might skip the pricey tower and order a plate of hamachi crudo (dotted with stone fruit during the summer season) and a dip of smoked cod with bagel chips. I’ve found more substantial plates, such as ridged mafaldine tangled in lobster sauce, in need of spice and acid.

Fish dip topped with trout roe at Cento Raw Bar in West Adams.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Desserts riffing on a Hostess cake or an ube cheesecake spangled with prismatic bits of flavored gelatins? Fun, but I’ve had my share of outlandish décor and cocktail nibbles — exactly what I came for.

4919 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 795-0330, cento.group

Also …

• Food editor Daniel Hernandez writes about Mexico City, the food lovers flocking to its energized restaurant scene … and the digital nomads who are also settling in, pricing out locals in some areas. As tensions boil, he asks, is it possible to still visit and be a mindful tourist?
• Daniel, a former longtime resident of Mexico City, also names 34 of the city’s best restaurants and bars that aren’t tourist traps.
• Speaking of Bryant Ng mentioned above, Jenn Harris checks out his new project, Jade Rabbit, a new fast-casual restaurant in Santa Monica where Ng re-imagines Chinese American food.
• Stephanie Breijo reports from West Hollywood on Darling, the new restaurant from legendary Southern chef Sean Brock, who is determined not to lean on his heritage in California. “In order to fully understand the taste of this place [L.A.], and that’s my goal, I can’t cook Southern,” Brock shares.
• Farewell, lunchroom pepperoni pizza? Daniel Miller lays out the details of the new state law aimed to ban some ultraprocessed foods from school meals.

The allure of sea cucumber, Addison on Cafe 2001 and its elusive watermelon cake, plus L.A.’s king of super chuggers and more. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Crackle pop

The sea cucumber spring roll at Wing in Hong Kong before it is sliced and plated. Behind the roll is a display of dried sea cucumber before its undergoes a multi-day cooking process.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

The crackle of paper-thin pastry under a razor-sharp cleaver as the chef beside your table slices a golden fried spring roll in half is just one sign that you are about to eat something extraordinary.

There is also the sight of the otherworldly creature — a sea cucumber — displayed on a platter in its dried state before it has undergone a multi-day blooming and braising process and formed the filling of the spring roll before you.

You bite into the delicate wrapper and find that the sea cucumber has been transformed into something that on one level resembles braised pork belly but also has its own kind of lusciousness.

This is the sea cucumber spring roll by chef Vicky Cheng, one of the not-to-miss dishes he created at his restaurant Wing in Hong Kong.

Cheng, who was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Canada and came of age as a chef in North America, learning the intricacies of French cuisine at Toronto and New York restaurants, including Daniel with chef Daniel Boulud.

That French training shows in the lightness of the pastry wrapper of Cheng’s fried spring roll. Not to mention the showmanship of its presentation, which provides ASMR thrills when the cleaver cuts through the cylinder. But Cheng’s true purpose is to recontextualize a traditional Chinese ingredient that has been seen as old-fashioned, a luxury texture food often eaten more for medicinal purposes and status rather than deliciousness.

Chef Vicky Cheng in the dining room of his Hong Kong restaurant Wing.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

At his first Hong Kong restaurant, the Michelin-starred restaurant VEA, one floor above Wing in the same office building that houses a collection of Michelin-starred restaurants, including the Chairman, Feuille, Hansik Goo and Whey, sea cucumber quickly became one of Cheng’s signature dishes.

In the VEA preparation, a smaller, spikier type of sea cucumber surrounds a shellfish filling — in January, when I tried the dish, it was tiger prawn. But for the spring roll at Wing, Cheng uses a much larger and smoother species from New Zealand and Australia, which has the first sea cucumber fishery certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council.

The sea cucumber spring roll is one of the dishes Cheng is planning to serve at Kato here in Los Angeles when he collaborates with chef Jon Yao for a two-night dinner series on Oct. 14 and 15. Reservations quickly disappeared when they were made available this week, but I’ll be talking with Cheng onstage Sunday, Oct. 12 at UCLA’s Fowler Museum about his restaurants and the different ways he’s trying to shift the conversation about Chinese cuisine for a younger generation. Joining us will be chef Curtis Stone, who featured Cheng and many others in the Hong Kong episode of his PBS series “Field Trip With Curtis Stone,” which will be screened at the free event.

The appearances will cap off our L.A. Times Food Bowl Night Market at City Market Social House Oct. 10 and 11. VIP tickets are sold out, but limited general admission tickets remain for the Friday and Saturday night event presented by Square. The more than 40 participating restaurants include Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, OyBar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla L.A., Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil, Heavy Handed, AttaGirl, Heng Heng Chicken Rice, the Win-Dow, Agnes Restaurant & Cheesery and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Chasing watermelon

Chef Giles Clark and some of his breakfast, lunch and pastry specials at Cafe 2001 in downtown Los Angeles.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

My habit at the Arts District’s Cafe 2001 has been to arrive just after 11 a.m. when chef Giles Clark‘s menu, restricted to breakfast items before that point, opens up with lunch choices. It’s the best way to experience the full array of inventive dishes Clark has cooked up for the day … with one big exception. The cafe’s gorgeous watermelon cake, taught to Clark by Tokyo chef Toshio Tanabe, doesn’t come out of the kitchen until 1 p.m., even if it’s sometimes visible earlier than that, tempting diners. All summer long I haven’t managed to get a slice of that cake. But our restaurant critic Bill Addison is a pro; he got the cake and so much more, which he elegantly describes in his new review of Cafe 2001 — “a peculiar and quietly serious little place, with a narrow yet soaring space reclaimed from urban decay, and casual, sophisticated daytime meals,” he writes. “Its eccentricities feel like welcome refuge.”

For more on Cafe 2001, read Food’s deputy editor Betty Hallock on Clark’s spring-green potato salad (with his recipe), plus my contribution to our brunch guide on the appeal of Clark’s morning offerings and my newsletter earlier this summer on how the chef’s corn fritter was a welcome sign of summer in a city recovering from downtown L.A. restaurant closures after immigration enforcement actions prompted a curfew.

The wine auteur

Winemaker Scott Sampler gets chuggy at Anajak Thai in Sherman Oaks.

(G L Askew II / For The Times)

Chances are good you’ve seen Scott Sampler‘s Scotty-Boy! wines in restaurants and local wine shops. And you may have sipped from bottlings of some of his other labels without realizing they came from the same mind.

“Sampler’s wines,” writes Food contributor Patrick Comiskey, “have managed to channel L.A.’s boundless culinary enthusiasms for the past decade.” Of course, Comiskey adds that Sampler’s wines — “pungent, savory, defiantly unfruity” — “can be polarizing even in the era of natural wine, when wine’s very range of flavors is in flux.”

Sampler and Comiskey met in a booth at Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood to talk wine, food, Serge Gainsbourg and how the king of the super chuggers got serious about what he puts in a bottle. A terrific read.

3 out of 50

Gilberto Cetina, chef and owner of Holbox, pictured outside his restaurant.

(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)

On Thursday night, three Los Angeles restaurants were named to the inaugural North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list from the World’s 50 Best franchise, as Food’s Stephanie Breijo reports. They are Kato at No. 26, Holbox at No. 42 and at No. 47 Providence, which also received its third Michelin star this year.

“Everybody’s really proud,” Holbox chef Gilberto Cetina told Breijo, “especially right now with these times when our people don’t feel as welcome as we have before, with the way politics are. Being able to be here at a national forum representing Mexican culture through our food is really cool.”

Diner talk

Chef Nancy Silverton and Phil Rosenthal share a milkshake at the counter of Fair Oaks Pharmacy and Soda Fountain in Pasadena.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Food’s columnist Jenn Harris took chef Nancy Silverton and TV’s Phil Rosenthal to Pie ‘n Burger and the soda fountain at Fair Oaks Pharmacy in Pasadena to discuss the many debates the two have during the making of their soon-to-open diner Max and Helen’s in L.A.’s Larchmont Village. Patty melt or hamburger? Both was the compromise. And the secret of a great milkshake? The answer might surprise you.

Reeling

PCH seafood stalwart The Reel Inn before the Palisades fire.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Will the Reel Inn rise again? That’s the question Food’s Stephanie Breijo asked in her story about the challenges the iconic restaurant is facing as it tries to rebuild after the Palisades fire.

And in her Quick Bites report on new restaurants, Breijo has details about Bub and Grandma’s Pizza in Highland Park; Michelin-starred Kali‘s pivot away from tasting menus to steakhouse favorites; the appearance of Pino’s Sandwiches in Los Feliz from the owner of Salumeria Verdi in Florence and the expansion of Tacos Villa Corona to Eagle Rock.

Also …

Last year on the campaign trail, President Trump repeatedly promised to “slash energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months.” But actions speak louder than words. Since returning to office in January, the Trump administration has instead done everything it possibly can to drive up the cost of electricity. What is going on?

The damage starts with Trump’s attempts to prevent any new clean energy generation at a time when electricity demand is growing rapidly, caused by an explosion of new data centers and new housing, the expanding fleet of electric vehicles and a resurgence in American manufacturing. The U.S. needs more energy than ever, and 96% of electricity capacity added to the U.S. grid in 2024 came from clean energy. Why? Because clean energy is both the cheapest source of electricity and the fastest to produce. If we don’t rethink our energy future quickly enough to keep up with a growth in demand, then electricity prices will only continue to rise.

Then again, maybe the recent price spikes are part of Trump’s goals, because he’s done everything he can do to block new clean energy, including:

• Raising taxes on clean energy projects by at least 30% when Trump had all the renewable energy tax credits removed from his “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
• Blocking clean energy projects on federal lands, effectively creating a bureaucratic veto by requiring Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to personally sign off on permitting for every proposed clean energy project.
• Issuing “stop work” orders (with no significant justification) for two offshore wind projects that were fully approved and permitted — and, in one case, where construction was already 80% complete. This not only drives up the cost of constructing new electricity resources; it also creates a business climate in which no sane company would risk investing in new projects that may be torpedoed by an arbitrary and capricious federal government simply because the President thinks wind turbines mar his view.
• Canceling a Department of Energy loan commitment for the Grain Belt Express, a major transmission project designed to carry low-cost wind and solar energy from the Great Plains to Illinois and other eastern U.S. states where electricity prices have risen rapidly. This deprives those states of new energy and undermines the ability of Great Plains states to harness natural resources and grow their economies as energy exporters.
• Gutting federal agencies, such as the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which helps finance big energy projects, especially for innovative new technologies such as geothermal and new nuclear. Without government support for first-of-their-kind projects, these initiatives simply won’t happen and promising new energy technology will be delayed for years.

It’s not just the cost of building clean energy development that Trump has sabotaged. His high and ever-changing tariffs have also scrambled supply chains and raised prices for all types of energy. New tariffs, for example, have raised the cost of steel by up to 50%, which affects the cost of pipes needed for natural gas plants as well as towers for wind turbines and racks for solar panels. Every single kind of new electricity generation is now more expensive, and those higher material costs create higher prices for electricity on our utility bills.

Trump has also raised costs of existing energy resources, including supporting the oil industry’s efforts to dramatically increase U.S. exports of natural gas. This will reduce the supply available for heating homes and running power plants in America, raising prices on electricity bills and gas bills at once. Trump has also used emergency powers to force less-than-profitable coal plants to stay open, saddling customers with the extra costs to subsidize these old plants. In one instance, it cost locals $29 million to keep the J.H. Campbell plant in West Olive, Mich., open for just five weeks of extended operations. Analysts now estimate that Trump’s push to keep coal plants open could add between $3 billion and $6 billion per year to our electricity bills.

Is this sheer economic incompetence — not difficult to fathom given the rate at which Trump has driven businesses into bankruptcy — or part of his strategy to deliberately make electricity more expensive so people won’t switch to EVs and the oil industry won’t lose its customers?

Either way, electricity prices are already rising and Trump’s actions are clearly making it worse. Doubtless, Republicans will try to point the finger at renewable energy when electricity prices spike over coming years, but the real causes should be clear: Trump’s reckless decisions to block new clean energy production, raise tariffs on the energy supply chain, export our natural gas and force customers to subsidize struggling coal plants.

Americans need abundant, affordable energy to power our homes and grow our economy, and we need leaders who know how to support the clean energy revolution, not try to stand in its way.

Josh Becker is a Democratic state senator from Menlo Park and chair of the California Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities and Communications.

In an overstuffed workshop in East L.A., Chris Francis reached out a heavily tattooed arm and pulled a single shoe box from one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the walls.

“Anjelica Huston,” the shoemaker and artist said. “Let’s see what’s in here.”

Removing the top of the box, he revealed two carved wooden forms known as shoe lasts that cobblers use to make their wares. Beneath those were strips of yellowing shoe patterns and a tracing of the actor’s foot with a note written in loopy cursive:

To Pasquale
My happy feet shall thank you
— Anjelica Huston

The Di Fabrizio collection includes shoe measurements for stars like Nancy Sinatra, Kim Novak, Joe Pesci and Madeline Kahn, all adorned with green, white and red striped ribbon.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“Cool, huh?” Francis said, gazing reverently at the box’s contents. “Every time I open one it’s amazing. It’s like Christmas all the time.”

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For the last three years, Francis has been surrounded by a sprawling archive of famous feet originally amassed by Pasquale Di Fabrizio, the late shoemaker to the stars. From the early ‘60s to the early 2000s, Di Fabrizio created custom footwear for the rich, famous and notorious out of his humble shoe shop on 3rd Street.

The shoes went to his customers, but his voluminous collection includes shoe lasts, patterns, drawings, correspondences, leather samples and handwritten notes from thousands of clients, all stored in cardboard shoe boxes that the Italian immigrant trimmed with green, white and red striped ribbon.

The names, written in bold Magic Marker on the front of each box are a who’s who of entertainers from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and beyond: Liza Minnelli, Tom Jones, Richard Pryor, Robert De Niro, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bea Arthur, Arsenio Hall, Nancy Sinatra, Ace Frehley. The list goes on and on.

Francis found foot measurements, wooden shoe lasts and a shoe in progress that Pasquale Di Fabrizio made for Ginger Rogers in a box marked with her name.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“Shoe Machine” is one of Chris Francis’ art pieces that he has shown at museums.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“So many great people stood on these pieces of paper,” Francis said, looking at the stacks of boxes around him. “Roy Orbison. Eva Gabor. Stella Stevens. Lauren Bacall. I could pull these down all day.”

Francis never met Di Fabrizio, who died in 2008, but in 2022 he traded two pairs of his sculptural shoe-art pieces to Di Fabrizio’s friend and fellow shoemaker Gary Kazanchyan for the entirety of the Italian shoemaker’s archive. Three years later, Francis is still making his way through it all.

The amount of material is overwhelming, but he is committed to preserving Di Fabrizio’s legacy. Ultimately, he wants to find a space where he can share it with others.

“I never want to be without it, but I’m realistic that it deserves to be appreciated by more than just myself,” he said. “If my life’s work ended up in somebody’s hands, I don’t think I’d want them to just keep it for themselves forever.”

A shoemaker’s journey

Francis isn’t just cataloging L.A.’s shoemaking history, he’s helping to keep it alive.

Over the last decade and a half he’s made a name for himself as a custom shoemaker, creating handmade bespoke footwear for rockers like former Runaways guitarist Lita Ford and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, as well as sculptural art shoes that are displayed in museums like the Craft Contemporary, the Palm Springs Art Museum and SCAD FASH in Atlanta.

Wooden shoe lasts hang from the ceiling as Chris Francis works on a shoe for the singer Lita Ford in his garage.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

In his East L.A. workshop, he eschews modern technology, focusing instead on traditional methods of shoemaking, often with hand tools.

“The handmade shoe is alive and well in this shop,” he said, dressed in pressed black slacks and tinted sunglasses, chunky gold rings gleaming on his fingers. “There’s no computer here, and even the records half the time are vinyls or 78s.”

Making shoes by hand is time-consuming and expensive work — Francis doesn’t sell a pair of shoes for less than $1,800 — but for his mostly musician clientele, a sturdy, custom-made, comfortable shoe that also boasts over-the-top style is well worth the price.

“At my price point, my customers are buying something that’s really a tool,” he said. “It’s part of their look, but it also has to hit 27 guitar pedals, keep all of its crystal, be beautiful, last multiple tours and they have to be able to stand in it all night.”

Francis, who has a certain aging-rocker swagger himself, never expected to become a shoemaker.

After going to art school and hopping freight trains for several years, he moved to Los Angeles in 2002 originally to join the Merchant Marines. Instead he found work hanging multi-story graphics and billboards on the side of hotels and high-rises on the Sunset Strip and at casinos in Las Vegas. “That gave me the same thrill of riding a freight train,” he said. “Being on a high-rise building and rappelling down.”

Francis found fabric samples and designs for shoes that Pasquale Di Fabrizio made for a Broadway production of the musical “Marilyn: An American Fable.”

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Shoemaker and artist Chris Francis makes shoes the traditional way in his workshop in East Los Angeles.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

He discovered he had a knack for pattern making in 2008 when he began creating hand-stitched leather jackets to wear to the Hollywood parties he had started attending with his now-fiancee. One day a stranger approached him and said she knew someone who would appreciate a jacket like the ones he was making. She was a stylist for Arnel Pineda, the lead singer of Journey. Commissions from Mötley Crüe and other rock bands followed.

A few years later he became interested in making shoes, but although he knocked on the door of several shoe shops in town, he couldn’t find a mentor.

“They didn’t have time, or they’d say, ‘You belong in a rock and roll band, you’re not one of us,’” he said. “But I would say, ‘Just teach me one thing, one trick.’ And everyone had time to teach one trick.”

It was an education in much more than shoemaking.

“Almost every shoemaker I met had immigrated to the country,” he said. “So I learned how to make shoes from the Italians, from guys from Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Syria, from everybody. And while doing so, I learned about all these different cultures.”

‘He was the king’

As Francis dove deeper into the history of shoemaking in Los Angeles, one name kept coming up again and again: Pasquale Di Fabrizio.

The late Pasquale Di Fabrizio, a cobbler to the Hollywood elite, photographed in front of his collection of shoe lasts, circa 1982.

(Bret Lundberg / Images Press / Getty Images)

“I started asking other makers about him, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we remember him,’” Francis said. “He was the king.”

For more than 50 years Di Fabrizio was the most sought after shoemaker in Los Angeles. He made Liberace’s rhinestone-encrusted footwear and shod Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck for touring productions of Disney on Parade. He was the go-to shoemaker for country western stars, Vegas showgirls, Hollywood movie stars, gospel singers and casino owners. The Rat Pack helped put him on the map.

“My best customer is Dean Martin,” Di Fabrizio told The Times in 1972. “He buys 40 pairs a year.”

Sporting a thick, bristled mustache and oversize glasses, Di Fabrizio had a tough reputation. He once kicked a movie star out of his shop because the star brought back a pair of patent leather shoes that he claimed were defective. Di Fabrizio accused him of missing the urinal and peeing on them at the Oscars.

“Never come back here again,” he said in his thick Italian accent.

The shoemaker occasionally made house calls, but his customers mostly came to him. In his workshop on 3rd Street near Crescent Heights, he would trace their bare feet on a piece of paper and measure the circumference of each of their feet at the ball, around the arch, the heel and the ankle. Then he would customize a pre-carved wooden last from Italy, adding thin pieces of leather 1 millimeter at a time to more perfectly mimic the unique shape of the client’s foot.

The size and shapes of the lasts varied wildly. He once told a reporter that it took “half a cow” to make shoes for Wilt Chamberlain, who wore a size 15. In his archives, Francis found a petite high heel shoe last roughly the length of his hand.

Francis holds a foot tracing and shoe lasts made for Robert De Niro by Pasquale Di Fabrizio.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“Di Fabrizio did lots of shoes for little people,” Francis said. “He really offered an important service for that community. They could have formal footwear rather than having only the option of wearing kids shoes.”

The same lasts could be used over and over again to make several pairs of shoes, as long as the heel height was the same. Each last went in its own box decorated with a ribbon in the colors of the Italian flag.

“It’s so simple, but he claims his territory with that ribbon,” Francis said. “He cared enough to take one extra step. It’s what really made that collection iconic.”

A legacy preserved

Francis first encountered Di Fabrizio’s archives in 2010 when Kazanchyan offered him a job at Andre #1 Custom Made Shoes on Sunset Boulevard. Kazanchyan inherited the shop from his uncle, Andre Kazanchyan, who once worked with Di Fabrizio and became his good friend.

Gary Kazanchyan and Di Fabrizio were close as well. When Di Fabrizio retired in the early 2000s, Kazanchyan hired all of the guys who worked at his shop. Di Fabrizio was at Kazanchyan’s wedding and when the older shoemaker was in a nursing home at the end of his life, Kazanchyan visited him every day.

For years Kazanchyan stored as many of the ribbon-trimmed boxes as he could fit in his Hollywood shop, but just before COVID he moved his shop to his garage in Burbank and transferred Di Fabrizio’s archives to his backyard. “At one point, my whole backyard was this mountain of shoe lasts,” he said.

Chris Francis, left, and Gary Kazanchyan at Palermo’s Italian Restaurant in Los Feliz.

(Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times)

Kazanchyan started a renovation on his house in 2022 and could no longer store Di Fabrizio’s archive in his backyard. He’d sold some of the most famous shoe lasts at auction — a bundle of Di Fabrizio’s shoe lasts for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. went for $4,375 in 2013 — but he still had several tons of material stacked on pallets and covered in tarps. He remembered that Francis loved the collection, so he called him and asked if he wanted it. Francis did.

Francis didn’t have the money to purchase the collection in cash, but he offered Kazanchyan two art pieces that he’d exhibited and Kazanchyan accepted. The first carload of boxes Francis took to his studio included lasts for Wayne Newton, Paula Abdul, Ginger Rogers, Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone.

“My excitement was on fire,” he said.

Francis spent a few weeks sorting through the archive and discarding lasts and shoe boxes that were too covered in mold or deteriorated to be worth keeping. Just before a rainstorm threatened the rest of the collection, he brought thousands of shoe lasts to his studio but even now regrets that he was unable to save it all.

“I tried to grab the big names, but there was so much I couldn’t keep,” he said. “It was heartbreaking.”

The boxes hold stories — and life lessons

Living and working among the Di Fabrizio collection has taught Francis a lot more than just the art of making shoes.

“I’m constantly seeing the obituary of a celebrity who has passed and I go to the workshop and there’s their box,” he said. “It really lets you know that life is for the living. It’s up to you to be responsible and live your life when you’re alive. Be yourself, teach others, leave something behind.”

Hanging onto the collection has not been easy — but Francis believes he was chosen from beyond to care for Di Fabrizio’s archive and to share it with others responsibly.

He’s still not sure what that will look like, but he’s determined to try.

And in the meantime, he is also determined to keep the traditional art of shoemaking alive in Los Angeles.

If you look around his workshop, you’ll spot several boxes adorned with red, white and blue striped ribbon.

Francis is making those boxes his own.

Working with hand tools, Chris Francis makes a custom pair of shoes for musician Lita Ford.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Cheese is the star at one of the world’s most enchanting restaurants in a Puglia forest. Plus, cold noodles to obsess over … how fish sauce caramel transforms instant noodles … the sexy steak videos transforming an Armenian meat shop … losing Birdie G’s pickle chicken … 6-to-1 grocery shopping … and an Angeleno’s connection to Mexican Chicago. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Slinging the blues

Cheesemaker Vito Dicecca, who built Baby Dicecca, a cheese bar in the Mercadante forest close to Altamura in Puglia, Italy.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

It’s been more than 15 years since I stumbled into Caseificio Dicecca, the shop of the famed cheesemaking Dicecca family in the Puglia city of Altamura, and bit into a round of freshly made burrata, the rich, oozing cream still warm. No burrata I’ve had since has equaled that first bite.

I had come to the region with chef Nancy Silverton, who was poking her head into the doors of the city’s many bakeries, sampling focaccia and the local bread that has a tradition so old the ancient Roman poet Horace called Altamura’s crusty loaves “by far the best bread to be had.”

Burrata is a much younger food. It wasn’t established in the region until the 1920s and Caseificio Dicecca is just one of several family-run operations in the area making the cheese that is now ubiquitous around the world — thanks in part to Silverton, who first started serving burrata in the 1990s at L.A.’s Campanile before she later opened her many Mozza restaurants.

The phenomenon got so out of hand that a burrata backlash was sparked, led by author Jeff Gordinier‘s 2019 Esquire story titled “F*** Your Burrata,” in which he argued that the appearance of the cheese on a menu “is like a billboard announcing, ‘The chef at this place has never had an original idea in his life …’”

Meanwhile, burrata sales continue to grow, with one estimate valuing the global market at more than $2 billion this year.

Last week, I returned to Puglia with Silverton, this time with author Alec Lobrano and several food-obsessed travelers. Silverton, who is a fan of Gordinier’s writing, read parts of his story aloud to the group even as she extolled her love for the maligned cheese. Especially when it is made by expert cheesemakers like the Diceccas.

And no one would ever accuse the Dicecca family of being unoriginal.

The cheese operation is now in the hands of five siblings — Vito, Paolo, Angelo, Vittoria and Maristella — who are the fourth generation to run the caseificio. At various points, the siblings left Altamura to travel the world and, in some cases, make cheese in places far away from Italy. But Altamura is their lodestar and several years back Vito Dicecca, who spent time in Japan, Thailand, Mexico, Australia and even lived for a bit in Southern California, not only brought back new cheesemaking ideas (the siblings make more than 300 varieties) he created one of the world’s most enchanting restaurants in the Mercadante Forest not far from Altamura.

Focaccia with fresh stracciatella at Baby Dicecca in Puglia’s Mercadante Forest.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

You may have seen an earlier version of the restaurant — which then was more of a kiosk — in the Puglia episode of Stanley Tucci‘s CNN series “Searching for Italy.” A few months ago, Vito Dicecca relocated and expanded his restaurant, Baby Dicecca, but it is still a very simple spot where the majority of diners eat outside surrounded by the trees of the forest.

“Proudly, we serve mostly cheese and some vegetables from our friends close to here,” Dicecca said as he welcomed the group. Even his wines are usually made by friends of his, he explained, as he poured “a natural, biodynamic sparkling wine” made with the Puglian Marasco grape from the producer L’Archetipo.

“I don’t buy the brand,” he said. “I like the people and then I’ll like the wine.”

What followed was a cheese lover’s feast, including focaccia draped in fresh, almost liquid stracciatella (or the “heart of mozzarella” as Dicecca put it on the menu) and “calzoncello alla Vito,” a handmade type of raviolo sauced with mozzarella whey and topped with a fresh grating of the aged cheese the family calls Dicecca Gold. To break up the richness, there was an heirloom tomato salad plus Vito’s take on a Caesar salad with seasonal greens mixed with fennel and celery plus a bit of honey and aged Pecorino. It may not have been a true Caesar, but it was delicious.

At one point Dicecca broke out a charcoal-colored loaf of bread made with grano arso, the burnt flour that also is used in some of the region’s pastas. He sliced the bread, drizzled it with local olive oil and then took a bundle of dried, wild oregano grown in the forest nearby and shook some of it on top of the slices.

Wild oregano is shaken on olive-oil-drizzled slices of bread made with grano arso, or burnt flour, at Baby Dicecca, a restaurant in Puglia, Italy.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Dessert was two kinds of gelato, including one with goat’s milk, oregano and honey, made on the spot by Dicecca’s friend — “a genius” — Maurizio Bonina.

But the climax of the meal was, of course, cheese. And it wasn’t burrata.

Amore Primitivo is Vito Dicecco’s fever dream of a cheese, a blue, aged variety that is soaked in local Primitivo wine for 100 days, turning the exterior deep purple. He places the whole cheese on a cake stand and then loads the top with macerated cherries. Once the group admires the cheese’s beauty, he slices and serves it atop guests’ hands like a caviar bump.

Only when you taste the cheese and its beautifully mellow funk does it become clear that this is not just a cheese for Instagram. This aged blue created in the land of fresh mozzarella exemplifies the best of the Italian spirit — a healthy respect for tradition infused with a risk taker’s desire for innovation.

“For the first three years, I didn’t sell one piece,” Dicecca told us. “My family was very mad at me. Friends of my dad, they said to him, ‘Tell your son, this is not a pastry shop, it’s a cheese shop.’”

For a time, he added, “I pretended to sell the cheese — I was giving it as a gift to friends. But now it’s one of the best sellers.”

These days, Caseificio Dicecca is almost as well known for its blue cheeses as it is for its fresh burrata and pasta filata family of stretched curd cheeses. They’ve experimented with more than 60 types of blue, including an ultra aged cheese, golden yellow on the inside, that Vito Dicecco named Surfing Blu. Who knows what he’ll think of next?

Baby Dicecca cheese bar is open from May through October.

Sexy steaks

Sevan Meat Market manager Norvan Simonian, right, and co-owner Serop Marukyan.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

More generational innovation, this time closer to home, as our favorite Grocery Goblin Vanessa Anderson reports in her latest dispatch on the social media ideas transforming an Armenian meat shop: “Sevan Meat Market’s social media videos — conceived by owner Hrach Marukyan, his son Serop and manager Norvan Simonian — tell an Armenian American story built on beef, a story of the old and new, of adaptation to a rapidly changing world. And their growing audience of now nearly 60,000 Instagram followers is eagerly tuning in.”

In a pickle

The “pickle chick” cutlet, front, plus the relish tray and knife-and-fork tomato sandwich at Jeremy Fox’s Birdie G’s, which will close in December.

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

Last month, when I was at Birdie G’s in Santa Monica for a family get-together — and a taste of the restaurant’s famed “pickle chick” fried chicken cutlet — the place was packed, with the crowded valet station just one indication that this was a place people wanted to be. It seemed that chef and partner Jeremy Fox‘s vision for a chef’s take on a chain restaurant was ready to spread to other locations.

But as Fox told Food’s Stephanie Breijo this week, business has been inconsistent since the Palisades fire in January. “One month the sprawling restaurant’s seats would all be filled,” wrote Breijo, “the following, sales would drop by 40%.” And in the days right after the fire, Fox estimated that the restaurant’s revenue fell by 80%.

“That was a bloodbath,” Fox told Breijo, explaining his decision to close the restaurant on Dec. 31.

Until the end of the year, Fox and Birdie G’s co-owners, Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan, owners of the Rustic Canyon Family restaurant group, are planning more daily specials, ambitious large-format dishes, guest chefs and “one final run,” Breijo writes, “of the restaurant’s fan-favorite Hanukkah series, 8 Nights.”

“What’s the worst that could happen,” Fox said, “we go out of business?”

The great holiday cookie bake-off returns

(Leslie Grow / For the Times)

Here at L.A. Times Food we decided it had been too long since our last Los Angeles Times Holiday Cookie Bake-Off — a tradition that began in 2010 and allowed us to connect with you, our readers, and your recipes. As Deputy Food Editor Betty Hallock wrote in our recipe call, we are accepting recipe submissions until Monday, Oct. 13. If you’ve got a great holiday cookie recipe we want to hear from you.

Noodle cool-down

A bowl of Beijing Yanji cold noodles from Bistro Na’s restaurant in Temple City.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )

Columnist Jenn Harris’ latest obsession is Bistro Na’s Beijing Yanji cold noodles. “It’s a tangle of buckwheat noodles in an ice-cold broth,” she writes, “with sliced beef shank, beef tongue, kimchi, watermelon, boiled egg, shredded cucumber, pickled radish and chile sauce all arranged over the top like a color wheel.” I think I need to return to the Temple City restaurant very soon for a bowl of my own.

Mexican as Chicago

Marcos Carbajal, left, and his father Inocencio Carbajal at their Little Village location of Carnitas Uruapan in Chicago.

(Carnitas Uruapan)

With so much of the Trump administration’s focus on Chicago, Food Editor Daniel Hernandez wrote about the city’s deeply established Mexican roots as seen in its restaurants from the perspective of a visiting Angeleno: “Los Angeles may have more Mexican residents in total numbers, but in terms of who makes up each city’s Latino population, Chicago is as Mexican as Los Angeles.”

Instant classic

Holy Basil’s chef and owner Deau Arpapornnopprat holds his ‘Yum Mama’ Instant Noodle Salad With Lime And Fish Sauce Caramel in the Times Test Kitchen.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Have you ever made fish sauce caramel? It could become your next kitchen essential. For our most recent “Chef That!” cooking video, Deau Arpapornnopparat, chef-owner of the Thai restaurants Holy Basil, came to the Times Test Kitchen to show us how he elevates instant noodles with easy-to-make fish sauce caramel and more toppings. As Deputy Food Editor Betty Hallock wrote, the “dressing is classically sweet, sour, salty and spicy all at once.” Find the recipe here.

Curtis Stone’s ‘Field Trip’

To cap off the weekend of The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market, presented by Square, we’ve added a free Sunday evening screening, reception and conversation on Oct. 12 featuring L.A. chef Curtis Stone with Michelin-starred chef Vicky Cheng of the acclaimed Hong Kong restaurants Wing and VEA. I’ll be talking with Stone and Cheng about the Hong Kong episode of “Field Trip With Curtis Stone” and more. It takes place at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. To sign up for free tickets, click here.

And although VIP tickets (allowing early entry) to The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market are sold out, general admission tickets remain for the two-night event taking place Oct. 10-11 at City Market Social House in downtown L.A. More than 40 restaurants are participating, including Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, OyBar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla L.A., Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

HELLMANN’S has stepped in to cover the cost of repairing a Spanish café set ablaze by an angry customer who couldn’t get mayonnaise with his sandwich.

The mayo giant pledged to foot the bill after the shocking arson attack at Cafetería Las Postas near Seville, Spain, last month.

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A Hellmann’s spokesperson said: “Cafetería Las Postas, we’re sorry we weren’t there. From now on, you can count on us.”

The brand promised to restore the premises and ensure the condiment will never be missing from its shelves again, Euro Weekly News reported.

Owner José Antonio Caballero called the incident completely “surreal” and said there was “no explanation for what he did.”

He explained: “First one waiter and then another the second time this gentleman asked for mayonnaise gave him the same answer which was that the bar didn’t have a kitchen and the sandwiches came ready-prepared and we didn’t have sauces.

“At that moment he walked to the garage opposite, returned to the bar with a bottle in his hand which we discovered afterwards had petrol inside, and asked the first waiter: ‘Are you sure there’s no mayonnaise?’ without giving him time to reply.

“There’s no explanation for what happened. It was awful.”

Horrifying CCTV shows the suspect storming inside, splashing fuel over the counter, and setting it alight with a lighter.

As flames shot towards the ceiling, terrified customers – including children as young as four – scrambled to safety while staff fought the blaze with an extinguisher.

Caballero said the fire left damage of up to £7,000 but praised “quick-thinking workers” for stopping it spreading.

He added: “The important thing is that nobody was injured. There were young children and elderly people around. Imagine if someone had been hurt.”

The 50-year-old suspect was arrested within minutes in a nearby square after burning his hand.

Police said he was taken to a health centre under guard and is due in court.

Investigators are probing why he started the blaze, with reports suggesting he was with two others at the time.

The mayo-fuelled attack has since divided opinion online after Hellmann’s public response.

Some hailed the move as clever marketing, while others blasted it as insensitive.

One local fumed: “Hellmann’s, it’s a little in bad taste, no? Will you get noticed? Yes. But at what cost? I don’t think a brand like yours needs to do this.”

Another said: “What happened is not a joke.”

A third remarked: “Taking advantage of someone’s misfortune to do marketing.”

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The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to allow Southern California Edison to hike customer bills by nearly 10% next month, and there may be more increases to come.

Edison’s plan would boost the average residential bill by $17 a month or about $200 a year, the commission said. The monthly bill for a customer using 500 kilowatts would jump from $171 to $188 on Oct. 1.

The five commissioners are scheduled to vote Thursday on the PUC administrative law judge’s proposal. It’s just one of multiple rate hikes Edison has asked the commission to approve in the coming year.

Scores of angry customers have written to the commission since Edison proposed the hike, asking the panel to deny it.

Some customers have pointed out that even as Edison has charged more for tree trimming and equipment upgrades meant to make its system safer and more reliable, its electric lines continue to spark fires.

The company now faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the Jan. 7 Eaton fire, which killed at least 19 people and destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena. Video captured the fire igniting under an Edison transmission tower. The investigation into the fire’s cause is continuing.

“Please, do not let SCE pass their damages on to their customers,” Sara Green, a Crestline resident, wrote to the commission. “Let them cut executive salaries and forgo dividends, rather than pass this on unilaterally to every customer.”

Other customers have complained about increasing outages, including the preventative blackouts the company uses to try to stop its equipment from sparking fires in hot, windy weather.

William Pilling, a resident of Rovana, a small unincorporated community near Bishop, told the commission last month that he and his neighbors were experiencing “highly frequent service interruptions.”

“This is the very definition of unreliable service,” Pilling wrote. ”We are now being asked to pay more per unit for a lower quality good.”

David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesman, said in an interview that the company was sensitive to concerns about rising rates. “We know that rate changes are challenging for customers,” he said.

“The cost of action is high, but the cost of inaction is higher,” Eisenhauer said. The increases, he said, were needed to support “a reliable and resilient electric grid that is ready to enable the clean energy transition.”

The proposed 10% hike is the result of what the commission calls a general rate case, where the agency allows utilities to propose how much they need to spend to operate and maintain the electrical grid for the next four years.

After months of hearings and debate, an administrative law judge recommended that the commission allow Edison to spend $9.8 billion on those costs this year — 13.7% more than the amount authorized for last year, according to the release. The proposal is less than the nearly $10.5 billion that Edison had initially requested.

Under the plan, Edison will get additional increases for inflation — and customers will see corresponding hikes — for each year through 2028, the commission said.

Edison says it has increased its spending aimed at preventing wildfires, including by undergrounding lines, installing new insulated wires and increasing equipment inspections in areas with high fire risk. The company has also increased the trimming of trees and other vegetation growing near its equipment.

Eisenhauer said that since 2019 wildfire-related investments have helped drive up rates.

He added that demand for electricity is “growing faster than it has in decades” leading to higher costs. In addition, he said, “threats to grid safety and reliability are becoming more frequent and more costly.”

Since 2014, Edison’s rates have risen by 80% — more than twice the rate of inflation, the commission’s public advocates office said in a May report.

More than 860,000 Edison customers — or 19% of the total — are behind in paying their electric bills, the report said. The average unpaid balance was $957.

The proposed 10% hike is one of several increases Edison has asked the commission to approve, or that state officials have already greenlighted.

In November, customers who use little electricity, like those living in small apartments or those owning solar panels, will see higher bills when the company begins adding a $24 monthly fixed charge, according to a recent Edison release.

In return, the price per kilowatt hour will fall, leading to possible savings for those using more power. For example, a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatts per month — double the average — will see their bill decline to $355 from $380, according to the release.

The commission designed the new monthly charge, which applies to customers of the state’s three largest for-profit electric companies, so that revenue increases from the new fees match the loss from the lower price per kilowatt hour.

The new fee was created under a bill pushed through the state Legislature in 2022 by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The utilities asked for the change in how electricity was billed to encourage Californians to switch to electric-powered vehicles and home appliances.

Edison also expects to raise rates for the damages from two catastrophic wildfires that investigators found the utility’s equipment sparked.

It has asked the commission for a nearly 2% increase to cover $5.4 billion in damages from the 2018 Woolsey fire, which killed three people and destroyed more than 1,600 homes and other structures in Malibu and nearby communities.

Earlier this year, the commission agreed Edison could increase rates by less than 1% to collect $1.6 billion from customers for damages from the 2017 Thomas fire. The blaze burned more than 280,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties and left barren hillsides that helped set off mudslides in Montecito that killed 23 people. The commission must still sign off on final approval of the hike.

Eisenhauer said that under state law utilities are allowed to shift fire damages to customers if they have operated their system prudently and reasonably. He said the two fires were “largely driven by unprecedented and extreme weather events and other factors outside SCE’s control.”

In another proposal, Edison has asked the commission to raise customer bills by 2.1% to increase profits going to its investors, according to its customer notice. The plan would increase its cost of capital — the rate that helps determine how much profit it earns when it builds electric lines and other infrastructure.

The utility asked for the increase in investor profits after its stock price plummeted in January when lawyers claimed its transmission line had ignited the Eaton fire. The company told the commission that because of California’s high risk of wildfire, it needed to earn higher profits to encourage investors to continue holding its stock and to bolster its credit rating.

Despite Edison’s rapidly rising spending on insulated wires, tree trimming and other fire prevention work, its equipment sparked 178 fires last year — up from 90 in 2023.

Company executives said most of those ignitions were small fires that did not spread. The number of fires each year, they said, depends on the weather. Last year, heavy rain and then hot weather, they said, left more dried vegetation.

Edison has said its increased fire prevention work will decrease the number of times that it must shut off power to communities in hot, windy weather to stop lines from sparking fires.

Yet the company said at an Aug. 19 meeting that it expects the number of days of preventative power shutoffs to increase by 20% to 40% this year and that the number of customers subject to them could be twice as high.

Eisenhauer explained that the number of preventative shutoffs was expected to rise because the utility recently lowered the wind speed thresholds that trigger them. The company also added 47,000 more customers to areas believed to have high fire risk, which are subject to the preventative shutoffs, he said.

At the August meeting, Edison executives touted the success of the company’s fire prevention work.

In a presentation, Timothy O’Toole, an Edison board member and head of its safety and operations committee, noted the devastation the January fires caused in and around Los Angeles.

“Nonetheless, we remain very proud and confident in the progress we’ve made,” he said.

O’Toole said the utility’s fire prevention work had “created ever greater protection for our communities and our customers.”

Later in the meeting, Caroline Thomas Jacobs, director of the state Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, questioned O’Toole’s repeated praise of the company’s work to prevent fires.

“Your tone sounded defensive and justifying the progress that’s made as opposed to acknowledging the humility of what an event like the January fires I would think would bring,” she said to O’Toole.

The public can comment on the proposed hike at the meeting on Thursday or in the docket for the case.

I have a suggestion: Treat yourself to a beautiful meal, right now, at one of the Los Angeles restaurants where the chefs really invest in seasonal produce. There is nothing, anywhere, like the high-ripe flavors and rainbow pigments of California fruits and vegetables at the close of summer. We know this, but the knowing hits different when the produce is freshly considered by our finest culinary minds.

It’s an excellent time for a spontaneous indulgence. Late August and through September is shoulder season for finer-dining in L.A. Vacations are done, kids are back in school, we settle in at work and home before the holiday blur. Reservations are often easier to score. Many of our favorite dining rooms could use our presence. The ingredients are so urgent, I’d nudge you even to show up solo at a restaurant’s bar and savor just a plate or two of summer’s final splendors.

Where to taste the end of summer in L.A.

The cooking at Rustic Canyon, guided by chef de cuisine Elijah DeLeon, is particularly exciting at this annual juncture, when the greatness of the raw product is a given and the deeper pleasure comes from the savvy, daily-changing flavor combinations. His weaving of spells began with a plate of halved greengage plums from Andy’s Orchard — a fruit Lucas Peterson once rightly dubbed the “Holy Grail of stone fruit” — filled with a cherry paste cleverly mimicking the Mexican candy Chamoy.

Charcoal-grilled Jimmy Nardello peppers were paired with hunks of white peach and dusted with fennel pollen, a garnish that can sometimes seem precious and innocuous but here added the right offsetting licorice nip. White cheddar blanketed a spread of earthy-sweet corn kernels and snipped shishito peppers, a feel-good riff that fell somewhere between Midwestern creamed corn and Korean corn cheese. Tiny Sungold tomatoes rolled like marbles around nearly translucent sea bass, crowned for contrast with an oversize round of orange-ish butter flecked with herbs and Calabrian chiles.

Jimmy Nardello peppers and white peaches at an August meal at Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

A meaty pork chop arrived with thin ribbons of zucchini that had been glossed in mustard vinaigrette. The effect was more of a glow than a zap, lifting the pork with gentle acid while allowing the vegetable to also shine. So light-handed, so summery.

DeLeon’s menu moves at warp speed during these heady months; I see figs and purslane currently adorn the pork chop this week, and the variety of snacking plums are speckled Mirabelles.

More summer-themed suggestions

For dining inspiration, here’s a rundown of some other spectacular summertime dishes I’ve had in the last month. They’re going fast, agriculturally speaking. Acorn squash and apples have their own joys, but nothing beats the moment we’re in.

Yess has opened for lunch service, and the menu includes Junya Yamasaki’s famed “monk’s chirashi.” A recent version, splayed over rice, modeled peaches, plums, cucumbers, peas still dangling from their pods and handsomely veiny shiso leaves.

A summertime version of “monk’s chirashi” at Yess in the Arts District.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

I’ve written plenty lately about the glories of the vegetable cooking at RVR in Venice. Go straight for the peaches and purple daikon stung with tosazu (vinegar-based dressing smoky with katsuobushi) and aromatic accents of pickled Fresno chiles, ginger and crushed Marcona almond.

It isn’t summer without at least one cracker-thin bar pie at Quarter Sheets (available Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday, for dine-in only) scattered with Jimmy Nardellos and sausage.

Two perennial favorites for savory-leaning stone fruit salads: The beauty at Kismet fragrant with lemon balm and dressed in turmeric-whey vinaigrette that adds intriguing color and weight, and the tomato and stone fruit salad at Majordomo splashed with a perfectly balanced sherry vinaigrette and flecked with shiso.

Dunsmoor’s summer menu straddles the influence of parallel agrarian regions: California and the American South. A simple platter of sliced duck ham and fleshy Honeyloupe melon from Weiser Farms brought the theme home early in the meal.

Smoked moulard duck ham with Weiser Farms Honeyloupe melon at Dunsmoor

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Camélia in the Arts District is operating at the height of its powers. A late summer dinner: a fluffy salad of greens with slices of yellow peach and hidden walnuts, generously covered in shaved Comté and tensed with calamansi vinaigrette, followed by soft-shell crab tempura over a fresh sauce vierge made with bright, chewy-soft Sungolds. I’m a cheese freak, so a Comté tart with bruléed figs for dessert didn’t feel redundant.

Speaking of stunning salads: They never disappoint at A.O.C. in West Hollywood. Case in point: tender arugula arranged with cherries and nectarines, an ash-ripened goat cheese called Linedeline with the scent of mushrooms and, to drive home the intensity, a garlicky, pesto-like aillade bright green with pistachios.

Birdie G’s, one of the sister Santa Monica restaurants to Rustic Canyon where Jeremy Fox can frequently be seen on the path, has brought back its incredible relish tray featuring five-onion dip. Look for the shimmery sprigs of ice plant among the spectrum of geometric carved vegetables.

Birdie G’s relish plate, pictured in 2019. It’s always changing.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

When do I know summer is over? When Nicole Rucker and her team stop baking pies with stone fruits at Fat & Flour. I just checked with Rucker, and the last of the peaches are touch and go. Fall might be here sooner than I’m willing to admit.

Food Bowl tickets

VIP tickets (allowing early entry) to The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market, presented by Square, are already sold out for the Saturday-night session taking place Oct. 11 at City Market Social House in downtown L.A. Friday-night VIP tickets are still available, but going fast. More than 40 restaurants are participating, including Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, OyBar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla L.A., Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

• This week I review 88 Club, the Beverly Hills fine-dining Chinese restaurant that’s the latest project from star chef Mei Lin and restaurateur Francis Miranda. I love the shrimp toast hands-down, and there’s plenty else to think through.
• Anyone else want to disappear into a big, nap-inducing pile of flapjacks this weekend? Khushbu Shah powered through diners, cafes and brunch stalwarts to name her 11 favorite plates of pancakes in L.A.
• Stephanie Breijo has news of the latest sushi sensation: Kiyoshi Kimura, a prolific sushi restaurateur in Japan known as the “Tuna King,” has debuted his first U.S. restaurant, Sushi Zanmai, in Koreatown.
• Jenn Harris singles out the best sourdough in the known universe. It’s made in Orange County, and it’s purple.
• Some uplifting news from Suhauna Hussain: A new owner aims to reopen the Original Pantry, the iconic eatery in downtown Los Angeles that closed earlier this year, by New Year’s Eve. His goal is also to re-employ the staff of 25 who had been laid off.
• As we head into the best time for oysters, Ari Kolender of Found Oyster and Queen’s Raw Bar & Grill shows us the right way to shuck them.

A federal grand jury has charged two brothers in Southern California with tax evasion on more than $1.1 million in income they allegedly received in part from a years-long scheme selling tee times on local golf courses.

Se Youn “Steve” Kim, 41, and his identical twin brother, Hee Youn “Ted” Kim, 41, were arrested Thursday morning by federal authorities and pleaded not guilty.

From 2021 to 2023, the Kim brothers’ tee time brokering business scooped up thousands of reservation slots at golf courses across the U.S., including at least 17 public golf courses in Southern California, according to the indictment filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

The brothers used online platforms including KakaoTalk, a Korean instant messaging app, to reach their customers. Federal prosecutors say that by quickly nabbing popular early morning tee times almost immediately after they were available to the public, the brothers “created a monopoly” of Southern California golf courses.

The prevalence of tee-time brokering was reported by The Times last year, in which scores of local golfers shared frustrations over their inability to secure a tee time on public courses in L.A.

“Finally, it’s justice,” said Joseph Lee, a vocal critic of tee time brokers who helped collect evidence and met with federal prosecutors during their investigation of the Kim brothers. “For a long time, L.A. golfers have been frustrated by these illegal tee time brokers and their resale market. Authorities have finally recognized the seriousness of the issue.”

Anthony Solis, the attorney representing Ted Kim, said he did not immediately have a response on behalf of his client. The attorney representing Steve Kim did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Federal prosecutors said the brothers had customers pay reservation fees to their personal accounts via Venmo, Zelle, and other applications. The tee time brokering business netted the brothers nearly $700,000 between 2021 and 2023, according to the indictment. The brothers, who also worked as MRI technicians, are accused of willfully failing to report a combined $1.1 million in income to the Internal Revenue Service for 2022 and 2023.

The Kim brothers are also accused of failing to pay taxes that the IRS had assessed. Rather than paying off mounting tax debts, the indictment alleges that the brothers made lavish purchases at Chanel, Cartier, Prada and Louis Vuitton.

In a brief interview with The Times last year, Ted Kim said that he used up to five devices and relied on unspecified friends to secure tee times. He said he is on the same playing field as every other golfer in L.A. and does not use bots to game the system.

“It’s not like I’m taking advantage of technology. I’m booking myself,” Kim told The Times in an interview. “I’m not doing anything illegal.”

Kim told the newspaper that he profited a couple thousand dollars a month, and framed his business as a way of helping elderly Korean golfers without tech savvy to navigate the online golf reservation system.

“I’m just helping Korean seniors, because they have a right to play golf, because all the Koreans play golf, right? Without my help, they actually struggle,” he said.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

California electric customers would pay $9 billion more to shore up the state’s wildfire fund under a last-minute deal reached behind closed doors that was introduced as legislation on Wednesday.

Southern California Edison, and the state’s two other large for-profit electric companies, had been lobbying Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders, urging them to pass legislation to replenish the state’s $21-billion fund that pays for damages of utility-caused fires.

State officials have warned the fund could be wiped out by damages from the Eaton fire, which killed 19 people and destroyed a large swath of Altadena on Jan. 7.

Customers of the three utilities are already on the hook for contributing $10.5 billion to the original fund through a surcharge of about $3 on their monthly bills.

If approved, the bill amendments made on Wednesday would have customers pay $9 billion more by extending that surcharge by 10 years beyond 2035, when it was set to expire.

Under the deal, the three electric companies’ shareholders would also pay an additional $9 billion into the fund. That means the fund would increase by $18 billion if the legislation, known as SB 254, passes.

Consumer advocates and environmentalists tracking the bill said they were still trying to understand all the provisions of the 229-page bill, which had been debated in hearings in recent months, but was then significantly amended without public input. The new draft of the bill was published at 9:12 a.m. on Wednesday.

“It’s a complete gut and amend,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group. “It’s an end run around the normal legislative process.”

The complex proposal was introduced just days before the state legislature’s session ends, which means it may receive little public debate.

The session was scheduled to end on Friday, but any amendments must be public for 72 hours, which would push a vote to Saturday morning.

Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group, said he was disappointed that ratepayers — who are already paying the country’s second highest electric rates — would have to pay more. But he pointed to some measures that could help reduce the upward pressure on bills.

For example, utilities would be required to finance some expensive transmission projects through a lower-cost method of public financing that legislators said could save ratepayers $3 billion.

Toney said after reviewing the bill’s language his group planned to support it even though it “falls short of addressing the growing affordability crisis.”

Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Irvine), the bill’s co-author, defended the last minute amendments, saying the legislature needed to move quickly to bolster the fund as the wildfire season begins in California.

She said many of the provisions added to SB 254, including the public financing of transmission lines, had been included in other bills that had been repeatedly been debated in public hearings.

Petrie-Norris, who is chair of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, defended the process and said that she believed electric customers were getting “a good deal” since half the $18 billion addition into the fund would come from utility shareholders.

Also, under the plan, she said, the three utilities must spend billions of dollars more on wildfire prevention costs, which they can’t earn a profit on.

The share prices of Edison International, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Sempra, the parent company of San Diego Gas & Electric all rose Wednesday on the news.

Newsom and lawmakers created the state wildfire fund in 2019 through a bill known as AB 1054 to protect the three utilities from bankruptcy in the event their electric lines sparked a catastrophic wildfire.

Under the law’s protective measures, Edison could pay nothing or just a fraction of the damages for the Eaton fire if its equipment is found to have sparked the fire.

A representative for Newsom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The investigation into the fire is ongoing. Edison has said a leading theory is that a century-old transmission line, not used since the 1970s, somehow re-energized and sparked the blaze.

The insured property losses alone could be as much as $15.2 billion, according to an estimate released in July by state officials. That amount does not include uninsured losses or damages beyond those to property, such as wrongful death claims. A study by UCLA estimated losses at $24 billion to $45 billion.

Damages from the Palisades fire, which also ignited on Jan. 7, are not covered by the state wildfire fund. The city of Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power, a municipal utility, services the area of Pacific Palisades destroyed by that fire.

Only customers of Edison, PG&E and San Diego Gas & Electric pay to support the wildfire fund. And only those three utilities are covered by its protections.

If you consume tea with any sort of interest, maybe you’ve been hearing about the worldwide matcha shortage of 2025?

Matcha, but much much more

In short: Viral posts featuring soothingly smooth, mint green matcha drinks on TikTok and other social media over the last few years have ignited a global craze. Coupled with a pandemic-era focus on matcha as an antioxidant-rich superfood that might help prevent cancer and perhaps even improve memory and reduce anxiety, its demand is booming. Industry analysts predict the market size to almost double to $6.5 billion internationally by 2030.

Supplies from tea farmers, and dwindled inventory from distributors, can’t keep pace — especially given labor shortages and a recent heatwave in Japan that decreased yields of tencha, the traditional variety of shade-grown tea which is powdered into matcha. Many companies, small and large, that sell matcha have attempted to stockpile their reserves. Wholesale prices this year have increased by a staggering 265%, according to the International Tea Co.

Walk with this knowledge into Kettl, a new Japanese tea cafe and shop in Loz Feliz, and the calmness of the two-story space feels all the more remarkable.

Leaves of Koju oolong, grown in Japan, before a tasting at Kettl in Los Feliz.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

No sense of scarcity here. Order a matcha cortado to drink on premises and it arrives in a gorgeously coarse ceramic cup, the tea decorated with the requisite foam art. Choose from three matcha varieties for your latte: nutty and chocolaty, creamy and floral, or umami-intense. Ask for whisked matcha with options in a similar range of flavors. Grab a cooling matcha splashed with sparking water over ice to go.

Or, stick around for a tasting with schooled staffers who can guide you through wider nuances of matcha — and, even better, to a world of Japanese teas far greater than the current object of focus. This is why I’ve become a regular at Kettl.

Zach Mangan was a jazz drummer in his twenties in the 2000s when, on tour in Paris, he happened upon a store selling sincha, the prized tea made from the first spring harvest in Japan.

“The smell of the glossy, needlelike leaves was incredibly nostalgic, though I had never experience it before,” he writes in his 2022 book, “Stories of Japanese Tea.” “It reminded me of the lawn of my childhood home when freshly mowed. I brewed it and was captivated by how much flavor was packed inside my tiny cup of tea.”

Kettl founder Zach Mangan talks tea behind the counter of his new Los Feliz shop.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

The experience led down one path after another: A job at a now-closed tea shop in New York called Ito En. A first monthlong trip to Japan in 2010, where he understood the degrees to which freshness can take green teas from pleasant to electric. A series of return visits in which he developed relationships with tea producers so he could become an importer.

His first client, from a cold call, was renowned chef David Bouley. Other chefs began buying. He and his wife, Minami Mangan, opened the first Kettl shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2021.

Their Los Angeles location, delayed for several years by a familiar litany of permit and buildout hurdles, steeped their first teas for customers in February.

The state of L.A.’s sit-down tea scene

As a mid-level tea obsessive, I’d say the culture around drinking serious tea in public spaces in Southern California remains niche. No insult intended to matcha and boba shops: I’m talking about places for a face-to-face, sit-down shared experience between the tea brewer and the drinker. I’ve written plenty about Alhambra’s by-appointment-only Tea Habitat, my favorite place in the country for dan cong, the exceptionally fragrant oolongs from the Phoenix Mountain region in China’s Guangdong province.

A tasting at Tea Habitat in Alhambra.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Tomoko Imade Dyen, a Tokyo-born Angeleno who works as a PR consultant and television producer, holds occasional, enlightening Japanese tea tastings with seasonal foods. The Good Liver store in downtown L.A. also holds regular tastings and carries premium matcha that tends to sell fast.

Kettl and its serene, sunny rooms, in this context, feel extravagant. There are ticketed classes, held upstairs, which teach the basics of, say, making iced matcha in summertime, but I’m most drawn to the four-seat tasting bar to the right of the ordering counter. On weekends it’s wise to reserve seats, but I’ve had luck slipping in on weekday afternoons. A staffer will hand you a menu booklet outlining options: bowls of first-rate matcha that begin at $15; pots of other teas, which include multiple steepings, starting at $10; an in-depth tea omakase starting at $70 per person.

I’m happy whisking matcha for myself at home. Drinking in the shop, I’m curious about sencha, the broadest category of green teas produced in Japan. Mangan likens the diversity of styles made under the term to the wild differences between all red wines bottled across France, or whiskies distilled in Scotland.

When he was in town last month, he brewed two for me at the bar. Hachiju Hachiya from Yame — a city on Japan’s Kyushu island so famous for tea that green fields show up at the top of a Google search — was herbaceous but also tasted like popping edamame pods as a snack at a sushi bar.

Hatsutsumi, grown 20 miles away deep in the mountains of the Fukuoka prefecture, smelled like one of those March mornings in Los Angeles after the rain when the city’s terrain rushes into urgent bloom. The texture was almost buttery.

A steeping of gyokuro, a Japanese shade-grown green tea, at Kettl in Los Feliz.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Kettl receives weekly shipments from Japan, so the possibilities are always changing. This past week I drank a rare gyokuro (tea that undergoes a specific, laborious shaded process for three weeks before harvesting; it’s steeped with lots of leaves at unusually cool temperatures) with specific, sweet seashore aromas emblematic of its style.

“The tasting notes were so enthusiastic on this one, I knew Zach wrote them,” joked Ashley Ruiz, who was brewing that day. The taste reminded me, wonderfully, of crabmeat. And I’ve had very few Japanese loose-leaf oolongs; Ruiz suggested one that was light and expressive, with stone fruit flavors knocking about.

There is so much more to return for. It’s promising to witness the shop’s steady foot traffic, and the groups of people lingering in conversation over tea. Maybe it’s matcha mania … and maybe Kettl is nudging L.A.’s tea culture in magnetic new dimensions.

Kettl: 4677 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 407-6155, kettl.co

Early bird tickets

VIP tickets (allowing early entry) to The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market, presented by Square, are already sold out for the Saturday-night session taking place Oct. 11 at City Market Social House in downtown L.A. Friday-night VIP tickets are still available, but going fast. More than 40 restaurants are participating, including Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, OyBar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla LA, Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

The fight to save Dulan’s on Crenshaw … Jenn Harris’ immersion into Nobu Los Angeles vibes … the post-fire rebirth of Altadena’s Bernee as Betsy … plus a new restaurant with no-tip, no-fee, no-surprises menu pricing and more. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Saving L.A. soul food

Greg Dulan inside Dulan’s on Crenshaw.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

On May 26, 1978, at 4:45 a.m., Adolf Dulan took out a black marker and yellow legal pad. The future “king of soul food,” who a few years later would open the Southern food mecca Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch, noted the date and time in the upper right-hand corner and wrote across the top sheet in capital letters: “GREG.”

Then, itemizing each point in Roman numerals and underlining key words twice, the late social worker-turned-entrepreneur, who started out with an Orange Julius franchise and had at that point opened his first independent restaurant, Hamburger City, wrote instructions to his eldest son, Greg Dulan, on running a business.

One of Adolf Dulan’s five guidelines: “Find out [the] cost of each item you sell and how much profit it brings in — determine if you need to drop or add items to be sold.”

At the bottom of the second sheet of paper, taped to the first sheet to form a scroll-like document, Adolf Dulan wrote this directive to his son: “If you are ever going to be a business man, this will be your bible to use … [for] ‘making the nut.’ ”

One piece of advice the elder Dulan didn’t pass on to his son: Don’t let a parking lot deal take you down.

Earlier this week Greg Dulan, who in 1992 opened his own successful soul food restaurant, Dulan’s on Crenshaw — years before his father started Dulan’s Soul Food Kitchen — posted a call on social media for help from the community.

“I bought some adjacent real estate with the goal of building parking for the restaurant and a culinary kitchen for training and workforce development,” he said on a video collaboration with radio station KJLH. “The real estate portion is dragging down the restaurant. The restaurant is doing great but the overall business is in trouble and maybe won’t survive unless I get some kind of support.”

On a fundraising page put up by the nonprofit civic and public arts organization Destination Crenshaw, the situation for the restaurant, which reopened early last year after a two-year renovation, was presented as dire: “With foreclosure looming on September 6,” read the plea, “time is measured in days, not weeks.”

During a phone interview on Friday afternoon, however, Greg Dulan wanted to make one thing clear: “I’m going to be here.” There’s no way, he insisted, that he’s giving up on his restaurant without a fight.

“It’s more of a real estate issue than a restaurant issue,” he said. “The remodel took longer than I expected, and it went over budget. It ate up a lot of my reserve capital.”

Dulan’s on Crenshaw, on a busy section of Los Angeles’ Crenshaw corridor, which has become denser with redevelopment and the building of the Metro K line. After a two-year renovation, the restaurant, which has been a fixture for more than 30 years, reopened early last year.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Redevelopment along the Crenshaw corridor, which prompted Dulan’s renovation, also put pressure on the restaurant. “We lost a lot of parking,” Dulan said. “The density on Crenshaw has been increased.”

He added valet parking to help relieve the pressure but hasn’t had the money to build a proper parking lot for the restaurant. Earlier this year, however, he started using the production kitchen on one of the two lots he bought to prepare heat-and-serve meals for Vallarta supermarket’s Hyde Park location and hopes to expand that operation.

The problem is that he took out a hard-money loan to fund the business and now a big balloon payment is due. “Sept. 6,” he said, “is the deadline for me to satisfy my loan obligation or refinance.” He’s hoping to avoid selling the two parcels he bought or even the land with the restaurant itself, but if he is forced to sell he says he would find a way to keep the restaurant going.

“I can run a successful restaurant,” Dulan said over the phone, “but real estate development is a whole different animal.”

Since the word went out that Dulan’s was in trouble, many people have responded with offers to help the restaurant, a soul food fixture for more than 30 years. “We’re getting calls from a lot of celebrities and people from the community,” he said. “Revenue is up 40% at the restaurant.”

Whether these offers will lead to a solution for Dulan’s money troubles is still uncertain, but for Los Angeles soul food lovers, the remodel has been a success. Dulan’s refurbished patio area has become a popular gathering spot for family parties, political events and even yoga classes. And his fried chicken is still some of the best in the city.

Fried chicken, meat loaf and more soul food favorites at Dulan’s on Crenshaw.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

“I had no idea that that my little soul food restaurant would go viral,” Dulan said of the community response, “but apparently we built up a lot of goodwill that I underestimated.”

Vibes and miso cod at Nobu Los Angeles

A view of the sushi bar and main dining room at Nobu Los Angeles on La Cienega Boulevard.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

Nobu Los Angeles, “which opened in 2008, several years after its more famous Malibu cousin,” writes columnist Jenn Harris, “is somewhat of a hidden gem on a stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, where black cars once swarmed its valet stand and reservations were elusive. Now … weeknight dinner reservations are procured with ease.” Though it “still vibrates with a current of money, celebrity and those who seek it,” Nobu L.A., Harris says, “suffers from the aesthetic malaise of an Asian-themed chain restaurant in the mid-2000s … The menu, for the most part, is … past its prime even if everyone (this writer included) still loves the black cod with miso.”

With a new chef at the helm of Nobu Los Angeles and a Netflix documentary on founder Nobu Matsuhisa released this summer, Harris tries to determine the value of the younger restaurant, up the road from the original Matsuhisa, which after nearly 40 years, she writes, has “exemplary” nigiri. Can Nobu L.A. “continue to thrive on vibes”?

Post-fire rebirth

At the newly reopened and renamed Betsy in Altadena (formerly Bernee), owner Tyler Wells, in a wide-brimmed hat, huddles with his staff at the bar overlooking the hearth.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

I was one of the few who was able to eat at the ambitious Altadena restaurant Bernee in the single month it was open before the Eaton fire destroyed much of the neighborhood around it. The restaurant, which was saved from the flames, was one of the spots that had been attracting diners from all over Los Angeles to the neighborhood. After the fire, chef Tyler Wells — who lost his home and was in the process of separating from his wife and restaurant partner, Ashley — thought he might leave the state and start over. But as Food’s Stephanie Brejo writes, Wells was drawn back to Altadena and is reopening the restaurant this weekend with a new name, Betsy, in honor of his late mother. Breijo’s story has all the details of Wells’ post-fire journey.

Chef-owner Justin Pichetrungsi’s doodles of new dishes for the renovated Anajak Thai Cuisine, left, and dishes served before the restaurant’s extensive remodel.

(Stephanie Breijo and Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times

)

And if you missed it, Breijo also talked with Anajak Thai‘s Justin Pichetrungsi last week about the two-month renovation of his family’s restaurant, which has reopened. “The hardest part of the business is the organization part, not the innovation,” he told Breijo. “Innovation is so fun…. But with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, people never saw how broken [the restaurant] was in order to make the show go on.” I can’t wait to check out the new show.

‘Instant-izing’ food

Customers shop and eat in the dining area at CU Ramyun Library convenience store in Hongdae, Seoul. Ramyun packets are ranked in terms of spiciness levels from “mild” to “very hot & hell.”

(Tina Hsu / For The Times)

Imagine “nearly every conceivable dish” … “turned into a packaged meal,” even “fried rice that you squeeze out of a tube,” writes Times Seoul correspondent Max Kim. “These have turned convenience stores into a $25-billion industry in South Korea and those food products are churned out at a staggering pace: up to 70 new food items hit the shelves each week, effectively offering a live feed of South Korean tastes.”

“In South Korea’s food retail market,” convenience store critic Chae Da-in tells Kim, “you go extinct if you’re not quick to change.”

Cooling down

The refreshing Mexican drink suero with lime and sparkling water.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

For these sweltering days, contributor Carolynn Carreño wrote about the refreshing Mexican water cocktail suero. It’s made with lime, sparkling water and lots of ice, then served in a salt-rimmed glass. She also includes two other cooling drink recipes, including IPA-Lada Michelada from the much-missed Whittier restaurant Colonia Publica and Salty Angeleno Micheladas, developed in our Times Test Kitchen using our own L.A. Times Salty Angeleno blend developed in collaboration with Burlap & Barrel. Salty Angeleno and our other spice blends, California Heat and L.A. Asada, are available online at Burlap & Barrel.

In the kitchen

Martin Draluck prepares sweet potato chili in the Times Test Kitchen.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Black Pot Supper Club chef and founder Martin Draluck, who was featured in the Netflix documentary series “High on the Hog” on Black food traditions, came to the Times Test Kitchen recently for our “Chef That!” video series. Watch him make sweet potato chili with a secret ingredient — a tab of Abuelita chocolate. As deputy food editor Betty Hallock writes, it “gives the chili a mole-reminiscent richness.” The vegetarian chili, she adds, “comes together in under an hour. Find the recipe here.

And if you missed last week’s “Chef That!” episode, you can watch Adrian Forte, the cookbook author of “Yawd” and chef at Sam Jordan’s modern Caribbean restaurant Lucia, make easy fried plantains with Scotch Bonnet aioli. Get the 30-minute recipe here.

Early bird tickets

VIP tickets (allowing early entry) to The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market, presented by Square, are already sold out for the Saturday-night session taking place Oct. 11 at City Market Social House in downtown L.A. But Friday-night VIP tickets are still available and for early birds, there is a “date night deal” with two general admission tickets available for $199, a savings of about 20%. More than 40 restaurants are participating, including Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, OyBar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla LA, Evil Cooks, Villa’s Tacos, Holy Basil and Luv2Eat Thai Bistro. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

A recent latte art throwdown at Picaresca Barra de Café in Boyle Heights.

(Julie Wolfson / For The Times)

• Latte art “throwdowns, special menus, omakases, pop-ups, speakeasies and out-of-the-box events are part of L.A.’s growing underground coffee scene,” writes contributor Julie Wolfson in her guide to 9 places to check out IYKYK coffee events. Kumquat, Be Bright, York Manor Market, the Pasadena branch of Woon, Mandarin and Picaresca Barra de Café are some of places that host the events. Of course, if you don’t want to wait for a special event to immerse yourself in coffee geekdom, Jack Benchakul is almost always pouring and, as restaurant critic Bill Addison described a while back, talking water alkalinity at Endorffeine in Chinatown.
• “The American beverage firm Keurig Dr Pepper,” reports the business section’s Caroline Petrow-Cohen, plans to buy JDE Peet’s, the European parent company of California’s gourmet coffee trailblazer, Peet’s Coffee, in an all-cash transaction worth about $18 billion.” Note that JDE Peet’s also owns Stumptown.
• Cracker Barrel is keeping its old-time logo after a new design elicited an uproar, reports Dee-Ann Durbin.
• Durbin also breaks down the rise of Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte business, by the numbers.
• And here’s a restaurant model to watch: San Francisco’s soon-to-open 14-seat counter spot La Cigale from chef-owner Joseph Magidow is instituting all-inclusive pricing with no additional tax, tip or service fees. “When the bill arrives, there will be no surprises,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle’s Elena Kadvany. “The price on the set menu — $140 — is exactly what diners pay.”

About 10 million YouTube TV subscribers could lose access to Fox News and Fox Corp. channels that broadcast sports in a fee dispute that comes just days before the start of college football.

The Google-owned television service notified customers that Fox-owned channels, including Fox Business and local stations such as KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles, may be dropped from their program line-ups as soon as Wednesday afternoon if the two sides fail to reach a new distribution pact.

YouTube TV viewers would be without “The Five” and other Fox News programs. Sports fans could miss out on Friday night’s Auburn-Baylor football game and Saturday’s high-profile contest between Texas and Ohio State, along with three regional Major League Baseball games.

A prolonged blackout could interrupt the start of Fox’s NFL season that begins on Sept. 7.

“Fox is asking for payments that are far higher than what partners with comparable content offerings receive,” YouTube said late Monday in a blog post. “Our priority is to reach a deal that reflects the value of their content and is fair for both sides without passing on additional costs to our subscribers.”

The dust-up comes as YouTube TV has become one of the most formidable television providers.

Earlier this year, Nielsen ranked YouTube, including its video service, as the largest television distributor in the U.S. by share of viewership. YouTube’s popular bundle — it also offers the NFL Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market games — has dramatically cut into the business of legacy pay-TV providers, including Charter Spectrum, DirecTV and Dish Networks.

“While Fox remains committed to reaching a fair agreement with Google’s YouTube TV, we are disappointed that Google continually exploits its outsized influence by proposing terms that are out of step with the marketplace,” Fox said in a statement, adding the dispute could force its channels to go dark “unless Google engages in a meaningful way soon.”

Last year, YouTube generated $54.2 billion in revenue, second only to the Walt Disney Co., according to the MoffettNathanson research firm. The analysts estimated that fast-growing YouTube TV would reach 10 million subscribers this year. That slightly trails Charter, which operates the Spectrum service, and Comcast. YouTube TV has eclipsed the once powerhouse satellite TV service providers.

Disputes between programmers and pay-TV providers have become increasingly common in recent years amid a weakening of television economics. The high cost of sports rights has become a major rub for pay-TV distributors who have been asked to pay higher fees to mitigate the loss of subscribers.

Last year, DirecTV customers lost access to Walt Disney Co. channels, including ESPN, for nearly two weeks.

The battle was costly. DirecTV acknowledged that thousands of subscribers fled — many to YouTube TV — during the blackout. Viewers who wanted to watch the U.S. Open tennis tournament, college football, “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” were upset by the outage.

In 2023, a separate dispute led to Disney channels going dark on Spectrum.

YouTube said Monday that it was “working diligently with the team at Fox to reach an agreement.”

Should the channels go dark, the company will provide customers with a $10 credit. YouTube said customers could also sign up for Rupert Murdoch’s television company’s new streaming service, Fox One, which costs $20 a month.

As with all of Los Angeles, one word or phrase can’t characterize the San Fernando Valley, or its 1.8 million residents. When it comes to dining within its 250-plus-square miles, the golden rule germane throughout Southern California very much applies here: Look past the visual ubiquity of strip malls and chock-o-block businesses to find the beauty — the cultural specificity — just inside the sun-bleached storefronts.

Our guide to dining in the Valley

There’s an overwhelming amount of good eating filling the vastness between Burbank and Canoga Park, which the Food team confirmed over the last several months. This week we published our extensive guide to the Valley, featuring 65 freshly researched restaurant suggestions, plus another 24 recommendations for standout bars, tea stops and coffee shops.

I remember my first meal in the Valley. It was at Brent’s Deli in Northridge in 1997. I was visiting Los Angeles, and as we settled into one of the booths spaced in neat rows the friend who lived in the area talked about the 1994 earthquake, how it felt to her like yesterday and already the distant past. I think she took me to Brent’s because I was a vegetarian at the time.

The menu had many meatless, filling choices: cinnamon-laced noodle kugel, latkes I layered with sour cream and apple sauce, kasha varnishkes with lots of caramelized onions but with no brown gravy for me, since it contained roast beef drippings.

My second meal in the Valley was nearly 20 years and about three lifetimes later, in the middle of my run as Eater’s national critic before I moved to L.A. in 2018. The meal, at Kobee Factory in Van Nuys, also carries a memory of cinnamon, one of the sweet spices infused in the broth in which rice-stuffed lamb intestines are served.

I was far from my vegetarian days, and the delicate, boudin blanc-like qualities of the innards complemented whirls of hummus, crackling fried kibbeh and a grilled, soft-crisp variation of kibbeh favored in Syria, where owner Waha Ghreir grew up.

Dishes at Kobee Factory in Van Nuys.

(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

Both of these culinary tentpoles show up in our guide.

So does plenty of sushi, certainly along the “Sushi Row” stretch of Ventura Boulevard in Studio City but also far beyond. Stephanie Breijo has an essay in the package on Tetsuya Nakao, the silver-coiffed 62-year-old Asanebo sushi chef who has brought a new angle of fame to the restaurant with viral social media videos. Breijo observes Nakao filming on a recent Sunday: “He dusts so much edible gold over the top it looks like the [crispy-rice] ‘pizza’ passed through the glitter aisle at a craft store, a dish truly made for the eye of the algorithm.”

Thai restaurants have been shaping the Valley’s culinary landscape since the 1980s. We name four of our very favorites, including Anajak Thai, the meteor that has my vote for the Valley’s absolute best restaurant.

Breijo has another story tracing Anajak’s recent two-month closure for a summer renovation. The space will have an additional dining room, an open kitchen with new equipment (including a refurbished wok station long manned by chef-owner Justin Pichetrungsi’s father Ricky) and art made by Justin’s grandfather. It reopens this weekend; report coming soon.

Sketches of dishes, and some that came to fruition, at Anajak Thai

(Stephanie Breijo and Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

What else made the cut? Our top choices from among the area’s smattering of Indonesian and Sri Lankan restaurants. Pork belly adobo, from among a menu of Filipino and Mexican dishes, served in a Northridge building that also houses a car wash. An Italian deli in Burbank steeped in red sauce and nostalgia. Extraordinary lamb barbacoa. Classics for breakfast burritos, hot dogs, burgers and soft serve.

A Chicago dog, top, with a signature Cupid dog with chili, mustard and onions at Cupid’s Hot Dogs in Winnetka.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Among dive bars and tiki haunts, in an expanse where breweries perfect West Coast IPAs and one shop brews Arabic coffee in blazing-hot sand, it feels especially cheering to settle in again at the Sherman Oaks destination Augustine Wine Bar, which reopened last year after a devastating fire in 2021.

The vintage by-the-glass list at Augustine Wine Bar.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

One final bonus: Vanessa Anderson (a.k.a. the Grocery Goblin) reports on Iranian spices, and other treasures of the cuisine, sold at Q Market & Produce in Lake Balboa.

And did I mention, during a heat wave, the cooling cherry soup that begins a Hungarian meal in Encino?

Mark the dates

The Times’ Food Bowl Night Market, this year presented by Square, is taking place Oct. 10 and 11 at City Market Social House downtown. Among the participating restaurants announced so far are Holbox, Baroo, the Brothers Sushi, Oy Bar, Heritage Barbecue, Crudo e Nudo, Hummingbird Ceviche House, Rossoblu, Perilla LA, Evil Cooks and Holy Basil. VIP tickets that allow early entry always go fast. Check lafoodbowl.com for tickets and info.

Also …

• One last bit of news from the Valley: Stephanie Breijo reports on the hidden weekend-only bar and tasting menu at Jeff Strauss’ Oy Bar in Studio City.
• Daniel Miller writes an obituary for Dan Tana, the founder of eponymous entertainment industry hangout Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood. He died on Aug. 17 at 90.