restaurant

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.

Masked goons are terrorizing American cities. The U.S. inflation rate is the highest it has been in over four decades. Gaza is starving to death. The Cracker Barrel unveils a new logo.

If you guessed which crisis is not like the others, then you’ve spotted the latest source of outrage fueling the right-wing media universe, where trivial distractions from Trump’s failures and the Epstein files are the name of the game.

In a kerfuffle as layered as the eatery’s hash-brown casserole ($4.79 for a side dish, $15 and upward for an entree-sized portion), the folksy-themed establishment, which first opened its doors in 1969, is once again fodder in a one-sided culture war.

The crime? The chain’s classic gold and brown logo now features the chain’s name in a more minimalistic font. Gone is the eatery’s unofficial mascot, that folksy fellow in coveralls who enjoys leaning on a wooden barrel.

“WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” said Cracker Barrel regular-in-spirit-only Donald Trump Jr. when responding to a post on X where the user shockingly blamed DEI for the restaurant’s monstrous decision.

“Cracker Barrel is done,” wrote the Federalist’s Sean Davis. “Woke executives killed it, wrapped the corpse in a rainbow flag, and then made it do a little puppet show in New York City for the entertainment of all their woke little friends.”

Not exactly a puppet show, but the Cracker Barrel did host its “A Taste of Country, Anytime” event Thursday in New York City with country music star Jordan Davis. The chain purported to bring a “country hospitality experience to the big city,” complete with “entertainment on the front porch, rocking chairs, classic Cracker Barrel games and crave-worthy food.”

Clearly a ruse for yet another Pride parade or Latin American gang invasion.

The deception started on Aug. 19, when the Tennessee-based chain in a press release announced changes to its logo and menu as part of a campaign titled “All the More.” The rebrand features new menu items, restaurant remodels and an “enhanced brand look and feel.”

“We believe in the goodness of country hospitality, a spirit that has always defined us. Our story hasn’t changed,”  said Cracker Barrel Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Moore in a statement. “Our values haven’t changed.”

But their signage has changed, and that in itself signaled a threat to a way of life that we need to rediscover, you know, in order to make America great again.

Nostalgia for a time that most of us weren’t even alive to see is part of Cracker Barrel’s appeal. Renowned for its Southern comfort food and down-home appeal, generations of Americans have wandered through the establishment’s general store decor and dined on its Southern comfort food. But like any business, it needs to keep up with the tastes and demands of new generations, and apparently Gen Z, millennials and even Gen Xers aren’t buying black licorice and candy corn like their predecessors once did.

It’s hardly the first time the dubiously-named dining establishment has faced accusations that it’s going gay. As the Bulwark pointed out, there was 2023 e-outrage over Cracker Barrel’s acknowledgment of Pride month, which included a rainbow-themed rocking chair and some corporate-speak about “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at Cracker Barrel.”

“We take no pleasure in reporting that Cracker Barrel has fallen,” the organization Texas Family Project wrote at the time. “A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob.”

When the country is in chaos and entangled in man-made catastrophes abroad, it’s easier to rail, risk-free, against a manufactured crisis. Fox Business News led its Friday news lineup with a Cracker Barrel report, but not about the logo redesign: “Cracker Barrel over the past decade has worked closely with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), changing its company culture to be more inclusive and LGBT-friendly ahead of its controversial store rebrand,” reads the lede.

It’s yet to be seen if a sizable swath of America will forgo the Signature Saucy Chicken Sandwich in protest, constituting another national crisis to chew on.

The feel of an Italian festa in Altadena, the South Bay’s “time capsule” Japanese food scene, delivery drones, a tasting menu hidden in a parking lot, more downtown L.A. closures, a Basque restaurant’s last days. Plus, recycle or reuse? And a bar that celebrates burlesque and red Solo cups. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Good food, good wine, good neighbors

The happy, chaotic scene outside Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine + Spirits with families enjoying Triple Beam Pizza, one of the rotating vendors appearing during the shop and bar’s summer pop-up series.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

When I first started going to Italy for summer vacations with my late husband, Jonathan Gold, and the extended friends and family of chef Nancy Silverton, we’d get to know different areas of Umbria and Tuscany through festas or sagras, local gatherings centered around a specific regional dish or ingredient — maybe cinghiale (wild boar), porcini mushrooms, summer truffles or various pastas such as strozzapreti (which is being celebrated this week in the Umbrian town of Paciano). These are kid-friendly, come-as-you-are parties, typically on a soccer field or town square with long tables, local wine poured into plastic cups and food often served by volunteer cooks pitching in to help raise money for a good cause.

Until recently, the closest I’d come to experiencing that sagra spirit in Los Angeles was the run of summer movie nights that Leo Bulgarini used to host outside his Altadena gelateria and restaurant Bulgarini Gelato Vino Cucina. He and his crew piled plates with pasta and salad before sunset signaled the start of the movie, often an Italian comedy or melodrama, projected onto an outdoor wall or a large, jerry-rigged screen. People would bring their kids and dogs, meet up with neighbors and settle into camping chairs or benches with their wine or cups of gelato once the movie began.

Bulgarini’s restaurant, which escaped the flames of the Eaton fire in January, has yet to reopen because of smoke damage and the loss of so much of the neighborhood around his shop — not to mention the fact that he, his wife and their son lost their home in the blaze.

But two other Altadena business owners have joined forces with local restaurants to create one of the most welcoming neighborhood gatherings with the soul of an Italian sagra.

As senior food editor Danielle Dorsey wrote in the guide she and Stephanie Breijo put together on the 21 best new bars in Los Angeles, a summer pop-up series has emerged outside Good Neighbor, “the first cocktail bar to open in Altadena in 40 years,” and West Altadena Wine + Spirits, both opened last year by Randy Clement and April Langford, the couple behind Everson Royce Bar in the Arts District, Silverlake Wine and the former Pasadena wine shop Everson Royce.

On Tuesday nights, Brisa Lopez Salazar’s Casa pop-up serves tacos with a different handmade tortilla each week — maybe white heirloom corn with beet juice or masa infused with turmeric or activated charcoal. On Thursdays, Triple Beam Pizza shows up; Fridays there are oysters, poke bowls and lobster rolls from Shucks Oyster Co.; Saturdays you can get smash burgers from For the Win and, new to the line-up, Altadena’s recently reopened Miya Thai restaurant is serving on Sundays.

Triple Beam’s heirloom tomato pizza served at the summer outdoor pop-up series hosted by Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine + Spirits.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Two weeks ago, an Instagram post from Triple Beam about its newest heirloom tomato pizza drew me to the outdoor space just outside the Altadena burn zone. I found the patio packed, sagra-style, with groups of families and friends from the neighborhood and beyond. Kids chased each other in and around a wood-chip-bedded play area fitted with reclaimed tree stumps; more freshly sawed stumps were repurposed as stools and tables around the outdoor space. Dogs sat on laps or at customers’ feet. A roving Good Neighbor barkeep took cocktail orders at the picnic tables. And on the side of the building, at a takeout-style window, a West Altadena Wine merchant was selling glasses and flights of wine.

Almost as soon as I arrived, I reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen in years as well as a family from my daughter’s old high school. The San Gabriel mountains in the near distance turned pink and purple during sunset, framed by a U-Haul sign as we ate our pizza, which arrived with all colors and shapes of tomato. With it, we sipped Sébastien Bobinet and Émeline Calvez’s Piak blanc de noir from clear plastic cups. It was a perfect summer evening, made poignant with a stop on the way out at the wall-sized map created by Highland Park production designer Noel McCarthy marking the more than 9,000 homes and businesses destroyed or damaged in the fire, and the places where people died. The map, as writer Marah Eakin reported in April, has helped people visualize the shocking extent of the fire’s devastation, even as Good Neighbor’s summer gatherings have brought people together, a reminder of why so many want to rebuild this community.

The map Noel McCarthy made displaying the extent of damage in Altadena from the Eaton fire. It is installed outside the parking lot and patio area of the Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine + Spirits.

(Marcus Ubungen / For The Times)

Japanese food ‘made the Japanese way’

The D-Combo at Fukagawa in Gardena.

(Rob Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Food’s summer intern Lauren Ng is headed back to school soon, but before she left to resume her studies at New York University, the Torrance native finished a project examining the “time capsule” nature of Japanese food in the South Bay. The area is “home to the biggest suburban Japanese community in the United States,” thanks in no small part to three of Japan’s biggest automakers — Toyota, Honda and Nissan — establishing their U.S. headquarters in the region during the 1960s. The car companies are now gone, but many of the restaurants remain, with a new generation of South Bay places opened in recent years. Ng visited many of them and wrote a guide to 18 of the best Japanese restaurants and food producers in the South Bay.

A loss for Chinatown

Yue Wa Market owner Amy Tran holds up dragon fruit and cherimoya at her Chinatown market in 2019.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In 2019, when former Times columnist Frank Shyong reported on the changes in Chinatown that contributed to the closure of Ai Hoa Market and G and G Market, he wrote that one of the few places left to buy affordable fruits and vegetables in the neighborhood was Amy Tran’s Yue Wa Market. Now, as columnist Jenn Harris wrote this week, Tran and her family will close Yue Wa next month after 18 years serving Chinatown. A spate of robberies, slow pandemic recovery, ICE raids and the forces of gentrification contributed to the family’s decision.

“I don’t feel ready to let go of the store, but there’s not much I can do to bring more people in,” Tran told Harris. “Business was booming and a lot of people used to come around, but now there is no foot traffic and a lot of people have moved away from Chinatown.”

More downtown losses: It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was at downtown L.A.’s Tokyo Fried Chicken, where, I must admit, the dining room was sparsely populated but four-wheeled robot carts were kept busy with takeout deliveries. Yet as Karla Marie Sanford reported this week, after owners Elaine and Kouji Yamanashi announced they were closing the restaurant Aug. 10, customers suddenly showed up and waited in an hours-long line for one last chance to eat the chicken known for its super-crisp skin and soy sauce-ginger marinade. It was a brief return to the restaurant’s days in its original Monterey Park location where lines for a table were constant.

The downtown location had the bad luck to open just before the pandemic and never had a chance to reach its full potential. Elaine Yamanashi told Sanford that she and her chef husband hope at some point to find a new location for Tokyo Fried Chicken. “We’re taking this time, not off,” she said, “but to reflect.”

Angel City Brewery.

(Sam Samders)

Meanwhile, Angel City Brewery, founded in 1997 by Michael Bowe then acquired in 2012 by Boston Beer — a year after the company established its downtown brewpub location notable for its distinctive neon signage that acted as a welcome to the Arts District — announced that it will close next April when the building’s lease is up.

“The brand no longer lines up with our long-term growth strategy,” said a Boston Beer spokesperson, adding that the company plans to focus on its “core national brands,” which include Samuel Adams.

And LA Cha Cha Chá in the Arts District, with its lush, tropical rooftop, is also set to close sometime this fall according to co-owner Alejandro Marín.

End of the Basque road

In addition to prime rib at the Glendora Continental, which is being put up for sale, French Basque dishes like slow-braised lamb in a Burgundy demi-glace, pickled tongue and escargots à la bourguignonne are on the menu, along with crab cakes and salads.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

There wasn’t an empty seat at Glendora Continental when contributor Jean Trinh stopped into the 45-year-old restaurant on Route 66, “a reminder,” she writes, “of fading connections to the Basque diaspora in California.” Now that the owners have put the restaurant up for sale, its days are numbered so regular customers have been showing up for live music and the Continental’s “mix of Basque, French and American food,” including lamb shank, prime rib, pickled tongue and escargots à la bourguignonne. “I would say it’s Basque with a sprinkle of American,” co-owner Antoinette Sabarots told Trinh, “or vice versa.”

Yes, restaurants are still opening

Oy Bar chef-owner Jeff Strauss, left, with sous chef Esteban Palacios at Vey, the tandem outdoor bar.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Despite all the closure news, as Stephanie Breijo reports, good restaurants keep opening in Los Angeles, including Baby Bistro from chef Miles Thompson and his sommelier business partner, Andy Schwartz. They call it an “Angeleno bistro,” with inspiration from Japanese, Korean, Italian, Mexican, French and more cuisines. “I think the food is really defined by the cultures of Los Angeles,” Thompson told Breijo. “If you already eat at any of the regional or international restaurants in this city, you’ll find inspiring foods that go into this menu.”

And chef Jeff Strauss, of the Highland Park deli Jeff’s Table and OyBar in Studio City, has set up a weekend-only six-course tasting menu spot called Vey in the back parking lot of OyBar. As Strauss described it to Breijo, he thinks of it as “a casual, rolling omakase.”

Another hidden spot is Evan Funke’s new Bar Avoja (slang for “hell yeah”), a Hollywood cocktail lounge accessed through the dining room of the chef’s Mother Wolf restaurant. In addition to drinks, Roman street food is on the menu. Meanwhile, the chef’s namesake Beverly Hills restaurant, Funke, is temporarily closed due to a fire in the kitchen’s exhaust system on Tuesday. As Breijo reported, no one was hurt and there was minimal damage.

Also, Hong Kong’s Hi Bake chain has opened a pet-friendly branch in Beverly Hills serving “banana rolls, thousand-layer cakes, meat floss rolls and egg tarts. And San Francisco’s Boichik Bagels, which opened in Los Feliz earlier this year, is now serving at downtown L.A.’s landmark Bradbury Building.

Burlesque and red Solo cups

Uncle Ollie’s Penthouse owner Brian Houck in the “backvan” at his downtown Los Angeles bar.

(Roger Kisby / For The Times)

Former L.A. Weekly nightlife columnist and Los Angeles magazine editor Lena Lecaro writes about Uncle Ollie’s Penthouse, a new downtown L.A. bar with “wild, color-saturated decor, potent cocktails served in red Solo cups and a soundtrack that inspires stomping the floor with pals or singing along with strangers.”

”I can’t remember the last time I felt so connected to my hometown as an L.A. native,” musician Taleen Kali told Lecaro. “I also love that you get to keep your own party cup all night — it’s a total vibe, plus it’s less wasteful and more sustainable.”

Noodles easier to make than you think

Mei Lin, chef and proprietor of 88 Club chef in Beverly Hills, right, makes mung bean noodles in the Times Test Kitchen. Left, the finished spicy mung bean noodles.

(Mark Potts / Los Angeles Times)

When Mei Lin, chef and proprietor of 88 Club in Beverly Hills and former “Top Chef” and “Tournament of Champions” winner, demonstrated her spicy mung bean noodle recipe in the Times Test Kitchen for our “Chef That!” video series, we all wanted to try making the noodles. It’s a lot easier and fun to do than most of us thought. You start with a startchy base that thickens into jelly in a bowl. After you unmold the gelatinous blob, you scrape a grater over the mound, forming the noodles. Then it’s just a matter of seasoning the noodles with chile, peanuts and herbs.

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, OyBar, 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.

And at this year’s LA Chef Conference on Oct. 6, an all-day event taking place at Redbird and Vibiana in downtown L.A., I’ll be on a panel with Roy Choi, Nancy Silverton, Ludo Lefebvre and Evan Kleiman talking about the legacy of Jonathan Gold. Find information on tickets and other events at the conference here.

Also …

(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; Photo by Nick Agro/For The Times)

I’m recently returned from two weeks in Paris for vacation (planned for the window right before so many restaurants close for a break in August), and I didn’t even pretend I intended to give myself a break from the business of dining. It’s Paris. Of course I was going all in, particularly since I hadn’t been to France in over a decade.

The research — the brooding over all the possibilities — is always part of the fun. Beyond suggestions from Parisian friends, there was much triangulating of recommendations, especially among the Paris By Mouth newsletter, Lindsey Tramuta (who writes for many English language publications and wrote the “Eater Guide to Paris” book released in April) and David Lebovitz’s very popular newsletter.

Nothing about the following list is complete, but as inspirations for your own travels I pared two weeks down to a dozen Paris suggestions, plus thoughts on a few of the city’s geekiest coffee bars.

The one Paris meal I can’t stop thinking about

Over the year and a half I traveled through our state to write the 101 Best Restaurants in California guide, I kept wishing to experience a tasting-menu restaurant that thrillingly centers vegetables on the plate. Excellent places like Kismet and RVR include intricately composed dishes on their menus that roll with the seasons. I’m thinking, though, of a kitchen with a revolutionary streak, where the emphasis on plant-based cooking not only feels unapologetic but galvanizing, rattling diners awake to the delicious, sustainable-minded possibilities of decentering meat in one of the world’s great growing climates.

That restaurant doesn’t exist yet in California. But it does in Paris.

Manon Fleury opened Datil, a 33-seat railroad-style space in the 3rd arrondissement, in September 2023. Her restaurant’s website details commitments that will sound familiar to Californian restaurant obsessives: how the staff (predominantly women) foster close relationships to producers, how the menu strictly reflects what’s coming from the meals, the low-waste approach.

Zucchini mille-feuille with skate wing, buerre blanc and sorrel sauce at Datil restaurant in Paris.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

So maybe, in my jadedness, I was caught off-guard by the lyricism of the five-course lunch. Beautiful in its garden colors and juxtaposing crunchy and yielding textures, but not showy or pushy. The kind of food where I found myself leaning toward what I was eating, like bending closer to catch what my smartest friend was saying at a party.

To describe the heart of the meal: After crackery nibbles, and a lovely flan whose flavors brought to mind white gazpacho, came porridge made using white rice from the coastal southern region of Camargue, where the grain (including a famous red strain) has been grown since the 13th century. It was crowned with an improvisational arrangement of tomatoes and other summery fruits and vegetables, and a gloss of herb oil. It was filling and comforting and also, given all the pointy vegetals flavors, enthralling.

Manon Fleury, center, the chef and owner of Datil in Paris.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Then came a stunning savory play on a mille-feuille formed from sinewy, perfectly salted blanched zucchini. Its layers hid flaked morsels of skate wing — the kitchen is roughly 85 percent plant-based but seafood or meat might be used sparingly — with a brunoise of zucchini, parsley and shallots. Servers swooped in with two sauces poured from metal carafes: a warm beurre blanc tensed with juiced kumquat and cider vinaigrette, and a cool sorrel sauce that clung to the butter in swirls. Another sauce made from plums already lurked underneath. So many harmonies to discern.

Lastly, some straight-up indulgence: a boozy, plush savarin, about the size of a Krispy Kreme doughnut, domed with half of a poached and lightly charred apricot.

Apricot savarin at Datil in Paris.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

All the reasons to travel — to know a place while better seeing ourselves, and who and what we might be — came to bear in this emotionally intelligent meal. Chefs in California could, and should, be cooking like this.

Where to eat in Paris

Two fantastic bistros: Friends urged that while Le Bistrot Paul Bert has become a de-facto option for visitors over the last decade (and I have, in the past, sopped up its île flottante until I indeed floated away), I should check out Bistrot des Tournelles in the 4th for a more intimate, relaxed but still bullseye bistro dinner. They were right. Surprise hit? The gushing, textbook chicken Cordon bleu.

Harder to book but worth the effort: Chez Georges at 1 Rue du Mail. (I mention the address specifically because there other similarly named restaurants, but this is the one you want.) Jean-Gabriel de Bueil leads a suave cast of characters in a rowdy, cramped, exhilarating room. Squint at the menu written in tiny handwritten cursive and pick out salade frisée, ris de veau, cote d’agneau grillé and the must-have tarte tatin.

My favorite Lebanese meal: If you read my work, you know I’m looking out for Lebanese restaurants wherever I go in the world. Part of my time in Paris was with my Lebanese crew, and among several meals we agreed hands-down the best was Kubri, the deservedly lauded draw in the 11th run by Ingrid and Mayfrid Chehlaoui and chef Rita Higgins Akar. So, so rarely does a Lebanese kitchen find balance between the traditional dishes (many of which have simple ingredients that demand technique) and innovation (which often produces aberrations that have no relation to the original). This one nails the midpoint, with wonders like a charred wedge of cabbage rubbed in Aleppo pepper butter and pummeled with diced pickled apricot, shanklish (crumbly aged cheese) and salty-sugary peanuts modeled after a snack in Lebanon called Cri-Cri. The only restaurant to which I circled back for a second meal.

Hispi cabbage with pickled apricots and many other garnishes at Lebanese restaurant Kubri in Paris.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Seafood for a casual lunch: Septime, the modern bastion of bistronomy, rides on its fame and is so difficult to book. Show up for lunch at its next-door seafood restaurant, Clamato, which doesn’t take reservations. I’d been warned about long waits, but we managed to walk right in on a summer weekday at 1:15 p.m. Beautiful plates of fish and shellfish from the French coast, most seasoned with restraint and a nod to Japan here and there. Loved the take on the bountiful Provençal grand aioli with a slab of pollock and big hunks of blanched fennel, carrots and zucchini. (I was continually reminded that Parisians could teach us how to blanch vegetables to just-tender, properly seasoned deliciousness.)

Seafood for a fancier night out: Restaurant Le Duc, in the 14th and around since the late 1960s, personifies midcentury Parisian elegance: rich wood paneling, career servers with sly humor, simple and impeccable seafood. A lovely crab salad, cleaned entirely of shell, segued to a gorgeous, finely textured sole meunière presented in a copper pan before filleting. Among desserts displayed on a roving cart, home in on crunching, gorgeously proportioned mille-feuille.

The three-star blowout: Plan half a year ahead to score a reservation at Plénitude, the ne-plus-ultra splurge (as in €345 per person) in the Cheval Blanc hotel, with its almost comically scenic perch at the edge of the Seine overlooking the Pont-Neuf bridge. Arnaud Donckele is a chef of the moment; Plénitude has all the global accolades. For fine-dining devotees, I say it’s worth the investment. Much has already been written about Donckele’s mastery over sauces, and I love how servers present both a side of the sauce to taste on its own — which I sometimes prized even more than with other elements on the plate — and a booklet that details the dizzying number of ingredients they contain. (So many wild vinegars!) The staff move as one, with the synchronized precision of a Rolex. As is expected during the loftiest modern tasting-menu dinners, a little fun comes into play: Diners might move location for one course, and those who opt for a cheese course rise from their chairs to make selections from a walk-in cabinet that opens at the end of one room. The whole experiences feels at once very worldly and very Parisian.

Composing a plate in the “cheese cupboard” at Plénitude in the Cheval Blanc hotel in Paris.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Speaking of cheese: Plenty of people visit Paris for the patisseries. I’m with y’all (the apricot tart at Du Pain et Des Idées forever), but I come even more for the fromageries. A group of us signed up for a cheese tasting experience, via Paris by Mouth, with Jennifer Greco, an American who has lived in France for decades and dedicated her curiosity to all things fromage. We begin at Laurent Dubois, her favorite cheese shop in Paris, and Greco is excellent about adapting a selection to the group’s interests and knowledge levels. I like bloomy rinds (like Brie de Meaux and the runnier, funkier specimens, and she obliged — while steering us towards the sublimely nutty Comtés the shop is known for carrying. We walked a few minutes to a space where we slowly tasted through our loot, with plenty of bread and appropriate wines. What an incredible afternoon, and believe me, it counts as a meal.

France meets Japan: Japan has been a major influence on aspects of French dining for over 50 years, and chefs in Paris, more than ever it feels like, graft the two cultures and cuisines. One newer great: Maison by Sota Atsumi in the 11th, also known as Maison and Maison Sota. Atsumi earned fan as the chef at Clown Bar, and his own tasting-menu restaurant is warm and communal: Most diners sit either along the counter or at a comfortable, room-length table. The air smells of woodsmoke, a fascinating counterpoint (in a way that particular fragrance usually engenders casual and rustic) to the meticulous compositions in large ceramics that define the aesthetic. But all the foams and saucy dots and tiny flowers trick the mind after all: The flavors are shockingly soulful.

Marinated tomato with paprika, sardine broth and chervil oil at Maison Sota in Paris.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

A standout Moroccan restaurant: Marie-Jose Mimoun waves you to a table at Le Tagine in the 11th, and for a few hours you sort of absorb into the living entity of her dining room, flowing with the pace. I was sad that, pre-vacation, she had stopped making a special lamb and peach tagine advertised on a placard, but a variation with the meat flavored with raisins, onions, honey and almonds was still among the best tagines I’ve tasted outside Morocco. Ditto the couscous, served with plenty of broth and smoky harissa full of tightly knotted spices. Great natural-leaning wine list too.

The dependable crêpe destination: Breizh Cafe has 13 locations around Paris, a chain by any standard, but it was recommended in so many publications it felt like the right recommendation for a group outing one night. We gathered at the location in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and we had the reliable experience we needed. The savory galette with ham, egg and Comté delivered lacy texture and deep buckwheat flavor (as is traditional in Brittany, where the company originates), and a sweet crêpes Suzette, flambéed with Grand Marnier, flickered with a taut dash of yuzu as well. To drink: dry pear cider.

Perfect end-of-the-trip pizza: So many friends mentioned Oobatz, a pizza restaurant by Maine native Dan Pearson in collaboration with the owners of Le Rigmarole (roundly lauded but not open during my trip). I thought that the last thing I wanted in Paris was pizza. And then, after two weeks of nonstop eating and drinking, my partner and I looked at each other the evening after a wine-soaked lunch and said, “Yeah, let’s go have pizza.” So good. Pearson uses a sourdough base for his bready crusts; they’d be well regarded anywhere in America. Bonus that the menu lists a “chef du surprise” pie; ours was a white pie dotted with meaty splotches of duck ragu.

Pizza with duck ragu at Oobatz in Paris

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

… and a few coffee notes

I recommend the list that Lindsey Trumata co-wrote for Conde Nast Traveler for a broader perspective on drinking coffee in Paris, but these three coffee bars stood out for me:

Emily Wilson of The Angel newsletter has a very trustworthy list of Paris recommendations. She directed me to Téléscope Cafe, presided over by Nicolas Clerc, regarded by many as the (still young) godfather of Paris’s fourth-wave coffee movement — by which I’ll define as bars dedicated to working with roasters (or roasting their own beans) with direct relationships to farmers and an emphasis on unusually expressive coffees. Wilson loves Clerc’s iced coffee; I admire his long list of pour over options listed by growing region and tasting notes in order of intensity. It was my first coffee stop on the trip, and the place to which I most returned. His banana bread with salted butter was, most days, the only breakfast I needed.

The most dedicated coffee nerds should plan ahead for Substance Café, a reservations-only bar run by barista Joachim Morceau and his wife Alexandrine. Joachim has showmanship, charming customers from behind the counter but he’s intensely serious about his craft. (The couple roasts their own beans.) He often encourages every person to start with one featured coffee to grasp individual tastes, and then he starts making excellent suggestions, equally compelling for pour overs or milky espresso drinks.

Joachim Morceau, who runs the reservations-only coffee bar Substance Café in Paris with his wife, Alexandrine.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Substance is one of those places where customers compare notes on where else they’re drinking coffee in Paris, and based on those conversations I ended up at Tiba, a tiny shop that gets intensely busy on the weekends. Kevin Cerqueira, as friendly as he is passionate, mans the place by himself. He wasn’t brewing a variety of Colombian beans roasted by local company Datura, but based on my very specific predlictions in coffee (notes dried fruits and booze) I bought them from his supply … and I already have an order in for four more boxes.

Also …

• Above I mentioned RVR, the reincarnation of Travis Lett’s California izakaya in Venice. This week I have a long-in-coming review of the restaurant. If you haven’t been to RVR since it opened last fall, two things: Summer is peak vegetables (which is where the kitchen truly excels), and it might be time to return for brunch (which launched in the last few months) on the rooftop patio.
• Jenn Harris weighs in on the buzzy San Gabriel restaurant that specializes in a single meat: lamb.
• Stephanie Breijo and Danielle Dorsey have a guide to L.A.’s bar boom, with 21 recommendations for vibes and cocktails.
• Lauren Ng reports on Mid East Eats, a fast-casual destination for homestyle Palestinian cuisine that’s also the first legally permitted home kitchen in Watts.
• Daniel Miller has a story on how local culinary students seem undeterred by the ongoing challenges of L.A.’s restaurant industry: Los Angeles Trade-Technical College’s saw enrollment in its culinary program grow by 13% last academic year, and it is up nearly 30% since 2019.

While most Japantowns across the country have vanished, Los Angeles is home to not just one, but two, Japanese enclaves. Most people know Little Tokyo. But on the Westside, past the 405 and tucked between strip malls and office buildings, there’s another: Sawtelle.

Smaller in footprint but steeped in history, Sawtelle reflects the legacy of Japanese immigrants — their resilience, resourcefulness and ability to reinvent. That spirit lives on in one of L.A.’s most dynamic neighborhoods today: a cultural crossroads where you can slurp the best ramen, dig into sisig, cool off with Korean soft serve, try a California roll burger or sing your heart out at karaoke until 4 a.m., all within 2.69 square miles.

Get to know Los Angeles through the places that bring it to life. From restaurants to shops to outdoor spaces, here’s what to discover now.

Long before Sawtelle became a hotspot for buzzy restaurants and boba shops, it was a refuge. Named after the manager of the Pacific Land Company that developed the area, Sawtelle in the early 20th century was a haven for Japanese immigrants barred from owning property or signing leases under exclusionary laws, like the 1913 California Alien Land Law. In this less developed pocket of the Westside, landowners looked the other way — allowing Japanese immigrants to carve out enough space to build new lives.

The proximity to the coast reminded them of home, mild weather and fertile soil made outdoor work a pleasure, and local Kenjinkai organizations offered vital community support. By the 1910s, Sawtelle — “so-te-ru,” as it was affectionately called — had become a magnet for Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants. Between 1920 and 1925, its population tripled, driven by an influx of Japanese farmers, a booming film industry and the opening of UCLA. Here, they set up nurseries and small businesses, tended gardens for wealthy Westsiders, built temples and schools and laid the groundwork for a close-knit community.

The neighborhood flourished until World War II, when residents were forced into internment camps and their lives upended. Those who returned started over, restoring what had been lost. In many ways, Sawtelle is a testament to the immigrant instinct to endure, adapt and rebuild — even with the odds stacked against them. In 2015, that resilience was officially recognized when the city named the area Sawtelle Japantown, sparking a renaissance of Japanese influence with restaurants, markets and shops celebrating Japanese culture and identity.

These days, Sawtelle’s prewar landmarks are fading, giving way to office buildings and rising commercial rent. Traci Toshiyuki Imamura, a fifth-generation Japanese American, remembers when her father’s business, Tensho Drugstore, stood at the corner of Sawtelle and Mississippi — a neighborhood fixture in the mid-1940s. Today, it’s the Furaibo restaurant.

“I miss the regular everyday people and how close people were with each other in the community,” she said. “It makes me emotional just thinking about what Sawtelle felt like to me when I was a young girl in contrast to what it is evolving to.” Now living in Torrance, Imamura serves on the Westside Community Planning Advisory Group and advocates against Sawtelle’s gentrification and upzoning.

Over the years, the neighborhood has certainly changed, and its identity has expanded beyond its Japanese roots. But you’ll still find traces of what made it special to begin with: Family-run Hashimoto Nursery and Yamaguchi Bonsai Nursery trace back to Sawtelle’s early days and serve as nods to its agricultural past. And every summer at the Obon Festival, a traditional Buddhist celebration honoring the spirits of one’s ancestors, hundreds still gather — dressed in kimono, yukata and hachimaki headbands to dance to the steady beat of taiko drums. Kids crowd around the balloon fishing pool, parents line up for takoyaki, and for a moment, the old Sawtelle feels as alive as ever.

To walk down these streets today is to experience not just what’s current, but what endures — in the smell of yakitori on the grill, the sight of bonsai trees still tended by the same families and the beat of the taiko drums that call people back, year after year. Sawtelle is a neighborhood shaped by people who made every inch count and built a community, and in a city that’s always changing, that may be the most enduring legacy of all.

Through the glassed-in entrance of Citizen Public Market in Culver City, up its short flight of stairs, past scents of barbecue coming from the Smokey Chance stand and chefs wrapping dry-aged fish into handrolls at Uoichiba, I turn a sharp right and reach the back of the food hall. Kiano Moju stands at an island behind an L-shaped counter. She’s calling out orders: “Two chicken and a beef, please. And I’m still waiting on a shrimp?”

Moju is the author of “AfriCali,” one of the Food team’s favorite cookbooks of 2024, in which she grafts the East African and West African flavors of her heritage with an approach to cooking she learned growing up in the Bay Area. In her hands, bacon, avocado and tomato jam fill an omelet rolled into a chapati in the Ugandan street food called rolex, and dirty chai (jolted with a shot of espresso) complicates the classic charms of tiramisu.

Now Moju has given herself a new job title: restaurateur.

Jikoni, which means “kitchen” in Swahili, is the name of her pop-up operating inside the market from Wednesday to Sunday throughout summer. Dishes derive from recipes in “AfriCali.” She’s structured the menu around riffs on street-food kebabs she remembers from coastal Kenya, where she spent summers growing up.

In the book she writes, “My first time eating mishkaki was in the northern part of Mombasa, in a local eatery where the meat hits your table within seconds of it being pulled off the charcoal grill. The accompaniments are simple because the meat is the star.”

A crowd gathers to order at Jikoni, Kiano Moju’s summertime pop-up inside Citizen Public Market in Culver City.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

As one example of her adaptive process: In “AfriCali,” she considers how to rework chicken and chips, a fast food popular in Nairobi that pairs flash-fried chicken and fries with poussin sauce made of chile-spiced butter and lemon juice. For the cookbook version, she rubs chicken with garlic and dried oregano before roasting it and then brushing the bird with poussin sauce right before serving.

At Jikoni, she grills chicken thighs threaded on skewers. The buttery sauce brings the character, with smoked paprika and Kashmiri chile powder (which has its own berry-like smokiness), a base of ginger and garlic and lemon juice’s lifting tartness. Similarly, garlicky butterflied shrimp soak in peri-peri butter, fragrant with basil, parsley and cilantro and punched with sweet paprika and cayenne pepper.

“Suya” is a Nigerian word for skewers typically coated with yaji, a peppery spice blend that includes crushed peanuts and burns with cayenne and cardamom. Moju thoroughly coats lamb chops with yaji and rosemary; the meat can stand up to the barrage.

A mix of mishkaki (skewered meats) and sides at Jikoni in Citizen Public Market, including egusi and kale in the center.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Each mishkaki variation comes with two sides. Among them: Moju’s simplified variation on egusi, the Nigerian stew thickened with ground melon seeds, which she renders far less soupy paired with kale. She seasons the dish with curry powder and, crucially, ground crayfish for its specific umami. A soothing recipe in “AfriCali” for chickpeas simmered in coconut sauce here becomes a foil for butter beans: They half-melt into coconut milk curried with garam masala and cumin seeds and tinted with turmeric.

Those are my two favorites, though I’d also encourage an extra side of basmati rice to sop up a meal’s mingled sauces. And then dessert: a riff on Key lime pie with the addition of fresh passion fruit and gingersnaps for the crust.

Welcome flavors, smart approach

Jikoni is a thoroughly heartening endeavor. Minus our wealth of Ethiopian restaurants, Los Angeles has too few showcases for the cuisines of Africa; how rich to have a glimpse into contrasting tastes of two of the continent’s coastal cultures on one succinct menu. And given the far more common path of chef to cookbook author, it’s fun to see how Moju and her crew (which frequently includes her mother, Katano Kasaine) acclimate her recipes to the rhythms of restaurant-style service. Interior design is also among her talents: Notice the beautifully curated shelves behind the ordering counter, arranged with African pottery and art and cookbooks written on a breadth of cuisines across Africa and its diasporas, that brings to mind the dining room of Two Hommés in Inglewood that she helped reenvision.

Kiano Moju pictured in the Los Angeles Times test kitchen, preparing pumpkin chapati for an episode of “Chef That!”

(Robert Hanashiro / For The Times)

Return for Swahili-style biriyani

In June, as a practice run for Jikoni, Moju settled into the market stand by serving Swahili-style biriyani, a Kenyan variation in which rice and saucy spiced meat (short ribs, in this case) are cooked separately and combined on the plate with fried onions and rounds of green chile. I heard glowing reports about the biriyani but missed its early run.

Good news: Many people have asked for it, so Moju has said she’ll be re-creating the dish as a recurring Sunday night special. See you there.

Jikoni at Citizen Public Market, 9355 Culver Blvd., Culver City, jikoni.co

Also …

• Want to know where to eat right now in Los Angeles? Danielle Dorsey recaps the Food team’s month of reporting and restaurant recommendations.
• Cole’s French Dip announced in early July that it would be closing on Aug. 2. Karla Marie Sanford reports that, after a surge in business after the announcement, the restaurant will delay its closure by 45 days.
• Jenn Harris reflects on her grandmother, Phyllis Harris, who died on July 17 at 91, and the profound ways she inspired Jenn’s career path.

  

  Phyllis Harris with two granddaughters at a dim sum restaurant in Los Angeles.

  (Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )

• Stephanie Breijo writes about the legacy of Bill Elwell, the colorful owner-operator of Van Nuys burger stand Bill’s Burgers, who died on July 21 at age 98.
• Gustavo Arellano has the scoop on a new iteration of Carlos Salgado’s Taco María, the lauded Costa Mesa restaurant that closed in June 2023. The location of his new place, named La Sirena? Wisconsin.

In the late 1990s, Paula Deen was an independent restaurateur whose family-operated restaurant had just received a glowing review from USA Today. Her life and career were permanently changed.

Now, over 25 years later, the Georgia native has announced the closing of the Lady and Sons — the iconic restaurant that made her a star of Southern cuisine and a household name in the cooking world.

Opened in downtown Savannah, Ga., in 1996, the Lady and Sons boasted a menu of local classics like fried green tomatoes, banana pudding and hoecakes. The signature dish, Southern fried chicken, was enough to draw lines wrapping around the block — and the restaurant came to be viewed as an embodiment of the indulgent and buttery flavors that characterize Southern cooking.

“There in Savannah, Paula Deen’s homestyle Southern menu at the Lady and Sons turned me into a ravenous beast, unmindful of manners, cholesterol, North-South diplomacy and the dropped jaws of my companions,” USA Today, then the nation’s most-read daily newspaper, wrote on Dec. 17, 1999.

Earlier that year, the popularity of the Lady and Sons caught the attention of Food Network journalist Gordon Elliott. Deen appeared on Elliott’s short-lived show “Door Knock Dinners” that led to her own Daytime Emmy-winning Food Network program, “Paula’s Home Cooking.”

On her website and social media accounts, Deen bid farewell to the Lady and Sons and its longtime fans. Also closing is her newer restaurant, the Chicken Box, which opened in 2023.

“Hey, y’all, my sons and I made the heartfelt decision that Thursday, July 31st, was the last day of service for The Lady & Sons and The Chicken Box,” Deen said in the statement. “We will now focus our attention on the four Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen locations across the country.”

The announcement came without warning, especially as the restaurant continued to draw tours and lines of customers. Three weeks prior to the announcement, the Lady and Sons posted on Instagram that it was hiring for all positions.

Over the years, some of Deen’s other restaurants have also closed suddenly. In 2014, employees at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House — a Savannah eatery she co-owned with her brother, Earl W. “Bubba” Hiers Jr. — reportedly arrived to work to find the doors locked and the appliances removed. A sign on the door said, “Thank you for 10 great years. Uncle Bubba’s is now closed.”

The Panama City, Fla., location of Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen also closed abruptly in 2019, laying off 30 employees without advance notice. Several former employees told local news channel WJHG that they were left without their main source of income following the closure.

Uncle Bubba’s closure came a year after controversy began to surround Deen after a former manager at the restaurant sued Hiers, alleging sexual and racial discrimination.

Food Network canceled “Paula’s Home Cooking” after Deen admitted to using a racial slur during a deposition for the 2013 lawsuit. Lawyers asked Deen if she had ever used the N-word, to which Deen replied, “Yes, of course,” later adding, “It’s been a very long time.”

Since then, the 78-year-old has focused on her restaurants.

The Lady and Sons, as her core establishment, was the result of a litany of personal struggles and ambition. Both of her parents passed away when she was in her early 20s and Deen, then a young mother, struggled with depression and agoraphobia, or fear of going outside.

With only $200 left, Deen founded a catering company out of her kitchen called the Bag Lady. Her handmade bag lunches were delivered by her sons Jamie and Bobby and earned Deen a local reputation for her homestyle cooking. After one attempt at a restaurant, the Lady in 1991, the follow-up, the Lady and Sons, co-owned with Jamie and Bobby, would be her success.

Two cooks talk about loss and recovery. Plus, our summer cook-along with “Chef That!” Also, advice on cooking for dogs and eating with dogs, taquito comfort and fan-service restaurants (or what Day 1 was like at the Tesla Diner). I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Kitchen dreams

Michelle Huneven in her Altadena kitchen before it was destroyed along with the rest of her home in the Eaton fire.

(Shelby Moore/For The Times)

The most beautiful kitchen I ever cooked in was far from perfect. It was built into one of six Pasadena apartments that in the 1920s had been carved out of a Victorian mansion designed by Frederick Roehrig, the architect behind Old Town Pasadena’s Hotel Green and its surviving annex, Castle Green.

The dining room and kitchen had once been a grand parlor room with a fireplace at one end and most of the original wood details still on the walls and ceiling. The kitchen’s counter curved with the arc of several windows set into the bend of one wall, with soft sunlight filtering in through the greenery planted outside.

But the stove, relocated and updated since the days Jonathan Gold and I occupied that apartment, was a finicky old thing. And the counter, so attractively placed, was too low for serious cooking. Our backs would often ache if there were too many vegetables to chop or dishes to wash.

It was a dreamy kitchen, but it wasn’t a dream kitchen. And yet, we made some of our happiest meals there.

There are cooks I know who have had dream kitchens, spaces that were designed just for them and functioned according to their specific cooking needs.

Ruth Reichl, author and former restaurant critic and editor, says she designed her U-shaped kitchen to fit her body and the open floor plan of the home she and her husband, Michael Singer, share in New York’s Columbia County. With expansive views of the upper Hudson Valley, it’s inviting but also intimate in its footprint; no more than two or three steps are required to reach most of her appliances and tools. During parties, Reichl is easily able to roll out pie dough while catching up with early-arriving guests and there is lots of counter space around the U for setting out platters of food that always tempt some hungry person before it’s officially time to eat.

Closer to home, I was lucky enough to be invited many times to the Altadena home of Michelle Huneven, novelist and food writer (often for this paper), and Jim Potter, an attorney specializing in environmental law and an accomplished bread baker. From big, crowded Seders at Passover to weekday soup meals, always with something wonderfully sweet at the end, I watched their modest cooking space expand and evolve into a beautiful, functional and comfortable modern space with a dining table at the center of the room that allowed guests to watch the interplay of two excellent cooks at work.

“I had a little 1,000-square-foot house, and when Jim and I married, that was fine for a while,” Huneven said recently in the Times Test Kitchen. “Then he began to bake bread. And very shortly, everything in my little kitchen was covered with bread glue. I was like, ‘We need a bigger kitchen.’ Before we knew it, we’d designed a great big freestanding kitchen. I’m short, so in the place of overhead cabinets, we had windows out to our garden. He had his breadmaking area; I had my cooking area. We each had a sink. He had his own oven. And he had his own dishwasher. Praise the Lord.”

Cookbook author Molly Baz‘s dream kitchen in Altadena was one I never saw in person but I interacted with it virtually through her “Hit the Kitch” video series and Instagram feed.

“My home kitchen was also my place of work,” Baz said, sitting alongside Huneven in the Times Test Kitchen. “My husband, [Ben Willett], designed the space as the heart of the home. It was an expansive space that was a hanging-out living room, lounge, bar, kitchen, all in this one large room. We designed the kitchen very intentionally to be the anchor of like everything I do, the place where I would shoot my cookbooks and all of my content, where I would develop all of my recipes. So we decided to do it all butter-colored, and it was just this beautiful monochromatic, creamy butter-yellow-colored dream.”

Food personality Molly Baz in her butter-yellow Altadena kitchen before her house was destroyed by the Eaton fire.

(PEDEN + MUNK)

As you’ve undoubtedly surmised by now, both Huneven and Baz lost their Altadena homes — and their dream kitchens — in the Eaton fire.

“We evacuated to a friend’s house about 4:30 in the morning with another couple who lived much closer to Eaton Canyon,” Huneven said. “When they learned that their house had burned, I found that so shocking that I just sat there with my hands over my mouth for about, I don’t know, 15 minutes. I just couldn’t absorb it. Then, at about 8 o’clock, Jim decided to drive up to our house. He later told me he’d known even before he drove up because he controlled the sprinklers and the solar panels from his phone, and nothing was responding. When he called me to say it was gone, he sent a picture of the house on the corner still burning with flames coming out of the windows, not a fire truck in sight. I was preconditioned for the loss, because I’d already reacted to one home burning down. I didn’t cry until 48 hours later.”

Baz’s story is similar. “I evacuated earlier, at 7:30 p.m., because some friends and neighbors had seen the fire, and it was creeping closer and closer,” she said. “We never got a notice, but we decided, let’s get out of here. Throughout the night, we were refreshing our phones, watching the map get populated with new homes that had burned. But the whole night, I was under the impression that my house had somehow by the grace of God gotten skipped because of this map. In the morning, my husband wanted to go to the house just to triple check and so, he got in the car and drove nervously up there. I got a call about 30 minutes later and he was just in tears. He was like, ‘There’s nothing left.’ ”

Huneven, whose newest, highly praised novel, “Bug Hollow,” is anchored in Altadena, her longtime home, and Baz, who came to Altadena from Brooklyn in 2020 and started the mayo/sando sauce brand Ayoh! last year, are both terrific cooks with very different styles. When Baz came into the Times Test Kitchen to record a video demonstration of the highly craveable pistachio halva chocolate chunk cookie recipe she created for her second cook book “More Is More,” I thought Huneven and Baz might want to meet each other. During their conversation about their experiences of loss and recovery, recorded by video producer Mark E. Potts, they immediately found things in common.

Molly Baz and Michelle Huneven in conversation at the Los Angeles Times Test Kitchen.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

“One of the things that I wanted in the kitchen was a sofa,” Huneven said, “so we had this beautiful, long window seat with big welted cushions. Every morning we would wake up and drink our tea and coffee there with the dog and look out into the garden and get ready for the day.”

“We also had a sitting area where we would start the day,” Baz said. “We had a built-in couch that my husband designed, the first coffee table he ever made, and a chaise longue, which didn’t really have a use until I had my son 10 months ago. It became the perfect place to nurse. I would have my coffee and nurse him on the chaise longue every morning. It was just kind of a perfect place.”

After the fire, neither Huneven nor Baz felt much like cooking.

“I rebelled,” Huneven said. “I didn’t cook for two months. Or, rather, I cooked like two dinners, and it was the same dinner where I stuck a bunch of cherry tomatoes on a sheet pan, boiled some pasta and that was it, with maybe some burrata. I don’t even remember how we ate. I mean, I say I wasn’t traumatized, but it really was a blur.”

“I didn’t cook for a while either,” Baz said. “I got back into the kitchen to finish a recipe I was working on the day of the fire. It was a savory egg quiche, but treated like a burnt Basque cheesecake, cooked at a really high heat, a crustless quiche. I thought about taking it with me when we evacuated, but I expected I’d be back the next day. One of the the last things I said before I left was, ‘Damn, I just wish the quiche was a little more burnt.’ Because I had this vision of a really burnished exterior. And so later the quiche got burnt. Once I pulled myself together enough to think about food, that’s the next thing I made. It was really comforting and cathartic. I made everyone leave the kitchen and was like, ‘I’m cooking. I need to be alone.’ So it was a bit of a therapy session for myself. And yeah, the quiche was delicious.”

Molly Baz with a just-baked batch of her pistachio brown butter and halva chocolate chunk cookies at the Los Angeles Times Test Kitchen.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

Both Baz and Huneven are now living in different rental homes in Echo Park while they figure out the logistics of rebuilding.

“So much of cooking is a graceful dance,” Baz said, “and I felt so ungraceful for the first three weeks that it made me not want to cook. I’ve gotten over that hump, and I think I’m regaining my muscle memory in this new space now. I feel like I can cook and not fumble around.”

“We moved into a completely empty house, nothing in the drawers. We had a couple of camping pans that had been in the trunk of our our truck. But one of the things that was so amazing is that we landed in a sea of generosity. I’m not wearing any clothes that I bought. They’re all gifts. And people furnished our kitchen with a house-warming party, but it was really a kitchen warming.

“The incredible kindness and generosity of people, that’s a gift I never anticipated,” Huneven continued. “It’s also really lessened the trauma. Because, you know, it’s stuff, and it can be replaced. Houses can be rebuilt. Somebody said to me, ‘This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s not.’ You know, the loss of people that I’ve loved, some bad breakups in my youth. Now those were bad. This was bad too, but it’s not the worst thing.”

“We lost all of the physical things,” Baz said, agreeing with Huneven. “But it highlights what you do have, which is your relationships and your community. And that becomes the most important thing in the world. My friends and my family, the people who are holding me together in all of this, are everything to me right now. All of the bulls— just washes away. You learn and understand like that living is actually about humanity and people. The rest can burn down, and you’re going to be OK.”

Summer cook-along

Andrew and Michelle Muñoz with beef ribs, beef rib tacos, and salsa outside the Los Angeles Times Test Kitchen.

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

Baz is just one of the cooks and chefs who have been to the Times Test Kitchen in recent weeks to meet our “Chef That!” challenge: Come up with a recipe that demonstrates chef skills and creativity but is still simple enough for an average home cook to make. Our “Chef That!” video series is ongoing, but this Sunday we’re publishing a special cook-along recipe section full of summer recipes from the chef series plus a few from cookbook authors in our “Book to Cook” video series. Among the recipes to look for, home-oven-cooked beef ribs with outdoor smoker flavor from Andrew and Michelle Muñoz of Moo’s Craft Barbecue, spicy cold mung bean noodles from 88 Club’s Mei Lin, Hailee Catalano‘s “mean, green” turkey sandwich, the egg salad sando that Father’s Office founder Sang Yoon serves at his Helm’s Bakery complex in Culver City and an incredible grapefruit cream pie from Quarter Sheets’ dessert guru Hannah Ziskin.

Dog days

Photographer Anne Fishbein’s bull terrier Ivy with dog food made from recipes by writers Carolynn Carreño and Michelle Huneven.

(Anne Fishbein / For The Times)

Los Angeles, says senior Food editor Danielle Dorsey, is ranked the nation’s most popular city to own a dog. It’s also a very good city for eating out with a dog. Dorsey put together a guide to the best dog-friendly patios to take your pup as part of our “Dog Days of Summer” collaboration with our features team. Regular contributor Carolynn Carreño explored the evolution toward human-grade dog food over the last 15 years and provides a recipe for Rufus hash, a raw dog food blend she used to make for her late dog, Rufus. It’s made with ground beef, turkey or chicken, organ meat, bone meal, steamed broccoli and steamed sweet potato. Novelist Michelle Huneven (see story above) also shares her recipe for the homemade hash she feeds her rescue dog, Tatty Jane. Like Carreño, she uses ground meat and broccoli (or spinach) but also includes peas, brown or white rice, fish oil or sardines, finely ground baked eggshells for bone health and, for the antioxidants, frozen-fresh cranberries.

The comfort of taquitos

Chef Wes Avila, left, with his father, Jose Luis Avila, in Pico Rivera in 2025.

(Wes Avila)

Chef Wes Avila‘s father, Jose Luis Avila, is a legal resident of the U.S. But he felt so fearful of being caught up in the ICE raids happening all over California that after more than 50 years in this country he recently moved to Mexico. Avila told Food reporter Stephanie Breijo that when he’s missing his father he makes a version of the Durango-style caldillo, or stew, that his father used to cook.

“It connects me to him,” said Avila, who leads the kitchens at MXO and Ka’teen. “I talk to him every other day. We have a very close relationship.”

And when he’s missing his mother, who died in 1995, he makes beef taquitos, which he thinks was her favorite dish — or at least, he says, “our favorite dish for her to make when my brother, my sister and I were kids.” He shared recipes for both dishes.

Also …

The lunch line at One Piece Cafe in Little Tokyo.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

• In a time of too many restaurant closures, two very different but fan-driven new restaurants are drawing big crowds. Karla Marie Sanford talked with diners lined up in Little Tokyo for One Piece Cafe, based on the longtime anime and manga series. “‘One Piece’ has a pretty big community,” a fan told Sanford, “and especially with the Lakers and Dodgers collaborating with One Piece, L.A. is bringing anime into their culture as well.” And on Day 1 of the Tesla Diner, reporters Lauren Ng and Stephanie Breijo showed up at the fully electric 24-hour restaurant where they found a protester decrying Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a threat to democracy while Tesla aficionados lined up for smashburgers and more from the diner menu created by chef Eric Greenspan. Whether either restaurant will last beyond the curiosity phase remains to be seen.

  

  The Tesla Diner.

  (Lauren Ng / Los Angeles Times)

• In this week’s Quick Bites, Breijo has details about the return of Ohana Superette in Silver Lake, from Eric and Miriam Park, serving “thoughtful, traditional poke”; Lasita‘s new weekend cafe Kapé, “a daytime-only Filipino cafe that riffs on meryenda culture” from Nico de Leon and Chase and Steff Valencia; the newest location in Highland Park of Sogo Roll Bar; a new Manhattan Beach branch of the Bill Addison-praised sandwich shop Bread Head; and notes on Dine LA’s two weeks of “special items and limited-run prix-fixe menus” from nearly 450 restaurants across L.A. County.
• Lauren Harvey reports that the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner determined this week that popular Food Network host Anne Burrell died by suicide June 17. “Her previously recorded final season on ‘Worst Cooks,’ co-hosted with Gabe Bertaccini, is scheduled to premiere July 28.”
• Piper Heath reports on In-N-Out Burger owner and Chief Executive Lynsi Snyder’s decision “to establish a corporate office in Franklin, Tenn.,” a state where there are currently no In-N-Out locations but where she plans to move her family. She also plans to shift the chain’s California offices from Irvine to Baldwin Park.

• And Dee-Ann Durbin reports on Coca-Cola‘s decision to “add a cane-sugar version of its trademark cola to its U.S. lineup this fall, confirming a recent announcement by President Trump.” She notes that “Coke currently sells Mexican Coke, which is made with cane sugar, in the U.S.”

Barafundle Bay is a semi-remote, east-facing golden sandy cove shrouded by sand dunes and blocked in by cliffs – it might be tricky to reach there, but the views are well worth it

Pembrokeshire’s beaches are so stunning that it’s a task to pick one for a day out while on holiday in the west. However, there’s one beach that always stands out, not just for its golden sands but also for its iconic status in Welsh music. Barafundle Bay may lack practical facilities or a trendy cafe serving oat milk flat whites, but what it does have is an enchanting beauty that makes you forget about such amenities for a day.

The beach, located on Pembrokeshire’s south coast, is semi-remote and features an east-facing golden sandy cove surrounded by sand dunes and enclosed by cliffs.

READ MORE: 40p-a-day GP-backed supplement gives ‘stressed’ shoppers a ‘full night’s sleep’

This tranquil oasis is nestled between Stackpole Quay, a small pebble inlet, and Stackpole Head, a breezy outcrop which, if you follow the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path around, will lead you to Broadhaven South, another top-rated beach worth visiting, though it doesn’t quite match up to its more compact neighbour.

What could be more delightful than a late afternoon spent frolicking in the waves, followed by an evening meal at Wales’ Best Local Restaurant 2025?

As The Good Food Guide reported, while the beach’s remoteness is a selling point for many seeking quiet beauty, its location in the southern part of the county means it’s just a quick drive to Wales’ top restaurant, Paternoster Farm.

After a quick change from your beach attire and a brush-off of the sand, you’ll be savouring locally caught oysters and home-reared beef and pork belly from a menu that changes every day, based on what’s in season, reports Wales Online.

The beach, which inspired Carmarthenshire’s psychedelic folk band, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, for their third album release in 1997, Barafundle, is only accessible on foot. However, it’s just a short stroll from Stackpole Quay, where you can park your car and grab a flat white before embarking on your journey.

The path will lead you across the often breezy cliffs before you reach the beach. Part of the Stackpole Estate, the secluded nature of the bay means it requires a bit of effort to reach, ensuring it won’t be as crowded as other beaches in Pembrokeshire.

If you’re willing to carry your beach gear there (and you absolutely should, as you won’t want to leave), it will be well worth it. Most of the time, the sand is occupied by families and friends enjoying the golden sands and crystal blue sea, or keen walkers on the coastal path taking a break to soak up the view.

If you choose to park and walk, it’s about a 15-minute journey. The descent isn’t steep, but it could pose a slight challenge for those with mobility issues. Its proximity to Stackpole makes it a convenient spot for visiting the nearby Bosherton Lily Ponds and the award-winning Stackpole Inn is definitely worth a visit.

Being part of the renowned Stackpole Estate, formerly owned by the Cawdor Family who resided in Stackpole Court, the beach features charming stone steps and walls that make for an Instagram-worthy shot.

But it’s more than just a photo opportunity. The moment you catch sight of the sandy beach stretching out before you through the stone archway, your spirits are instantly lifted and the urge to dash into the sea is irresistible. It’s a view you won’t easily forget.

How to get to Barafundle and where to park

You’ll need to park at the National Trust-owned Stackpole Quay car park, which forms part of the Stackpole Estate. The postcode for this location is: SA71 5LS.

From there, you’ll need to climb the steps on your right as you head down towards the shore, and then continue up over the cliffs to reach the beach. Alternatively, you can park at Broadhaven South and follow the coastal path. The postcode for Broad Haven South car park is SA71 5DR.

A meal in Tuscany’s Valdichiana. Plus, L.A.’s best new Armenian restaurant. Avner Levi’s cherry-topped hamachi crudo. The chicken Caesar wrap comeback. And the best wedding gifts for restaurant lovers. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Something wild

Pasta with wild mint pesto made with walnuts and pine nuts at Massimo Giavannini’s Osteria La Vecchia Rota.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Most of the time we travel to escape our everyday lives, to experience something new. But sometimes we travel to return to something familiar.

I’ve been returning to the same part of Italy, an Umbrian town where it’s easy to slip across the A1 into Tuscany, for more than 20 years. For many of those years I’ve made my way to Osteria La Vecchia Rota in Marciano della Chiana, a small fortress town between Arezzo and Siena.

Two things bring me back. Certainly, there is the food, intensely local pastas and roasted meats you are unlikely to find in any of the thousands of Italian restaurants that exist in the U.S.

And then there is the proprietor, Massimo Giavannini, who appears before you in a burgundy-red chef’s apron and matching chef’s hat that, in contrast to the stiff toques favored by classically trained French chefs, flops jauntily to the side — a sign of friendliness and approachability.

You can order from a printed menu, but most of the time, if he is not handling a rush of orders in the kitchen, Giavannini — who has called himself “the innkeeper with a passion for organic produce” — prefers to describe the dishes for you in his distinctive raspy voice. These are the moments you realize you have found yourself in the hands of a passionate cook, one who wants you to understand what is special about the ingredients that will go into your food.

“You know pesto,” he said on one visit, “but our grandmother and grandfather made another pesto. We make it with selvatica mint [or wild mint], good garlic, good oil, pine nuts and walnuts.”

He explains that the portulaca, or purslane, which sauces his tortelli, is critical to the region in summer — for people and for animals — “because inside the leaf it’s like water … it’s important for energy, to cool off.”

Of the black truffle-topped ricotta gnudi I always order, he says, “Ours are green because they are made with … “

He struggles with the English word and then smiles big when I ask, “nettles?”

“Yes!” he says. We have done this information exchange before and I love it every time. Often, I’ll learn something new, but mostly I like being in his now-familiar presence.

Gnudi made with nettles and topped with shaved black truffles at Massimo Giavannini’s Osteria La Vecchia Rota.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Of course, it was my late husband and this paper’s previous restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, who first brought me and our kids — and then our friends — to La Vecchia Rota thanks to his obsession with trying as many places in the guidebook Osterie d’Italia, put out by Italy’s Slow Food organization. I didn’t see it in this year’s guide, but at one point La Vecchia Rota — specializing, as its website says, in “the now-forgotten cuisine of the Valdichiana” — was awarded a “snail,” the guide’s highest ranking for restaurants that epitomize Slow Food’s cook-local ethos.

Last month, a big group of us gathered in the piazza outside the restaurant, where tables are set out in the summer for al fresco dinners. Plates of our favorite pastas were passed around, including one of hand-cut squares of dough sauced with pears and Pecorino cheese and another made with Tuscany’s big-bulbed garlic known as aglione di Valdichiana, then platters of chicken “made the way it used to be,” roast pork, onions cooked in the ashes of the wood-fired oven and some of the best potatoes I’ve ever eaten.

We may have been a group of outsiders with no actual roots in this land, but after being fed here by Giavannini year after year, this corner of Tuscany has started to feel a bit like home.

Freshly baked

A spread of dishes, including fresh-baked breads, stews and an omelet with basturma at Tun Lahmajo in Burbank.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Ever since I shared a meal with critic Bill Addison early in his research for this week’s review of Tun Lahmajo in Burbank, I haven’t stopped craving the Armenian restaurant’s many meaty and cheesy breads, stews and roasted potatoes hand-mashed at the table. Since then, I’ve tried to get other people to come try what Addison calls “L.A.’s best new Armenian restaurant” — in part because Tun Lahmajo serves dishes that go beyond the classic repertoire of charcoal-grilled meats and sides we’ve come to love in Southern California. I wasn’t always successful. Maybe now, with Addison’s official blessing on the place, I can persuade my friends to come along.

Red hot

The founders of Dave’s Hot Chicken work the line in their East Hollywood parking lot pop-up in 2017.

(Dave’s Hot Chicken)

“A trio of friends — all from L.A.’s Armenian community, and all high school dropouts — scraped together $900 in 2017 because they believed that their Nashville-style fried chicken stand was the future,” writes Food’s reporter Stephanie Breijo. “Now Dave’s Hot Chicken is worth $1 billion.”

Breijo describes how Arman Oganesyan, Tommy Rubenyan and Dave Kopushyan (a former line cook at Thomas Keller‘s now-closed Bouchon Bistro in Beverly Hills) went from an unpermitted pop-up in an East Hollywood parking lot to the central figures in “one of L.A.’s most astounding small-business success stories” after being acquired in June by private equity firm Roark Capital.

It’s a classic L.A. story — one more national fast-food chain born in Southern California. Of course, Dave’s is not the L.A. restaurant that popularized hot chicken in Southern California. That would be Howlin’ Ray’s started in 2015 by Johnny Ray Zone. He gives full credit to the Black cooks of Nashville, who started bringing the fire to fried chicken, especially the family behind Prince’s Hot Chicken, started in the 1930s by Thornton Prince after an angry lover tried to get her revenge on the philandering entrepreneur with an overdose of spice on his fried chicken. (The name of the woman who made that first fuming batch seems to have been lost to history.) Angelenos have access to the Prince legacy through Kim Prince, who partnered with Dulan’s on Crenshaw owner Greg Dulan to start the Dulanville Food Truck.

Back in 2020, columnist Jenn Harris made hot fried chicken with Prince and Zone for her Bucket List video series. It still makes good watching.

With a cherry on top

Cento Raw Bar chef Avner Levi prepared hamachi crudo with cherries and jalapeno in the L.A. Times Test Kitchen.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Cento Raw Bar has become one of L.A.’s hottest new restaurants of 2025. Its chef, Avner Levi, came to the Times Test Kitchen recently for our “Chef That!” video series to show us how he makes hamachi crudo, fresh jalapeños and an unusual but delicious addition of sweet cherries. Watch Levi break down half of a hamachi into two filets and then transform the fish into a perfect summer appetizer in this video. Then try the recipe for yourself. It’s a wonderful summer dish.

Closings

Shibumi chef David Schlosser prepares the mackerel dish shime saba in a style that originated over 250 years ago.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Reporter Lauren Ng talked with Shibumi chef-owner David Schlosser about his decision to close the Kappo omakase-style restaurant on Saturday. “In the end of 2023 to 2024, things really flattened out,” he said. “The staff is the same, the recipes were the same. The only thing that wasn’t the same was people just weren’t coming in.”

And in another loss for downtown L.A., Verve Coffee Roasters has closed its Spring Street location, the first shop it opened in Southern California. “Like many businesses in downtown L.A., we saw lasting changes in foot traffic patterns that deeply affected day-to-day operations,” a Verve spokesperson told Ng in an email. “The level of consistent foot traffic simply didn’t support what is needed to sustain the cafe in a high-overhead environment like downtown.” Its other L.A. locations remain open.

Chef Michael Mina‘s Mother Tongue in Hollywood has also closed, and Cabra, the Peruvian-inspired restaurant from Girl & the Goat chef Stephanie Izard at downtown L.A.’s Hoxton hotel is closing on July 31.

Also …

• Contributor Kelly Dobkin says the much-maligned and often soggy chicken Caesar wrap is making a comeback “with some much-needed upgrades.” In her guide to some of the best new-style and classic chicken Caesar wraps, she’s seeing better bread for the croutons (from Jyan Isaac Bread at Dialog Cafe and Alfalfa), better wrap choices (grilled Mejorado flour tortillas at Ggiata) and sometimes changing up the croutons themselves (falafel croutons cooked in beef tallow at Mini Kabob and tortilla chips instead of croutons plus cotija cheese instead of Parmesan at Casa Vega).
• “I love it when you call me Big Salad.” Carolynn Carreño defends the California big salad … with recipes.
• Could this be the start of a wedding gift trend? Jenn Harris tells the story of Liv Dansky and Jeffrey Rosenthal, a couple who skipped the usual wedding registry requests and asked for gift cards to L.A. restaurants instead of an Instant Pot or even honeymoon contributions. Dansky was new to L.A. so when their guests came through with gift cards for restaurants all over the city — including Musso & Frank, Bavel, Osteria Mozza, Playa Provisions, République and Pink’s Hot Dogs — they started exploring the city through food and fell in love with their new home. “I lived in a lot of cool places, but in L.A., anything you want is accessible,” Dansky says. “On the weekends, we can spend the entire day running around, eating and exploring new neighborhoods. It’s the best way to get to know a city.”

Finding great Mexican food in unexpected places. Losing the city of L.A.’s oldest restaurant. A guide to the vegan ice cream boom. The Italian potatoes that changed Jenn Harris’ mind about fat fries. And “some guy on Tripadvisor.” I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Salbute salute

Salbute with Yucatan-inspired racado negro chicken at Sanchez in Copenhagen.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

As Angelenos, we don’t think twice about eating Mexican food one day, Thai food the next and Korean food the day after that. Weekend breakfast with friends is as likely to be Chinese rice porridge as it is a plate of buckwheat pancakes or chilaquiles. In fact, we rarely bother to break down our dining choices by cuisine. It’s more, let’s go get some ramen or birria or boat noodles.

But when we travel, we tend to eat more conservatively. With limited time in a new place, we usually stick to what we perceive as the food of the country we’re visiting. Trying to find decent Mexican food in Italy, for instance, while not impossible, isn’t easy in a country that prizes the joys of hyper-regionality. You take a risk ordering pasta alla carbonara (a seemingly simple dish that’s hard to perfect if you don’t take your time with the guanciale) outside of Rome or tortellini en brodo in any Italian region other than Emilia-Romagna.

And yet, when I landed in Copenhagen late last month, with all the glories of smørrebrød and cutting-edge Nordic cuisine to explore — including two places in the city (Noma and Geranium) named at different points the No. 1 restaurant in the world on the World’s 50 Best list — the first place I headed was a Mexican restaurant.

Of course, the restaurant, Sanchez, is no ordinary Mexican spot. The owner, Rosio Sanchez, was the head pastry chef for Rene Redzepi at Noma for five years before opening her first Copenhagen taqueria, Hija de Sanchez, in 2015. She briefly returned to collaborate with Redzepi on Noma’s 2017 Mexico pop-up in Tulum. If a real-life version of “The Bear” character Marcus (Lionel Boyce) had been sent to Copenhagen for pastry chef training at the world’s best restaurant in 2014, Sanchez likely would have been his mentor, not Will Poulter‘s character Luca. Indeed, Sanchez appears in the series’ chef-packed Season 3 finale talking about why she loves to cook. And one of Sanchez’s former chefs, Laura Cabrera, has risen to lead her own kitchen at the zero-waste restaurant Baldío in Mexico City.

Chef Rosio Sanchez at the Kødbyen location of her Copenhagen taqueria Hija de Sanchez in 2016.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

When I first ate Sanchez’s Mexican cooking in 2016 at Hija de Sanchez, I was immediately struck by the skill of her tortilla making, not easy in a place where masa is not readily available, and the way she was able make food that felt completely Mexican while incorporating Danish ingredients — a fjord shrimp taco, for instance, or gooseberry salsa. Never mind that as she told Margy Rochlin in this paper during a 2017 guest chef appearance at the L.A. Times Food Bowl with Sqirl‘s Jessica Koslow, some of her first customers in Copenhagen called tortillas “pancakes.” Or that when she saw Danes eating tacos with a fork and knife she had an illustrated and nonjudgmental “how to eat your taco” poster made. Since those early days, Copenhagen eaters have taken to her tacos. There are now five Hija de Sanchez taquerias across the city.

Al pastor, barbacoa and vegetarian tacos plus a glass of jamaica at the Torvehallerne food market location of Rosio Sanchez’s Copenhagen taqueria Hija de Sanchez.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

But Sanchez was not solely interested in exploring tacos. At the end of 2017 she opened Sanchez, a restaurant that elevates Mexican cuisine while still keeping it approachable. In its current form, the restaurant offers a five-course tasting menu for the rough equivalent of $82 with the option of an even more affordable three-course meal for about $59. If you want still more, you can add extra courses — such as an oyster with a sauce of habanero and sea buckthorn, or a slender bean, sheep cheese and cured egg burrito.

The oyster was a good, bracing start. And lime-cured langoustine ceviche, served aguachile style, with a verde sauce and fermented tomato water, kept the freshness going. But it was the salbute, with a jolt of intense corn from the puffed fried tortilla and layers of deep, complex flavors from chicken cooked in recado negro sauce, made with charred chiles, plus grilled bladderwrack seaweed in place of lettuce, a quail egg and a drizzle of habanero-árbol chile oil that showed how Sanchez is combining tradition, local ingredients and her own new way of approaching Mexican food.

Monkfish cheek, marinated al pastor style, beautifully charred and served with herbs on a lightly charred lettuce leaf came next. It all led to carnitas tacos that we assembled ourselves with freshly made tortillas, herbs, salsa, pickled jalapeño and onion, plus, because this is Copenhagen, green sea buckthorn.

The night’s most memorable dish, however, was dessert. The menu’s description was understated: chocolate mousse. But what is usually a satisfying but unexciting dish came out with a ring of salsa macha, crunchy with pumpkin seeds and preserved ancho chiles, a layer of whipped cream and, for good measure, roasted kelp and drips of olive oil. The mousse itself was made chocolate from Chiapas and hid a nugget of more chiles underneath.

Chocolate mouse with salsa macha, whipped cream and roasted kelp at Sanchez in Copenhagen.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

The spicy and sweet flavors felt both old and new. It’s the kind of dish that shows that Mexican cuisine even thousands of miles away from Mexico itself is still evolving. Now if only we could get Sanchez to open a branch of her restaurant here in L.A.

Loss and uneasy hope

Cole’s French Dip on 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles will close its doors on Aug. 2.

(Con Keyes / Los Angeles Times)

It’s been a tough week for L.A. restaurants. Karla Marie Sanford reports that Cole’s French Dip, which opened in 1908, making it the city’s oldest restaurant, will close its doors on Aug. 2. “By the time the Olympics get here, all these mom and pops will be gone,” said Brian Lenzo, senior vice president of operations for Cedd Moses’ Pouring With Heart, which took over the downtown L.A. restaurant in 2008. “Hopefully it’s a wakeup call for the right people to step up and figure out a plan.”

Another downtown loss: David Schlosser announced that his rigorous Japanese-focused restaurant Shibumi — last year he recreated a 1789 Japanese banquet — will permanently close on July 19.

Senior food editor Danielle Dorsey reports that Alisa Reynolds’ soul food bistro My 2 Cents, on The Times’ 101 Best Restaurants in L.A. list, will close on July 31 after 12 years on Pico Boulevard. Reynolds plans to focus on catering, pop-ups and collaborations.

And Lauren Ng reports that Melody, the Virgil Village natural wine bar that hosted many pop-ups during its nearly 10 years in business, will close this weekend, though owner Eric Tucker will open a temporary “Bar Band-Aid” pizza spot on July 16 until the Craftsman bungalow space can be sold.

Members of the Morfin family eat tacos and drink agua frescas at El Gato Night Market.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

But there are some signs of resilience even in this tough climate. Ng spent time at the recently reopened El Gato Night Market, which shut down for two weeks after ICE raids heated up in Los Angeles. Though more than half of the market’s 70 to 80 vendors had not returned in the first days of the reopening and business was slow at first, the crowds started to return after a few days. “Vendors, many of whom worry for their safety and the future of their businesses, show up for work out of necessity,” Ng writes, “but also to provide comfort and familiarity for customers, most of whom are Latino and often bring their young children.”

Maria Sanchez, known as “Maria la de los Burritos” sells $5 burritos in Watts out of the trunk of her car.

(Yasara Gunawardena / For The Times)

Meanwhile, when Maria Sanchez, known on social media as “Maria la de los Burritos,” was asked to leave her usual burrito-selling spot outside a Home Depot after ICE raids started happening, she was undeterred. She packed her gold-foil-wrapped burritos in the trunk of her car and found eager customers at construction sites. Her carne asada burritos typically sell out in 30 minutes. Contributor Madeleine Connors profiles the maker of these internet-viral burritos that are also doing some good for L.A. workers.

Also …

Awan offers more than a dozen flavors of the fully vegan ice cream made with coconut cream and Balinese vanilla.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

• The days of chalky, grainy, barely sweet plant-based ice cream are in the past, says contributor Omari Allen, who writes about the blossoming of vegan ice cream in Los Angeles and put together a guide to 10 of the best shops serving great dairy-free ice cream.
• How Steve Samson‘s thrice-fried potatoes at Rossoblu changed Jenn Harris’ mind about fat fries.
• Hawa Hassan, author of “Setting a Place for Us” and “In Bibi’s Kitchen,” made arnabeet mekleh — Lebanese fried cauliflower with tahini — in the Times Test Kitchen. Watch how she did it and get the recipe.
• Deputy food editor Betty Hallock has 15 ways to make the most of summer melons.
• If menu prices are feeling too high, here are 19 affordable picks from critic Bill Addison‘s 101 Best Restaurants in California guide.
• Restaurants, bars consider turning off music as licensing fees skyrocket, report Ashley Carman and Aruni Soni.
• The Country Kitchen in Malibu is just one of the businesses recently reopened after the Palisades fire struggling to regain customers even in peak tourist season, reports Caroline Petrow-Cohen.
• Kraft Heinz Co. is preparing to break itself up, reports Crystal Tse, Liana Baker and Kristina Peterson.
• Jewel Thais-Williams, founder of L.A.’s Black lesbian and queer nightclub Jewel’s Catch One, has died at the age of 86. “Jewel’s Catch One became a kind of West Coast Studio 54,” writes August Brown. “People came from all over the world to party there. Europe, South America — they’d come straight from LAX and leave their bags at coat check,” Thais-Williams’ sister Carol Williams told Brown. “The club was universally known for its acceptance.”

And finally … a word from ‘some guy on Tripadvisor’

The sign outside Sliders in Copenhagen: “Try the worst sliders some guy on Tripadvisor has ever had in his entire life alongside enjoying our ‘terrible service.’”

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Restaurants handle negative customer feedback in different ways. Some, as this sign seen outside the burger bar Sliders in Copenhagen, embrace it. The invitation: “Try the worst sliders some guy on Tripadvisor has ever had in his entire life alongside enjoying our ‘terrible service.’ ” It certainly got my attention. If I hadn’t already filled up on smørrebrød, I would have stopped in for a “lamb za’atar spectacular” or “decadent Dane” (beef patty, melted Danish cheese, caramelized onions and pickled apple) slider.

Ever since operetta composer Victor Herbert sued Shanley’s restaurant in New York in 1917 to force it to pay for playing his song on a player-piano, songwriters and music publishers have depended on Performing Rights Organizations to make sure they get compensated.

For much of the last century, three organizations dominated the industry, a relatively staid and unglamorous corner of the music scene that remained largely unchanged throughout the eras of radio, records and CDs. But the rise of streaming has led to a surge in revenue and spawned a handful of new organizations looking to cash in.

Now there are at least half a dozen PROs in the United States, representing songwriters and publishers, each demanding that bars, restaurants, hotels and other venues pay a fee or risk being sued.

Businesses say the rising licensing costs have become overwhelming, and some question whether it’s even worth playing music at all. The House Judiciary Committee last fall asked the Copyright Office to investigate the current system and consider potential reforms. In February, the Office opened an inquiry and received thousands of comments from businesses and songwriters.

“The growing proliferation of PROs and their lack of transparency have made it increasingly difficult to offer music in our establishments,” hundreds of small businesses from across the country wrote to the Copyright Office in a joint letter.

“The issue is not that small businesses are unwilling to pay for music,” they wrote, adding that the current system is unfair and untenable. “Small businesses can be left feeling like PROs have them over the proverbial barrel.”

Creating a welcoming ambiance in a restaurant or yoga studio isn’t as simple as putting on a Spotify playlist. Streaming has unleashed trillions of songs, and every one must be licensed and have royalties paid to the songwriter whenever any track is played in public. Violations can cost up to $150,000 per infringement.

This booming market for music publishing has led to a windfall for the two major PROs. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, founded in 1914, and BMI, established in 1939, together represent more than 90% of musical compositions in the U.S. today with talent lists covering Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and Eminem, to name a few. SESAC, founded in 1931, rounds out the original three and operates on an invite-only basis.

ASCAP, the oldest and, as a nonprofit, the only PRO to publicly share data on its collections and payout, has seen revenue jump to $1.8 billion in 2024 from $935 million in 2010. Broadcast Music Inc., in its last public report as a nonprofit in 2022, showed record revenue of $1.6 billion, with 48% of that from digital sources.

This kind of growth hasn’t gone unnoticed. In just over the last 12 years, three new PROs have emerged. Legendary music manager Irving Azoff founded Global Music Rights in 2013, offering “boutique services” and royalty transparency, building a stable of more than 160 high-profile songwriters such as Bad Bunny and Bruce Springsteen.

AllTrack, founded in 2017, caters to smaller, independent songwriters. Pro Music Rights launched in 2018 and says it represents more than 2.5 million musical works, including AI-created music.

Many songs today are composed by several songwriters, each of whom could be affiliated with a different PRO. Therefore, to legally play those songs, establishments must pay for a license from each PRO. Most PROs offer blanket licensing agreements, meaning that they provide access to their entire repertoires for one fee. And while that gives a particular venue a wide range of musical freedom, it also means bars and restaurants are paying for thousands of songs they may never play or are essentially paying twice, in instances where a song with multiple writers is represented by more than one PRO.

The National Restaurant Assn. said its members pay an average of $4,500 per year to license music, or 0.5% of the average U.S. small restaurant’s total annual sales.

“This may not seem like a large amount, but for an industry that runs on an average pre-tax margin of 3%-5%, this cost is significant, especially since operators don’t clearly understand what they get for this particular investment aside from avoiding the very legitimate threat of a business-ending lawsuit,” the association wrote in public comments to the Copyright Office.

The American Hotel & Lodging Assn. said the mushrooming number of PROs has led to “significant increases in both financial and administrative burdens.” It gave an example of one “major global hotel chain” that reported the cost per hotel for PRO license fees rose by about 200% from 2021-25, with some hotels seeing increases of 400% or more.

A large hotel that hosts occasional live music events could be paying a single PRO $5,000 to $20,000 a year. If it’s paying all of the major PROs, it could be incurring as much as $80,000 in fees, according to the association.

BMI said its licensing fees have remained “relatively steady over the years” and are based on objective criteria that apply equally to all similar businesses. Fees for individual bars and restaurants start at just over $1 a day, according to BMI. Other factors that go into licensing fees include the occupancy rate, and the type of music being played — live, DJed or recorded, for example.

Songwriters’ livelihoods

In the 1917 Supreme Court case that delivered Herbert his victory over Shanley’s, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “If music did not pay, it would be given up.”  He wasn’t only referring to the songwriters, but also to the venues themselves and addressing whether music helped generate revenue. The ruling was a win for Herbert personally but also for ASCAP, which he had helped found, and established the royalty payment system that’s largely still in use today.

A spokesperson for ASCAP said an increase in fees paid to songwriters by venues is an appropriate and inevitable outcome of a growing market. The organization’s musical repertoires have grown exponentially over the years to include tens of millions of works, giving music users more music and more choice, the spokesperson said. ASCAP says about 90 cents of every dollar it collects from licensees is made available for distribution to its members as royalties.

“Licensees are seeking more regulation of PROs because they want to pay songwriters less,” ASCAP Chief Executive Elizabeth Matthews said in a statement to Bloomberg. “If transparency, efficiency and innovation are the goals, more free market competition among PROs is the answer— not unnecessary government intervention.”

Songwriters depend on PROs for their livelihoods, especially in the streaming era. Many individual songwriters wrote to the Copyright Office in defense of the PRO system, expressing concern that government regulation would only diminish their hard-won earnings.

“Every royalty payment I receive represents not just compensation for my work, but my ability to continue creating music that enhances these very businesses,” wrote Joseph Trapanese, a composer who has created scores for film and TV.

Performance royalties make up about half of total publishing revenue, which is collected by PROs and dispersed to songwriters, according to the National Music Publishers’ Assn. Last year, only about 5% of songwriters’ earnings came from bars, restaurants and other venues, a figure that is “significantly undervalued,” according to NMPA executive vice president and General Counsel Danielle Aguirre.

“There is a substantial opportunity for growth here,” she said, speaking at the group’s annual meeting in June.

The organization set a goal to significantly increase that money over the next year, likely by enforcing licensing requirements.

Several establishment owners equated the PRO’s efforts to collect fees to a mob-like shakedown, citing aggressive on-site confrontations and threatening letters.

BMI said it spends a lot of time trying to educate business owners on the value that music brings to their establishment, federal copyright law requirements and the importance of maintaining a music license.

Lawsuits are always a last resort, a spokesperson said, which is why BMI spends sometimes years on educational outreach. If those efforts are ignored, however, an in-person visit might occur, and BMI may take legal action.

Opaque, bureaucratic

Despite their differences, songwriters and businesses agree that the current system is opaque and bureaucratic and could serve both sides better.

Businesses complain about the lack of a comprehensive database of songs and the fact that there is no easy system for reporting which songs they’ve played. Meanwhile, songwriters claim that the sheer volume of music and businesses throughout the U.S. makes it hard to track where and when their work is played and to know whether they’ve been properly compensated.

“What’s really being called to question is, is this system working accurately—is the money that should be finding its way to the songwriters’ pockets finding its way in an efficient manner?” said George Howard, a professor at Berklee College of Music. “And the answer is ‘no.’ There’s no excuse for that with the level of technology we have today.”

BMI and ASCAP joined forces in 2020 to launch Songview, a free digital database showing copyright ownership and administration shares for more than 20 million works. The two PROs are exploring including GMR and SESAC, which would add even more songs to the platform.

Some of the complaints about the PRO licensing system go back decades. Michael Dorf, a producer and founder of the legendary Manhattan music club The Knitting Factory, has faced off with PROs numerous times over his 30-some years as a venue operator. In the 1990s, he signed singer-songwriters who performed at his club to his publishing company and submitted their setlists to the PROs, assuming he and his acts would reap the resulting royalties from their performances.

But no money came in

“We didn’t receive one penny,” Dorf, who’s also the founder and chief executive officer of City Winery, said in an interview. “To me, there is a cost of doing business, and we want to have the artists and the songwriters properly paid — we love that. What’s simply frustrating is to pay money and know it’s not going to the reason why it’s being collected.”

Caleb Shreve, a songwriter and producer who’s worked with the likes of Jennifer Lopez and is also chief executive at Killphonic Rights, a rights collection organization, said he hears music he has produced “all the time in yoga spots and bars, and I’ve never seen them on publishing statements.” Many songwriters are convinced the current system favors the biggest artists at the expense of middle-tier and emerging songwriters. Because of the blanket licensing system, BMI and ASCAP don’t track individual song use by those licensees and instead rely on proxy data, like what’s popular on the radio or through streaming platforms, to divvy up those collected fees.

Sometimes radio hits mimic what’s played in an arena, restaurant or bar, but not always.

ASCAP said it tracks trillions of performances every year across all media platforms and only uses sample surveys or proxy data when obtaining actual performance data isn’t feasible or is cost prohibitive.

Technology could be a way to solve the current issues without regulation. London-based Audoo is one company leading the way.

Founded by musician Ryan Edwards in 2018 after he heard his music being played in a department store and discovered he wasn’t getting paid for it, the growing startup uses proprietary listening devices it places in cafes, gyms and other public venues to recognize and log songs. It uploads the data to the cloud, ensuring every artist — not just the chart toppers — receives compensation for their work.

The company has attracted investment from music icons including Elton John and Adele, and its devices are used by PROs in the U.K. and Australia. It made its first foray into the US earlier this year, placing listening devices in about 180 establishments around the Denver area in a test run.The collected data underscored that what’s played in public places doesn’t necessarily mirror what’s on the popular playlists or radio and streaming platforms. Edwards likens the idea of using proxies to political polling — directionally helpful but not precise.

Audoo found that 77,000 unique tracks were played around Denver over two months, split among 26,000 artists, according to data viewed by Bloomberg News. On average, only 6.6% of the top-40 songs played in the venues also appeared on Billboard’s top radio-play chart.

In markets where Audoo has partnered with venues, Edwards said business owners have been proud to support particular songwriters and the music business writ large.

“All of a sudden it went from a push-and-pull of, ‘Why do I owe you money?’ to, ‘OK, I can understand music is funding the people who create,’” Edwards said.

Carman and Soni write for Bloomberg.

“Let it go!” one person screamed at a massive TV screen.

“Get him out of my villa!” shouted another.

“Oh, we’re voting tonight!” declared another as they whipped their index finger in a circular motion as if to say, “We need to round up the troops and get ready for war.”

It’s 8 p.m. at the Palm & the Pine and every single seat is taken, so some people have resorted to huddling outside to watch the action through a window. A small crew of bartenders are working double time to serve up wings, french fries and tropical-themed cocktails.

Attendees celebrate the start of the episode.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

On most nights at the family-owned Hollywood spot, dubbed “your girlfriend’s favorite sports bar,” patrons might come to watch tennis or basketball or soccer. But on this Tuesday evening, the guests were there to watch a different type of game. They came to the crowded bar to watch “Love Island USA” with 200 other fans who are just as invested in the reality dating show as they are.

“The decibel levels crush any Super Bowl, World Series or anything we’ve shown there,” said Colin Magalong, co-owner of the Palm & the Pine.

“This is our Super Bowl,” added Madeline Biebel, founder of the pop-up event series that screens reality TV shows called Reality Bar, which has been hosting free “Love Island USA” watch parties at the Palm & the Pine and other bars across L.A.

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While people have been gathering to watch high-profile television episodes in public spaces for years, the communal watch party has been having a resurgence, fueled in part by social media and the highly dissectible nature of shows like “The White Lotus,” “Severance” and “Traitors.” This summer, “Love Island USA,” a spinoff of the U.K. reality dating show that airs six days a week, has sparked a pop culture craze and Angelenos are flocking to coffee shops, bars, restaurants, social clubs like Soho House and arcades like Dave & Buster’s just to watch the show and kiki about it with others in person.

“This is our Super Bowl,” says Madeline Biebel, founder of Reality Bar, which hosts reality TV watch parties around L.A.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Now in its seventh season, the premise of “Love Island USA” is fairly simple: Ten singles are plopped into a lavish villa in Fiji, where they must couple up with a member of the opposite sex or risk getting dumped from the island. Over the course of several weeks, contestants (who are referred to as “islanders”) participate in extravagant challenges — many of which require them to wear revealing outfits and make out with one another — that are designed to stir up drama. At random, “bombshells” are brought into the mix to encourage the islanders to test their romantic connections. All the while, viewers at home can vote for their favorite islanders, sort of like “American Idol,” with hopes that they will make it to the end and win the $100,000 prize.

“It is so outlandish,” said Lauren Sowa, who lectures on television and pop culture at Pepperdine. “Shows like ‘The Bachelor’ try to maintain a level of decorum and something like ‘Love Island’ throws that into their ocean and their pool and their foam parties with both hands.”

Between the spicy games, the contestants’ disconnection from the world, their dorm room-style living conditions and the ultimate challenge of finding love, Sowa says, “The stakes couldn’t be higher. The drama couldn’t be more and therefore we could not be more entertained.”

The idea of bringing people together to watch “Love Island” and other reality TV shows came to Biebel in 2021 when L.A. was starting to reopen after the COVID pandemic. She wondered, “Why isn’t there a bar or restaurant that shows ‘The Bachelor’?” Biebel, 28, recalled.

At first the bartenders at her local sports bar laughed at her request to turn on the show, but when a crowd of people joined her to watch it on the patio, she knew that she was onto something.

Attendees arrive as early as 5 p.m. to secure a seat at the “Love Island USA” watch party in Hollywood. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“Those moments where everyone is freaking out together are just magical,” said Madeline Biebel, founder of Reality Bar. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

She hosted the first Reality Bar event in 2023 at a restaurant on the rooftop of the Kimpton Hotel Wilshire and 40 people showed up to watch “Love Island USA” Season 5. She continued hosting watch parties for reality shows including “The Real Housewives” and “The Bachelor,” one in which Joey Graziadei, the Bachelor himself, made a surprise appearance.

But none of the events have been as popular as the parties for the current season of “Love Island USA.” Thanks to a TikTok that got nearly 3 million views, the watch party at the Palm & the Pine went from having about 100 RSVPs to 1,500. On Sunday, fans cheered when Austin Shepard and Charlie Georgiou, who were booted from the island, made an appearance at the event. To keep up with the growing demand, Biebel added 10 other venues to watch the show at including the Nickel Mine in Sawtelle, Roosterfish in West Hollywood and the Happy Rabbit in Sherman Oaks.

“People are just so hungry for connection and community especially post-COVID,” said Biebel, adding that it brings people together who share a common interest. “Those moments where everyone is freaking out together are just magical.”

(Clockwise from left) 1.) Fans of “Love Island USA” cheer, scream and gasp during the dramatic episode. 2.) Reality Bar’s “Love Island USA” watch parties became so popular that 10 more L.A. locations were added. 3.) Maya Suarez, left, and Reanna Davidson enjoy drinks and roses courtesy of Reality Bar. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

At the Tuesday night party, people started arriving as early as 5 p.m. to secure a seat inside the two-story bar. As pop and hip-hop music played loudly over a sound system, attendees sipped on “Love Island”-themed cocktails with clever names like the “I’ve Got a Text-ini” (a vodka martini with cranberry juice), “Bare Minimum” (an espresso martini), “Hot New Bombshell” (tequila, grapefruit and lime), “Aftersun Spritz” (Prosecco, mint, soda and lemon) and “I’m Open” (cucumber, vodka, lemon and soda).

When the show promptly appeared on the bar’s multiple TV screens at 8 p.m., a thunderous roar of cheers exploded. Throughout the dramatic episode — which involved the islanders reading anonymous letters about how their fellow cast mates truly felt about them — many patrons talked among themselves and shouted at the TV, but no one seemed bothered. The energy was high and the subtitles were on.

Branson Bond, 27, of Hollywood and six of his friends went to the watch party for the first time after learning about it on social media.

“It’s one thing to see people’s perception online, but it means so much more — whether it’s music or film — to be around people who have a common interest,” said Bond, who managed to find a booth in the upstairs area of the bar with his friends. “Especially with everything going on in the world, it’s cool to kind of decompress with something silly every now and then.”

“We love to kiki, to party [and] we need a debrief like immediately after the show, so I needed to experience this,” said Giselle Gonzalez, 27, of Hollywood.

Reanna Davidson, 26, and her sister Maya Suarez usually rotate watching “Love Island USA” together at one of their homes, but they thought a watch party would be more fun.

“I feel like we’re obsessed with “Love Island” and we go crazy at home so we wanted to see what the environment was like here,” Davidson said in between sips of a martini.

“I like the drama, but also I like the love,” she said. “Like last year, watching them all fall in love and really have relationships outside of it was so sweet.”

“I love the camaraderie here and everybody yelling,” says attendee DeVante Waugh.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

After attending one of Reality Bar’s watch parties at a different venue, DeVante Waugh, 32, wanted to come back with a group of his work friends who all started watching the show recently.

“I love the camaraderie here and everybody yelling,” said Waugh, adding that he’s still mad that Jeremiah was sent home during one of the show’s most shocking moments. “It’s fun. It’s like watching a game. And then there’s a lot of pretty women, not a lot of guys,” he adds jokingly.

While some attendees left the bar immediately after the episode was over, some stayed to do karaoke, strike a pose in the photo booth or to recap what happened on the show with their new friends. It’s this community aspect that JP Stanley, 29, of Hollywood appreciates most about watch parties.

“I think it’s the sense of being a part of something,” said Stanley as he sipped on a glass of Prosecco. He attended the event with a friend and said he hopes to see more watch parties even after the current season of “Love Island” wraps. “L.A. is really yearning for that community and I think this is something that really gives people of any age a place to connect, and it’s such an easy common denominator.”

He added, “There’s no prerequisite required. You don’t have to know anything about me and I don’t have to know anything about you. I can just be like, “So, Love Island” and you’ll be like, “Right, Amaya!”

However you might be feeling about the state of our country this long holiday weekend (me: angry, troubled, resolute in staying aligned with the progressive values that truly move our nation forward), I hope you have time to rest and regroup. Here are three suggestions for eating and drinking this weekend: They’re places that brought me some recent, needed joy.

Bar Benjamin

Not long after the Benjamin opened in Hollywood early last summer, I showed up hoping for a couple unreserved seats at the bar, situated in the center of the restaurant’s posh Art Deco room. No go. The staffer put us on a wait list and suggested we hang out at the Moon Room bar located above the restaurant.

We climbed the stairs and peeked in. I could roll with the New York 1970s nostalgia vibe — parquet floors with checkered tiles around the bar counter, wild art, a baby grand. That night, though, the place was so empty it looked lonely. We took a walk until the Benjamin called us back.

Riding on the success of the glamour downstairs, owners Ben Shenassafar, Kate Burr and Jared Meisler reintroduced Moon Room (which Meisler had opened last spring) as Bar Benjamin, replicating the same tasteful woods, moss-colored velvets and dim chandelier lighting as the restaurant below. Much, much improved.

Last Laugh and Everything Gibson cocktails at Bar Benjamin in Hollywood

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

The group brought in two ace bartenders: Chad Austin and Jason Lee. I’m particularly a fan of Lee: A few years back he crafted a summertime cocktail at n/soto of ice, shaved to order, over watermelon juice laced with amaro and lime juice. Then he moved on to Baroo, masterfully devising drinks around Korean spirits or kombucha that synched with Kwang Uh’s singular cooking.

At Bar Benjamin, he and Austin distill many of the cuisines that define Los Angeles (Mexican, Thai, Sichuan, Persian) into liquid odes. To work backwards, there’s a fun play on the ubiquitous Iranian stew fesenjoon that includes Granada Vallet pomegranate liqueur and walnut-rice orgeat that’s sweet enough to qualify as dessert. To start, I’d lean more toward the bumblebee-yellow, mezcal-spiked Last Laugh bright with saffron, pineapple, bell pepper and mango.

A Gibson infused with the essence of an everything bagel? A bit intense in its pickled flavors for me. But then again, I lean purist in the martini realms. I’ll choose the lemony Ben’s Martini that also happens to nicely match the very edited selection of small plates, including mustardy beef tartare and dilled shrimp salad in a brioche bun.

An ikura-topped shrimp roll at Bar Benjamin.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

A fun, fizzing crowd filled the space on a recent weeknight visit. But even if I came upon Bar Benjamin with few customers, the new cocooned atmosphere would be one I’d be happy to have to myself.

Fusion Kitchen

How might a bowl of warm borscht appeal in summertime temperatures?

The broth at the version served at Fusion Kitchen in Mid-Wilshire is light, for starters. Chunks of stewed tomato and grated beets and carrot gently vary the textures. Every third or fourth spoonful catches a few strands of beef. Taste first, and then stir in a couple splotches of sour cream. On the side are toasted triangles of rye bread and several slices of melt-on-the-tongue salo — salt pork, similar to Italian lardo, that is ubiquitous to Ukrainian culture.

I’ve been hungering for more tastes of Eastern European food since writing about Noroc, a restaurant in Sacramento that serves Moldovan dishes, for the 101 Best Restaurants in California guide.

With a name as unfortunately generic as Fusion Kitchen, you need to know what you’re looking for. This was previously known as the second location of Mom, Please, the Ukrainian draw in Playa Vista opened by Oleksii Kochetkov, his wife, Inna Kochetkova, and his mother, Olena Kochetkova. The same owners run Fusion Kitchen; only the name changed.

Borsht (center) and other Ukrainian dishes at Fusion Kitchen LA

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

After blitzing through the menu, I have a few strong recommendations beyond borscht. Cabbage rolls show off the same gravity-defying sleight of hand, improbably delicate wrappers bundling minced beef and vegetables scented with basil. Among varenyky and pelmeni, the half-moon dumplings filled with mashed potato and dressed in mushroom sauce turned out to be the most compelling.

And among many options for desserts, zero in on the medovic, or honey cake. It doesn’t have the zillion layers of, say, Michelle Polzine’s fame-making version at her now-closed 20th Century Cafe in San Francisco. Its sour cream frosting zings, though, with the crucial sweet-smokiness of burnt honey.

Manila Inasal

I’m ordering too much as usual, calling out chef Natalia Moran’s modern takes on Filipino standards: lumpia, sisig, lechon, adobo, kare kare, garlic rice … .

When I’m done, the server studies me. “You forgot to order the signature dish,” she says. “There’s a reason our name is Manila Inasal.”

Oops. Thanks goodness she steered me right.

Chicken may be the traditional choice for this class of thoroughly marinated and grilled dishes, but the bungus inasal, made with silvery milkfish, is particularly wonderful here. Achiote stains the fish, which has also absorbed the aromatics of lemongrass, ginger and sharply citrusy calamansi juice. Swipe forkfuls through two sauces, one based on green chile and the other on coconut vinegar. With a bit of cucumber salad spooned on the plate, it’s a refreshing warm weather meal.

A spread of dishes at Manila Inasal in Silver Lake

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

To dive deeper: start with always-easy-to-crunch lumpia or, even better, laing, taro leaves creamed in coconut milk with seasonings like garlic, ginger and shrimp paste. Moran’s take is restrained, but pleasantly so, and she presents it as an appetizer dip surrounded by focaccia baked with taro leaves. The vegetable pancit satisfyingly mingles egg and glassy vermicelli noodles in a soy-based sauce with thrumming umami.

Meatier dishes I tried like the kare kare with ultra-tender cuts of beef (including oxtail) and lechon could have been punchier in their flavors; it’s hard not to compare them with the masterful versions Maynard Llera prepares at Kuya Lord. As my colleague Stephanie Breijo reported in June, the restaurant opened two months in Silver Lake Plaza, in the same complex on Virgil Avenue that houses Daybird. So it’s still settling in and calibrating.

The namesake inasal? I’m already all in.

Also …

• Karla Marie Sanford reports on the fear gripping the restaurant community in aftermath of ICE’s arrival in Los Angeles. This quote states the crisis succinctly: “The industry is deeply confused,” said Corissa Hernandez, the owner of Nativo, a Mexican bar and restaurant in Highland Park. “We’re alarmed. We’re frustrated about the lack of transparency, especially legal clarity. We’re business owners, we’re not immigration experts.”
• Jenn Harris, doing the lord’s work as always: “I taste tested the viral cakes that look like fruit and nuts. Which L.A. bakeries make the best ones?”
• Sanford also reports on the reopening of Gladstones, the iconic seafood restaurant in Pacific Palisades, that closed for six months after sustaining damage in the Palisades fire.
• To cool off, and for excellent distraction from the world, the Food staff names 15 of its favorite over-the-top tea and match drinks.
• Laurie Ochoa had the scoop on big news: Copenhagen’s world-famous restaurant Noma announced this week that Los Angeles will be the site of its next months-long residency in 2026 .
• Culling from the Food team’s reporting and writing in June, Danielle Dorsey has more suggestions on where to dine right now in Los Angeles.

It takes a little over an hour for “Nobu” to marinate long enough to approach a point of complexity, not exactly bitter but no longer cloyingly sweet. Nobu Matsuhisa, the celebrated sushi master, is running quality-control checks in one of his restaurants. A poor chef is sweating the test so badly, he won’t need soy sauce soon enough. His dish keeps being sent back: Chop the chives finer. Why is this pile of raw crudo smaller? Why did you paint a line of salt instead of a dot? The scene goes on, excruciatingly. A few minutes later, Robert De Niro — an early investor and co-founder — dominates a private board meeting with concerns about too-rapid growth. It’s not quite the ominous Waingro showdowns of “Heat” but in the ballpark.

Fastidiousness, precision and a kind of reputational exclusivity are at the heart of Matsuhisa’s enterprise. These are hard things to make a documentary about. But it’s also why Nobu needed to come to Beverly Hills for his concept to take root — not just any Los Angeles but the ’80s-era boomtown of power lunches and spend-to-impress dining. Spago’s Wolfgang Puck makes an appearance in director Matt Tyrnauer’s half-interesting film, fawning over his longtime friend sitting next to him but not quite articulating the essence of their revolution: high-end branding. You wish more time was spent on that conceptual idea, enabled by celebrities throwing around money on food they barely ate.

The kind of doc that “Nobu” more often resembles (as do most foodie-targeted profiles) is a gentle chronology of a humble genius and everyday guy who just happens to fly private. Matsuhisa bows to euphoric local fishmongers, does a lot of hugs and selfies with his staff, visits his roots in Japan and Peru. There are family interviews and a detour to Alaska, where, years before he had a 300-person nightly waitlist, an early restaurant of his caught fire — in the bad literal way (Tyrnauer cuts to the Anchorage newspaper headline). These false starts are somehow exhausting, lacking in suspense. He contemplated suicide, then came to California.

The food sails by: wedges of black cod with miso, delicate plates of thinly sliced fish adorned with tweezer-manipulated herbs. All of it is crazy-making and delicious. Still, apart from former Los Angeles Times food editor Ruth Reichl, who witnessed the rise of Nobu as it happened, there are few on-camera voices who speak directly to Matsuhisa’s gifts and experimentation with form. 2011’s “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” does a better job of delivering the intimate discipline of cutting and shaping. More testimony to the experience of eating at Nobu would have helped this feel less like a commercial.

“Nobu” is a film oddly unconcerned with the communal experience of dining. We hear about the way his sushi workstations are elevated (a “stage,” Matsuhisa calls them) and that’s central to the performance going on here, also the remove. Something clicks when the film heads to Nobu Malibu and visits the table of supermodel Cindy Crawford, whose “Cindy rice,” a dish he invented for her, adorns the menu. There’s a deep mutual gratitude between them that goes back years. An appreciation of the finer things? No doubt. Game recognizing game? Definitely.

United States President Donald Trump’s big tax and spending bill has faced backlash from both Democrats and fiscal hawks in his own party. But one proposal that has received rare bipartisan support from the start — eliminating taxes on tips.

The Senate bill passed on Tuesday, which mirrors the House bill passed last month, would deliver this campaign promise from Trump and had also been proposed by his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

The House plan lets workers deduct all reported tips from their taxable income, while the Senate version sets limits — $18,500 for individuals or $25,000 for joint filers — and phases it out for higher earners. The tax break would expire at the end of 2028.

If this bill passes, filers could deduct some or all of those tips starting in 2026.

Economists forecast that cutting tax on tips could increase the federal deficits by $100bn over the next decade.

Many restaurant workers continue to earn the federal tipped minimum wage, or subminimum wage, of just $2.13 per hour nationally. It is slightly higher in places like New York at $3.55 per hour. The law assumes that tips will bridge the gap to reach the $7.25 federal minimum wage.

A survey cited by the White House and conducted by a fintech firm found that 83 percent of restaurant workers support a no-tax-on-tips policy. Trump’s plan has been endorsed by the National Restaurant Association.

“The inclusion of the No Tax on Tips and No Tax on Overtime provisions recognises the value of our dedicated workforce. More than two million tipped servers and bartenders stand to benefit, while the overtime measure rewards the commitment of over 13 million hourly team members across the sector,” Michelle Korsmo, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, told Al Jazeera in a statement.

The bill at the surface promises to put more money in the pockets of servers, bartenders, and other tipped workers. But it has been criticised by worker-centric advocacy groups and restaurant workers themselves, who caution against embracing it too quickly because it also comes with cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which workers in the restaurant industry disproportionately rely on.

“That is like one of like the biggest fears I have right now. I rely on SNAP myself. I rely on Medicaid. At one point, I didn’t have insurance because of the whole sub-minimum wage, ” Jessica Ordenana, a server at a Chili’s Restaurant in Queens, New York told Al Jazeera.

According to One Fair Wage, about 66 percent of tipped workers in the US don’t earn enough to pay federal income tax, so eliminating tax on tips wouldn’t help the majority of restaurant workers.

To put this in perspective, a worker earning $2.13 per hour, working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, would earn just $4,430.40 annually. Employers are legally required to make up the difference if tips don’t bring workers to $7.25/hour, totalling $15,078 per year. Federal income taxes must be paid by those who make more than $14,600 annually. Many workers still fall short due to inconsistent schedules and unreliable tipping.

Work requirements complications

Restaurant tipped workers overwhelmingly rely on services like SNAP and Medicaid, and will now face new work requirements to get them.

For instance, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” includes a Medicaid work requirement that obligates able-bodied adults aged 19 to 64 to work at least 80 hours per month to remain eligible.

For many restaurant workers, this is simply not feasible. Not because of unwillingness, but because their hours depend on consumer demand.

According to Harvard Kennedy School’s The Shift Project, which studies workplace trends, one in five service sector workers reported having not as many hours as they would like and saw a 34 percent fluctuation in the number of hours week to week.

“I’m actually having a hard time at Chili’s because they went from giving me my full like four or five days a week, to now just one day a week. It really varies week to week,” Ordenana said.

“When I ask for another day on the schedule [the manager] tells me, yeah, yeah sure. And then they don’t even put me on the schedule. So last week, I didn’t work at all,”  Ordenana said.

Demand for eating out has started to slump as Americans tighten purse strings in the face of a slowing economy and uncertainty over the impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Consumer Price Index data showed that spending on eating out was flat for three months from February to April and has started to decline heading into the middle of the year.

Consumer spending is projected to drop by 7 percent over the middle of the year, according to KPMG’s Consumer Pulse report.

As a result, One Fair Wage estimates that 45 percent of restaurant workers currently enrolled in Medicaid could lose their health insurance because of the possible downturn in hours because of slumping demand.

“More tipped restaurant workers would lose their Medicaid than would gain small tax benefits. This is not the right solution,” Saru Jayaraman, founder of the advocacy group One Fair Wage told Al Jazeera.

“Why are these workers on Medicaid to begin with? Because they earn a sub-minimum wage and can’t afford to take care of themselves.”

SNAP benefits face a similar threat. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, forecasts that the tax bill could lead to as many as 11 million people, including restaurant workers, losing access to critical benefits. The House bill would cut $300bn from SNAP over the next 10 years and the Senate bill would cut $211bn.

“Those cuts have to come out of benefits or eligibility. There is just no way that cuts to administrative costs, to streamline waste, fraud, and abuse, or whatever the talking points are about thinking. Those are benefits to eligible people. To achieve that kind of savings, you have to cut benefits to people. There’s no way around it. And that’s devastating,” Ed Bolen, director of SNAP State Strategies at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Al Jazeera.

Nationwide, 18 percent of restaurant workers rely on SNAP benefits, including Ordenana.

“How am I going to eat? How am I gonna survive? How am I going to pay rent? And then on top of that, I might lose benefits? How is this happening in America?”  Ordenana asked rhetorically.

Only seven pages in, John Birdsall offers a conclusion to the question that titles his book, “What Is Queer Food?”

It’s a subject that has consumed him for decades, as a restaurant cook in the Bay Area and then as a journalist and author. In the last dozen or so years — when food media began more honestly grappling with identity and diversity in its subjects, and also with who is given opportunities to tell those stories — Birdsall won national awards for feats like his groundbreaking piece, “America, Your Food Is So Gay.”

The queering of American food

“Still, saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me,” he writes in his new work, published this month. “Lots of us could say that queer food, like desire, exists, but nobody could definitely point through what is was.”

Drag-brunch eggs benedict? Rainbow cookies? Intentional diet choices? Suggestively shaped edible schtick?

“It shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did,” he accedes, “but at last I accepted the obvious truth that queer food is not a commodity. There is no essentialized cuisine of queerness, any more than there’s one simple answer for what it means to be queer.”

Acceptance is a doorway. He is freed to spend the rest of the book coupling meticulous research and gorgeous prose to illuminate lives that, in ways indirect and overt, shaped who we are as a culinary nation.

There’s Harry Baker, a man who flees from a sullied life in Ohio to Los Angeles and who, true to his name, develops a style of cake that becomes the de-facto dessert of young Hollywood; later it well be reworked and homogenized as a signature recipe for General Mills. There’s Esther Eng, an early 20th-century film auteur, her movies now mostly lost, whose fluency with the group dynamics of creating cinema translates to a second act as a New York restaurateur. In her masculine clothes and bluntly cropped hair, she is at once successful and invisible.

John Birdsall, author of “What Is Queer Food?”

(Courtesy of Rachel Marie Photography)

Birdsall notes that Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times and the father of modern American restaurant criticism, reviewed Eng’s self-named restaurant in the 1960s. Claiborne used his platform to push dining and cooking toward their current cultural status in the United States. Privately he was far more tragic — “haunted,” to use Birdsall’s word, by his difficult Southern childhood and misguided in a mess of a memoir published in 1983, 17 years before his death at 79.

Birdsall does not abide counterfeit joy. He narrates lives shaped by society’s denials, prejudices and punishments, and he lays their suffering bare. Some (among them Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin and Richard Olney, one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors) know to leave the country to love in greater peace.

Where delight comes easy is in Birdsall’s prose. He took the narrative lessons he learned from his 2020 biography of James Beard, “The Man Who Ate Too Much,” to tighten the intricate threads of this opus. Characters that appear early in the book return for lightbulb impact. No strand dangles. Even when the reader feels his own rage — as when he veers into a personal story about making quiche for a Sunday open house in the storm-center of the AIDS crisis — his eloquence carries us through the bitterest aftertastes.

The past and present of gay restaurants

Birdsall centers his elucidation of queer culinary culture on people, and by extension the worlds around them. In “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants,” also published this month, Erik Piepenburg shifts the focus to place.

His catalyst for his book: the accelerated disappearance of spaces by and for LGBTQ populations across America.

He opens with a requiem for a 24-hour diner in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood where he was a regular in the 1990s. “The Melrose was a gay restaurant because gay people made it one,” he begins. He watched older men share their meals and drag queens scarf bacon-and-cheese potato skins post performance, and took solace in blueberry silver dollar pancakes when chemistry fizzled with the guy across the table. The Melrose closed in 2017 after 56 years in business.

“When gay restaurants close, gay reliquaries empty of memory and meaning,” he writes. “Gone are favorite waitresses and go-to-meals, safe spaces and party places in the night’s last hours. For me and other gay people who love to eat out, losing a gay restaurant is a kind of dispossession.”

Erik Peipenburg, author of “Dining Out”

(Peter Larson)

Piepenburg traveled across the country throughout 2023, interviewing owners and customers of establishments still present and long gone. Chapters graft careful reporting with his own running commentary, at turns cheeky and poignant and angered by the tenuous state of gay rights and acceptance.

Some salute institutions like Annie’s Paramount Steak House in Washington D.C.; lesbian-feminist restaurant Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Conn.; and trans safe havens like Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis. Others seek to debunk myths, including the supposed queer riot in 1959 at a downtown Los Angeles location of Cooper Do-nuts whose occurrence Piepenburg could find little hard evidence to support. To consider the future of gay dining, he considers two recently opened restaurants in Southern California: the Ruby Fruit in Silver Lake and Alice B. in Palm Springs.

Mara Herbkersman and Emily Bielagus, photographed in 2023, are owners of the Ruby Fruit, one of the restaurants mentioned in Erik Piepenburg’s book “Dining Out.”

(Brittany Brooks / For The Times)

Piepenburg has been writing for the New York Times for nearly 20 years, concentrating mostly on film (especially horror), television and theater. He is, in the most wonderful sense, not a food writer. He self-identifies as a “diner gay.” This is a work about history and, above all, community, not exalted poetry on the art of gastronomy.

What strikes me most about Piepenburg’s frame of reference is how explicitly and organically he twins the subjects of dining and sex. We rarely acknowledge the existence of sex in Food Writing. First, it’s the hardest subject to not be cringe about, and food and sex analogies usually land as ick. But also, most of us who cover restaurants are keenly aware of ugly power dynamics that went unspoken in male-dominated kitchens for decades, and the industry as a whole is in a slow but sustained corrective era.

The approach in “Dining Out” succeeds in its matter-of-factness. Lonely people congregate over holiday buffets in bathhouses. Men frequented — still frequent — certain gayborhood restaurants to cruise, to pose, to be themselves.

A bit of melancholy also winds through the book, as Piepenburg laments the “golden age” of gay restaurants that halted at the turn of the millennium, if not before, and also his own aging. Here is where I mention: I met the author 35 years ago, in my early college years before either of us was out, so I relate to his feelings on the passage of time. When in the book he references his ‘90s-era club kid days, sporting “shaggy wigs and carrying lunchboxes” at the Limelight in New York … I remember.

Of course, the release of Birdsall’s and Piepenburg’s books was planned for visibility during Pride month. Their merits, individual and collective, make for absorbing, enlightening reading far beyond 30 days of designated LBGTQ recognition.

Also …

Returning to downtown L.A. restaurants after the curfew. The spirituality of red Fanta. “The most exciting place to eat in the South Bay in recent memory.” And a Crunchwrap Supreme plot twist. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

In the sunshine of our L.A. love

Chicken with radishes, tarragon mayonnaise and toasted milk bread at Cafe 2001 in downtown Los Angeles.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

I was happily eating a light lunch of poached chicken with an array of radishes, tarragon mayonnaise and buttered milk bread toast dusted with sea salt when our friendly and attentive waiter, just four days on the job, walked up holding a plate of sunshine: three beautifully fried corn fritters with flash-fried basil, a wedge of lime and a mound of salt for dipping. There was a dish of chile sauce too, but the corn’s sweetness, salt and herbs were all I needed on the day before the official start of summer.

I was at chef Giles Clark‘s Cafe 2001 with the editor of L.A. Times Food, Daniel Hernandez, and every table in the place was filled. The cafe’s big brother restaurant, Yess, from chef Junya Yamasaki, was boarded up at the front entrance facing 7th Street — the dinner-only spot closed during the recent downtown L.A. curfew — but we saw activity in the kitchen when we peeked through the glass blocks on the side of the restaurant and were hopeful that Yess would reopen that night.

As columnist Jenn Harris wrote this week, the seven-night curfew left downtown L.A. streets empty: “All along 2nd Street, the windows and doors were hidden behind plywood. … The frequently bustling Japanese Village Plaza, where shoppers dine at a revolving sushi bar and stop for cheese-filled corn dogs, was desolate.”

Now there are tentative signs of recovery.

Diners eat dinner at Kura Sushi in Little Tokyo on the evening the city’s curfew was lifted. The restaurant’s glass doors were covered in plywood, but open.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“Hours after the curfew was lifted Tuesday, downtown started to show signs of coming to life again,” Harris wrote. “Just before 7 p.m., a line began to form at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo … known as much for the perpetual wait as it is for its steaming bowls of tonkotsu ramen. It was a hopeful sight.”

Yet, as Harris also reported, Kato, the three-time No. 1 restaurant on the L.A. Times 101 list, whose chef, Jon Yao, was named the best chef in California at this week’s James Beard Awards, “was still looking at a 70% drop in reservations for the upcoming week” after the curfew’s end.

Kato chef-owner Jon Yao was named the best chef in California at this week’s James Beard Awards.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

“The direct impact of the media’s portrayal of DTLA being unsafe, which it is not, has impacted Kato,” Ryan Bailey, a partner in the restaurant told Harris.

Certainly downtown is frequently portrayed, “as a sometimes dodgy place to live and work.” But “despite myriad challenges,” reported real estate specialist Roger Vincent this week, “downtown L.A. is staging a comeback. … Occupancy in downtown apartments has remained about 90% for more than a year … slightly higher than the level before the pandemic. … In fact, the downtown population has more than tripled since 2000, reflecting a dynamic shift in the city center’s character toward a 24-hour lifestyle.”

On Tuesday night, I met reporter Stephanie Breijo at Hama Sushi, another Little Tokyo spot where the wait is usually lengthy, and was able to get a spot at the sushi bar by arriving before 6 p.m. The place quickly filled up behind us.

Funeral wreaths outside Hama Sushi in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo to honor the memory of longtime owner Tsutomu Iyama, who has passed away. Plywood was still covering some of the restaurant’s windows from the curfew that had been imposed by Mayor Karen Bass.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Though some were at Hama to support downtown, many came to pay their respects to the memory of recently deceased owner Tsutomu Iyama. Breijo will be reporting on the life and legacy of Iyama in the coming days, but on Tuesday night the longtime staff was on top of its game, serving affordable but excellent sushi, without gimmicks as Iyama intended.

The counter scene at Hama Sushi in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Fried shrimp heads served with sweet shrimp at Hama Sushi in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Two days later I was at Cafe 2001, which has become one of my favorite — and most useful — restaurants in the city, open all day and into the evening on weekends. In our recent brunch guide, I wrote about Clark’s red-wine-poached egg, my partner, John, swears by Clark’s caponata, and deputy food editor Betty Hallock loves “his versions of a quintessential yoshoku icon, the Japanese potato salad … [sometimes] kabocha pumpkin and puntarelle with blood orange and fermented chiles [or] a verdant pea and potato salad with lemon-y pea tendrils.”

But my current favorite Clark dish? Those light and crisp corn fritters. They were the perfect welcome back downtown gift after a tense week of closed restaurants.

Looking for the American dream

Employees of the Vallarta Supermarket in Carson serve aguas frescas and ice cream to customers on June 13.

(Lauren Ng / Los Angeles Times)

“I’ve … had customers come in and tell me, ‘The American dream doesn’t exist anymore.’” That’s Evelin Gomez, a juice bar worker at the Carson location of Vallarta Supermarket, speaking with reporter Lauren Ng. Ng checked social media accounts and conducted interviews with people in grocery stores and restaurants founded by immigrants and the children of immigrants about what they are witnessing with the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement actions in Southern California.

Christy Vega, owner of Casa Vega in Sherman Oaks.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The independent-minded Casa Vega owner Christy Vega, who supported Rick Caruso over Karen Bass for mayor in the most recent election, “has been an outspoken critic of ICE,” Ng wrote.

“I protested in honor of my Mexican immigrant father, Rafael Evaristo Vega, and the very people Casa Vega was built on since 1956,” Vega wrote on Instagram of her attendance at a “No Kings” protest. “I will always remember my roots and ALWAYS fight for the voiceless immigrant community.”

Some restaurateurs, as Stephanie Breijo reported, have been coordinating grocery handouts and deliveries for those fearing being swept up in ICE raids.

“We understand the feelings that are happening in our community right now, even if we are legal,” said Xochitl Flores-Marcial, a partner in Boyle Heights’ X’tiosu with its chef-founders, Felipe and Ignacio Santiago. “Even if we have documents, that doesn’t exempt us from the danger that so many people are facing right now and in our culture.”

Meanwhile, assistant food editor Danielle Dorsey, put together a guide to 15 different food fundraisers and events to support those affected by ICE actions. Many are happening this weekend.

South Bay hot spot

Co-chefs Kevin de los Santos and Katya Shastova in the kitchen at Vin Folk in Hermosa Beach.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

The young and ambitious staff at Vin Folk — with two alums of Aitor Zabala’s Somni leading the team of chef-servers — charmed columnist Jenn Harris during her visits to the Hermosa Beach restaurant created by chefs Kevin de los Santos and Katya Shastova.

“The dining room crackles with the hopeful, earnest energy of a start-up company, ripe with possibility,” she writes in her restaurant review published this week. “And with food that has all the technique and precision of a tasting menu restaurant with less of the fuss, it is without a doubt the most exciting place to eat in the South Bay in recent memory.” Some of the dishes she highlights: a savory tart that could be “a love child of mussels in escabeche and pot pie”; headcheese toast, “a loose interpretation of the patty melt at Langer’s Deli”; pritto, “a take on Taiwanese popcorn chicken”; “exceptionally tender” beef tongue, “an homage to Shastova’s childhood in rural southern Russia,” and a risotto-style interpretation of Singapore chili crab.

Vin Folk is also nurturing a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs: “Staff are trained in multiple positions, both in and out of the kitchen,” Harris writes. “Everyone helps with prep, then De los Santos and Shastova [place] members in positions where they may be strongest.”

“We are teaching them,” Shastova tells Harris. “You go through everything because we believe it’s important to learn every single detail of the restaurant if you want to have your own one day.”

Seeing red

Red Fanta presented as an offering at the spirit houses at Silom Supermarket in Thai Town.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

In her latest Grocery Goblin dispatch, correspondent Vanessa Anderson examines why strawberry red Fanta — “known as Fanta nam daeng, or ‘Fanta red water’” — is seen in so many Thai shrines or spirit houses, many of which are set up at local grocery stores and restaurants. “Much like those on this earthly plane, the way to a spirit’s heart is through his or her stomach,” Anderson reports.

“In the past when we would do offerings to ghosts, it would be an offering of blood,” Pip Paganelli at Thai dessert shop Banh Kanom Thai, tells Anderson, who concludes that “the bubbly strawberry nectar has since replaced animal sacrifice.”

Paganelli, Anderson adds, also posits that red Fanta’s “sickly sweetness … is beloved by ghosts because of just that. Most spirits have a sweet tooth.”

• And even though Juneteenth has passed, the recipes that deputy food editor Danielle Dorsey gathered to celebrate the holiday are delicious all year long — and often feature red foods that some say “honors the bloodshed and suffering of enslaved ancestors.” Others say that red symbolizes power.

Crunchwrapped

The shark from “Jaws” looking for a good bite in the 1975 film.

(Universal)

The anniversary none of our social media feeds or TV news anchors will let us forget this week is the release 50 years ago of Steven Spielberg‘s “eating machine” blockbuster “Jaws.” But columnist Gustavo Arellano has another anniversary on this mind this week — the debut 20 years ago of Taco Bell’s Crunchwrap Supreme.

“The item has become essential for American consumers who like their Mexican food cheap and gimmicky,” he wrote this week, “which is to say, basically everyone (birria ramen, anybody?)” The plot twist is that Arellano, author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America,” had never actually eaten a Crunchwrap Supreme until this month. And when he finally did try it? Let’s just say it lacked the crunch he was looking for. I’ll let you read his column to find out why he prefers the bean-and-cheese burritos and Del Taco.

Bonus: Arellano references Jenn Harris’ 2015 story and recipe for a homemade Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme, to be enjoyed in the comfort of your home, without the “bad playlists, scratchy paper napkins and fluorescent lighting” of a fast food restaurant. I think hers would have the crunch Arellano seeks.

Also …

• Reporters Jessica Garrison and Melissa Gomez report that “as the crucial summer harvest season gets underway in California’s vast agricultural regions, farmers and their workers say they feel whiplashed by a series of contradictory signals about how the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration might affect them. California grows more than one-third of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts. … Without workers, the juicy beefsteak tomatoes that are ripening and must be hand-harvested will rot on the vines. The yellow peaches just reaching that delicate blend of sweet and tart will fall to the ground, unpicked. Same with the melons, grapes and cherries.”
• Danielle Dorsey culled 18 immigrant-founded restaurants in L.A. from our Hall of Fame list by critic Bill Addison and columnist Jenn Harris.

For years we’ve read stories about antidemocratic countries abroad — supreme leaders acting with impunity, masked agents rounding up residents, troops in the streets, crackdowns on peaceful protests, intimidation and arrests of opposition figures, show-of-force military parades and political assassinations.

For a time this month, I was abroad. And the antidemocratic country I was reading about was my own.

Tuning out the news on vacation proved impossible. Every day brought another must-read outrage, reflecting the punitive policies and hateful climate that wannabe strongman Donald Trump has fostered in the United States.

From the vantage of an ocean away, even as a visitor in a developing country with problems of its own, I read about events back home with the clarity of the proverbial 38,000-feet view: The news added up to a picture of a proud nation slipping into the authoritarian ways modeled by the kleptocratic dictators that President Trump so admires.

For perspective, I reread President Reagan’s farewell address: Trump has taken America far from the shining “city upon a hill” that Reagan, yesteryear’s Republican icon, evoked. And far from our self-image as a land of immigrants and a bastion of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Reagan’s city on a hill was “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.” If there had to be walls, he said, “the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

That was then.

As I flew off for my break, the U.S. news was dominated by the tawdry breakup of Trump and “first buddy” Elon Musk. But then that sophomoric saga was overshadowed by more serious stuff — starting with military-style raids throughout Los Angeles by thuggish agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rounding up migrants, including children, for detention and deportation.

It’s a drama that continues from big-city L.A. to small-town Great Barrington, Mass., in heartland hotels, meatpacking plants and restaurants. Descriptions of the shock troops have become too familiar: Many wear face masks and no badges to identify themselves. They often don’t wear recognizable uniforms. They have no warrants but lots of guns. And migrants are disappearing into their unmarked vehicles. To where, families aren’t told; when they find out, it’s often too late to help their loved ones assert their due process rights.

On Day 2 of my vacation, Trump took the all but unprecedented step of federalizing the California National Guard to act against protesters in L.A., over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass and despite police assurances that local law enforcement could handle even the most confrontational of demonstrators. Next came the Marines.

That only seemed to exacerbate the unrest, as drama king Trump, who governs as if he were still scripting a reality TV show, surely intended. With Los Angeles as a testing ground, he may be seeking a pretext to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act so he can freely deploy the military nationally against any who oppose him. He toyed with the idea during his first presidency. Back then he was constrained by responsible advisors; now he has surrounded himself with sycophants.

Meanwhile, he’s as unnervingly erratic on his deportation policy as on tariffs. First Trump posted that he’d lighten up on farm, restaurant and hotel raids because those industries complained that they were losing “very good, long time workers.” But days later, he ordered ICE to expand its efforts in L.A. and other big cities where Democrats, he lied, “use Illegal Aliens” to cheat in elections and steal jobs from citizens.

Amid the mayhem, the commander in chief traveled to Fort Bragg, N.C., and disgracefully crossed the line that, since the founding, has kept the military out of politics. He goaded the young troops he addressed — reportedly vetted for their political leanings — to cross it too. He started by boasting about reversing former President Joe Biden’s deletion of Confederate traitors’ names from military bases, and throughout encouraged boos against Biden, Newsom, Bass and Democrats generally, and applause for himself. He wore a MAGA cap. Such merch was on sale.

Days later, he got the military parade he’d long wanted. Or maybe not: It was more historical than martial; instead of goose-stepping through the capital, the troops ambled, smiled and made hand hearts. And it was sparsely attended. The nationwide “No Kings” counterprotests were not.

The toll that Trump’s overreach has taken on America’s reputation, especially in just a few weeks in June, has been heavy. Five Democratic politicians detained or arrested. An uncountable number of workers — not criminals, and many here legally — removed and sometimes disappeared from their families, jobs, communities and even the country. Armed military facing down peaceful protesters and protecting ICE and FBI agents as they snatch people off the street without due process.

On Tuesday, California Sen. Alex Padilla — who five days earlier had been wrestled to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents for interrupting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as she claimed Trump’s actions were liberating L.A. from socialists — delivered an emotional speech in the Senate. In U.S. history, he said, “we’ve had tumult. But we’ve never had a tyrant as a commander in chief.”

Until now.

Reagan ended his farewell with a sentiment that was inarguable 36 years ago: America, he said, “is still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.” No longer. Even many citizens live in fear for their freedoms; I’ve heard from them. And I’ve felt it myself — no more so than when I was out of the country, looking back from afar.

@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes

As the crucial summer harvest season gets underway in California’s vast agricultural regions, farmers and their workers say they feel whiplashed by a series of contradictory signals about how the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration might affect them.

California grows more than one-third of the country’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts in the fertile expanses of the Central Valley, Central Coast and other farming regions. The industry produced nearly $60 billion in goods in 2023, according to state figures — an output that depends heavily on the skilled labor of a workforce that is at least 50% undocumented, according to University of California studies.

Without workers, the juicy beefsteak tomatoes that are ripening and must be hand-harvested will rot on the vines. The yellow peaches just reaching that delicate blend of sweet and tart will fall to the ground, unpicked. Same with the melons, grapes and cherries.

That’s why, when federal immigration agents rolled into the berry fields of Oxnard last week and detained 40 farmworkers, growers up and down the state grew worried along with their workers.

Farm laborers, many of whom have lived and worked in their communities for decades, were terrified of being rounded up and deported, separated from their families and livelihoods. Farmers worried that their workforce would vanish — either locked up in detention centers or forced into the shadows for fear of arrest — just as their labor was needed most. Everyone wanted to know whether the raids in Oxnard were the beginning of a broader statewide crackdown that would radically disrupt the harvest season — which is also the period when most farmworkers earn the most money — or just a one-off enforcement action.

In the ensuing days, the answers have become no clearer, according to farmers, worker advocates and elected officials.

“We, as the California agricultural community, are trying to figure out what’s going on,” said Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive of the Fresno County Farm Bureau and a farmer of almonds and grapes. He added that “time is of the essence,” because farms and orchards are “coming right into our busiest time.”

After the raids in Ventura County last week, growers across the country began urgently lobbying the Trump administration, arguing that enforcement action on farm operations could hamper food production. They pointed to the fields around Oxnard post-raid, where, according to the Ventura County Farm Bureau, as many as 45% of the workers stayed home in subsequent days.

President Trump appeared to get the message. On Thursday, he posted on Truth Social that “our great farmers,” along with leaders in the hospitality industry, had complained that his immigration policies were “taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

He added that it was “not good” and “changes are coming!”

The same day, according to a New York Times report, a senior official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wrote regional ICE directors telling them to lay off farms, along with restaurants and hotels.

“Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels,” the official wrote.

Many in California agriculture took heart.

Then on Monday came news that the directive to stay off farms, hotels and restaurants had been reversed.

“There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said, according to the Washington Post. “Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability.”

In California’s heartland, Jacobsen of the Fresno County Farm Bureau spoke for many farmers when he said: “We don’t have a clue right now.”

Asked Tuesday to clarify the administration’s policy on immigration raids in farmland, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the Trump administration is committed to “enforcing federal immigration law.”

“While the President is focused on immediately removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Jackson said, “anyone who is here illegally is liable to be deported.”

Still, Jacobsen and others noted, aside from the upheaval in Ventura County last week, agricultural operations in other parts of the state have largely been spared from mass immigration sweeps.

Workers, meanwhile, have continued to show up for work, and most have even returned to the fields in Ventura County.

There has been one notable outcome of last week’s raids, according to several people interviewed: Employers are reaching out to workers’ rights organizations, seeking guidance on how to keep their workers safe.

“Some employers are trying to take steps to protect their employees, as best they can,” said Armando Elenes, secretary treasurer of the United Farm Workers.

He said his organization and others have been training employers on how to respond if immigration agents show up at their farms or packinghouses. A core message, he said: Don’t allow agents on the property if they don’t have a signed warrant.

Indeed, many of the growers whose properties were raided in Ventura County appear to have understood that; advocates reported that federal agents were turned away from a number of farms because they did not have a warrant.

In Ventura County, Lucas Zucker, co-executive director of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, a group that has often been at odds with growers over issues such as worker pay and protections, underscored the unusual alliance that has forged between farmers and worker advocates.

Two days after the raids, Zucker read a statement condemning the immigration sweeps on behalf of Maureen McGuire, chief executive of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, an organization that represents growers.

“Farmers care deeply about their workers, not as abstract labor, but as human beings and valued community members who deserve dignity, safety and respect,” McGuire said in the statement. “Ventura County agriculture depends on them. California’s economy depends on them. America’s food system depends on them.”

Before reading the statement, Zucker evoked light laughter when he told the crowd: “For those of you familiar [with] Ventura County, you might be surprised to see CAUSE reading a statement from the farm bureau. We clash on many issues, but this is something where we’re united and where we’re literally speaking with one voice.”

“The agriculture industry and farmworkers are both under attack, with federal agencies showing up at the door,” Zucker said later. “Nothing brings people together like a common enemy.”

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.