Wong

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

Market of dreams

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also …

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

And finally … ‘slug it down’

Diane Keaton in 2023.

(Raymond Hall/GC Images via Getty Images)

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

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

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

The wildest new bar in Los Angeles

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

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

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

Idiosyncrasy is welcome right now

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

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

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

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

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

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

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

What to eat and drink

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

A martini at the bar of Cento Raw Bar.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

Also …

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

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

Crackle pop

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

Chasing watermelon

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

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

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

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

The wine auteur

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

(G L Askew II / For The Times)

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

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

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

3 out of 50

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

(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)

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

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

Diner talk

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

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

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

Reeling

PCH seafood stalwart The Reel Inn before the Palisades fire.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

Also …

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

Slinging the blues

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby Dicecca cheese bar is open from May through October.

Sexy steaks

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

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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

In a pickle

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

(Shelby Moore / For The Times)

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

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

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

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

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

The great holiday cookie bake-off returns

(Leslie Grow / For the Times)

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

Noodle cool-down

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

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )

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

Mexican as Chicago

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

(Carnitas Uruapan)

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

Instant classic

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

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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

Curtis Stone’s ‘Field Trip’

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

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

Also …

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

More summer-themed suggestions

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

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

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

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

Smoked moulard duck ham with Weiser Farms Honeyloupe melon at Dunsmoor

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

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

Food Bowl tickets

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

Also …

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

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

Matcha, but much much more

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

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

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

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

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

A tasting at Tea Habitat in Alhambra.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

Early bird tickets

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

Also …

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

Saving L.A. soul food

Greg Dulan inside Dulan’s on Crenshaw.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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

Vibes and miso cod at Nobu Los Angeles

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

(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)

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

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

Post-fire rebirth

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

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

(Stephanie Breijo and Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times

)

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

‘Instant-izing’ food

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

(Tina Hsu / For The Times)

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

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

Cooling down

The refreshing Mexican drink suero with lime and sparkling water.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

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

In the kitchen

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

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

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

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

Early bird tickets

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

Also …

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

(Julie Wolfson / For The Times)

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

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.

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)

NEW ORLEANS — Hezly Rivera was the fresh face a year ago. The newcomer. The teenager on a team of 20-something Olympic gymnasts, doing her best to absorb what she could from Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles.

The one thing that stood out, even more than the sometimes otherworldly gymnastics, is the way her fellow gold-medal-winning teammates went about their business.

“They looked so confident,” Rivera said. “They’re like, ‘I’m going to go out and I’m going to hit.’ It gave me that confidence as well.”

Looks like it.

The now 17-year-old who says she’s paying no attention to the idea that she’s the leader of the women’s program in the early stages of the run-up to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics certainly looks the part.

Buoyed by a polished steadiness — and a beam routine that finally looked the way it does back home at her home gym in Texas — Rivera captured her first national title Sunday night at the U.S. Championships. Her two-day total of 112.000 was good enough to fend off a challenge from Leanne Wong and put her in excellent position to lead the four-woman American delegation at the world championships in Jakarta, Indonesia, in October.

Rivera, by far the youngest member of the five-woman team that finished atop the podium in Paris a year ago, bounced back from a shaky performance at the U.S. Classic last month with the kind of measured, refined gymnastics that she attributed to simply “letting go” of whatever pressure she might feel as the lone Olympic gold medalist in a remarkably young field.

“No matter how rough the competition is, I still can get back into the gym and work hard because all those months previously that I’ve been working hard, I know it’s going to show up eventually,” she said. “So it kind of just took a weight off my shoulders.”

Rivera, at the very least, locked up a spot in the world championship selection camp next month. So did Wong, a four-time world championship medalist, budding entrepreneur and pre-med student who shows no signs of slowing down despite years of competing collegiately and at the elite level simultaneously.

Asked how she juggles it all, the 21-year-old who insists she doesn’t keep a planner said she lives by the motto “there’s time for everything.”

Joscelyn Roberson, an Olympic alternate last summer, shook off an ankle injury suffered at the end of her floor routine to finish third as the three most internationally experienced athletes in the field looked ready to lead after spending most of the last Olympic quad learning from Biles and company.

“You go from, ‘Oh you’re so young, you’re so young,’ to, ‘Oh, you are the older kid,’” the 19-year-old Roberson said. “People say, ‘How are you feeling?’ Like, I honestly don’t feel that different.”

Two summers ago, Roberson was Biles’ bouncy sidekick. Now she’s among the leaders of the next wave.

“I felt like more responsible to let the little, smaller, less experienced kids know it’s not the end of the day if you have a bad day or if you had one fall,” Roberson said. “I want to help them grow instead of think ‘I have to be perfect.’”

Roberson then walked the walk. Or maybe limped the limp. She appeared ready to make it a three-woman race for first until she turned an ankle on the final tumbling pass of her floor routine.

The rising sophomore at Arkansas gingerly continued on anyway. She gritted her way through her vault dismount, though the five-tenths (0.5) deduction for using an additional pad for her protection took her out of contention for the all-around.

Hezly Rivera, center, stands next to Leanne Wong, left, and Joscelyn Roberson at the U.S. gymnastic championships on Sunday.

(Gerald Herbert / Associated Press)

Still, the victory hardly came easy for Rivera. She was pushed through four rotations by Wong, who started Sunday with a stuck Cheng vault and didn’t relent over the course of two hours.

Rivera responded each time — she posted the top scores on three of the four events — but it wasn’t until she walked off the podium following her floor routine with victory in hand that she could relax.

“Everything fell into place,” Rivera said. “I tried not to get too overwhelmed because nerves obviously can be there, especially when you know you’re in a spot to win a national title, but I just took all pressure off myself.”

Skye Blakely, who was injured at the Olympic Trials in both 2021 and 2024, was sublime on both uneven bars and balance beam to put herself in consideration to make the world team.

Graves writes for the Associated Press.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

At the end of a nearly two-week trip to Melbourne, Australia, early last month, I drove with a friend 50 miles outside the city to a rural town with the amazing name of Cockatoo.

A once-in-a-lifetime Korean meal in Australia

She teetered her pickup truck at the edge of a steep driveway, double-checking the address to make sure we were in the right place. She inched her way down to park and we walked the short path to a house nestled in the woods. Yoora Yoon greeted us at the door and welcomed us inside. We had made it to our Saturday lunch destination: Chae, a six-seat restaurant centered on the talents of Jung Eun Chae, to whom Yoon is married.

Yoon stood at the crook of the L-shaped counter where the diners had settled and introduced Chae as she quietly glided between tasks in the open kitchen we sat facing. Then he left the room. Chae placed pots of ginseng tea on burners in front of us. We were in her hands.

A plate of jeok and jeon (Korean meat or vegetable fritters) at Chae, a six-seat restaurant run by Jung Eun Chae in Cockatoo, Victoria, Australia.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

A trio of bites comprised the first of seven courses. Sanjeok can refer to skewered meats and vegetables; Chae reconceived the dish as minced chicken marinated in ganjang (the Korean version of soy sauce that Chae makes herself) and pan-fried. She hid a lightly candied walnut half in its center for crunch. It was flanked by two jeon, or fritters. One was a loose ball of shrimp and julienned king oyster mushrooms nipped with spring onion and chile, flattened where it had browned in the skillet. The other was a zucchini coin cooked in translucent egg batter.

Each was a microcosm of mixed textures and savory flavors. I looked over with “ok, wow” raised eyebrows at the friend next to me, Besha Rodell. Longtime food-obsessed Angelenos will remember Besha as the last food critic for L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017. She’s currently the chief restaurant critic for the Age and Good Weekend in Melbourne, and this month her memoir “Hunger Like A Thirst” was published.

We’ve been close for 20 years and shared many exceptional meals. Chae was shaping up to be one of them.

Jung Eun Chae at her six-seat restaurant Chae in Cockatoo, Victoria, Australia.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

A stone bowl filled with more diverse tastes arrived next. Pyeonyuk, striated pork meat and fat pressed into square slices for satisfying chew. Yukhoe, a tangle of chopped raw beef glossed with just-made sesame oil. The dish often includes Asian pear; Chae spritzed it instead with a fermented apple extract she had concocted. Cilantro leaves dressed in nutty perilla oil acted as mulchy contrast against poached octopus and a ojingeo-jeot, squiggly fermented squid.

In the center of the plate, to season and balance the tastes, was a dense pool of cho-gochujang, a vinegared variation on the ubiquitous Korean chile paste. Chae had made this, too, from the very building blocks of Korean cuisine: She ferments her own meju, the bricks of crushed soybeans also used to craft ganjang and doenjang, the paste analogous to miso.

A platter of meat, seafood and vegetables that’s part of a multi-course meal at Chae, the six-seat restaurant run by chef Jung Eun Chae in Cockatoo, Victoria, Australia.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

I’m generally a fast eater. This collage of small dishes, where every element felt so considered, managed to slow me way down.

Something beautifully simple followed: chicken noodle soup, its poultry-intense broth sharpened only by thin triangles of radish kimchi.

Chae, who was born in Seoul, had been working in Melbourne fine dining when she injured her ankle in a motorcycle accident, forcing her to step away from the extreme demands of kitchen work. She was considering her next move when she watched the season-three episode of “Chef’s Table” on Netflix about Buddhist nun-chef Jeong Kwan, who lives and teaches at the Baegyangsa temple in South Korea. Moved by the clarity of her philosophy and relationship to nature, Chae went to study with her. It set the path for her tiny home-based restaurant, where she would make her own jangs — as she remembered her mother doing in her childhood — and serve meals only two days a week.

What we have (and don’t have) in Los Angeles

I read up on all this after my meal with Besha, but aspects of the cooking registered as familiar even in the moment.

Kwang Uh, the chef and co-owner of extraordinary Baroo in Los Angeles, also studied with Jeong Kwan; he met his wife and business partner Mina Park at the temple. With a couple of day’s notice, Uh will make a vegetarian or vegan version of Baroo’s set menu. When I think of its bowls of wondrous, seaweed-seasoned rice and banchan of seasonal vegetables, and treasures like dried acorn jelly with the thick chew of cavatelli, I can trace the through-line of Jeong Kwan’s influence to both chefs. I’m remembering Chae’s finale of rice crowned with spinach and mushrooms and sides of kimchi and spicy radish salad; she served it alongside jeongol (hot pot) of mushrooms and croquettes of minced beef and tofu.

Los Angeles, we all know, is blessed with one of the world’s great Korean dining cultures. If I’m hungry for jeon of many shapes, I can head to HanEuem in Koreatown. For soup that seemingly heals all ills, we have Hangari Kalguksu. For chefs that turn the essence of Korean cuisine into personal, meditative tasting menus, we have Uh at Baroo and Ki Kim at his new Restaurant Ki.

And still: How rich to have a meal, on the opposite side of the world, that expressed another side of the culinary Korean diaspora unlike anything I’ve experienced. The economics of a small operation like Chae‘s must sometimes feel precarious. But the impressive structure and flow of the meal, balanced with a forested home environment in a room full of honeycomb-colored woods, was singular. Would a chef anywhere in the Los Angeles area be able to age meju, produce their own jangs and serve meditative meals to a tiny number of people?

Unlikely, but if nothing else, it reminds me that the Korean dining possibilities here are inexhaustible.

A centered shot of ginseng tea at six-seat restaurant Chae in Cockatoo, Victoria, Australia.

(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Curtis Stone’s Malibu work retreat

I’ll be writing more in detail about my time eating in and around Melbourne in the coming months. Australia is on our minds at the Food section this weekend since the Times and Tourism Australia will present the 2nd Annual Great Australian Bite on Saturday, featuring chefs Curtis Stone of Gwen and Pie Room and Clare Falzon visiting from Staġuni above Adelaide in South Australia. The event has sold out, but food reporter Stephanie Breijo wrote about the Malibu property where Stone will host the event — and where he’s building a new lifestyle empire.

Chef Curtis Stone examines new growth in his vineyard at Four Stones Farm.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Also …

More than 20 easy takeout ideas from chefs and food pros for your next potluck. Plus, Curtis Stone grows a lifestyle empire in Malibu wine country, the return of Miya Thai and making chicken in a rice cooker. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

When chefs don’t cook

Azizam’s “kuku sandevich,” house-leavened flatbread with herb-and-leek frittata, yogurt, cucumber, tomato and radish.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

The invitation via text message was brief: “Having a ‘potluck’ at my house next Sunday. Bring your favorite takeout food.”

I looked at the sender’s name: Nancy Silverton.

I’ve been to Nancy Silverton’s house for parties many times. I co-wrote her bread book and first got to know her while writing a story for this paper on the making of Campanile, the restaurant she and her late ex-husband Mark Peel opened in the complex that is now Walter and Margarita Manzke‘s Republique. So the idea of Silverton throwing a party with only takeout food — nothing cooked by her or any of her chef or food-obsessed friends — was surprising.

It’s not that Silverton favors complex dishes. One of her lesser-known cookbooks is “A Twist of the Wrist,” with simple recipes made from jarred, tinned or boxed ingredients. And she sometimes augments her party menus with food from some of her favorite takeout spots like Burritos La Palma.

But Silverton is obsessed with details, even at a burger party where the patties are hand-shaped with a custom-blend of meat (20% to 28% fat, as writer Emily Green once described in a story on the chef’s hamburger process), and she only assigns grill duties to trusted cooks (frequently Elizabeth Hong, culinary director of Silverton’s many Mozza restaurants, or Jar restaurant owner-chef Suzanne Tract). Even the burger toppings and condiments are precisely arranged. Her avocados, for instance, are almost always halved, loosened from the skin, which remains to protect the fruit, then sliced, drizzled with lemon or lime juice and seasoned with salt, pepper and often chopped chives.

I wondered how Silverton would react to the chaos that can ensue at potluck gatherings. What if everyone showed up with Burritos La Palma? (Well, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.)

Of course, Silverton and her partner, former Times reporter Michael Krikorian, eliminated some of the event’s wildcard nature by making gentle inquiries over text to find out what people were bringing.

It was clear from the start that one of my favorite foods to bring to a party would not be an option: the football-shaped Armenian flatbread from Glendale’s Zhengyalov Hatz — filled with more than a dozen different herbs, as writer Jessie Schiewe described in our recent guide to “15 L.A. restaurants where ordering the house specialty is a must.” Krikorian was already bringing some.

He was also getting brisket from Andrew and Michelle Muñoz‘s Moo’s Craft Barbecue, which is one of critic Bill Addison‘s favorite L.A. barbecue spots; “kuku sandeviches,” or house-leavened flatbread filled with herb-and-leek frittata, yogurt, cucumber, tomato and radish from Azizam, which Addison called “L.A.’s best new Persian restaurant”; fried chicken and fish sandos from Mei Lin‘s Daybird, the shop that attracted columnist Jenn Harris’ admiration soon after its 2021 opening and before Lin’s most recent restaurant, 88 Club in Beverly Hills, previewed recently by Food’s reporter Stephanie Breijo; and fantastic basturma brisket sandwiches from III Mas Bakery & Deli (pronounce it “Yerord Mas”) run out of a Glendale ghost kitchen by husband-and-wife team Arthur Grigoryan (who used to work at Mozza) and Takouhi Petrosyan.

Oh, and Silverton also arranged for Frutas Marquez (phone: 909-636-1650) to set up an umbrella-shaded cocos frios and cut fruit stand.

Fruit cup from Frutas Marquez.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

So before the first guest turned up, there was enough food for a hungry crowd. Then the chefs and other food pros started to arrive with food from all over city.

Chef Chris Feldmeier of the sorely missed Bar Moruno in Silver Lake and now back in the kitchen at Love & Salt in Manhattan Beach gave Silverton’s guests a chance to try some of the Southland’s greatest Indian cooking from Quality of Bombay in Lawndale. He brought goat biryani, butter chicken and palak paneer, with large pieces of curd cheese mixed into the gently seasoned spinach. People were raving over the butter chicken and I was so taken with the goat biryani that I stopped into the unassuming storefront this week and picked up some lamb biryani as well as two of the restaurant’s naans, one flavored with green chile and one, Peshawari naan, baked with ground nuts and raisins. Feldmeier also brought crispy rice salad with Thai sausage from North Hollywood’s Sri Siam, a place I recently rediscovered.

Feldmeier’s former Bar Moruno partner (and contributor to our wine coverage), David Rosoff, brought a sampling from Armen Martirosyan‘s Mini Kabob spinoff MidEast Tacos in Silver Lake. Many guests had heard about the Armenian-Mexican tacos and were happy to have a chance to try them.

Another hit from the party came from Jar’s Suzanne Tract, who brought spicy shrimp dumplings and kimchi dumplings from Pao Jao Dumpling House started by Eunice Lee and Seong Cho in the food court of the Koreatown Plaza on Western Ave. In the dumpling season of Jenn Harris’ video series “The Bucket List,” she finds out that Cho developed the recipe for the spicy shrimp dumpling and isn’t sharing the secret to its deliciousness — which will make you all the more popular when you show up with a batch at your next potluck.

Photographer Anne Fishbein brought many delicious things from chef Sang Yoon‘s Helms Bakery, including doughnuts and gorgeous breads with different schmears and butters, including the sweet black garlic butter that Harris included in her story about the Helms’ foods that got her attention when the marketplace opened in Culver City late last year.

Times contributor Margy Rochlin arrived with swaths of the pebbly Persian flatbread sangak, so fresh from the oven at West L.A.’s Naan Hut the sheets of sesame-seeded bread burned her arm when she picked up her order. (Read Rochlin’s 2015 story for Food for more on how sangak is baked on hot stones.) She then went to Super Sun Market in Westwood for French feta cheese, fresh herbs and the shallot yogurt dip mast-o musir, arranging everything on a wood board.

The shallot yogurt dip mast-o musir with fresh herbs and French feta from Super Sun Market in Westwood and a basket of the Persian flatbread sangak from Naan Hut in West L.A.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Silverton’s daughter, Vanessa Silverton-Peel set out an impressive array of flaky borekas from the always-busy Borekas Sephardic Pastries in Van Nuys with various fillings. These included cultured cheese and za’atar; potato and brown butter; mushroom, caramelized onion and truffle; spinach and cheese, plus carrots and hot honey, which is an occasional special. With them, came pickles, tomato sauce and jammy eggs. And because she is everywhere, Harris has written about her love for this place too.

Taylor Parsons, once declared L.A.’s best sommelier when he was at Republique by former L.A. Weekly restaurant critic Besha Rodell, and Briana Valdez, founder of the growing Home State mini-chain of Texas-style breakfast tacos and more, brought cheesy Frito pies and tacos from Valdez’s restaurant. And Pasquale Chiarappa, a.k.a. the sometime actor Pat Asanti, a.k.a. Patsy to his pals, brought his own Della Corte Kitchen focaccia, which he supplies to Pasadena’s Roma Deli among other places.

Pizza and cake from another Addison favorite, Aaron Lindell and Hannah Ziskin‘s Quarter Sheets in Echo Park went fast, though I’m not sure who brought them since at this point it was getting hard to keep track of all the incoming food. The same goes for the bucket of Tokyo Fried Chicken that was quickly gobbled up. Jazz musician and composer Anthony Wilson had the good taste to bring a whole duck from Roasted Duck by Pa Ord, which I wrote about in this newsletter recently because I think it might be the best duck in Thai Town.

A platter from Thai Town’s Roasted Duck by Pa Ord with boxes of pizza from Quarter Sheets in the background.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Claudio Blotta, founder of All’Acqua in Atwater Village and Silver Lake’s Barbrix, which is undergoing rennovations at the moment, tapped his Argentine roots by bringing empanadas. I missed the name of the place he bought them, but a good bet if you’re looking for some to bring to a party is Mercado Buenos Aires in Van Nuys.

Erik Black, founder of the recently revived Ugly Drum pastrami, broke the rules a bit by actually cooking something — spiced caramel corn from recipe in “Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book.” And Mozza’s Raul Ramirez Valdivia made tortilla chips, guacamole and wonderful salsa verde. Of course, Burritos La Palma showed up thanks to Mozza’s Juliet Kapanjie.

I ended up bringing a tray of fresh Vietnamese spring rolls, a party offering that has never failed me, from Golden Deli in San Gabriel. There were three kinds: shrimp and pork, beef and tofu for vegetarians.

And just when it seemed that the party could not take one more food offering, in walked former L.A. Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila and photographer, wine aficionado and cook Fred Seidman with a box of burgers from In-N-Out. Because no matter how full you are, there’s always room for In-N-Out.

Cheeseburgers from In-N-Out.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Curtis Stone’s work retreat

Chef Curtis Stone examines new growth in his vineyard at Four Stones Farm.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Food reporter Stephanie Breijo got a look at the inner workings of Curtis Stone‘s Four Stones Farm in the Santa Monica Mountains, where the Australian chef of Hollywood’s Gwen and the Pie Room in Beverly Hills has established a base for his burgeoning lifestyle empire. This includes TV-ready testing and production kitchens for taping live HSN cooking demos promoting his cookware, plus a winery that uses grapes grown on the property’s vineyards and a set up for events, including the upcoming Great Australian Bite in collaboration with the L.A. Times and Tourism Australia. On May 31, Stone and visiting chef Clare Falzon of Staġuni in South Australia’s Barossa Valley are teaming up to prepare a multicourse meal in the area becoming known as Malibu wine country. Tickets cost $289 and are on sale now.

Altadena check-in

Thai fried chicken with papaya salad at Miya Thai restaurant in Altadena.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I have been keeping watch in my Altadena neighborhood for signs of recovery following the firestorm that destroyed so much of the area. I’m thrilled to report that Miya — David Tewasart and Clarissa Chin‘s Thai restaurant, which survived in the section of Lake Ave. that saw major destruction — has quietly reopened and is happily busy. We ran into friends from the neighborhood and sat with them at a table to catch up. It felt like home. And the fried chicken with hand-pounded papaya salad? It’s as good as ever.

Easy rice cooker chicken

A whole chicken is cooked in the rice cooker and served alongside a condiment made with ginger and scallions.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times )

Have you seen that woman who cooks an entire chicken in a rice cooker?” style pro Joe Zee asked columnist Jenn Harris recently, as she wrote in our most recent Cooking newsletter. He was referring to the Instagram video made by London content creator Shu Lin, who showed her followers how to make Hakka-style salt-baked chicken with not much more than a seasoning packet sold in most Asian supermarkets and a rice cooker, plus ginger, green onions, shallots and oil. The technique isn’t new, but Lin’s recipe is very simple and inspired Harris to try it.

Coffee generation

Gefen Skolnick, owner of Couplet Coffee in Echo Park.

(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)

Gefen Skolnick tells Food contributor Jean Trinh that she wanted a “fun and funky” Gen Z-friendly space when she opened Couplet Coffee in Echo Park this year. That means “limited-edition product drops, community-building, storytelling and social media.” As Skolnick put it to Trinh, “There needs to be great coffee made more approachable.”

Also …

• Writer Lina Abascal asks, “Is the teahouse the future of nightlife in L.A.?” She describes Jai in Koreatown, Tea at Shiloh in the Arts District, the invite-only tea purists haven NEHIMA in Los Feliz and Chinatown’s Steep LA, which is one of my favorite spots.
• Frequent contributor Tiffany Tse says zhajiangmian, or “fried sauce noodles” is having a well-deserved moment. She selected 11 L.A. places to eat the comforting noodles, including traditional and creative interpretations and jjajangmyeon, a Korean-Chinese adaptation.
• And with the weather heating up, many diners are looking for rooftop dining. Food’s senior editor Danielle Dorsey updated our guide to 50 of the best rooftop restaurants and bars to soak in city views, with Butterfly, Tomat, Lost, Sora Temaki Bar and Level 8 among the additions.