Tag: california

Reasons to Like Los Angeles, Part 3: Food

So by now, you’ve all got your March issue of Saveur, and you already know L.A. is a great food town.

They can point out all of the specifics, but the big one for me simply is: in February, you can eat beautiful fruits and vegetables. Yes, they’re eating potatoes and kale out there, just like we are on the East Coast, but they’re doing it in the sunshine, and that makes all the difference. Where we subsist on two varieties of tangerine (the only dose of color in my winter diet), they have about 46.

I had the pleasure of meeting the brains behind A Thinking Stomach, and she arrived with Meyer lemons and a bag of snap peas, like it was no big thing. Snap peas! In February! I’m crying.

In part because of this freshness, and in part because L.A. is like Queens but a million times bigger, we ate amazing food three nights in a row, without even trying.

Moles La Tia, on Cesar Chavez in East L.A., is the kind of place we just don’t have yet in New York–Oaxacan food, a little fancier than you might expect, not dirt cheap and all exceptionally good, right down to the clearly housemade salsa and the slightly funky goat cheese grated on the guacamole. Man. I totally misordered (wound up without any mole), and it was still better than most Mexican we get here. And semi-fancy Mexican–I’ve watched a ton of these places go under, just in Astoria. Breaks my heart.

The next night, we went to Soi 7, downtown, for Thai food. Having just come back from Thailand, I was starving for everything, but slightly skeptical that it would measure up. Again with the misordering–following my suggestions, we wound up with chili-basil everything. But whoa–so good. There were wee sweet scallops in the noodles, and the eggplant is something I’d want to eat for lunch every day. And because we weren’t in New York, we could sit for a full four hours at our table and talk and talk. We got about eight rounds of tea (white, with black fruits–so delicate!).

And on Sunday, I went to a Chicks with Knives dinner. I have spent the last nine years or so throwing dinner parties for fun and very occasional profit. I got a book deal out of it, but I’ve gotten precious few reciprocal dinner invitations. And I’ve never gone to someone else’s supper club. (I was just about to go to Lightbulb Oven, but then she moved to Dallas–kills me!)

So I have fresh appreciation for anyone who has ever made the trek to Sunday Night Dinner, showing up totally cold in the middle of a strange neighborhood. And I’m sorry I couldn’t provide them with the fabulous digs I enjoyed at the Chicks with Knives event. Again, we were downtown–this time in a fabu loft. And the food was fantastic–I love hollandaise on anything, but who knew it would be so delicious on fennel? And I have to start making my own butter, stat.

And I have to start rounding up some more smarty-pants friends. New Yorkers–watch your backs. You think you’re the wittiest, most intellectual folks around, but, no offense, because you don’t have to drive home, you get pretty sloppy drunk by Hour Three and start repeating your jokes.

Which is about the only point in favor of a car culture that I can think of: staying sober enough to drive home leads to far more charming conversation. If you’re not sure how to cope without the sauce, please see the Dinner Party Download.

So we come relatively full circle. And because I have no other photos in this post, here’s a random one, from the cathedral downtown:

Reasons to Like Los Angeles, Part 1: Downtown
Reasons to Like Los Angeles, Part 2: Weirdness

Reasons to Like Los Angeles, Part 2: Weirdness

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about downtown L.A. It borders on weird, because of the architecture and the schizophrenic quality of it. And everything seems weirder when the sun is blazing down–the balmy weather somehow backfires in L.A., and gives everything a slightly dystopian feel. At least to my grumpy New York eyes. But some things are stranger than others.

That honor is reserved for the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I first read about this place in 1994, in a fabulously disorienting article in Harper’s by Lawrence Weschler; it still stands out as one of the best pieces of art criticism I’ve read. (I will violate all kinds of copyright laws by posting it here, until someone tells me not to. Really, you should read it.) I’ve loved Weschler ever since, and of course hankered to visit the museum.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t recreate Weschler’s experience, of walking into the place cold–I know too much. But I was surprised at just how much the exhibits could pull me in, even though I know their conceit. I spent an hour believing/not believing, and could have spent hours more.

Last fall, I saw David Wilson speak, and he presented a couple of the newer exhibits at the museum. At the time, I fell asleep. But in the context of the museum, with Wilson fully out of the way (behind some curtain somewhere, most likely), the strange Soviet science business and the ponderous films actually all worked together, and I was properly mesmerized.

Alas, I did not have time to enjoy tea and cookies in the salon upstairs. If you go, have some for me.

We also stopped by Watts Towers, which I somehow have never seen. I thought they were bigger. The fact that they’re kind of small makes them all the odder. And I didn’t realize how intricate the metal structures were. Nor that the guy had skipped town and never came back to revisit the place, even when the city got to arguing about the towers’ fate, before he even died.

In other weirdness, I much enjoyed the fact that the counter ladies at the China Cafe in the Grand Central Market (another downtown attraction) all spoke Spanish, and that the bulk-chile-and-beans vendors all seemed to be Chinese.

While I was snapping photos, some guys chatted me up (with the flawless opening line, “Take a picture of this guy–he’s a criminal!”) and made me realize how much I miss hearing the northern Mexican accent in New York. We have Mexicans now, and some of them even live in Astoria, but even they don’t really speak with that same just-over-the-border cadence. Raul and Martin congratulated me for taking the time to slow down and talk to them, even though I was one of those fast-moving New Yorkers. Then I actually had to say, “Gotta go–I hear my mom calling!”

I’ll get into the L.A. food stuff in the next post…

Reasons to Like Los Angeles, Part 1: Downtown

Reasons to Like Los Angeles, Part 1: Downtown

My epiphany, on my most recent trip to Los Angeles: L.A. is like the Queens of California. (San Francisco is the Brooklyn, natch.) As a New Yorker, I am duty-bound to think like this–the world revolves around us!

Queens is spread out, low-rise, disconnected communities with no real center. And it’s bursting with amazing food. Also, New Yorkers hate Queens because it embodies all the horrors of suburbia that they’re trying to escape.

Likewise with Los Angeles. New Yorkers–including my very own husband–hate the place on principle. (In fact, Peter just walked up behind me and saw the title of this post and shouted, “WRONG!” But, but…we live in Queens! We love Queens!)

Humph. I had a great trip! And it was sunny! And there was amazing food!

Some things I appreciated:

Downtown:

I was born in L.A., and I didn’t even know L.A. had a downtown! I guess it wasn’t up to much till very recently, but still. I saw lots of gorgeous old buildings, like the central library, where the murals are outstanding; the Bradbury Building, where the elaborate wrought-iron interior staircases are clearly the work of a deranged mind; and Oviatt’s, likewise deranged with Deco. When Peter’s mom dropped me in front of Oviatt’s to poke around, she advised me, “Sweet-talk your way in.” I suck at sweet-talking, but I did get to poke my in the store-turned-restaurant, where they were setting up for a wedding. Holy woodwork! We also got to leaf through the happy couple’s photo album, which was pretty funny.

But, as Lars von Trier says, you have to take the good with the evil, so there’s also a whole crazy office-park part of downtown, where great slabs of concrete are connected to other slabs by skyways and secret tunnels. Which I got a brief tour of with the guys from The Dinner Party Download (an excellent podcast that I love because I can imagine a world where dinner parties are a common thing, and where people don’t spend all of dinner talking about the food). We got to walk through the Bonaventure Hotel building, which is one of those ridiculous 1970s-vision-of-the-future creations that’s all curves and atriums and external glass elevators.

Aaand, that’s about all the attention span I have for today. More L.A. attractions to come…