Tag: mexican

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

RG goes XXX! ¡Solo Adultos!

So I was reading this Mexican porn comic book that Tamara picked up at Hidalgo Grocery. To learn vocabulary, of course.

See, I allegedly speak a number of languages, but when it comes down to nitty-gritty street-level communication, I suck. This is because I’ve learned all of them in the classroom, and very little on the streets, and never, ever between the sheets. Oh, to have the filthy Syrian colloquial mouth of Adrienne, to have the wisdom of Maureen, who started Arabic tutoring with the specific goal of learning how to gossip, or even just to have the extemporizing talent of Tamara, who can entertain a party with a bawdy sentence memorized from the Italian phrasebook.

Instead. I’ve busied myself with verb conjugations and nuances of the subjunctive. I only happen to know that kut means “cunt” in Dutch because it’s printed in the newspaper, often in the compound word kuttelikkertje, which is the word for a lap dog. Generally, I conduct myself with utter decorum and grammatical propriety in Arabic, French, and Dutch–but that also means I don’t talk nearly as much as I’d like to.

A few years ago, I vowed it would be different with Spanish. It’s the only language I feel I have a cultural edge with, some innate instinct for, having grown up in New Mexico, where all my grade-school teachers spoke Spanish and it was a required class in sixth grade.

But I didn’t learn crucial words for genitales there, of course, nor did I learn them in Instituto Cervantes classes in Cairo, or in chipper expat immersion courses in Merida, or any of the other places I’ve studied Spanish over the years.

It’s too late for me to have a passionate fling with the guy who brings the umbrella drinks at the Tulum resort, or a coffee-break canoodle with the hot manager at Pret a Manger.

So that’s why I’m reading Mexican porn comics. And the reason I’m telling you this on my food-ish blog is that these are the words I learned today:

papayita: Imagine this fruit cut in half…
chorizo: Sausage. Duh.
aguacates maduros: Not a slang term per se, but a metaphor for the state of the aroused husband’s testicles: like “ripe avocados”

Hot, no? Grocery shopping in Mexico will never be the same…