Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:41)
Thanks to appropriately-titled Find La Food Trucks for consolidating all your mobile-dining options on one page. Living on the east-side makes it difficult to check a fair number of these but I’ll vouch for an enjoyable dog at Let’s Be Frank, and an adequately priced delicious Sunday brunch from the Gastrobus.
Duffy grows some of the hottest and rarest chile peppers in the world. Duffy–who 6 years ago knew nothing at all about chiles except that they were good in his homemade salsa–runs the website Refining Fire Chiles (he recently bought a secondary domain name, Super Hot Chiles, which also links to the site), from which you can buy fresh chiles, chile plants and chile seeds.
Not just any chiles either, but Bhut Jolokias, Trinidad Scorpions, Naga Moriches and Trinidad 7 Pots, to name only a few. Bhut Jolokia chiles have been tested at one million Scoville Heat Units (SHUs), which puts them as the world’s hottest chile pepper.
I’m curious to see how these taste but am not quite ready to meet death yet.
[Squid Ink]
Differentiating the sheer number of restaurants and kbbq joints that line block after block in Koreatown can sometimes be a challenge. Sure, by now the network of food communications and blogging have allowed for a fair handful of established institutions to differentiate themselves as predominant de facto destinations — Bosam at Kobawoo, Korean blood sausage at Western Soon Dae, an icy bowl of arrowheat noodles at Yu Chun, or perhaps some nourishing abalone porridge at the hole-in-the-wall Mountain Cafe?
But really, despite this prevailing sense that everything to be found has already been unearthed, how many restaurants get lost in the shuffle and left waiting to be discovered?
It was with this thought and a tinge of anxious excitement that led us to Don Dae Gam, resting solely on a tip via the twitter of “The Belly of Los Angeles” and LA’s own intrepid food explorer, Mr. Jonathan Gold.
Don Dae Gam is the second KBBQ establishment for restauranteur Jenny Park of Park’s BBQ. Tucked between 11th and 12th street off Olympic boulevard, the restaurant sports a large and open interior space scattered with circular steel tables and stool-seating setup for parties of 3~5, and larger long-table seating arrangements in back for parties of 6+. With an aesthetic that’s noticeably modern and an atmosphere designed towards the casual, it becomes clear — this is an environment designed for conversation and consumption, with an emphasis on the latter in mass quantities of pork and soju.
We opted for the “Combo #3″ platter — pork neck, chop, belly, marinated pork rib, and pork intestine so good the experience could only be described as revelatory. As per custom, an array of banchan was laid out before us as we waited in anticipation for the meat. The grills are gas-powered but are of the newer hybrid variety lined with baskets of charcoal near the base. As we sipped our soju, the meat arrived in a tear-inducing platter of sheer beauty.
Just what is Food + Sex Magazine? Even I’m not completely sure despite what they say:
Collage art food magazine, Food + Sex, is a combined effort of artists, writers, farmers and foodmakers exploring how desire shapes the food environment. By weaving erotic, shocking and thoughtful layers of beauty, wildness and the human spirit, we peer into the fire of hope and fear to find the hidden, seek the cosmic and reflect on the elemental connectedness in life that opens us to new ways of being. Included in its pages are a visual patchwork of uncommon art, essays and excerpts by thinkers, makers and doers from the food underground and beyond.
A hippy-esque idealogy presented through snug little essays sandwiched between high-end designs, it seems. Their debut magazine is available for preview and gives some sort of glimpse for what they’re going for. Though one of their most intriguing stories about psychedelic mushrooms, titled “Tripping Balls on the Magic Penis” seems to have been already been printed in a previous issue of Vice.
Grub Street has surveyed 11 prestigious foot-literates (Tony Bourdain, Jonathan Gold, Gael Greene, Kate Krader, Ed Levine, Michael Nagrant, Adam Platt, Alan Richman, Lee Schrager, Regina Schrambling, and Bret Thorn) to ask them about the current state of the restaurant world as it stands today. Our own Jonathan Gold chimes in with his opinions on important matters such as overhyped trends, restaurant fine dining, favorite cheap meals, and…
2. What is the most important restaurant city in the country right now?
Jonathan Gold: I’m duty-bound to say Los Angeles, aren’t I? But even if I weren’t, there is no city in the world with nearly as much diversity in its restaurants, as much access to splendid ingredients, or as much devotion to the competing concepts of tradition and change. It is not for nothing that such a huge percentage of national trends begin here.
Frank Bruni, the once-elusive prestigious food critic for the NY Times wrote his swan song today for the food section. Scattered amongst a mix of general tidbits of advice he had never had a chance to write prior, Bruni gives his tried-and-true method of navigating a restaurant menu to reach the good dishes.
Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.
Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.
Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.
Funny how one blog post can instantly change your evening plans. Via the food-wire, if you hear there’s a one-night event involving one of LA’s finest chefs themed around burgers — recession be damned, you go. At least, that’s how my mind works.
Nancy Silverton while famous through her La Brea Bakery and her collaborative Mozza-venture with Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali, is not unfamiliar with the burger world. Few chefs can champion a specific butcher item named after them, but those who have frequented Huntington Meats at the Grove can attest to the glories of the “Nancy Silverton blend,” a specific burger mixture of prime chuck and sirloin fat, combining to a juicy total of about 20~28% fat.
Over at LA Weekly’s Squid Ink they talk to Aidan Demarest, The Edison’s director of beverages and spirits, along with lead barman Marcos Tello about their monthly event where they fly out some of the most prominent bartenders throughout the country to their establishment.
SI: What was the inspiration for The Radio Room?
AD: Marcos and I were slowly changing things behind the scenes, but we hadn’t rolled anything out yet. I started asking Damian (The Roger Room) and Eric (The Varnish) and Vincenzo (Copa d’Oro) to come down and play. All three of them had places opening in the next six months so they were all magically in limbo. I thought of it as Advanced Swim Class: let’s have one night, with the best bartenders in town so we can make the kind of drinks we really want.
The guest bartender program immediately resonated with me and I was traveling a lot at the time and kept inviting people down. When I was up in San Francisco at Bourbon and Branch, I realized that I didn’t have to just have the guys from across town guest bartender, I could have these guys, and the liquor brands were stoked because it doubled their market.
Because it’s the weekend and cocktails just sound perfect about now.
The coffee maestros at Intelligentsia have always been fervent supporters of the Chemex brewing system developed in the 1940s by German inventor, Dr. Peter Schlumbohm. The device is essentially “part chemist’s funnel, part Erlenmeyer flask, with a blond leather band in the middle corseting its hourglass curves.” Where the spectacular coffee comes from is the unique multi-layered paper funnel used to filter the coffee, trapping more of the “undesired” oils that they say kill the coffee’s flavor. After having finally tried this method, consider me a convert — the coffee was noticeably less bitter and layered with a more complex taste.
