Two old friends— a chef and a ceramicist— dreamed up the perfect bowl of ramen: not just the broth, noodles, tare (seasoning), and toppings, but also the bowl itself. A few years later, 50 Angelenos sat down at asi asi Supper Club in Boyle Heights for a dinner called Bowl & Broth. Ceramicist Brian DeRan of Western Desert Studios in Joshua Tree custom-made and hand-painted each bowl that Chef David Potes used to serve his ramen, which our guests got to take home.
Read MoreLike other loves, restaurant love is complicated.
Owning a restaurant isn't easy. To state the obvious: it’s work, an absolute job. And like love, it takes work. It just so happens that it requires a whole lot of each.
Read MoreOne circular table, thirty ingredients, and ten open seats became the hottest restaurant no one knew, stranded somewhere deep in the open desert at Burning Man in 2019. In-keeping with the festival’s gift-giving tradition, designers and Istanbul natives Alper Nakri and Deniz Hotamisligil built a mobile kitchen and dining room on wheels to offer the Burning Man playa what they knew how to do best: Turkish breakfast. The first ten guests spanned the ages of 17 to 85-years-old, from Australia to Sweden, students, and company executives. They had nothing in common except the time and space to connect and discover that they were all more similar than they had thought. Nakri and Hotamisligil flipped the table ten times that week and before they knew it, they had the first one hundred members of what had become, right then and there, the Turkish Breakfast Club (also known as TBC).
Read MoreLeslie Kirchhoff lets me into her Mid Century house in Mt Washington and settles into her favorite chair with an expansive view of the city. Everything about her is lean and striking--her honey-colored hair piled onto her head, her big eyes, her expressive face and hands. She’s a hybrid, she tells me, part DJ, part creative consultant, part art director, part photographer, and part ice cube innovator.
Read MoreNancy Singleton Hachisu first went to Japan intending to teach English but, on the first day of classes, she met Tadaaki Hachisu, the tall handsome farmer who would later become her husband. Since then she’s made her life in Japan, living on an organic farm in a traditional Japanese farmhouse, and raising their three sons. She’s passionate about Japanese food ways and well known on Japanese television, where she visits artisanal producers and gives viewers a glimpse of her rural life.Nancy Singleton Hachisu first went to Japan intending to teach English but, on the first day of classes, she met Tadaaki Hachisu, the tall handsome farmer who would later become her husband. Since then she’s made her life in Japan, living on an organic farm in a traditional Japanese farmhouse, and raising their three sons. She’s passionate about Japanese food ways and well known on Japanese television, where she visits artisanal producers and gives viewers a glimpse of her rural life.
Read MoreLiquid tasting menus, omakase everything, the Forager Bartender, these are a few words to describe Matthew Biancaniello, veteran of A & E’s Good Spirits, and author of Eat Your Drink. What’s different with Matthew is his omnivorous curiosity and his deep connection to what’s ripe, what’s new in the market, in the forest, the fields, and even the sea.
Read MoreTwenty years ago, friends in London took me in during a tough time. More accurately, they threw a Thames-worth of water on the dumpster fire that was me in the midst of splitting up with my husband. One evening, they scraped me off the floor of their Shepherd’s Bush row house and hauled me to a neighborhood restaurant, promising that there was something there worth surviving for. Turns out, it was foie gras. I’d never tasted it, despite fancy French food being my New York mother’s love language.
Read MoreVinovore is Coly Den Haan’s wine shop featuring all-female wine-makers. Also a sommelier, Coly wanted to come up with an easy way to help people figure out how to find their favorite wines. Check out the animals below, line them up with your taste, and—presto—you’ll know just what to ask for the next time you’re looking for that perfect bottle for yourself or a friend. Are you a T Rex? (we are) Or maybe a Pink Pony? Or a Tiger? Can a Snake ever be truly happy with an Ape? Can a fox be best friends with a lion? Try it and let us know.
Read MoreMonterey Park, an “ethnoburb” and America’s first non-white dominant city, is just twelve miles east of LA’s historic Chinatown. It marks the beginning of this sprawling multi-generational and visibly Chinese-dominant region that grows all the way out to Diamond Bar. For many in Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), has always been known as “that other Chinatown” or “the place with the good dim-sum,” but the restaurant scene there is quickly changing. Dim-sum banquet halls and decades-old Cantonese restaurants are closing and, in their place, trendy internationally-backed hot-pot places, mainland Chinese restaurants and boba chains are popping up.
Read MorePeople really care about their rice in Japan. Go to a grocery store, and you’ll see aisles and aisles of different kinds of spectacular rice. Families have strong allegiances to their favorite brands, and rituals in cooking rice from soaking to washing to steaming. In so many ways it’s emblematic of the Japanese food artisans we’ve to come to admire with their national pride and insistence on the very best.
That’s why it’s especially exciting that rice flour made with Japanese short grain rice grown in Japan is now locally available. This is not your garden variety rice flour, and it’s making its entrance just at the right time.
Read MoreMinh Phan’s Phenakite now occupies Ace Mission Studios, a 28,000 foot space in Boyle Heights, and is part of an immersive art show called A Forest For the Trees.
Inspired by the powerful nature writings of The Atlantic, the magazine has partnered with Superblue and artist Glenn Kaino in a surreal installation “designed to inspire audiences to reimagine their relationship with the natural world.”
Directed by Kaino, it’s also a collaboration with Grammy-winning producer and musician David Sitek, as part of their new band project, High Seas. Think animatronic trees, interactive sound sculptures, fire illusions and Minh’s spectacular food. An integral and exciting part of the experience, Phenakite is the fine dining restaurant.
Read MoreNicole Rucker became friends with Lydia Clarke and Reed Herrick at the DTLA Cheese stall before she landed at Grand Central Market in 2019. That date ring a bell? Yep, right at the start of the pandemic we all remember so well. Nicole and the others in the market all banded together, helping each other get through with masses of takeout. Now Fat and Flour is firmly installed at the market, complete with happy-pink columns and cases of Nicole’s signature offerings.
Read MoreFall always brings a return to routines of comfort and certainly one of those is being in the kitchen, cooking and enjoying food in the company of loved ones. For us at the shop, Fall ushers in the biggest releases of the year that get everyone all the way to the holidays.
Read More“I want people to understand that mole is not a chocolate sauce,” Bricia Lopez says.
It’s early in the morning, and her kitchen team at the Oaxacan Guelaguetza Restaurant in Koreatown is already prepping their mole, stirring giant vats of broth, frying dozens of spices in huge pans, and blending all the ingredients with an industrial stone grinder. Founded by the Lopez family in 1994, Guelaguetza has become a center for the Oaxacan community in Los Angeles, offering dishes made with their family recipes and using carefully sourced Oaxacan ingredients.
Read MoreI’m a fan of Desert Island Lists. Strip away everything you can live without till you arrive at the single thing you love but also need. My Desert Island chocolate is See’s. Keep your Godiva and Cadbury and the famous Belgian Leonidas. Forget that bespoke Parisian guy who makes the most expensive candy per ounce on the planet and does wondrous things with passionfruit cream. There is chocolate, and then there’s See’s.
Read MoreEdible Explorer has been exploring, and lately it’s occurred to us that Paris and Los Angeles, so different—old versus new, dense versus dispersed—are also sister cities in new and expanding ways. We had questions though, lots of questions about the ins and outs of French culture, and how the French achieve that elegant simplicity we can’t help but admire. For answers, we went to expert, Aleksandra Crapanzano.
Read MoreSurya Spa has long been a secret for the health curious on the Westside. Operating for years out of a residential house in the Palisades, it’s now landed splashily at The Proper Santa Monica hotel.
Read MoreMAD is the Danish word for food. MAD is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. MAD is stark raving…. MAD is the brainchild of Rene Rezdepi, chef of Noma, arguably the best restaurant of the world. MAD Academy is a school for people who work in hospitality that focuses on making you do better, be better.
Read MoreI first fell in love with natural wine when I drank a glass of Grenache Gris by Berkeley-based Broc Cellars. During quarantine, I expanded my palate with the wine club selections from Tabula Rasa, a bar in Little Armenia. I liked the silty, unpredictable quality of these natural wines, sometimes smoky and challenging, and sometime refreshing and fun, pure pleasure machines.
Read MoreChef Suzanne Goin and restaurateur Caroline Styne takes “farm to table” and give us farm to… 18,000 seat amphitheater.
It’s not often that you get handed a kale salad by the farmer who grew the kale, all while dressed to the nines on the stage of one of the most famous concert venues in the world. But that’s what happened at the Hollywood Bowl’s 100th season kick off - a perfect preview of what’s to come this Summer.
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