WHY Pure, unadulterated Peruvian flavors (puro sabor means ‘pure flavor’) in a sweet Valley spot with modest prices. WHAT This isn’t the most scenic neighborhood in Van Nuys, but inside is a cheerful, spotless café that showcases the accomplished cooking of chef Juana Paz, a bank teller from Peru who succeeded in achieving her twin [...]
September 2nd, 2010 is approaching fast, and Beverly Hills is throwing a big party to celebrate. What’s so significant about that date? Let’s look at it another way: 9/02/10. Or even better: 9.02.10. And just for good measure: 90210—you know, like the zip code and TV show (maybe this is obvious but it took yours [...]
WHY Art deco elegance reminiscent of old Hollywood, with superb cocktails and Mark Peel’s take on bar food. Great happy hour, too. WHAT More luxe than the north La Brea address would suggest, this new cocktail lounge by Campanile’s Mark Peel is as retro as they come, from the steak Diane to the high-backed white [...]
Thanks to our finally-summer weather, the next two Saturday nights will be peak time for the neon-lit pleasures of Chinatown Summer Nights, a food festival and neighborhood open house. Restaurants, food trucks, art galleries and entertainers are all contributing to a street-fair feeling in the blocks between Broadway and Yale Streets from College to Bernard. Here’s [...]
In June, teams of westside children, upset at the budget cuts impacting their schools and teachers, starting having lemonade sales to help their schools. It came to be known as Project Lemon-Aid. Their efforts so impressed the adults around them that they started pitching in, having fundraising yard sales, yoga classes and more. Now local [...]
This week, as part of our partnership with the KPCC show Off-Ramp, I joined host John Rabe and guest David Lazarus to talk about tipping—specifically, an issue recently uncovered by Lazarus, the consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He noticed that an increasing number of credit-card receipts list tip amounts based on 15%, 18% [...]
Paul Greenberg is an award-winning seafood writer. You’ll find his work fairly regularly in the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. His new book is Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. In it, Greenberg explores the history of salmon, bass, cod, and tuna—the four fish species we eat the most of—as [...]
Pico Boulevard between Beverly Drive on the west and a little beyond Robertson on the east is a Miracle Mile of multiethnic, multicultural Jewish foods. The dense concentration of mostly kosher restaurants, cafés, groceries, bakeries, fish markets, fast-food spots and delis make it a rich source of specialty items for cooks, a meeting place for [...]
This neighborly, charm-packed certified market used to be better for prepared foods than produce, but new manager Greta Dunlap is kicking things up a few notches, and now it’s the best market east of Hollywood. There’s an abundance of great produce, including amazing mushrooms from LA Funghi, berries from Pudhill, grass-fed beef from J & [...]
This week on Off-Ramp, John Rabe, Kevin Ferguson and I ate at Slaw Dogs and talked about hot dogs—and there’s a whole lot more to hot dogs in L.A. than standing in a tourist-filled line at Pink’s. To listen to the podcast of our talk, click here for KPCC’s Off-Ramp site. Here’s our short list [...]
