It's too late to tariff the globalization out of American cuisine. More chili crisp, please

Los Angeles Times

12-04-2025

Tariff fear and loathing. The $40 Dodger dog, $100 a box for avocados and remembering Hal Frederick. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes.
There's been a lot of talk lately about tariffs and the Ford F-150, the hugely popular pickup truck made with 'parts that come from over 24 different countries,' as the Wall Street Journal documented in a widely viewed video. 'No car,' says the narrator, 'not even a U.S.-built Ford F-150, is 100% U.S.-made.' The American car has been globalized.
The same could be said of the American palate, which has been shaped by far more than 24 different countries.
Let's put aside the many 'all-American' grocery store products that unknown to most consumers use ingredients from other countries, such as apple juice concentrate, Vitamin C or ascorbic acid and vanillin from China. Because even if those exports were cut off in a Trump administration executive order, you can't tariff or deport away Americans' globalized food cravings.
Consider one condiment that is becoming increasingly integral to American cuisine: chili crisp.
The star condiment in countless TikTok videos — so many chili crisp eggs! — is readily available at Walmart, Costco, Target, Kroger stores and other mainstream supermarkets. And not just in the so-called 'international' section. It's increasingly stocked in the salsa and hot sauce aisle, often right next to Huy Fong Food's sriracha sauce and its many imitators.
The rise of chili crisp follows Americans' progression from ketchup to Tabasco sauce to salsa and ever-hotter chile sauces. Back in 1991, Americans for the first time spent more on salsa — 'a retailing category that includes picante, enchilada, taco and similar chili-based sauces,' wrote Molly O'Neill in the New York Times — than they did on ketchup. 'The taste for salsa is as mainstream as apple pie these days,' the president of market research company Packaged Facts Inc. told O'Neill.
Then came sriracha sauce, which first emerged in Thailand during the 1930s and is now so popular here that periodic shortages of the sauce cause panic buying. Two different women are credited with its origin, either La-Orr Suwanprasop or Thanom Chakkapak, using a recipe from her father Gimsua Timkrajang. What is certain is that Vietnamese immigrant David Tran popularized the sauce through his rooster-emblazoned Huy Fong Foods brand founded in 1980 here in Southern California, making sriracha the true Angeleno's ketchup. (Note that Huy Fong's sambal oelek was the secret ingredient in Jonathan Gold's Hoppin' John, though he considered sriracha an acceptable substitute.)
Chili crisp, sitting right beside the sriracha in the condiment caddies of so many Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants across Southern California, wasn't far behind in gaining popularity.
As columnist Jenn Harris wrote last year during a now-settled trademark dispute over the term 'chili crunch' (the term is now free to be used by any brand), many of us came to know chili crisp in our own homes through the Lao Gan Ma or 'Old Godmother' brand started in China by Tao Huabi and prominently stocked at 99 Ranch and other Chinese grocery stores. In a 2015 taste test of hot sauces (from Tapatío to habanero) for this paper with former food editor Amy Scattergood, Gold, Harris and chef judges Roy Choi and Alvin Cailan, Lao Gan Ma's chili crisp was the winner.
'It has texture. It has sweetness, heat, fermented complexity and a deep toasted-onion flavor,' Gold wrote. 'It is like a three-course meal in a spoon.'
Since then, many L.A.-area restaurants have started making their own chili crisp — during the pandemic, I relied on the version made by Yang's Kitchen in Alhambra, picking up a jar along with fresh produce and other grocery items they were then stocking, including blocks of Meiji tofu.
But the person who is credited with bringing chili crisp into mainstream grocery aisles is Jing Gao, who started her Fly By Jing brand in 2018. Gao's sauce costs a bit more than typical Chinese brand but people noticed the quality, and she was an excellent marketer for the sauce, getting it into the hands of prominent chefs and other tastemakers who spread the word — with the purpose, she has said, of 'evolving culture through taste.'
Last year, when deputy food editor Betty Hallock persuaded Gao to create a chili crisp-inspired Thanksgiving menu — because chili crisp turns out to be a wonderful addition to the American holiday table — she reported that more than 2 million jars had been sold nationwide.
Of course, one of the things that makes Gao's chili crisp so good is the sourcing of her ingredients. And those ingredients come from China.
Which means that Fly by Jing, as Gao posted this week on Instagram, has been 'highly impacted by the trade war that's currently happening.'
As of Thursday, she said that her growers and producers in China are facing tariffs of 160%. 'That's compared to about 15 percent before all of this began.'
Even so, she wanted her customers to know that she is holding firm: 'We continue to prioritize the sourcing and manufacturing of our core sauce products in my home town in Sichuan. The integrity of our ingredients, their specific provenance and the craftsmanship of our products are highly local to Sichuan and will continue to be. These ingredients — from the fermented black beans ... to the highly prized tribute peppers, the erjingtiao chilies, the cold-pressed roasted rape seed oils — cannot be grown anywhere else. They're integral to the deep and complex flavors of our products and this will not change.'
All of this comes after she lowered the price of her chili crisp so that it would be accessible to more consumers. So she's starting this tariff season with less of a cushion than she had before.
What could get Gao and others like her through this is the fact that there is a high demand for her product.
'Over the last six years, as a result of our growth and investment into a global supply chain, we've made an indelible mark on the international aisle of the grocery stores. ... We have fundamentally changed and diversified the palates of millions of Americans and we believe that these bold and complex flavors are universal. And once you expand your palate there's no going back. Bold and diverse international flavors are what Americans want. And they're here to stay.'
No matter how high the demand for bold and complex flavors, however, satisfying these cravings isn't going to be easy for the Southern California chefs and restaurateurs who helped shape those tastes.
'We are freaking out,' Billie Sayavong of the Westminster Laotian spot Nok's Kitchen told Harris in her story this week about how restaurants plan to handle the tariffs. 'In just the last week,' Harris wrote, 'the restaurant's meat and seafood invoice increase by 30%.'
Shaheen Ghazaly's Kurrypinch in Los Feliz uses Sri Lankan cinnamon sticks 'in at least 80% of the dishes on the menu,' Harris wrote. 'It's what gives Ghazaly's seeni sambol, the caramelized onion relish, a distinct, subtle, almost citrusy cinnamon flavor.' This month, his 'weekly grocery order jumped from $1,800 to $2,600.'
'Thai Nakorn in Stanton relies on a specific coconut cream from Thailand to make its curries, as well as Thai Jasmine rice and a long list of herbs. There's a unique Thai crab fat, fermented Thai crabs and Thai shrimp paste in the crab papaya salad,' said Harris.
Linda Sreewarom, 'whose aunt opened the original Thai Nakorn in Orange County in 1984,' told Harris, 'To change the recipes completely and try to find different brands of all these things made in the U.S. is impossible.'
As Caroline Petrow-Cohen and Malia Mendez reported in a broader story on how the tariffs will affect the economy of Southern California, the higher cost of produce grown in Mexico and other countries has already made things harder for small businesses. 'It's going to hurt a lot,' said Riyad Ladadwa of Diamond Fresh Farmers Market. 'I've never in my life seen avocados for $100 a box.'
'What does 'America First' mean when applied to the restaurant industry?' Harris asked in her column. 'What cuisines are considered American and who gets to decide? ... Without immigrant food culture, what is American food?'
In the introduction to 'The Gourmet Cookbook' published in 2006, editor and former L.A. and New York restaurant critic Ruth Reichl put it simply: 'The history of American cooking is the history of immigration.'
Our palates have been globalized and we're not going back.
Also: Will tariffs kill your favorite affordable wine? Patrick Comiskey talks with Lou Amdur, owner of Los Feliz' beloved Lou Wine Shop about the tariff's effects on 'comfort zone' wines.
'Wines that we are currently are selling for $30 and might be doable for a weeknight, for some people it will no longer be doable at $40,' Amdur said. 'Wines that people would grab unthinkingly at price X, now that there's a 20% tariff, suddenly it's no longer unthinkable.'
And for those who think they can escape tariffs by buying American, Amdur says not so fast: 'I love all these glib Monday morning quarterbacks who just say, you know, 'Just switch to California wine.' I do carry a fair amount of California wine, and I sometimes have New York wine, but they don't really understand the economics of the wine. It's not like there's going to be a one-to-one replacement.'
Brad Johnson, founder of the recently closed Post & Beam, wrote a lovely appreciation of Hal Frederick, the trailblazing Venice restaurateur and owner of Hal's Bar and Grill, who died April 2 at 91: 'Tall, handsome and elegant, Frederick, a former actor, maintained a nightly presence at Hal's. He moved from table to table, never overstaying, and everyone sought his greeting. There is a fine art to being a restaurateur, and Frederick fully embraced the role.'