Latest news with #LaurieOchoa
Los Angeles Times
26-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Altadena is slowly ... very slowly ... reopening for business
Altadena's slow reawakening. Plus, mole 3,675 days old and counting, L.A.'s hardest reservation, Festival of Books cooks and lots of restaurant openings. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. Ever since the Eaton fire destroyed much of Altadena, I've been on the lookout for signs of recovery. I often drive up Lake Avenue where so many small businesses burned, leaving twisted steel frames and slumping walls. This is a neighborhood I used to walk. It's not far from my home in north Pasadena, and just two days before the Eaton and Palisades fires began I spent part of that Sunday afternoon enjoying an excellent cappuccino in the color-splashed back garden of Café de Leche's now-destroyed Altadena location. As I wrote in January, the fire came 'at a particularly vulnerable moment for a food community that was in the midst of renewal' with 'a fresh generation of small-business owners ... starting new businesses or reviving old ones.' One of those businesses was Altadena Beverage & Market on Allen Avenue. It survived the flames but its owners, Kate and Adam Vourvoulis, lost their home in the fire. Week after week I would drive by the superette, looking for the plastic goose mascot that always signaled that the shop was open for business. Along Lake Avenue, I've been watching for activity at David Tewasart and Clarissa Chin's Thai restaurant Miya, where I loved the khao soi and crispy snapper, and at Leo Bulgarini's gelateria and Italian restaurant Bulgarini. These business owners also saw their homes burn while their restaurants survived. But surviving the flames, as former Times reporter Cindy Carcamo wrote in late January, doesn't mean the businesses can easily reopen. 'We're not a winner at all in any of this,' Bulgarini told Carcamo. 'You've lost your home so you've lost your sanctuary, and you really have lost your business right now because it's not going to be around for a while.' He estimated that with so many of customers displaced, his business, at least in its Altadena location, would be 'pretty much dead for at least a year.' And yet ... there are small signs of progress. Army Corps of Engineer teams have made headway in the debris cleanup, though many, many homes await their turn. And while the green Servpro vans that popped up for smoke and ash remediation are still a common sight, they're not quite as ubiquitous. Most heartening, a few businesses have begun to open their doors. Last month, Maggie Cortez's popular restaurant El Patron began serving its classic Mexican American dishes again. I stopped by last Friday for fish tacos and found the sunlit restaurant busy at lunchtime. It was good to be among my neighbors. Yet there were two conflicting scenes out the picture glass windows lined with colorful papel picado banners. Through one window was greenery from a pocket park untouched by the flames, but across the street, on the block where the pizzeria Side Pie used to be, the fire's wreckage revealed itself like an open wound. Then, the very next day, I spotted something new when I was leaving Armen Market on Allen Avenue (owner Armen Gharibi managed to open quickly after the fire, with only a minor noticeable glitch one day when the credit card connection wasn't working). The goose was loose. The plastic bird wasn't in its frequent resting spot along the sidewalk across from Armen; it was perched on the wood bench outside Altadena Beverage & Market. I walked over and found the store up and running. 'We couldn't have imagined how much would change and that it would take 100 days and so many tears and so much uncertainty to come back,' read the shop's most recent Instagram post from this week announcing a May 3 reopening celebration. 'We weren't sure if we wanted to. We were scared. Our whole future was uncertain. But your support and words of encouragement pushed us forward.' It's true that some of the shelves and one of the refrigerator cases were nearly empty. No Maury's bagels yet. But there was some tempting dishware from the shop's still-closed sister business, Zinnie's Table. When I asked if they would be getting any Bub & Grandma's bread deliveries soon, they said they'd already started and had sold out for the day. I'll be back this weekend for bread and maybe some bagels. Plus, I've got my eye on a colorful confetti-patterned cutting board that could go well with my new kitchen cabinets. I know the goose will be waiting. Is mole better aged and rich or young and tart? This was one of the questions we contemplated this week at the sold-out residency of Enrique Olvera's acclaimed Mexico City restaurant Pujol at his L.A. outpost Damian in the Arts District. Olvera is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Pujol, which, as Food's Stephanie Breijo recently wrote, is closed in Mexico City until May 5 for a quick remodel of the restaurant's terrace. (At Olvera's taqueria Ditroit behind Damian, a more casual pop-up, Molino el Pujol, will run through Sunday, but know that there will probably be a long line.) On the menu Tuesday night, the first of the nine-day dinner series that ends April 30, were several dishes from Pujol's past, including an avocado flauta with shrimp, and skewered baby corn coated in a coffee mayonnaise flecked with chicatana ants. One of my favorite dishes of the night was pulpo en su tinta, with a blackened octopus tendril wrapped around a silky mash of incredibly flavorful ayacote beans. But the plate everyone was waiting for was the mole madre, aged and maintained like a sourdough starter for more than 10 years — or 3,675 days and counting on Tuesday night. Our server told us that some 90 kilos of the mother mole was flown to L.A. from Mexico City. The inky-dark sauce had several layers of complexity, including a smoky backnote. In the center of the circle of mole madre was a smaller circle of burnt orange mole nuevo. Only about a week old, it was made with several fruits that gave the sauce an intriguing tartness. No protein was served on the plate. Instead you took freshly made hoja santa tortillas and swiped it into the sauce scarpetta-style. It was hard to decide which I liked better. All I can tell you is that by the end of the course there was barely any sauce left on the plate. This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Come see us at our Food x Now Serving booth near the cooking stage on the campus of the University of Southern California. We've got a great line-up of cookbook and food authors coming to the booth, including memoirist Laurie Woolever ('Care and Feeding') and Found Oyster chef Ari Kolender ('How to Cook the Finest Things in the Sea'). Some of the chefs on the cooking stage include Fat + Flour chef Nicole Rucker, Milk Bar's Christina Tosi, Kogi's Roy Choi and 'Top Chef' star Brooke Williamson. Speaking of 'Top Chef,' I'm interviewing the show's head judge, Tom Colicchio, and host Kristen Kish onstage Saturday at 4:30 p.m. And senior editor of Food, Danielle Dorsey, is talking with Sarah Ahn ('Umma: A Korean Mom's Kitchen Wisdom'), Michelle T. King ('Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food') and Steve Hoffman ('A Season for That: Lost and Found in Southern France') about their memoirs at 3 p.m. on Saturday. Check here for the full lineup of food-related book happenings at the festival.
Los Angeles Times
12-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
It's too late to tariff the globalization out of American cuisine. More chili crisp, please
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.'
Los Angeles Times
23-03-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Escape to Italy with six spring recipes
My birthday falls in late January at the height of winter, when post-holiday blues are at their peak. I use it as an excuse to plan an annual warm-weather getaway and take advantage of off-season prices. This year — in the wake of California wildfires and a tense presidential inauguration — the need to escape felt even more pronounced. In early February I frolicked solo through Rome, Florence and Naples, with day trips to explore Tuscany and Pompeii ruins. I decided early on in my trip that I wouldn't bother with souvenirs — save an herb-salt seasoning blend I picked up from Dario Cecchini's Chianti-based butchery at the behest of Food general manager Laurie Ochoa. My suitcase was heavy enough as it was. But exuberance got the best of me during a seven-hour Tuscany wine tour. From Champagne-method sparkling wine to crisp rosé and bold Sangiovese, every option seemed better than the last. And the wineries were kind enough to offer to ship my selections directly to my home so I wouldn't have to deal with overweight luggage. Heady with Chianti Classico, I generously scrawled my credit card information and address across a handful of order forms. Six bottles come in a case, so it'd be wasteful to order anything less, right? Weeks later I was back at home and my trip to Italy was a fast-fading memory. That is, until my shipment arrived in the mail. Opening my international bounty was like unwrapping a Christmas present. I had scant memory of my purchases — six wines and two olive oils in total — but was nonetheless impressed by the variety I'd chosen. I thought about what our sommelier tour guide had said about the drawbacks of saving wine for a special occasion. Even the best wine can unexpectedly turn when it's left for too long. As in life, nothing is guaranteed. I decided to host an Italian-themed potluck that could double as a wine and olive oil tasting. I stipulated a springtime-in-Italy dress code, and that every guest should bring an Italian export to share. I promised a lineup of Italian cinematic masterpieces as entertainment, from 'The Lizzie McGuire Movie' to 'Roman Holiday' and 'House of Gucci.' The party is coming up this weekend, and the menu is almost finalized. I plan to greet each guest with an Aperol spritz when they arrive, with fresh focaccia for ripping and dipping in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and pitted Castelvetrano olives for snacking. To cut down on food prep, since I'm also playing host, I'll be making a classic Caprese salad pulled from Laura Vitale's 'At My Italian Table' cookbook, with tomatoes on the vine, buffalo mozzarella, olives and fresh basil, all drizzled with olive oil. My friends, who happen to love a theme as much as I do, are bringing more involved plates, including chicken cacciatore, mushroom risotto, a seafood salad, Margherita pizza and pistachio tiramisu. In case you're also feeling the need to escape, here are six recipes to create your own transportive Italian spread. Eating out this week? Sign up for Tasting Notes to get our restaurant experts' insights and off-the-cuff takes on where they're dining right now. As mentioned, I personally do not possess the skills to both host a successful party and cook or bake anything that requires prolonged attention, so the focaccia at my soiree will be fresh-baked courtesy of Eataly, but if you're keen on doing it yourself, this recipe from Duff Goldman's 'Duff Bakes: Think and Bake Like a Pro at Home' cookbook is fairly straightforward. Goldman begins with starter dough, or biga, to give the focaccia more flavor, and recommends allowing for three days of fermentation. You can top the bread with the ingredients of your choice, though the basil oil, sliced onion and Parmesan that Goldman uses are great for an Italian flavor profile. Get the recipe. Cook time: 2 hours. Makes 2 12-inch rounds. With sunny weather on the horizon, this simple bruschetta with albacore tuna steak from Evan Kleiman is the perfect way to celebrate the shift in season. It's based on the Sicilian dish tonno alla Matalotta, and though it involves grilling, any simple setup will do as long as you have olive oil on hand. Get the time: 35 minutes. Serves 4 to 8. Artichokes are currently in season and this straightforward recipe from former cooking columnist Ben Mims by way of his friend Helen Rosner is a simple take on Italian fritti with oil-marinated artichoke hearts that are cooked in the oven on foil-lined baking the time: 35 minutes. Serves 6 to 8. Is it really an Italian party without fried vegetables or seafood? This pezzetti fritti recipe from Leah Koenig traces back to Roman Jewish kitchens and features a thick batter that completely coats the vegetables. Serve the dish hot with a generous squeeze of lemon. Get the recipe. Cook time: 1 hour. Serves 4 to 6. This risotto from Dunsmoor chefs Brian Dunsmoor and Manuel Mendoza uses Carolina gold rice for a lowcountry take on the classic Italian dish, but a generous helping of Parmesan, white wine and dry sherry, plus shrimp paste and butter, bring it back to its roots. Get the time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Serves 6 to 8. To cap off your Italian spread, try this pistachio lemon olive oil cake from Valerie Gordon of Valerie Confections. Gordon uses pistachio flour to further boost the creamy, nutty profile, and a blend of sumac, coriander and fleur de sel in the lemon glaze lends a warmth to the finished the time: 1 hour plus cooling time. Makes one 9-inch cake.
Los Angeles Times
22-02-2025
- Los Angeles Times
From Hong Kong to L.A.'s San Gabriel Valley, the snap, crackle and pop of claypot rice
The beauty of claypot rice, the comfort of chicken pot pie, Panda Inn's orange chicken redo, a Grocery Goblin's art discoveries, pie from a cake queen, plus line-worthy sweets and a last meal at Cassia. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. The crackle of hot rice sizzling inside a covered clay vessel is the happy sound you hear at Nature Pagoda on a busy weeknight in San Gabriel just before your server lifts the pot's lid. It had been several years since I'd eaten at Nature Pagoda, one of the last restaurants Jonathan Gold reviewed for this paper before his 2018 death, but after a phenomenal claypot rice meal in Hong Kong recently, I've been seeking out the dish here at home. Hong Kong, which remains one of the world's great eating cities even after the political crackdowns against pro-democracy protests, is packed with restaurants and shops that specialize in one specific dish. Roast goose. Beef brisket noodles. Wonton soup. Pineapple buns. And, of course, claypot rice. Despite the many exciting high-end restaurants that garner Michelin and World's 50 Best attention, some of Hong Kong's best eating is in more egalitarian places where you often wait in line for a spot at a table you might share with other diners. At Kwan Kee Claypot Rice, two of us were seated with three Hong Kong students who showed us how to rinse our chopsticks and bowls in hot tea before the food arrived. I ordered my clay pot dish with white eel, pork and liver sausage and an egg. After drizzling the rice with the restaurant's specially flavored soy sauce, I dug in. The sausage, with just the right amount of funk, was a terrific counterpoint to the eel — surf and turf at its best — with the egg yolk bringing everything together and a few slices of red chile to heat things up. My reward at the end: crisp, beautifully charred crust from the bottom of the rice pot. Back home at Nature Pagoda, some of the claypot rice combinations include catfish with black bean sauce, frog, mushroom with chicken, pumpkin with preserved meat plus the classic spareribs with Chinese sausage. Broccoli florets top the rice. Whenever I can't decide which topping to order, I default to spare rib and sausage with an added egg. It's hard to beat Kwan Kee's charred crust in Hong Kong, but the burnished brown crust at Nature Pagoda is reliably satisfying. While waiting for the rice to cook, most Nature Pagoda customers order mini tureens of herbal soups, such as black chicken with either ginseng or a blend of Chinese herbs. Earlier this week, the restaurant had a special of tian qi chicken soup, which is supposed to be good for blood circulation and had a fantastically intense chicken flavor. Chong Yuen Fong, nearby in Alhambra, is another rice specialist that also offers different health soups to sip while you wait for your rice. I tried one with bitter melon, soybeans and pork ribs — not for everyone, but I happen to love the stark bitterness of the melon. Among the claypot rice toppings at Chong Yuen Fong, which has a tearoom-style decor with a view of the kitchen, are barbecue eel, chicken feet, beef brisket, pork belly and salted fish. A stalk of Chinese broccoli lays atop the rice. The crust at the bottom comes out crisp and golden brown. For dessert, there are Portuguese egg tarts, the tops caramelized. And in the same building, just a few doors down, is Kang Kang Food Court, seller of Jenn Harris' favorite sheng jian bao — 'part yeasted bun, part potsticker and a soup dumpling all in one,' as she writes of the pork dumplings. After our claypot rice at Chong Yuen Fong, we couldn't resist stopping at Kang Kang to get an order of sheng jian bao for the road. (Grab plenty of napkins if you eat these in your car.) I headed home with extra egg tarts and dumplings to share, thinking about the incredible meals I'd eaten in Hong Kong (some of which I'll describe in coming weeks). But as I drove along Valley Boulevard, past one great Chinese restaurant after another, I also thought about the wealth of good food we have right here. Food reporter Stephanie Breijo has explored two popular places recently where customers wait in line to be served. In Long Beach, San & Wolves Bakeshop, a former pop-up operation run by Kym Estrada and Arvin Torres, serves 'some of the most sought-after pastries ... gushing with ube,' Breijo writes, 'slathered with fresh salted caramel or showered in shaved cheddar — they're Filipino, and they're vegan.' Over in Koreatown, the line for dumplings, noodles and pastries at Liu's Cafe has been joined by a line for the new Liu's Cafe Creamery, 'a Taiwanese-influenced ice cream parlor ... where cilantro syrup helps replicate night-market flavors,' writes Breijo, 'and nearly every component is made from scratch' by pastry chef Isabell Manibusan. Food columnist Jenn Harris grew up eating at the original Panda Inn in Pasadena, opened in 1973 by Andrew Cherng and his father, chef Ming-Tsai Cherng. 'In its previous incarnation,' Harris writes in her review of the recently remodeled restaurant, 'the Pasadena Panda Inn was where you went before a school dance, met the extended family for birthday parties or found yourself on a Wednesday night because it was the only place everyone could agree on.' Now the mothership of the Panda Express chain (with some 2,600 locations worldwide) has been reconceived as 'a bustling Chinese American brasserie' that also has a sushi bar — 'an overzealous play at fusion,' Harris says. As for orange chicken, the now-ubiquitous dish that most people agree was invented at a Panda Express in Hawaii in 1987, it's also received a makeover. 'Every other orange chicken, whether in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant, freezer aisle or even the Panda Express near you,' Harris says, 'will pale in comparison.' Union jobs for food service workers have been in decline for decades — last year, just 1.6% of employees in 'food services and drinking places' were union members, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Los Angeles, even Musso and Frank, whose workers originally organized in 1937, had its union contract decertified in 2015 after a healthcare plan dispute. Now, as Food reporter Cindy Carcamo reported this week, the union jobs at the Original Pantry Cafe are under threat. A trust set up after the death of former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan — who bought the 100-year-old restaurant in 1981 — currently owns the Pantry, but is looking to sell the property. When the workers' union tried to get the trust to 'agree to keep on the employees and their union representation even under new ownership ... the trust threatened to shutter the restaurant.' The trust says that the Original Pantry Cafe could close as soon as March 2. 'Given what we know of former Mayor Riordan, he would be rolling over in his grave over this situation,' Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, told Carcamo. 'He loved those workers and his restaurant was part of him and his life and legacy.' It may not be as old as the Pantry, but Moffett's Family Restaurant & Chicken Pie Shoppe has been serving Arcadia diners for 50 years. Recently, columnist Jenn Harris, seeking 'something that felt familiar and stable' after evacuation orders from the Eaton fire were lifted, found herself eating chicken pot pie at Moffett's. There she discovered that Juan Valerio Garcia, hired at Moffett's as a dishwasher in 1980, had moved up through the ranks to cook and is now the owner of the legacy restaurant. With the help of his family and other longtime workers, Garcia hopes to keep Moffett's running at least another 50 years. Many of us at L.A. Times Food are followers of Vanessa Anderson's Grocery Goblin dispatches on TikTok and on Instagram. Her soothing voice guides viewers through grocery store aisles as she seeks to learn more about international ingredients and food history as well as the people who run the shops. One of her most moving posts was her recent follow-up with John Hopkins, longtime owner of Altadena's O Happy Days vegan cafe and natural food store, who lost his home and store in the Eaton fire. Anderson also takes time to appreciate the artistic labels she finds on packaged goods. And in the first of what we hope will be regular contributions to L.A. Times Food she highlights some of the spontaneous art and ephemera displays inside grocery stores, or as she puts it, 'museum exhibits hidden in plain sight.' She finds a mysterious knife display at LAX-C ('the Thai Costco'), brass Jesus plaques from Armenia at Sahag's Basturma in Hollywood and a mural on the wall of Vince's Market in Atwater Village painted by Rafael Escamilla. 'Neighborhood markets,' Anderson says, 'often offer something the Broad or the Getty simply cannot. The artifacts within them live and breathe, signs of age like rust and sun stains tethering them to our world in a way that traditional exhibits divorce.' If you follow the reviews of restaurant critic Bill Addison, you know that he is a huge fan of Echo Park's Quarter Sheets, not only for Aaron Lindell's fabulous Detroit-inspired pizza but for Hannah Ziskin's way with cake. ('I have become a Ziskin cake zealot,' Addison wrote a while back in Tasting Notes.) But when we invited Ziskin to the Times test kitchen to make a video for our Chef That! series, she didn't want to make cake; she wanted to make pie. Grapefruit pie. The recipe is a twist on a citrus curd pie with lemon olive oil drizzled on top. It was so delicious that Addison may have to become a Ziskin cake and pie zealot. Watch Ziskin make the pie and share her baking tips here. Tonight, as Stephanie Breijo recently reported, Bryant Ng and Kim Luu-Ng's Cassia, 'one of the most singular Asian restaurants in Los Angeles, will close after nearly a decade in operation.' (In spring, the Ngs will open a more affordable fast-casual restaurant called Jade Rabbit.) Last week, I had a chance to eat one last meal at Cassia, which frequently appeared on the L.A. Times 101 Best Restaurant list and was 2019's Gold Award winner. The food and wine, as always, was wonderful. Mapo tofu, tender with lovely spices, was just one of the standout dishes. More than the food, however, I loved the camaraderie of the staff. Chefs who had worked at Cassia in earlier years returned for this final stretch of dinners and the restaurant's sommelier and general manager Marianna Caldwell was pouring glasses of wine from bottles she had been saving for a special occasion. The meal was one more reminder that behind every great restaurant is a team of dedicated workers who at their best treat each other and their customers like family.
