Fed, White, and Blue by Simon Majumdar

Author:Simon Majumdar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

K-Town Rocks

There are some cities with which you have an immediate affinity. Cities with which you connect deeply the first time you arrive, and that continue to excite you every time you pay them a visit after that. London is obviously one of them for me; it created an affection so strong that I remained in the city for more than twenty-five years after coming down from the north of England to study the unlikely subject of theology at King’s College in 1982.

Then there are cities that leave you cold. If I never have to go to Paris again in my lifetime, I won’t shed a tear, and despite three visits, I have yet to discover quite why the rest of the world loves Sydney so much.

My current home, Los Angeles, falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. It was not always like this. In fact, when I first started coming here on a regular basis to visit Sybil, I positively loathed the place. The excitement I felt at seeing her again as my plane came in to land at LAX—officially the most depressing airport in the developed world—was dissipated by the thought of having to spend time in a place that to my eyes offered little in the way of beauty or culture. While I suspect I shall never develop any deep affection for Los Angeles, over the last four or five years I’ve discovered a few of its charms and the City of Angels and I have somehow come to an agreement to tolerate each other.

There is, however, one aspect of being in Los Angeles that has always impressed me, and that is its food scene. I do need to qualify that. I’m not talking about its plethora of middle- to high-end restaurants that garner so much attention and which, with a few exceptions, always leave me feeling underwhelmed. In fact, back in 2011, when asked by the Chicago Tribune to describe the dining scene in Los Angeles, I replied to my interviewer, “. . . much of [it] seems to be driven by what I call ‘the hype and the herd.’ The food on the whole rarely lives up to the Twitter-driven hyperbole.”

Things have certainly improved a lot since then, and if I were to be asked the same question today, I think I’d be a little kinder. However, it is not this aspect of eating out in Los Angeles that really marks it as a great food city, nor, given the market to which most of these restaurants are playing, is it ever likely to be. Where Los Angeles really excels is in the multiplicity of ethnic cuisines on offer in its many neighborhoods, and the astonishing authenticity and quality of food that they are able to deliver on a regular basis.

Los Angeles lays claim to being one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. Driving around any one of its 272 neighborhoods, it is easy to see that this is no idle boast.

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