Food is more than what’s on the plate. This is Equal Portions, a series by editor-at-large Shane Mitchell, investigating bigger issues and activism in the food world, and how a few good eggs are working to make it better for everyone.

“It’s weird to put a real fork in my mouth,” says Susan Bustamente, while stacking footed oval platters at People’s Pottery Project (PPP), a ceramic collective in Los Angeles’ Glassell Park neighborhood. “Because we ate with plastic. If we were locked down, everything came in styrofoam trays. And it took a long time to not save a container with a lid, because it gave us something to eat out of rather than the little white bowl that you could buy in [the] canteen.”

Several days a week, the 66-year-old great-grandmother leaves before dawn to commute from San Gabriel Valley, where she now lives with extended family. She obtained her driver’s license three years ago, but still doesn’t feel comfortable navigating rush-hour traffic. At this early hour, the industrial warehouse turned studio space where she works is usually empty as she starts wedging clay and shaping ceramics that will be brushed with the collective’s distinctive “Abolition Blue” glaze.

A survivor of child molestation and domestic violence, Bustamente was the first woman to have her sentence commuted in 2017 from California Institution for Women, the state prison where she served 31 years of a sentence of life without parole. “It just empowers you to know that you’re the only one that created this little bowl,” she says, cradling one in her arms. “It gives you a sense of accomplishment, especially when I had no clue, because being without parole,  Life without parole? You don’t even anticipate coming out to society.”

People’s Pottery Project was founded in 2019 by artist Molly Larkey, who has exhibited work at MoMA PS1, the Saatchi Gallery, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In 2016, she joined the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots abolitionist organization that advocates for institutional change in the prison-industrial complex. She decided to open a ceramic studio in her own Los Angeles workspace as an artistic outreach project. “I had a kiln and a slab roller and one pottery wheel,” says Larkey. “A friend of a friend offered to teach a class once a week to formerly incarcerated folks from the community.”

Larkey explains that the next phase was to create a product to sell, so the studio began with a simple “hump mold” bowl, which is made by rolling out a slab of clay and then folding it by hand over a shape the artist likes. “You can even do this with a rolling pin, so it’s very accessible,” Larkey says. The handmade aspect, from the imprint of textured cloth holding the clay to the fingerprints of the potter, imbues each piece with singularity and humanity. “The energy of the person who made it is transferred to the person who then has the object and interacts with it,” she says. 

Larkey presented these first bowls in a popup gallery at a ceramic art fair. Then she brought on Ilka Rosales Perkins and her wife Domonique Perkins as co-founders. “I wanted it to be a collective founded by people who had the experience and were directly impacted by incarceration.” Both served “extreme punishment” sentences. They were in the same prison with Bustamente and now live near her; Ilka and Domonique first encouraged her to start working with clay.

A study conducted by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy center that addresses racial disparities in the criminal justice system, found: “A disproportionate share of women of color received extreme punishments in response to homicides committed in order to escape domestic violence. The legal system has consistently failed to take their experiences into account. Imprisonment often exacerbates their trauma.” After Florida and Pennsylvania, California ranks third among states with the highest number of women serving this sentence. Transitioning to society after parole doesn’t always guarantee success, Larkey points out; it was important to her that every step of joining PPP, including on-the-job training, earns employees a living wage. Bustamente’s paycheck has helped her buy her first car.

“I’m used to working with my hands,” says Bustamente, who also advocates for Home Free and Survived + Punished, non-profit organizations that focus on the wellbeing of women parolees as they transition to life beyond bars. Having learned to crochet at age six, she made lap blankets for wheelchair-bound veterans after parole. And her ceramics, along with those made by other PPP craftspeople, are part of the tableware at Hatchet Hill restaurant, and displayed in the gift shop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“When you make something that you know somebody likes enough to buy and eat out of––compared to the store-bought stuff––to me, it’s special,” she says.      

For People’s Pottery Project, Bustamente is currently focused on shaping gravy boats with braided handles for Thanksgiving, a meal she looks forward to sharing with her family and friends. Bustamente is frank about surviving for decades on a prison diet, describing how women in her unit supplemented meals by purchasing Top ramen, peanut butter, and dehydrated beans. She says she’ll never eat Velveeta cheese again. But Bustamente is planning to have mashed potatoes and stuffing for the holidays. “It makes me sad that inside they don’t have this pleasure.”

Please consider donating to Harvest Now, which creates grow-to-donate gardens within correctional facilities, and improves the wellbeing of inmates by providing fresh food for their own cafeterias.

The post In Pottery, Women Parolees Find a Path Forward appeared first on Saveur.

Until the age of seven, I thought my father was a movie star. He left the house every day wearing a tuxedo and whistling Yves Montand. He returned every night with pockets full of money. Edmond Louis Le Draoulec was a waiter. Not the kind who keeps a screenplay in his sock drawer, but a career waiter—right down to his collection of satin cummerbunds.

My father lived to seduce diners with his expertise and tableside charm. He felt that every meal was special, and had little patience for those who didn’t see waitering as an art. This set the course for my life as a food writer. I turned down the job of restaurant critic at the New York Daily News twice because I didn’t want to tell people not to go to a restaurant. When I finally accepted in 2001, I imagined my parents as the diners I would write to, people who cherished every meal and every dime.

From the early 1960s through the late 1990s, my father worked in some of Los Angeles’s most celebrated dining rooms: Scandia, The Saloon, The Ambassador Hotel. Each morning before school, he would regale my sister and me with tales from his shift: “The chef was so angry, he flung a bread roll at Mario!” “The hostess is giving Jean-Louis all the best tables, c’est louche.” “The paparazzi were out in full force last night.” While he spoke, my mother would brush his tuxedo jacket, which smelled of shrimp scampi, cigarettes, and cologne. First, she’d scatter the contents of the pockets on the table: champagne corks, breath mints, the occasional escargot shell (for his girls), and, of course, cash. My father would interrupt his narrative to tell her about the canard a l’orange or Dover sole he’d brought home for our lunches.

In 1941, Edmond and his parents fled occupied Brittany and hid on the tiny island of Porquerolles, in Provence, and food was scarce. He likes to tell the story of the day he stumbled upon a barrel of lard that had washed ashore, presumably from a sunken warship. It may as well have been a pot of gold, he says, because they could use it to fry potatoes. I’ve wondered if his career had to do with silencing that growling stomach.

Living with his parents in Nice, at 16, my father took a summer job as garçon de cafe at a beachside terrace. Instead of going back to school, he signed up for fine-dining training at a hotel in Evian, France. He never looked back. In 1960, he crossed the Atlantic to work at the swank Beaver Club in Montreal. There, he met my mother, Lucette, also fresh off the boat from France. She, too, had known hunger. He took her out for a steak dinner but he was so smitten, he couldn’t eat. Lucette directed her fork at his T-bone: “May I?” They were married six months later.

Edmond and Lucette bought an old Chevrolet and followed Route 66 until they reached Santa Monica, California. They found an apartment the day they arrived, after which my father went out for a smoke. He poked his head inside a restaurant called The San Francisco and was hired on the spot. Finding a job was never a problem. The network of French expat waiters was thick. Keeping one was another story. One chef fired him for refusing to deliver a New York strip he deemed overcooked. He was dismissed from another restaurant for trying to unionize, and yet another for passing the bartender pilfered steaks.

Yet there were places where he stayed put, and despite the odd hours, my father was a family man. During the Scandia years, we would go camping at Leo Carrillo State Park, near Malibu. He couldn’t take time off, so he would swim with us by day, slip into his tux, and drive to work in the afternoon. The first thing I’d see the next morning was his uniform hanging from the branch of a sycamore.

My father developed close relationships with many of his regulars, who showed their appreciation by slipping him cash. While he felt no guilt swiping a lobster from the walk-in, my father was fanatical about sharing tips with the other waiters. Some tips were priceless. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer at 63, one of my father’s customers, a doctor, got her the best surgeon.

By the time I became a critic, my father’s health had declined and he wasn’t able to travel much. Still, I felt him there with me, night after night, condemning a mere fish soup that dared call itself bouillabaisse, or praising the bartender who had bothered to float a lemon zest in my Kir. On his last visit to New York, he joined me on a review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se. The service was flawless. I wanted so badly to tell our waiter that he was in the presence of a pro. But by then, long retired, my father was ready to be fawned over. That was gift enough.

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Rising rents across Los Angeles have forced would-be restaurateurs to go underground and consider some creative locations. Can’t afford a stand-alone retail shop? Open one inside a magic theater. Have an idea for a Mexican-inflected Korean spot but don’t want to deal with a standard retail space? Try a local swap meet.

From Angelino Mexican-inspired Korean at a local swap meet to stuffed naan roti rolls in a family-owned West L.A. Chevron station, here are four excellent, unforgettable dining experiences to try when visiting the City of Angels.

Thai drinking food at a magic show

Black Rabbit Rose is a house of illusion, with Prohibition-era magicians performing nightly shows—but the more potent sorcery is found with Crying Tiger, the Thai restaurant housed in its adjacent bar (with a street-front window for passersby). Diners indulge in baskets of crisp chicken-skin chips and crab fried rice with Chinese sausage and edamame while roaming characters survey the dark room, proffering playing cards. Phuket-native chefs Noree Pla and Fern Kaewtathip love the unusual vibe—and the low rent for the prime location—but the dinner rush comes with an added level of pressure: The food must be served before the show begins, when the old Holly­wood performers take to the stage.

Crying Tiger Thai
1719 N Hudson Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90028
(323) 461-1464

Mexican-inspired Korean tacos at local swap meet

Cookbook author Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee chose to locate Nabi, her Mexican-influenced Korean food counter, in a low-rent swap meet in East Hollywood to “get her sea legs,” she says: Her goal is to open a proper restaurant. At the swap meet, her counter is tucked between the numerous stalls and hallways of the crammed warehouse space. While other vendors sell discounted underwear, pet supplies, or stationery piled to the rafters, Lee offers tortas made with ginger-marinated pork and kimchi grilled cheese. When she opened Nabi, Lee wanted to find an affordable place to introduce Angelenos to the food of her heritage. “I do that every day now,” Lee notes with pride.

Nabi
4632 Santa Monica Blvd
Suite 16
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(323) 986-0107

Bagel sandwiches at an indie concert hall

Most evenings, the Hi Hat attracts indie music lovers in rapidly gentrifying Highland Park on the city’s hip east side. On weekend mornings, however, it’s lox and bagels that drive the crowds to its diminutive window out front. (It doubles as a burger joint during shows.) Co-owners Nick Schreiber and JD Rocchio were selling bagels out of their Echo Park apartment when a friend opened the Hi Hat last year and mentioned the small serving window. Now, Belle’s Bagels sells their hand-rolled bagels in brown bags by the dozen, or with made-to-order sandwiches like the Loxsmith, which, in addition to paper-thin slices of locally smoked fish, features neon pink beet-and-dill cream cheese with crispy salmon-skin flakes. It’s a new approach to an old-school classic—the shop was named for Schreiber’s great-grandmother. “The food that we’re making is grandma food,” he explains, “if your grandmother had a septum piercing and a bunch of tattoos.”

Belle’s Bagels
5043 York Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90042
(323) 208-8408

Stuffed-naan roti rolls at a gas station

In the back of a Chevron station convenience store, near a Highway 405 ramp on Los Angeles’ west side, is the Bombay Frankie Company. With a clay tandoori oven built into the countertop, naan breads are baked fresh to order and filled with housemade chicken tikka masala, pickled vegetables, and a fresh mint chutney crema for a California twist on the roti rolls, or “frankies,” of Mumbai. Priyanka Mac Griffith, who co-owns the shop with her husband and brother, and whose family owns the gas station and several others throughout the area, said they chose to use this popular and low-budget location to experiment with a culinary concept they couldn’t find elsewhere in L.A. Fuel sales have increased since opening the original Bombay Frankie, and they already have two more locations set to open this year.

The Bombay Frankie Co.
11261 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 444-9241

The post Four Unforgettable, Weird Places to Eat in Los Angeles appeared first on Saveur.

The craft cocktail boom of the past decade has given rise not only to creativity behind the bar, but also in the kitchen. Just ask young-gun baker Zack Hall, the one-man team of Clark Street Bread in Los Angeles. This month, he’s teamed up with Redemption Rye to create an open-faced sandwich where everything, and we mean every thing, is given a huge boost of flavor using rye.

It starts with the loaf: Hall uses a classic Danish rye bread, nodding to Denmark’s beloved smørrebrød, or open-faced sandwich. For his whiskey-whispered version, however, Hall soaks whole rye berries in water and whiskey overnight. The Redemption rye he uses boasts a mash bill that contains 95% rye (the minimum to be considered a rye is just 51%), doubling down on the slightly floral nuttiness of his bread. Then there’s the mustard, whose black and yellow seeds are similarly soaked overnight with a mix of whiskey, water, and vinegar, and the whiskey-infused dill pickles.

Once the infusions are complete, the hard part is over. Hall simply layers the sandwich with butter, mustard, roasted pork, dill pickles, and a fennel frond garnish. Watch the video to see how it’s made and head to Grand Central Market in Los Angeles through the month of March to try it.

The post This Sandwich is a Whiskey Lover’s Dream Come True appeared first on Saveur.

There’s something about Los Angeles and budino.

On other cities’ menus, where you might find pot de crème or straight-up pudding, in L.A. that jar of creamy chocolate (or butterscotch, or salted caramel) greatness is often called budino, a word whose fat, tactile syllables conjure the way the dessert feels in your mouth, smooth and round and creamy and rich.

The sweet highs and bitter lows of the ingredient that rules the world

There’s the chocolate budino at Angelini Osteria a bustling but elegant pasta-focused restaurant on Beverly. There’s the caramel, sea salt, and olive oil–topped budino at Jon & Vinny’s, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo’s ode to Italian-American cuisine on Fairfax. There’s pastry chef Genevieve Gurgis’ bittersweet chocolate budino tart with salted caramel at Bestia, the modern Italian Arts District powerhouse that’s perhaps the hardest reservation in town.

Then, of course, there’s the butterscotch budino at Pizzeria Mozza. Most people’s first guess is that Mozza co-owner and chef Nancy Silverton is to blame for L.A.’s budino preoccupation, and they’re partially right: Mozza’s version has become one of L.A.’s most iconic desserts. But Silverton takes very little credit for its creation. “The history, at least from my perspective, goes back before Mozza,” Silverton says. While she was preparing to open the pizzeria in 2006, their pastry chef Dahlia Narvaez was biding her time and honing her skills at Jar, a restaurant owned by Silverton’s friend Suzanne Tracht. Jar had a butterscotch pudding on the menu, and, according to Silverton, “Dahlia turbocharged that,” by adding a layer of caramel and a sprinkling of sea salt. “My main contribution was the pine nut rosemary cookie that accompanies Pizzeria Mozza’s—and also now Chi Spacca’s—butterscotch budino.”

The first mention of budino I was able to find in an American newspaper appeared in San Fernando Valley Living in 1963, in an article describing the 32nd dinner of the Wine and Food Society of the San Fernando Valley. Seven Iberian wines were paired with dishes from “six foreign lands,” culminating in Budino Maltais, a dessert, reportedly, from Malta.

But in the modern culinary era, budino may have been introduced to Angelenos by Evan Kleiman, chef and host of KCRW’s “Good Food.” A 1990 Los Angeles Times profile of Kleiman and her longtime cookbook collaborator Viana la Place includes a recipe for ricotta budino from their third cookbook, Cucina Rustica. The profile was written by none other than Ruth Reichl, and her lede tracks the relationship between Californian and Italian cooking: “California cuisine started in France and began a gradual glide towards Italy.”

Kleiman also served budino regularly at her restaurant Angeli, which opened in 1984. “We were the [budino] pioneers no one remembers,” Kleiman says.

When I wrote to a pastry chef friend in San Fransisco to ask about the budino factor there, she replied: “Budino is just pudding! People use the word on their menus to make them sound more Italian.” She’s right, of course—budino is literally and simply the Italian word for “pudding,” and can refer to anything that might fall into that category, from thick custards to pudding-like cakes. Even Nancy Silverton admits there’s really no difference between budino and its less lovely-sounding American counterpart.

“I was probably about four years old, maybe even younger, when I had had my first budino,” Silverton says. “It was chocolate, and back then, in the San Fernando Valley, we called it pudding. And just for the record, my mom made it like every other mom in the ‘50s and ‘60s: out of a package.”

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At SAVEUR, our obsessive quest to unearth the origins of food and discover hidden culinary traditions sends us from our test kitchen in New York City to all the corners of the globe. From morcilla in Pittsburgh to cocktails in Paris, here are all the ways SAVEUR editors ate the world in October.

Bogotá, Colombia

Run by a young Colombian couple, El Ciervo y El Oso (the deer and the bear) is a new sun-drenched restaurant in an old house in the Chapinero neighborhood of Bogotà. Marcela Arango and Camilo Ramirez—who live on a farm outside the city with a dozen dogs and cats—met working in a kitchen years ago and wanted to create a love letter to Colombian food, which, in fine dining, has been pushed aside for European and Asian cuisine. Inside this little cottage splashed in turquoise and blond wood, they’re reviving cooking with cubios—knobby white root vegetables with a reputation like that of brussels sprouts in America ten years ago—and are creating a tapestry of soulful food with nods to the country’s biological diversity. There’s crudo using fish from the coast, salads with vegetables from the Amazon, cocktails with Muppet-looking tropical fruits, and cubios from nearby mountain towns. If you eat at one place in Bogotà, make it El Ciervo y El Oso. Runner up? Minamal. — Leslie Pariseau, special projects editor

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

I had the absolute best charcuterie in Pittsburgh at Morcilla—a Spanish-inspired restaurant by a construction-crew-cook-turned-cured-meat-genius Justin Severino. He makes some unbelievable morcilla blood sausage, alongside chorizos, serrano ham, and my personal favorite, a smokey, cured tuna. The restaurant is less than a mile from the faded blue factory buildings still lining the waterfront in Lawrenceville. In a way that somehow remains un-obnoxious, the neighborhood is full of genuine obsessive-types—a woman enthusiastic about glass-blowing, a guy dedicated entirely to craft coffee, a passionate whiskey distiller, and a bar with an menu devoted to beer + shot specials. Severino’s elaborate, skillful charcuterie menu is not to be missed. — Allie Wist, associate art director

Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China

I was in southern Yunnan on assignment for a story about the region’s obsessed-about puer tea—tea, after all, was born in the stretch of land from what’s now Yunnan over to modern-day Assam—but I’m already planning my next trip back. Yunnan Province is not what you think of when you think of China, and left to its own devices, Xishuangbanna Prefecture on the southern edge of the province is jungle territory. The sheer biodiversity here is awesome in the most classical sense of the word.

This all translates into food, people, and culture that bleed seamlessly into Southeast Asia, and an incredible diversity of produce. The chiles? They’re everywhere, and come in every color of the rainbow. The garlic? As pure and platonically garlicky as garlic can be. One of my favorite dishes consisted of little more than steamed and lightly oiled new potatoes and taro as sweet as carrots. There’s bamboo, sweet, grilled, pickled, stuffed with rice, stir fried with beef, simmered in soup—god, the bamboo. And then these winged beans you see above front and center, crunchy like string beans but more amenable to be eaten raw, with a flavor like snow pea leaves and little pores that soak up the perfect amount of sauce. I gobbled them up every chance I got.

In Yunnan, “farm to table” isn’t even a question. Everything’s local. Most of what you’re eating was in the ground earlier that week. Unless it was sitting in a tree, like the crunchy larvae some Hani friends fried until as crisp as potato chips. Hey, you gotta have some protein in between all that vegetation. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

Brattleboro, Vermont, U.S.A.

The drive up takes about four hours. Sometimes it seems that the only thing we city dwellers have in common is the insistent, if only occasional, desire to get the heck out of here. And so every fall, just as the leaves start to change, my friends and I are beckoned northward to the woods of Vermont, where a good friend has a family home, still standing on a grassy hill after 200-hundred-some odd years. Time moves slower there.

The turning point in the trip happens about three hours in, just as the leaves switch over from their mottled city greens to the vibrant oranges and scarlets that suggest the season’s first frost has already swept through. This is when the meal planning for the week takes place. Looming ahead is the Brattleboro Food Co-op, and we’ve got to have our shopping list locked down by the time we get there, lest we get stranded fireside with not enough butter to make that apple pie come evening-time. The weekend’s priorities come through loud and clear from the few of us in the car: butter, meat, and lots and lots of wine. When we pull into the co-op parking lot, still half an hour from our final destination, my friend pulls his parents’ old Saab in between two Subaru Outbacks. Those Subaru Outbacks are nestled between two other Subaru Outbacks. I’m convinced the Brattleboro Food Co-op parking lot holds the highest per capita number of Subaru Outbacks in the entire world.

Inside, we collect the basics: three pounds of the finest Grade A beef chuck roast (there will be a steak pie in the works the next afternoon), 8 bottles of red wine (you can never be too careful), a 5 lb. bag of local Empire apples (which will be cooked into a pie as well as eaten at odd intervals throughout the day), and a few packets of yeast (because I thought of cinnamon rolls in the car and can’t get them out of my head). While I pluck Brussels sprouts from a basket, a lithe middle-aged woman in a shimmery rainbow neoprene dress and matching fairy wings stocks carrots from a crate nearby. While Halloween is indeed coming up, it’s apparent this is an everyday type of dress, and it is fully appreciated.

So into the basket go the sprouts, some leeks, a handful of Russet potatoes, a hefty 4 lb. chicken, a few slabs of bacon, and a quart of salted caramel ice cream just for good measure. At the house, we split up the duties between gathering wood for the fire and unloading the groceries. The key to the weekend’s cooking is low and slow. Minimum effort is the goal, the tasks stretched languidly across the hours, fueled by a glass of wine that never quite runs dry, and a few hunks of cheese slowly working themselves toward the rind. The chuck roast bubbles on the stove, and every now and then I walk by and give it a stir, the aroma mingling with that of a pot of mulling cider on the burner behind it. Eventually it’ll get a crust and go into the oven to bake to flaky perfection, but what’s the rush? I take a little taste and slip contentedly back into my seat, all of us thoroughly sated by the fire and the wine. — Alex Testere, associate editor

Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

I have to tell you something. I am obsessed with breakfast sandwiches. And not just in the “I enjoy an occasional bagel” way. It’s in the “I just woke up and have an implacable yearning for an egg smothered in cheese squished between two pieces of toasted bread and I can’t do anything else until I get one” way. I dream of good breakfast sandwiches. I will walk 30 minutes out of my way to get one if I think it’ll be amazing.

So when I heard about EggSlut, I knew I was going to fall in breakfast love. After pining over it for years, I finally went in September on a trip to Los Angeles, and I’m only mildly embarrassed to say it was one of the best things I ate in LA. I get it, tacos are the thing, and trust me, I had a lot of those, but this met every single enormous expectation I had built up. The bread was buttery and soft, and eggs goo-ed over the side. There was cheese, there was avocado—if I could eat one thing every morning for the rest of my life, this would be it. There are a number of locations across the city, but my favorite was Grand Central Market, which sits in downtown LA – if you decide you don’t like EggSlut, or you are just not quite full enough, there are plenty of taco options to fall back on (trust me, they’re a great way to wash anything down). — Katie Whittaker, assistant digital editor

Hatch, New Mexico, U.S.A.

This month, I was lucky enough to attend the Hatch Chile Festival in Hatch, New Mexico. It’s gorgeous there; between the vibrant colors and the occasional abandoned buffalo skull, you’re walking around an O’Keeffe painting. I was there on assignment, shooting a story abut the region’s eponymous chile, and why it might possibly be the greatest pepper in the world. So of course I had to sample as many as I could, from warm and sweet to so blisteringly hot they made me shout out in pain.

That moment of embarrassment hasn’t steered me away from my new-found love of the New Mexican staple. Over the weekend I tasted the roasted chile in guacamole, queso smothered all over fries, ranch dressing, and scrambled eggs at breakfast. New Mexicans use hatch chiles to top off Frito pies, add a kick to margaritas, and spice up a milkshake (don’t miss the version at Sparky’s). I brought home tons of powdered dried red chiles and can’t wait to put them to work in this red chile and pork stew.

On my way to the airport on my last day in town, I ate at the Church Street Cafe in Albuquerque. The tables are decked out with honey packets, and I didn’t get why they were there until the end of the meal, when the server dropped off a pile of hot fluffy sopaipillas. You take a small bite off the corner and fill them with honey. I’ll definitely be making sopaipillas this weekend as I reminisce about New Mexico’s tongue-numbing peppers and tear-inducing scenery. — Matt Taylor-Gross, staff photographer

Paris, France

Mace is one of my favorite bars in New York City—I love the super-funky but also thoughtful approach to using lesser-known spices in cocktails. So when I heard that Mace’s Paris-based bartender-owner Nico de Soto was opening another spot in his hometown, I knew I had to add it to my itinerary. Tucked in the back of the elegant Daroco restaurant, Danico takes a very different approach to design compared to its no-frills New York counterpart, but the two share the same spice-forward ethos. Highlights included an aptly-named Sayonara, Mortherfucker !!!!! [sic] with Japanese whisky and soy sauce; and a delightfully strange mustard-seed–laced Suze number served, naturally, in a mustard pot. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

The post Where SAVEUR’s Editors Traveled In October appeared first on Saveur.

“It was a big culture shock for me moving to Los Angeles from the UK,” Curtis Stone says. “There were so many restaurants and people and communities that I had never experienced before.” Not a surprising remark for someone moving to a city that’s home to people from 180 different countries speaking 140 languages.

Stone was born in Melbourne. He moved to London in his early twenties and spent ten years there cooking for the likes of Marco Pierre White. As a new Angelino, Stone is fascinated by the city’s breadth and depth of Mexican, South and Central American, Korean, and Japanese restaurants. “I had never been to a Koreatown before,” Stone tells me. (The abundant Asian population in Australia is predominantly from neighboring Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Vietnam, not Korea.)

Stone will be the Local Star at the James Beard Foundation dinner at Vibiana in Los Angeles this Friday, the 23rd. The dinner is part of a series introduced in 2013 called Taste America, whereby the Foundation takes the iconic Beard dinners historically held at 167 12th Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to ten different U.S. cities. “Taste America is a celebration of the best chefs, flavors and American cuisine all across the country,” says Susan Ungaro, Foundation president of ten years. For Stone, who’ll be cooking alongside Scott Conant, Hedy Goldsmith, and Neal Fraser, it’s a chance to take what he’s been playing with at Maude and Gwen, his two LA restaurants, into a different spotlight.

As the star of TLC’s Take Home Chef, Stone “was cooking in a different home every day, shopping at all these different markets in a different part of Los Angeles on a daily basis.” This was his first exposure to the city’s diversity, and he’s since become an authority on where to eat.

This is how he does it.

Strip Mall Sushi

“If you’re going to do sushi,” Stone starts, “there’s a few ways to do it.” Stone’s favorite place is Sushi Park. It’s a small space on the second floor in a strip mall with a sign out front that says “No Take Away. No California Roll. No Spicy Tuna Roll.” Stone says the chef will quickly point out to you how to eat the varieties of fish: soy, no soy etc. “After I first had sushi here I thought, ‘Holy shit!’ What have I been eating all this time that people call sushi?”

Dollar Taco Dos and Don’ts

“The further east you go in Los Angeles, the better the tacos get,” Stone tells me, and goes on about how the best Mexican food in LA isn’t served in restaurants, but as street food. “The way to choose the best taco stand,” he says, “is to look for the biggest queue.” And take note: “Price is no indication of quality. Often, the more you spend the worse it is. You want to find dollar tacos.”

Korean Connection

Stone’s wife, the actress Lindsay Price, hipped Stone to Korean barbecue. Her mom is Korean, and a “great cook,” Stone says. He’ll go to Chung Ki Wa for Korean Barbecue, and he loves to shop in Koreatown. “There are great places everywhere,” he says, “and great Korean markets where you can find fresh seafood and beautiful produce.”

One of Stone’s favorite places to eat, though, isn’t a restaurant. “Los Angeles just has such incredible ingredients,” he says. “And one of my favorite things to do is shop and take advantage of this and take a picnic at Hollywood Bowl,” the historic amphitheater in the Hollywood Hills.

Pizza Worth a Trip

Angelinos are used to traveling for good food; the same is true for Stone. He calls out restaurants around town like Bestia, Providence, Birch, and Pizzeria Mozza as places he’ll take visiting friends to. The Field of Dreams “If You Build It They Will Come” ethos is true for Stone the restaurateur too. And he attributes this largely to his staff, and the fact that, “There are so many great chefs coming to LA. It’s becoming such a culinary destination, and the food keeps getting better as the talent keeps coming here.”

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To Filipinos born and raised in the Philippines, Alvin Cailan is an Amboy: an American-born Filipino. Amboy is also the name of the lunch project he operates out of Unit 120 in Los Angeles from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. His menu there is a mix of Filipino cuisine and Southern California style, including a celebration of LA’s backyard grill culture that parallels the grilled meats found throughout the Filipino canon.

Most people know about Cailan from Eggslut, his enormously popular counter in Downtown’s Grand Central Market where you’ll find one of the city’s best, and most obsessed-over, breakfast sandwiches. This January he opened Unit 120 in Chinatown’s Far East Plaza, not just to expand his repertoire beyond egg sandwiches, but to show LA just how much Filipino cooking has to offer.

At this point, arguing that Filipino cuisine is going to be the Next Big Thing in American food is hardly new. But in Los Angeles, a powerful wave is cresting, and the argument deserves a fresh perspective. There a quickly growing community of second-generation Filipinos cooks are taking a refined, even studious approach to their heritage. In the county with the largest population of Filipinos outside the Philippines, chefs like Cailan are making unprecedented headway in a decades-long push to make Filipino food as attractive to the American mainstream as Chinese or Thai.

Four years prior to Amboy’s debut, the Concordia family opened The Park’s Finest, a community-driven barbecue spot at the end of West Temple Street in Historic FIlipinotown. At Warren Almeda’s Belly & Snout and Eric de la Cruz’s Oi Asian Fusion, diners are swooning over classic Filipino dishes sold at inexepensive prices and executed for a modern crowd. And if you’re looking for Filipino desserts, you won’t find any better than those made by Isa Fabro (and served at Amboy).

So how are they doing it? That’s a question Cailan addressed in June last year at Next Day Better, a discussion and event series about diaspora communities. But the first spark came at Coachella two months prior, when Cailan first met fellow Filipino chef Charles Olalia and began a discussion about Filipino food in an entirely new way. At Next Day Better, Cailan spoke to a crowd of 300 people. “Because my restaurant Eggslut had made it to the mainstream,” he says, “people wanted to know how I got there.”

Cailan was born to Filipino parents in Pico Rivera, a predominantly Latino neighborhood 15 minutes from Downtown Los Angeles. His second-generation sensibilities, academic background (he graduated from the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland), and commitment to the culinary arts put him in a position to consider the role Filipino food plays in the North American landscape. And he’s not doing it alone.

“Alvin wants to help everyone out in the most honest way,” Olalia says on a Monday evening, surrounded by people snapping open cans of beer while cooks fry chicken in the kitchen. It’s industry night at Unit 120.

“Six months ago Charles and I decided to invite chefs we didn’t know to get together and ask them to bring food,” Cailan says, the excitement in his voice enough to drown out the small speaker on the table playing Drake. The first meeting place before 120? Olalia’s apartment. There, a roomful of chefs started talking about how to make the crispiest lechon skin and ways to promote sweet Filipino rice-based desserts by translating them into something with mainstream appeal. “It started amongst the Filipino community,” Cailan says. “But the awareness has grown to everyone in the industry.”

A large part of the initiative has to do with the growing number of Filipino chefs in Los Angeles. “Every major Los Angeles restaurant has a Filipino chef working in it,” Cailan says. Most don’t serve Filipino food, but the presence of Filipino chefs in their kitchens is encouraging. “It shows we can cook and run successful restaurants,” Cailan says. And it’s a great start. “But if our community doesn’t support us,” Cailan wonders, “then what’s the point? Unless my mom, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews support us, there’s no way we can cross over.”

At Amboy, Cailan leaves the core of Filipino food intact. But he shifts the final product for the community at large he’s cooking for. “Instead of using heavy pork fat as the base,” Cailan says, “I’m using vegetarian shiitake mushroom dashi.” For other traditional Filipino stews—kaldereta, kare-kare, and monggo—he swaps out meat for legumes to appeal to the area’s vegetable-oriented diet. “Southern California food is vegetable heavy,” he says. So he roasts vegetables, sears and glazes them with an adobo sauce, and then adds lashes of soy, vinegar, and garlic—classic flavors of the Filipino pantry. Traditional? Not really. But “if you eat it all together,” Cailan tells me, “you’re eating Filipino food.”

Filipinos began arriving in Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th century after the signing of the Pensionado Act of 1903, which allowed Filipino students to study in the United States. 20 years later, as the population grew, restaurants opened to feed them, particularly in LA’s Little Tokyo, where the community eventually established what’s become known as Little Manila there. The Depression and, later, the Tydings-McDuffie Act, restricted Filipino migration, which would not pick up again until after WWII. Decades later, in 2002, the city of Los Angeles designated the area that makes up the southwestern portion of Echo Park Historic Filipinotown, which is home to a number of Filipino restaurants and bakeries. They still serve a primarily Filipino dining community.

“For our parents,” Cailan says, “Filipino food wasn’t a focus, because it was more sustenance than craft.” He’s after what Chase Valencia calls a “second-generation response to the food.” In addition to cooking lunch at Amboy, Cailan hosts Filipino-American brothers Chad and Chase Valencia’s dinner pop-up LASA Friday through Sunday.

“Our parents’ main concern was assimilation,” Valencia adds, and seconds Cailan’s point: “They never thought about Filipino food other than as a means to provide for their families.” Valencia, 31, tells me that he and young people like him have opportunities their parents never did—the result of the herculean work of his parents’ generation. “We’re able to move more freely with our decisions and the careers we choose,” he says.

That’s why, for Charles Olalia, when he’s cooking, “the element of home always has to be there.” Olalia is the chef/owner of RiceBar in Downtown LA, where he serves Filipino rice bowls out of a 275-square-foot space. “For me,” Olalia says, “my social responsibility is to take the food we’ve been enjoying our whole lives and give it to everyone consistently with a level of attention and care.”

RiceBar offers $7 to $10 bowls made from heirloom grains imported from the Philippines. The low price point “brings the city together,” Olalia says. “We get all types of people coming to us.” The low pricing is only one means of drawing in non-Filipinos; central location is another. But low prices don’t mean low effort. “It’s about properly cooking proteins and vegetables,” Olalia says, “and serving things at the right temperature.” You get it perfectly when you taste his pork longganisa. Bright yellow pickled vegetables shine against green scallions and the deep reddish-pink hue of the most flavor-packed and juicy sausage I have ever eaten.

The attention to detail is Olalia’s response to the casual Filipino steam table restaurants run by the older generation over on West Temple Street, the main artery in Historic Filipinotown. Filipino restaurants there like Nanay Gloria’s and Bahay Kubo serve dozens of classic Filipino dishes, like dinuguan, laing, sisig, pinakbet, and various forms of adobo. “What they’re doing is the most efficient way to serve food,” Olalia says, “and I always give them respect for that.” But Olalia’s micro-managing—even closing the restaurant during low-traffic hours to keep things as fresh as possible—reflects his industry chops and, ultimately, care for the level of detail that upscale restaurants can achieve more easily than volume-focused restaurants.

At RiceBar, Olalia makes everything from scratch. That longganisa—a sweet, smoky, spicy Filipino pork sausage that Olalia grinds using his uncle’s recipe—gently cooks in stock all morning in the tiny open kitchen in front of guests. “I wanted to keep a sense of the restaurant experience there,” he says, “and curiosity. I want people to ask questions.”

Olalia admits RiceBar may not be the most revenue-driven model. It’s difficult to scale up this attention to detail. But it’s also an investment in Filipino food education. “Eight months in, non-Filipino people are coming in and asking for dishes by name,” Olalia says, “and they are pronouncing things right.”

Cailan is seeing similar results. “Because people Instagram,” he says. “People talk about it. The food is delicious. We take our time and strike a combination of price point and sourcing ingredients.” He’s hopeful that special sauce of approachability without compromise will give Filipino cuisine the momentum not just to build great restaurants, but work its way into public discussion.

He doesn’t see any of this work as cutting ties from the old generation. Quite the opposite: keeping a sense of family and community is everything.

Cailan recalls going to his dad’s friend’s house as a kid. “Their camaraderie and closeness, and generosity and willingness to help each other, was just amazing.” As Cailan becomes a leader in the industry, he sees parallels to his father, who’s an established figure in the Catholic community and who teaches bible studies and preaches regularly at church. “When I was giving that speech,” he tells me about the Next Day Better talk he gave in June, “in the middle of it I realized, wow, I just became my dad.”

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The evening is well underway, and I’m hungry in the incredible food city of Los Angeles, but rather than eating in the digs of some talented chef, I’m sitting in a touristy octogenarian Fairfax cantina. Why? Because 35 years ago when the busboy with the feathered ’70s hairdo whispered “gracias” and flashed me a dazzling smile as he cleared my plate, I fell in love with El Coyote. Back home in Philadelphia, the guys in my ninth-grade class ignored me, and the closest I got to Mexican food was a 45-minute drive with my older brother to a suburban Taco Bell. But in L.A. at El Coyote, I was flirted with and the enchiladas suizas were loaded with chicken and sweet onions; they were bathed in a spicy, tangy tomatillo sauce and gooey with the Monterey Jack cheese that puddled around them. My West Coast aunt ordered the cheese enchiladas; they were earthy with red chiles. She snuck me a sip of her margarita, and I thought this old joint was the most marvelous of Edens. I still do. The busboys are just boys now, but the enchiladas being placed before me at my table right now, with their crowning dollop of sour cream punctuated by fresh cilantro? Those have stayed in my heart.

See the recipe for El Coyote Enchiladas Suizas »
**See the recipe for El Coyote’s Cheese Enchiladas »

**El Coyote
7312 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
323/939-2255

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Today my breakfast consists of fruit juice (bottled apple juice mixed with water, 50/50; I’ve also squeezed an orange from a tree in my backyard into it) to help swallow the following vitamins: C, D3, B12, and folic acid. I’m told I get the rest of my vitamins in my bowl of bran flakes. On top of the bran flakes I hurl a mélange of blueberries, raisins, dried currants, and banana. All of that is swimming in organic nonfat, non-lactose milk. Once I’m done, there is still some milk left over at the bottom of the bowl. So as not to waste it, I throw in a handful of Cheerios. I drink a large cup of coffee with it all. I try to find coffee beans from Kenya, Peru, Brazil, or Costa Rica. Sometimes if I have a winning horse at the races I will buy a pound of Blue Mountain Jamaican Coffee—very, very expensive. In the coffee I have 2 percent milk. Nonfat milk turns it gray, and I like coffee-colored coffee. While this is my everyday routine, on the weekend it is huevos rancheros!

Huevos rancheros take a bit of making to make, so I go to my favorite Mexican restaurant,** Kay ‘n Dave’s** in Brentwood. Theirs are perfect: eggs over easy (whites firm, yellows runny) on toasted corn tortillas with beans and rice. They’re topped with ranchero sauce, pico de gallo, and cheese. Sometimes, when I’m finishing my last bite, I go crazy and I tell the waiter, “Please! Do it again!” He says, “All of it?” I say, “All of it! The works!”

Kay ‘n Dave’s
262 26th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90402
310/260-1355

See the recipe for Kay ‘n Dave’s Huevos Rancheros »

Mel Brooks is a writer, director, actor, and producer.

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Its mid-century signage—a neon whoosh wrapping its name and pointing at a humble clapboard house—is a nostalgic reminder of classic roadside diners, the inside true Americana. But the Modern Snack Bar is even better than it looks. This 54-year-old family-run diner on Long Island, New York’s agrarian North Fork is open in summer and fall only. Locals and seasonal visitors come to this adored hangout for its culinary riches: roast Long Island duckling raised on the farm right across the street, custardy shrimp and crab quiche, and the perpetual side of buttery mashed turnips (they prepare six tons of it during the Thanksgiving season alone). Sky-high lemon meringue pie ferried by waitresses who’ve worked here for decades tops off a meal of little fuss and loads of satisfaction. The clincher is a friendly word with co-owner Wanda Wittmeier: At 91, the matriarch still comes to work four hours a day to roll silverware in a front booth and chat.

See the Recipe for Shrimp and Crab Quiche »
See the Recipe for Classic Lemon Meringue Pie »

Modern Snack Bar
628 Main Road
Aquebogue, New York
631/722-3655

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