To Know is to Taste

Los Angeles is a hundred cities spread out over a hundred miles. Travel south to north on the 110 - from industrial Long Beach to sleepy Altadena – and you’ll unconsciously bypass main streets and markets, high schools and fire stations. Likewise, when you go west to east - from Santa Monica to San Dimas – you’ll traverse more city signs than you can count.

I imagine sometime ago, the many cities of Los Angeles seemed fairly distinct – separated by unseen lines of school competition and social demographics. Planning commissions probably designed splendid layouts for Arcadia and city councils from Montebello to Torrence envisioned making their city better and brighter than all others. But the feeling you get today as you drive the streets of Los Angeles is that the city has grown beyond any sort of planning commission. Urbanization has swallowed all perceived boundaries. The county has lost the manufactured landscape you’ll see in Zionsville or Orange County and has become organic – a thing unto itself. It stretches and lurches and blends into the vast hills and valleys.

And, yet, as amorphous as LA has become, tiny fragments of particularity still exist. Certain cinemas or buildings stand out above the rest. But, after living here for more than three years, I can think of only one thing that truly distinguishes one city from another in Los Angeles: food.

Food is the great differentiator in a land of plurality and anonymity. It wouldn’t seem so at first glance since the food of Los Angles is as varied as the people who call it home. Besides, you’re bound to find a McDonalds or Starbucks whether you’re driving on Sunset Blvd or Rosemead Blvd. But, the important thing is that long after all these minor cities lost their original borders, certain eating establishments have managed to thrive. Thus, while no one in Los Angeles can clearly draw an outline for the city they live in, they can quite easily tell you which restaurant or burger joint puts their city on the map.

Pasadena is known for Marsten’s, Pie n’ Burger, El Taquito #2, and Saladang. And, of course, every Little Tokyo to Little Armenia has its own “gotta have” sushi or shwarma, just like you only go to Monterey Park for a good dumpling. Culver City has La Dijonaise; Hollywood has Pink’s. These are the trademarks that keep LA interesting and separate. They’re also why you’d drive thirty miles to eat dinner in Santa Monica when there’s over four hundred restaurants in Pasadena.

When I first moved out here, Matt Cecil – an old friend from high school – gave me a book called “Counter Intelligence,” which was one man’s exploration and expose on where LA’s best eateries are. It’s still one of my favorite reads, and just to prove how central and significant food is to LA culture (not to mention how great this guys writing is), I’m going to quote an excerpt from Jonathan Gold’s review of Zankou Chicken:

“Nothing on heaven or on Earth may be as severe as the Armenian garlic sauce served at Zankou Chicken, a fierce, blinding-white paste the texture of pureed horseradish that scents your car, sears the back of your throat, and whose powerful aroma can stay in your head – and your car – for days. A couple of drops is enough to flavor a hunk of bread; a modest schmear will do for an entire shwarma sandwich. Go ahead, Ultra Brite; go ahead, Lavoris; go ahead, CarFreshener: My money’s on the sauce. It’s also good with chicken … the spit-roasted chickens are superb: golden, crisp-skinned, and juicy, with developed chicken flavor, the kind of bird that makes you want to scour the carcass for stray bits of carbonized skin and delicious scraps of flesh, or hoard your favorite bites … that rich chunk of dark meat right where the leg joins the thigh, or that tender strip running along the top. Such chicken really needs no embellishment – but a little bit of garlic sauce couldn’t hurt.”

I could go on with other reviews, but you’re either (a) from Los Angeles and salivating by this point or (b) not from Los Angles and screaming, “Who cares!” I only bring this up to explain why Anna and I had to go to Diddy Riese’s in Westwood tonight.

Our main reason for going to Westwood – for snailing our way up and down the 405 – was to see Lon Chaney (the man of a 1,000 faces) in the original “Phantom of the Opera.” That silent film – by itself – is worth another blog another time.

But right now we’re talking food – specifically $1 ice-cream sandwiches. We’re talking Diddy Riese. Just like IU had the “hot dog” stand guy and DePauw had Marvin’s, UCLA has this cookie shop, which has somehow locked its prices into the 1960’s ($1.75 for three scopes of Dreyer’s ice cream). It is opportunistically located near the nightlife of the college, which makes it a great curtain call for the day.

All of this meant Anna and I had to take full advantage of our rare trip to the Westside. Chocolate cookie chocolate chip with mint chip ice cream for Anna, and chocolate chip with espresso chip ice cream for Wes … and a half dozen white chocolate macadamia nut cookies for the week. Ah, make that five cookies for the week as of a ten minutes ago.

Hey, when in Rome …

Because to truly understand Los Angeles, to get a grasp of the variety, you have to experience it – taste it. And after eating an ice-cream sandwich for a buck in Westwood, all I can say is that the America of Hollywood’s golden years still exists – if only in between the warm, crumbly, soft-chew of two chocolate chip cookies … prepared by Latinos and enjoyed by Asians and African-Americans, of course. This is Los Angeles.

Wes