Four great places to eat in Los Angeles - San Francisco Chronicle

For this past week’s review, The Chronicle sent me to Los Angeles to check out Alice Waters’ splashy project, Lulu. You can read the review here. I spent a week in the city — the better to space out my three visits to the restaurant — and [insert original quip about traffic here]. 

There’s a lot to love about Los Angeles: its seemingly infinite textures, the papery crinkle of swaying palm fronds, the beans of searchlights stretching up into the night sky. I would have loved to spend another week just in the San Gabriel Valley, and maybe I will when some other Bay Area luminary opens a spot over there. One can dream, anyway.

When I wasn’t walking the halls of the Hammer Museum to digest my meals at Lulu, I found other good places to eat. While I travel, I try desperately to relax and quell my urge to optimize — to make every meal the BEST meal I could ever eat — but, well, it tends to work out that way anyway. (It helps that my friends and family there have great taste.) Here are some of the highlights, if you happen to find your way over there soon.

Country Style Jamaican Restaurant

This Jamaican spot in Inglewood got in my crosshairs while I was scoping out a place to eat before my flight back to San Francisco, and it made for an incredible goodbye meal. (A tip of the hat to LA Eater’s Mona Holmes on this one!) Its business is primarily takeout, so I’m not too proud to admit that this was a meal eaten off the trunk of my rental car. Even so, the decor of the restaurant has a heartfelt atmosphere: The green, black and yellow walls are hung with portraits of Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama and Bob Marley. Outside, diners like me expertly dig fingers into ore-like blocks of braised oxtail, mining the crevices for succulent shreds of meat.

I was tempted by the whole fried snapper escovitch, which looked entrancing covered with slivered peppers and okra, but since it was just me, I grabbed a combo plate with jerk chicken and curried shrimp. While my intention was to go light, it came piled with starches, just like a plate you’d make if you were at a cookout and fully intended to pass out on the couch after: deep-fried festival bread, rice and peas, plantains. A pineapple-ginger drink, with an aftertaste that sizzled with the spiciness of fresh ginger, was an essential accompaniment to all that.

10:30 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday-Sunday. 630 N. La Brea Ave., Suite 111, Inglewood. 424-227-6915

Sonoratown

Flour tortillas are the backbone of Sonoratown, a taqueria with two locations in Los Angeles. The restaurant is an homage to the cuisine of San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, the hometown of co-owner Teodoro Diaz-Rodriguez, Jr., as well as a shout-out to a historically Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles. Sonoran food, also known for its bacon-wrapped hot dogs (and burritos!) and mesquite-grilled carne asada, isn’t incredibly common in the Bay Area, though there are some small businesses here that do focus on it and other regional Mexican cuisines.

It’s worth it to pause before you eat your tacos to give the tortillas themselves a sniff to take in the aromas of toasted wheat and pork. The gauzy tortillas, crosshatched with grill marks and made with Sonoran wheat and lard, would be good eaten simply brushed with butter. But the shop’s fillings, and the piquant chiltepin salsa you can drizzle over the whole package, are just as satisfying. Definitely try the burrito, which I think really showcases the flakiness of the tortilla when it’s folded over itself. And consider also ordering a taco, splashed with creamy, pastel-green avocado sauce and salsa roja — think of it like the “dessert” slice at the House of Prime Rib.

11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. 208 E. 8th St., Los Angeles. 213-628-3710 or www.sonoratown.com

Wat Thai Temple

A great place to walk around aimlessly is this Thai Buddhist temple in North Hollywood, which hosts a bustling open-air food market in its parking lot on the weekends. You’ll find a wide variety of Thai street food here: smoky grilled squid skewers, deep-fried mussel fritters, pandan jellies swimming in fresh coconut milk and bamboo shoots dusted with toasted rice powder. Prices for entrees hover at around $7, and there’s plenty of seating on the premises.

While I’d generally recommend staying away from the fried stuff, which turned out pretty soggy by the time I got it, the soups and desserts are really something special here. The tom yum noodle soup sparkles with chile pepper spice and citrus, while shrimp balls, a bubbly fried wonton chip and coarse ground pork add body to the broth. To finish the meal off, even though we were deliriously full, my companion and I picked up mango sticky rice. Paired with slices of mango that vibrated with a floral aroma, the rice was pleasantly green, tinted by pandan leaf, and scattered with crisp mung beans. If I had more time, I would have certainly gone back to try even more.

8 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. 8225 Coldwater Canyon Ave., North Hollywood, Los Angeles. 818-780-4200 or www.watthailosangeles.com

Yangban Society

In late 2019, Katianna and John Hong left Wine Country, and their jobs as head chefs at Charter Oak and the Restaurant at Meadowood, to start a family and open a casual Korean American restaurant in Los Angeles. What diners got was Yangban Society, the restaurant the couple fantasized about for years: where matzoh ball soup is bulked up with confited fingerling potatoes and hand-torn sujebi noodles, and the deli counters are filled with kimchi breads, chilled acorn noodles and blueberry cobbler. Since it opened in the Arts District this past January, the Korean-Jewish hybrid has gained national acclaim and landed on multiple best new restaurants lists.

That’s a lot of hype to live up to, but I think it’s truly earned it. That phenomenal matzoh ball soup, redolent with the refreshing flavor of dill, was as rich with chicken bone essence as paitan ramen. The Hongs’ team also have a special way with flaky doughs, as showcased in the restaurant’s crisp biscuits, draped in curry gravy, and the crust that covered the congee pot pie. You don’t usually expect to come out of a Korean American restaurant singing about biscuits and pie crust, but that’s the truly fun part of this place. 

5:30-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 5:30-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. 712 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles. 213-866-1987 or https://yangbanla.com

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Four great places to eat in Los Angeles - San Francisco Chronicle
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Unusual Foods Queen Elizabeth Liked To Eat - Tasting Table

In Russell Hoban's 1964 children's classic "Bread and Jam for Frances," the eponymous Frances eats her favorite food day after day until she gets sick of it, thus learning a valuable lesson in why little badgers (and people) need to eat a variety of different foods. ("Green Eggs and Ham," published just a few years earlier, touched upon the related theme of trying new things, so obviously dietary kidlit was big in the early '60s.) Meanwhile, across the ocean, the reigning Queen of England was already in her fourth decade of eating bread and jam every day... although, to give Her Majesty her due, the rest of her diet was as varied and nutritious as any mid-century dietitian could wish.

According to (who else?) Darren McGrady, the queen had a favorite teatime treat called jam pennies that she ate on a daily basis ever since she was five years old. The dish couldn't be much simpler as it consists of small, circle-cut sandwiches of Frances' old favorite, bread and jam. (The queen's preferred flavor was strawberry.) We're not entirely sure we believe McGrady's assertion that Her Majesty ate jam pennies every single day for 91 years, as what with the Blitz, her coronation, a couple of zillion occasions of state, not to mention all the world traveling she did, surely she missed a day here and there. She did, however, seem to have enjoyed this simple nursery treat throughout her long life.

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Was This Book the Original Eat, Pray, Love? - JSTOR Daily

When Elizabeth Gilbert’s sensationally popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love was published in 2006, readers felt like they were being treated to something new. Here was a female writer who, seemingly for the first time, blended an engaging travelogue with an honest and intimate account of personal trauma. What many may not know is that, despite the critical and commercial success of Eat, Pray, Love, it wasn’t the first narrative of its kind. More than two centuries earlier, in 1796, Enlightenment philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft published her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to widespread acclaim.

Women’s travel writing in the eighteenth century was sparse, its authorship typically restricted to wealthy aristocratic ladies writing as a pastime during or after being abroad with their families. Missing was the objective of producing a bestseller. Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was such a book: informative yet guarded, with the author always conscious of the threat to her reputation if she included content better left secret.

Like Elizabeth Gilbert, Wollstonecraft embarked on her physical and spiritual journey in the aftermath of a major relationship breakdown.

But Wollstonecraft wasn’t an aristocrat with a high social status to uphold. She was a middle-class working author and journalist who had a young daughter (Fanny Imlay) to support and inner demons to work through in the form of a project. This turned out to be the key for writing a trailblazer. And Wollstonecraft also wasn’t scared of critics. She’d already penned and published the explosive A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. She could, and would, write whatever book she had in her head.

Title page from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 1796 via Wikimedia Commons

Like Elizabeth Gilbert, Wollstonecraft embarked on her physical and spiritual journey in the aftermath of a major relationship breakdown. Gilbert went through a divorce, Wollstonecraft split with her American lover, Gilbert Imlay. Wollstonecraft was traveling across Northern Europe in a vain attempt to win him back; he needed someone to track down valuable cargo that had been stolen by a shady business associate. Wollstonecraft didn’t succeed in recovering the goods, but she did acquire a rich trove of material in the form of the letters she exchanged with Imlay. The resulting book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, sold well and helped alleviate attitudes toward women traveling alone and having worldly adventures accompanied by revelations. This is exactly what Eat, Pray, Love would do in its own era.

In Romantic Outlaws, a dual biography of Wollstonecraft and her equally famous (second) daughter Mary Shelley, Charlotte Gordon not only traces the history of Letters of Sweden’s publication but also includes her own review of it. Swap the names, and it could easily be a review of Eat, Pray, Love, in terms of the book’s best merits and ground-breaking achievements within its parallel genres.

“The book is a psychological journey, one of the first explicit examinations of an author’s inner life, tracing Mary’s path from despair to self-acceptance, from desolation to a hard-won tranquility,” Gordon writes. “As such, Letters from Sweden is a reflective, innovative book, an emotional but philosophical announcement of the artist’s artistic goals, her initiation of an artistic revolution. As one modern critic puts it, Mary’s ‘revolutionary feminism’ allowed her to transform the genre of travel writing.”

“Wollstonecraft gains authority for her writing by inviting readers to an ‘intimacy’ with her,” suggests literature scholar Christine Chaney. From the outset, it appears that the reader is privy to the innermost thoughts and details of Wollestonecraft’s transformative journey. However, as narrative theory analyst Mary Heng notes, Wollstonecraft heavily edited and altered some of the letters to present a more idealized and level-headed version of herself, hiding the emotional crisis she was experiencing while writing.

Here Gilbert can be given more credit in terms of authenticity; her book may have been a bit more honest,  venturing a bit more shamelessly into gritty and explicit territory. However, as Chaney reminds us, the stigma around sensitive topics such as suicide and uninhibited female romantic and sexual passion, especially in print, was extreme in Wollstonecraft’s time. Wollstonecraft may not have been able to get away with bending the truth in our no-nonsense, fact-checking, twenty-first-century literary culture, but perhaps she can be forgiven for her act of self-preservation, as a struggling single mother writing to make a living, at the end of the 1700s.

Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Wollstonecraft Letters shouldn’t be pitted against each other for the imaginary title of Best Woman’s Travel Memoir of All Time but instead appreciated separately for the bravery with which each author appealed to their contemporary audiences. The message of both books is clear and kindred: travel with me, and see what I see. Understand me, and don’t judge me. Read on with an open mind.

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Extra! Extra! Eat all about it! A Little Something Extra Ice Cream… - 1819 News

Collinsville High School. Photo: Brian Moats.

Photo: Brian Moats.

Advocating

Both Michelle and Hunter visited Collinsville High School Thursday to share their story and to inspire students.

Hunter graduated in 2020 from Geraldine High School and he is already a CEO of a business. Although he said it is very hard work, he is thankful to have employment.

“It’s awesome,” said Hunter Norwood. “I like working with my friends, meeting new people and of course unlimited ice cream. Yes, I eat all the ice cream!”

Michelle Norwood said when Hunter was born doctors told her he would not be able to do things that she might expect him to do.

“Really they didn’t have the right to tell me what he would or wouldn’t do,” Michelle Norwood said. “Because no matter how we come into this world, we all come with a purpose.”

That’s why Michelle Norwood said she wants to be an advocate for all people with exceptionalities. She also wants to use her experience with her son as an example to all children and young adults with dreams.

“I remember someone telling me I was terrible at math when I was in the eighth grade,” Michelle Norwood told the class. “Suddenly, I thought, ‘I’m terrible at math.’ Then I just started thinking I wasn’t smart. I went onto college and I’m really not great at math, but I worked hard and I ended up having the highest grade in the class. I ended up with three graduate degrees. So, people, I’m just telling you, don’t let somebody define you with words. You can work so hard, and you can set your goals. It can be anything.”

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Extra! Extra! Eat all about it! A Little Something Extra Ice Cream… - 1819 News
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This Eating Habit May Harm Cognitive Function, New Study Says — Eat This Not That - Eat This, Not That

The old saying tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it turns out that tidbit of food-related wisdom could be true. That's because a new study has found that skipping breakfast could seriously harm your cognitive function.

The results were reported in a paper by Dr. Changzheng Yuan and Dr. Dongmei Yu of Zhejiang University, which was published in Life Metabolism. The findings were based on a study that involved 3,342 participants from the China Nutrition Health Survey (CHNS) public database. All were men with a mean age of 62 years old. The data focused on the eating habits of the participants—specifically when they were eating and what meals they tended to skip—while also conducting phone-based tests related to cognitive functions such as recall, counting, and basic math.

While noting various lifestyle and health factors might affect the outcomes, the researchers found that eating meals over an evenly-distributed schedule was best for cognitive health. On the other hand, skipping breakfast increased the risk of harm to cognitive function.

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"This study is no surprise and makes complete sense, mostly because it coincides with similar studies that suggest the same results for children, adolescence, and young adults who skip meals," Kiran Campbell, RDN, a registered dietitian nutritionist, tells Eat This, Not That!6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

Campbell notes that "skipping breakfast, no matter the reason, ends up being entirely counterproductive in the end," saying, "Whether you are in a rush, don't know what to eat, or are just not hungry at the moment, skipping breakfast is a bad idea. That being said, Campbell notes that "eating a poor-quality breakfast consisting of only simple sugars (such as a candy bar) can have a negative impact on cognitive function."

Explaining that "our bodies rely on glucose as fuel to keep our brain functioning at an optimal level," Campbell says that "if your first meal of the day is skipped altogether, you are essentially depriving your body and brain of the fuel it needs to get going and sustain yourself until you do decide to eat."

RELATED: The #1 Worst Intermittent Fasting Mistake, Dietitian Says

As for eating on a more evenly distributed schedule, Campbell says, "I instruct patients to go no longer than 4 to 5 hours without eating during waking hours. This is to not only prevent the decline in cognitive function and thinking skills but to also maintain proper blood sugar levels and body weight over time."

Indeed, beyond the benefits to cognitive function, Campbell points out that "skipping meals has negative effects on other areas in addition to cognitive decline." She tells Eat This, Not That!, "Studies indicate that skipping meals may be linked to weight gain and increased risk for metabolic diseases, CVD risk, hypertension, insulin resistance, and elevated fasting lipid concentrations."

That's why "your goal should be to start the day right with the nutrients your body and mind need to function properly," and, as Campbell noted previously, "make sure you refuel every 4 to 5 hours to continue the process."

Desirée O

Desirée O is a freelance writer who covers lifestyle, food, and nutrition news among other topics. Read more about Desirée

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USDA issues public alert because Listeria found in ready-to-eat wieners - Food Safety News

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has issued a public health alert because Family Fare, a Chippewa Falls, Wisc. establishment, produced ready-to-eat chili cheese wieners that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. A recall was not requested because it is believed that the products are no longer in commerce.

“FSIS is concerned that some product may be in consumers’ refrigerators or freezers. Consumers who have purchased these products are urged not to consume them. These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase,” according to the public alert.

The ready-to-eat chili cheese wieners were produced on Sept. 21. The following products are subject to the public health alert:

• 15-ounce vacuum-packed packages containing “Our Local SMOKEHOUSE Chili Cheese flavored Wieners” with a use by date of Jan. 19, 2023.

The products have establishment number “695SEWI” printed inside the USDA mark of inspection on the labels. These items were shipped to a Family Fare retail location in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, where three packages of the wieners were sold.

The problem was discovered when the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture reported to FSIS that some product was found to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes during routine testing.

There have been no confirmed reports of adverse reactions due to consumption of these products. Anyone concerned about an illness should contact a health care provider.

About Listeria infections
Food contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes may not look or smell spoiled but can still cause serious and sometimes life-threatening infections. Anyone who has developed symptoms of Listeria infection should seek medical treatment and tell their doctors about the possible Listeria exposure.

Also, anyone who has eaten any of the recalled products should monitor themselves for symptoms during the coming weeks because it can take up to 70 days after exposure to Listeria for symptoms of listeriosis to develop. 

Symptoms of Listeria infection can include vomiting, nausea, persistent fever, muscle aches, severe headache, and neck stiffness. Specific laboratory tests are required to diagnose Listeria infections, which can mimic other illnesses. 

Pregnant women, the elderly, young children, and people such as cancer patients who have weakened immune systems are particularly at risk of serious illnesses, life-threatening infections, and other complications. Although infected pregnant women may experience only mild, flu-like symptoms, their infections can lead to premature delivery, infection of the newborn, or even stillbirth.

(To sign up for a free subscription to Food Safety News,click here)

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No power? Here's how long your food is safe to eat - West Orange Times & Windermere Observer

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No power? Here's how long your food is safe to eat  West Orange Times & Windermere Observer
No power? Here's how long your food is safe to eat - West Orange Times & Windermere Observer
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