One thing Los Angeles has? Food. Lots and lots of food. And the king of the castle: Mr. Jonathan Gold, meandering though the seedy back alleys of this metropolis, scouting the next big taco. To introduce his latest annual list of the 99 Essential Restaurants in L.A., he writes:
"The best enchiladas I've ever tasted were made by a woman whose makeshift stand occasionally pops up around the corner from a more established stand whose location I can never quite figure out. The most celebrated young chef in Los Angeles imports his restaurant into a different kitchen every couple of months, like a soufflé-happy hermit crab inhabiting a new shell. At one of the most popular new places in town, your dinner may be prepared one night by one of the most famous chefs in Mexico; the next by a moonlighting lackey from a place you wouldn't eat at with somebody else's mouth.Read The List here, then meet the master, here.
Is the restaurant the empty taqueria where the cook watches Lucha Libre between customers, or is it that taqueria's truck out in the parking lot, with lines stretching down the block? Is reality the hamachi with pig's foot that you eat at a famous restaurant, or is it that same hamachi with pig's foot handed over with a smile at a charity benefit buffet?
The mantra of Local, Seasonal, Sustainable, Organic has become so persistent in Los Angeles, and the crush of chefs at the farmers market is so pervasive, that the menus at some restaurants seem almost identical to one another at certain times of the year, and completely different from their own menus in spring. Heraclitus once wrote that it is impossible to step in the same river twice. In Los Angeles, it can be nearly impossible to eat in the same restaurant twice.
This is, I believe, what the economists call creative destruction. And it is not impossible here to experience extremes — restaurants that are born and die in a single evening; restaurants in suburbs so distant that they may as well be theoretical; restaurants so hard to get into that they may not actually exist outside of blogs.
Los Angeles is where the modern restaurant was born, the good, the bad and the ugly of it, and we're too far gone to stop now.
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