I’m a sucker for lists, so I was eager to peruse the Jonathan Gold / LA Weekly’s 99 Things to Eat in LA Before You Die, looking for some local representation.  Here are the four dishes from Northeast LA that made the cut, and one more that should have based only on last night’s dinner:

Casa Bianca’s Sausage-and-Eggplant Pizza

First off, this is a California interpretation of thin-crust Southside Chicago bar pizza, so if you didn’t grow up rooting for the White Sox, back off: It doesn’t resemble the pizza from Taconelli’s or any place named Ray’s because it’s not supposed to, and it’s cut into diamonds instead of slices because that’s the way it’s done. Secondly, you don’t like canned mushrooms? Don’t order it with mushrooms. You’re offended by the idea of pineapple? Don’t order the Hawaiian. The pasta isn’t al dente? Go to one of those fancy places where the valet charge alone is more than the cost of feeding a family here. But if you’re in the mood for dense, crunchy, chewy, half-burnt, family-cooked pizza with fried eggplant and homemade sausage, nothing even comes close. Casa Bianca, 1650 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock. (323) 256-9617.

Huarache de Cabeza

A huarache, the definitive unit of Mexico City street food, is a flattish, concave trough of masa shaped like a size-12 sandal, pan-fried or deep-fried, then smeared with beans, sprinkled with meat and layered with lettuce, grated cheese and cream. Part of the fun is eating the thing — a huarache is too brawny to attack with a flimsy plastic fork, and you will either burn your fingers or wait for your lunch to cool into corn-flavored cement. Emily Post provides no guidelines for eating a huarache. You can have a huarache topped with almost anything, from the black corn fungus called huitlacoche to standard-issue steak, but I like it best with cabeza — rich, gelatinous meat pulled from a cow’s head and cooked down into an ultraconcentrated essence of beef. El Huarache Azteca #1, 5225 York Blvd., Highland Park. (323) 478-9572.

El Atacor #11’s Potato Tacos

You will encounter many schools of thought when it comes to these tacos, some of which call for coarsely mashed spuds, others for herbs, and still others for a wallop of chorizo. But all pale before El Atacor #11’s tacos de papa: thin corn tortillas folded around gooey spoonfuls of puree and fried to an indelicate, shattering crunch. The barely seasoned potatoes ooze out of the tacos with the deliberate grace of molten lava. The glorious stink of hot grease and toasted corn subsumes any subtle, earthy hint of potato, and guacamole-drenched tacos de papasevaporate so quickly from the table that you understand why they come 10 to an order. El Atacor #11, 2622 N. Figueroa St., L.A. (323) 441-8477.

Good Girl Dinette’s Chicken Pot Pie

I have occasionally posited the existence of universal comfort food, dishes that would convey warmth and love and abundance as well to an Inuit as it would to a Jain, in Canada as well as in Kyrgyzstan. Then I start daydreaming about fermented mare’s milk, and the afternoon goes downhill from there. But if you were going to compile such a roster, you could do worse than to include Good Girl Dinette’s chicken potpie, a classically transcultural dish of yellow Vietnamese curry, peas and carrots and everything, baked under a dense, buttery biscuit crust. Good Girl Dinette, 110 N. Avenue 56, Highland Park. (323) 257-8980.

Eibis Restaurant’s Arabes:  I wrote a pretty sophomoric post a few months ago about hunting down an Arabes truck in East LA, comparing it to Ahab’s White Whale from Moby ####.  The irony of course is that I drive within two blocks of Eibis Restaurant , which specializes in Poblano food, every day.  As a prerequisite for writing a food post I have to sprinkle a little knowledge on the dish at hand:  Allegedly, Arabes  trace their origins to Lebanese immigrants to central Mexico who brought spices from their homelands and applied them to pork, instead of the beef and lamb that was more common in Lebanon.  (For two other examples of successful Lebanese-Mexican fusion, see Salma Hayek, and Carlos Slim.)  At Eibis, the pork is roasted on a veritcal spit on the street (so as to maximize the exposure to exhaust emissions), filled with some salsa, and rolled into pan arabe, essentially a slightly thick flour tortilla, that has been warmed in corn oil.  One word of warning: I don’t think anyone at this restaurant speaks English beyond “hello”.  If you don’t speak Spanish, bring a friend, or prepare a script in advance.

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Eagle Rock Brewery finally ready to start brewing beer

Raub hopes to taste the fruits of his labors by late November. After that, you might see Eagle Rock's brews in local establishments like Verdugo, Colorado Wine Company, Oinkster, Blue Palms Brewhouse and BottleRock in downtown L.A. If all goes according to plan, Raub will also have secured a permit for the brewery's tasting room by then.

Located in a mostly industrial area near the intersection of the 2 and 5 freeways, the Eagle Rock Brewery is the only dedicated commercial brewery located within Los Angeles city limits (as opposed to restaurant/breweries like Weiland's, Bonaventure Brewing Co., BJ's, etc.). But the greater L.A. area is home to a burgeoning craft brewing scene that includes Angel City Brewing (Torrance), Craftsman (Pasadena), Skyscraper Brewing (El Monte), the Bruery (Placentia) and Hangar 24 (Redlands).

If Los Angeles, known more for its cocktail culture than its beer culture, is ever to become a beer town on par with Denver, Portland or San Diego, Raub thinks it's essential the city has more breweries. "We want to start small and keep it local," he says, "and help make Los Angeles a better beer town."

Eagle Rock sandwich shop celebrates Thanksgiving weekly

Dave Evans couldn't find a sandwich he liked when he moved to L.A.; so he created one: a Thanksgiving dinner on a bun, available every Thursday, September to April -- except on the holiday itself.

Dave Evans, owner of Dave's Chillin-n-Grillin in Eagle Rock, puts up orders of the Pilgrim: a French roll filled with grilled turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and turkey gravy, served most Thursdays, September to April. (Ricardo DeAratanha, Los Angeles Times / November 12, 2009)

Click "Keep Reading" to see entire article.  Highland Park is mentioned in the FIRST PARAGRAPH.

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY about food critic Jonathan Gold. For nearly twenty-five years, Jonathan Gold, the high-low priest of the L.A. food scene, has been chronicling the city’s carts and stands and dives and holes-in-mini-malls; its Peruvian, Korean, Uzbek, Isaan Thai, and Islamic Chinese restaurants; the places that serve innards, insects, and extremities. He tells his readers where to get crickets, boiled silkworm cocoons, and fried grasshoppers. On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals which new populations have come to town, and where they are, and what they’re cooking up.

Two years ago, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer, and a first for his home paper, the alternative L.A. Weekly.

Interesting cuisine, he believes, often comes out of poverty. He sees L.A. as “the anti-melting pot” —the home of true, undiluted, regional cookery—but also has a fondness for what he calls the “triple carom”: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas. Chefs read Gold, as do food nerds in their thirties who spend their weekends retracing his steps. Mentions Javier Cabral. Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman and for Mario Batali.

He is sly and erudite; withdrawn in person and, in print, exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone considers him the S. J. Perelman of food. Gold is forty-nine, and grew up in South Central. He attended U.C.L.A., and then worked for a legal newspaper downtown. As an experiment, he set about trying every restaurant along Pico Boulevard, which encompasses Korean, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Oaxacan, and Jaliscan areas. Mentions Brooklyn Bagel Bakery and Mama’s Hot Tamales.

Gold eats at three to five hundred restaurants every year, mentions Robert Sietsema. At the Weekly, when Gold was in his mid-twenties, he met Laurie Ochoa. They got married in 1990, and she has been his dining companion and first reader ever since. They have two kids, Leon and Isabel. Gold drives twenty thousand miles a year in search of food. Mentions the San Gabriel Valley. Gold has observed that the insular nature of L.A. allows imported regional cuisines to remain intact, traceable almost to the restaurant-owners’ villages of origin.

Describes Gold’s visit to a Malan fast-food restaurant and to a Sichuan restaurant in Rowland Heights. In 1990, Gold started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in, for the first time. To Gold’s readers, his reviews have the ontological status that the New York Times has for people interested in current events: he doesn’t write about it because it is, it is because he’s written about it.

Gold used to guzzle hot sauce as a kid, and he still eats as if his manhood depended on it. He suspects that he has encouraged those he calls the “dining-as-sport” crowd. The other night, the stunt dish was live octopus, in a divey strip-mall restaurant. Mentions Jitlada, a restaurant with a once-untranslated menu of hard-to-find southern-Thai specialties.

Jonathan Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants

Between a tweet and a truck

By Jonathan Gold

published: August 27, 2009

Anne Fishbein

As surely as figs ripen, basil bursts into fragrance and the paleta vendors step up their rounds, so too arises the question of what an essential Los Angeles restaurant experience might be, whether one is in line at a taco stand or sipping an exquisite Meursault among the Robert Graham bronzes in the patio at Michael’s. And in this year, which saw both the grandest restaurant openings in decades and the rise of the pedal-powered pushcart, the discussion takes on a different sort of weight.

The idea of an essential Los Angeles restaurant includes neither the kitchen so hamstrung by the whims of the farmers market that it is barely able to get a sandwich to table, nor the hotel dining room run by a supremely gifted Spanish chef but slinging the more reproducible artifacts of molecular cuisine without respect to season or place. Luxury for the sake of luxury seems almost vulgar now — you’re probably not going to see a padded footstool for your purse again — but the ruder sorts of chefly idiosyncrasy, the bit of pickled lard in your tomato salad, are going to be around for a while.

This year especially, an essential L.A. restaurant may not even be a restaurant at all — it may be a tweet telling you which street corner to hang around at, or a cart parked in the same location from the hours of 11 to 2. Clubgoers are used to seeing their favorite band at the Smell one week and at Spaceland the next, but it is a new thing for diners, separating chef from dining room, the exultation of guerrilla cuisine.

As we’ve said before, an essential restaurant is one that reflects Los Angeles in a startling and unusual way, that uses fresh local ingredients in a fashion that respects the land in which they were grown, that showcases cooking echoing both foreign-trained chefs’ region of origin and the hypercharged mosaic of the L.A. dining scene. An essential restaurant moves people, inspires them to think about food in a different way, inspires them to think about Southern California as a great agricultural region, a great port, a builder of the shiny symbolism that is a large factor in how the rest of the world thinks of itself. And it’s also a damned good place to eat. —J.G.

* DENOTES RESTAURANTS NEW TO THE LIST

http://www.oxy.edu/x8270.xml

November 4, 2008

Students celebrate in Samuelson Pavilion

A roar that could be heard all across the Occidental College campus erupted Tuesday night when television commentators declared Barack Obama ’83 had been elected the 44th president of the United States -- the country’s first African-American chief executive.

Students gathered in Haines Hall, where Obama lived his freshman year, and packed into Samuelson Pavilion broke into cheers when the announcement was made -- a moment captured by a local television crew .

“We are proud that an Occidental alumnus will be serving in the country’s highest office,” said Occidental President Robert A. Skotheim. “Barack Obama is the latest expression of Occidental’s long history of public service that has produced such distinguished leaders as Robert Finch, Class of 1947, Jack Kemp, Class of 1957, and Rear Admiral Marsha Johnson Evans, Class of 1968.”

Kemp, a presidential candidate in 1988 and a vice-presidential nominee in 1996, served as one of Sen. John McCain’s chief economic advisors and barnstormed through the key states of Ohio and Florida during the final days of the campaign urging voters to support his old friend.

Although Obama transferred to Columbia University in 1981 at the end of his sophomore year, the significance of the two years he spent at Occidental was a theme than ran through much of the reporting about his candidacy.

Change of Heart
My neighbors and I just couldn't get along.
By Mary A. Fischer

Being in the Minority


 In 1992, like many people in Los Angeles, I watched TV news reports of Rodney King speaking to the press after four officers accused of beating him in 1991 were acquitted, leading to riots in the city. As King spoke to reporters, he plaintively asked, "Can we all get along?"

 "No! We can't," I shouted back at the TV, though no one else was in the room to hear me. Mine was not an idle, uninformed response. I knew what I was talking about. In late 1989, I had bought a house in an affordable eastside neighborhood of Los Angeles called Highland Park, which was being transformed by waves of new immigrants, and I was convinced racial harmony was impossible. Statistics said that each year, tens of thousands of new immigrants, mostly from Latin America and Asia, were pouring into Southern California, yet for most whites, these trends remained in the abstract realm of statistics.

 

This is the kind of store that Highland Park has been waiting for! Great selection of fresh produce, bulk nuts, dried fruits, etc. individually packaged on site, a meat counter with personal service and fresh meats w/ good prices, baked goods, spices, most grocery necessities, and a made to order sandwich counter tucked next to the meats and seafood counter.   All delightfully presented in a quaint "cooperative" atmosphere with attentive and devoted staff on hand to assist.  Let's all welcome this cross between "Trader Joes" and "Food for Less" with open arms!  (It's in the old Blockbuster space next to the 99¢ Store on York at Fig.)  - Here's their website URL:  http://www.figueroaproduce.com/

Figueroa Produce

Ξ July 1st, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ 90042, Food, Highland Park, Shopping |

The readers are really motivating me to get off my ass and do some posting on the neighborhood this week.  This time, Heather sent an email with the subject line “I Love Figueroa Produce” (It’s so nice to see proper capitalization in an Email…).  Well Heather, I love Figueroa Produce too.

Approximately 9,000 people attended events at Lummis Home, Casa de Adobe and Sycamore Grove Park on Sunday June 1 for the 3rd annual Lummis Day Festival

Man finds $140,000, then his conscience