My dad first introduced me to the morning charm of Perry’s one Sunday a few years back. Since then, he makes time once every weekend to drive over and say hi to the ocean. It runs in our blood: visiting the beach, even if just for a few moments, is a cleanse for our brains. After spending the past year land-locked and studying in Arizona, I found myself more anxious to visit the ocean this summer than ever before.

The Perry’s that my dad and I patronize is a few miles past the Santa Monica Pier heading toward Venice. Sometimes I look around and wonder how a place could be so charming. A few times a week, as I made my summer commute from the San Gabriel Valley to an office in Santa Monica, I left an hour earlier than I needed to—all so I could park my car in a $1 per hour lot, leave my shoes in the car, and go to Perry’s.

Each visit begins the same way: I walk up to the counter and am greeted with a big smile by perhaps the cheeriest guy in this city. He’s patient with me as I stare at the board for minutes, contemplating their extensive menu.

Is it weird to have mahimahi tacos for breakfast? I wonder.

Deciding against it, I end up choosing the King Richard’s veggie breakfast burrito with egg whites.

I settle into one of the red lawn chairs they’ve set up in the sand as I watch the ocean waves and wait for them to call my number. I’m often the first number of the day. They open at 9 a.m. on weekdays, and that’s exactly when I like to show up.

On a Tuesday morning, there are rarely many people at this walk-up, shoe-optional beach café, and that’s a big reason I’m there. Beachfront peacefulness is hard to come by in a crowded city. Santa Monica is full of people and traffic, but it still feels like a real beach community before the day begins. There aren’t even that many cyclists out at that time—just a few joggers and weary surfers. It’s well worth waking up early to catch a moment of small-town charm.

Nothing I’ve found in L.A. beats the combination of crisp morning air, toes in the sand, and a small black coffee as I wait for my breakfast. It’s always a good morning after that.

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Joe, who had been my colleague at the Fair Housing Council of the San Gabriel Valley for nearly two decades, told me that we had never failed at anything, and we weren’t going to start now.

I put on my community-organizing hat and tried to get to know the movers and shakers around the park. I knocked on doors of Neighborhood Watch captains, at the neighborhood churches, at nonprofits, at local businesses, and at City Hall. Most of the people I met didn’t trust me at first, not even the street vendors we were trying to help; I was new and from Pasadena. Who was I, they asked me again? And would I stay?

I didn’t tell them the whole story, but I wasn’t someone who gave up easily. I was born in 1954, in Santa Monica, to Helen Flores and Casiano Romero. They divorced when I was 2, and I lived with three generations of women: my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. My great-grandmother, Alicia Gutierrez, who was originally from Michoacan, raised me until she passed away when I was 10. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she taught me about culture, often via food. The best memories of my childhood involve going into the garden in our backyard and picking fresh vegetables and herbs for cooking, and then coming inside where my grandmother would be baking, making atole, a warm corn drink, and plucking feathers to get the chicken ready for cooking.

At 14, I got pregnant and had my beautiful daughter. Instead of stopping me, becoming a mom made me more determined to focus on what was important, which was to be a loving, positive person who contributed to community. In times of struggle and hardship, I tried to learn from mistakes and put my faith in God.

After my husband died suddenly, in 1990, I reevaluated my life and left my position as executive director at the Fair Housing Council. I spent time working in Washington, D.C. on fair housing and traveled to China and to Chiapas, Mexico to work on women’s issues. Then, Joe and I joined forces and established a new nonprofit, the Institute for Urban Research and Development, through which I ended up in MacArthur Park.

Joe and I had never done anything like establishing a vending district before—and we couldn’t find anyone else who had, either. So we put the vending district together ourselves, from scratch. Joe found a designer and a manufacturer to build the vending carts. He also engaged the designer of the Santa Monica Promenade to help in redesigning the vending district. We didn’t want a swap meet feel. We wanted a real cultural hub, a destination that people from all over would want to come and visit!

That meant cleaning up the park, too. Every morning, before the carts would go out, I would go into the park and ask folks—mostly homeless people with shopping carts—to leave in order to make space for the vendors. Each day was a battle. Some of the homeless would become intoxicated and disturb the peace. I would pick up needles and empty wine and beer bottles and ask gang members to please step away to the other side of the park. Eventually, I got a special permit that gave us leverage, which helped. People still ask me all the time if I was scared, but I was never afraid and was never threatened.

I also began organizing community meetings for anyone interested in making MacArthur a safer, more beautiful place. These meetings led to the birth of the Rediscover MacArthur Park Alliance, which combats crime in order to revitalize the park and neighborhood. We got the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks to assign rangers to patrol the park and to help me clear out the homeless in the morning. Eventually, the LAPD partnered with us and patrolled on a regular basis.

As the Alliance worked on the park, Joe and I tried to figure out how to help the vendors make a decent living. In addition to crime, we had a difficult time getting the city health department to approve hot foods. The vendors wanted to sell elotes, champurrado (Mexican hot chocolate), tacos, and hot dogs, but the health department was worried about cross contamination and food poisoning.

We needed a staple that everyone could sell but that would allow each vendor to distinguish their cart. One day, Joe called me and said, “Tamales.” We called a meeting with our vendors—from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua at the time—and Joe proposed that each vendor make tamales from their respective country. They were resistant at first, but opposition disappeared when the health department gave its approval.

Joe suggested that in addition we start a café—also selling tamales—that would make people more comfortable with the vendors and the neighborhood. Joe, an Italian-American, told me that every good Italian restaurant has a “Mama” who comes out to ask how everyone is enjoying the meal. He asked me if I minded being called Mama. I didn’t. Mama’s Hot Tamales Café opened in 2002 by the south corner of the park.

One day that year, I was walking home from work at around 7:30 p.m. My path took me through the entire park—around the lake and through two tunnels—until I emerged at the opposite end from the café. I sat down and looked around and saw families and children playing, happy and laughing. Newly installed lights illuminated the park. It was hard to believe it was the same space I had spent so long battling over with gangs and the homeless.

That same year, William J. Bratton’s arrival as LAPD chief accelerated the improvements in the park. Back in 1998, I had counted around 700 arrests in the park alone, not even including the streets or surrounding neighborhoods. In December 2005, I called the senior lead police officer for the area and asked him how many arrests the department had made in MacArthur Park that year. The answer was zero.

The vending district closed in 2006, so we invited the vendors to come and prepare tamales for the café; they’d be reimbursed for all their tamales that we sold. The café also became a small business training center for local people as well as anyone in L.A. needing the support, guidance, and love it takes to build the confidence to start one’s own company.

In 2010, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a year later I underwent surgery. At the end of 2011, I closed Mama’s Hot Tamales Café and took a year off to go through treatments and heal.

Now I’m back in action, with a catering business, Mama’s Hot Tamales. I’m still very involved with community development and economic activities around MacArthur Park. The park has slipped a little bit, and some of the issues we tackled more than a decade ago are back. But trust Mama with her watchful eye: In a couple of years, we’ll see the park return to full strength. We’re not going to start failing now.

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My mother had dinner plans with a friend and no time to arrange a sitter, and so I found myself sitting at the bar at Sushi Ike trying not to stare at the row of raw fish filets in front of my nose. Stacked behind the glass counter in front of me were orange pink salmon, deep red ahi tuna, pearlescent white yellow-tail, fish eggs, eel, seaweed, octopus legs, and more!  It wasn’t whetting my appetite, but Ike had my attention.

Ike-san himself kept me entertained: carving pine trees out of cucumbers, daisies from carrots, all arranged beautifully on their own bed of sushi rice. When he presented me with a perfectly carved red rose—red because it was made from a flawless piece of ahi—I was enjoying the attention too much to be alarmed. And then, with my first bite of unbeatably fresh fish, somehow sweet and mineral-tasting and unlike anything I’d had before, I was hooked.

Sushi Ike has been a favorite go-to place for me ever since—whether it’s for a spontaneous night out with my mom or a quick hand roll before a show with my best friend. You won’t find a “dragon roll” or anything containing cream cheese in the joint, and requests for the aforementioned are met humorlessly. But for a bite of the freshest fish around, expertly sliced and diced before you, I won’t go anywhere else.

Ike-san has moved on to Sushi Kimagure in Pasadena, but Sushi Ike is now helmed capably by his former right-hand man. Like all L.A. gems, Sushi Ike is buried in a strip mall—tucked between Domino’s Pizza and Al Wazir Chicken, on the corner of Gower and Hollywood. The Pep Boys across the street suggests the ultimate form of Angeleno multi-tasking—grabbing a bite of sushi while getting your oil changed.

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Kleiman introduced Yoon by explaining how, in 2000, the former executive chef at Michael’s in Santa Monica came to open a restaurant famous for burgers and beer. But she wanted him to start at the beginning.

Yoon was born in Seoul. When, Kleiman asked, did he leave South Korea?

“I was the tender age of one, so I don’t have a lot of fond memories of Korea,” said Yoon. An only child, he traveled to L.A. with his parents by way of Tehran (his father was friends with the shah) and Paris (his mother worked for Chanel for many years). “I grew up in Brentwood, and I went to school in Santa Monica,” said Yoon. “Westside kid, don’t hate me for that!”

Yoon said his first entrepreneurial experience was “probably making fake IDs in high school.” He added, “I think the statute of limitations is up, so I can admit it now.” In college, Yoon started a small company with friends making snowboards just as the sport was taking off; three years later, they sold it to Salomon.

So how did food come into the picture?

Yoon said his parents weren’t culinary influences (“My mom cooks horribly”). They had loftier goals for him. “Back then there was no such thing as a famous chef–except Chef Boyardee,” he said. When he told his parents he wanted to become a chef, “They said, ‘You want to be the help?’”

But they agreed to let him go to culinary school in San Francisco after he graduated from high school a year early. His stint there was short but memorable. He was thrown out “for being a total dick”; he rebelled against the prescribed uniform, a pleated paper hat that was to be worn in all classes, even those in a classroom with no kitchen.

Yoon landed next at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, enrolling only after ascertaining that they didn’t require students to wear a hat in class. But his tenure there likewise ended early, this time after some late-night mischief at the expense of a classmate’s ice sculpture of Paris. “I re-carved the Eiffel Tower into a very phallic” structure, he said, and “added some balls.”

After working on a farm and in high-end kitchens in Europe, Yoon returned to Los Angeles. He recalled how, in the late 1990s, he and his colleagues lamented L.A.’s lack of a fine dining culture–which Yoon said he associated with the city’s not having a theater culture. Yoon was working at Michael’s, but he wanted to create a different type of restaurant.

Inspired by the casual enotecas, tapas bars, and brasseries of Europe, Yoon took over Father’s Office, a bar where he had been a regular for many years. He cleaned it up, added a small kitchen, refined the tap system, and, in 2000, opened L.A.’s first gastropub.

Father’s Office had long been one of the few places in L.A. that had a good selection of small-producer beers, and Yoon wanted to continue the tradition while serving food that reflected what he called “casual Europe.”

He had no intention of serving a burger, but a friend of his insisted. So Yoon drew on an unlikely source of data: an informal journal he’d kept of all the burgers he had eaten. Yoon compiled his notes into a spreadsheet, breaking down the parts–bun, sauce, meat–and trying to find a commonality among his favorite versions of the burger.

“I found I liked bacon,” he said.

He also borrowed the flavors of French onion soup (beef, bread, gruyere cheese, and sweet onions) and of dry-aged beef served at Peter Luger Steakhouse in New York. Father’s Office, too, dry-ages its beef. “It’s a step that nobody else takes. It’s an incredibly costly, labor-intensive piece of the pie that makes the beef the star of the show,” he said. This is why he didn’t want the burger to be condiment-laden.

“You know where this conversation is going,” said Kleiman: to ketchup. Why doesn’t Yoon have it on the menu?

“There was no intention not to serve ketchup,” he said. “I simply forgot it.” But “one guy ruined it for everyone” by giving Yoon a hard time the first night the restaurant was open. He decided if one guy was going to “be a dick about it,” Yoon wasn’t going to serve ketchup to anybody.

At the bottom of Yoon’s menu at Father’s Office is a warning: “No substitutions, modifications, alterations, or deletions.” Kleiman said that the same line now graces “every menu of a certain generation of chefs.” The directive wasn’t driven by ego but by necessity, Yoon said. His business was too small to accommodate special requests. “Sorry,” he told the crowd.

As the evening came to a close, Kleiman asked Yoon to talk about his newer project, Lukshon, which opened in Culver City in 2011, and his test kitchen. Lukshon’s name is a play on the Yiddish word for noodles–a strange choice for a Korean Angeleno chef. But, said Kleiman, Yoon “had a secret bubbe.”

When Yoon was a child, his parents met an older Jewish woman who became a grandmother to Yoon. She was his first culinary influence–he puts veal shin bones in all his stock because she put beef bones in all her dishes. She also taught him an important lesson about Chinese restaurants.

“My grandma Rose only ate pork in Chinese restaurants,” he said. And when he asked her why she felt comfortable breaking the rules of a Kosher diet, she told him, “‘God can’t see us in here.’” He grew up thinking Chinese restaurants were “safe havens from deities”–and he still believes that they’re a place where you can get away with a great deal of mischief.

So what has Yoon been up to at his test kitchen, and what’s next?

Yoon said that he equates his test kitchen–which isn’t attached to a restaurant–with a musician’s recording studio. It’s a place where he can “jam,” and experiment with his many modernist kitchen gadgets. He invented a special sink that freezes and recirculates water, helping save the large amounts of money restaurants spend on ice and energy to cool down hot ingredients.

Yoon also revealed that he has a top-secret project in the works. “I can share that it is top secret,” he said, and that “it involves really famous people.” But his lips were sealed.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked if, now that Yoon has made it in the industry, he feels he’s less innovative. Yoon said no, because his nature is to overthink things and also because the pressures are different now. He has 180 people working for him, and he’s thinking more about the business side when it comes to innovation. “You’ve got to find a way to do what you do better,” he said. “I have to make their jobs easier.”

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Read Angelenos’ ideas for the city’s next great restaurant chain here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

The post No, Sang Yoon Will Not Get With the Program appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles has given the world In-N-Out Burger, The Cheesecake Factory, California Pizza Kitchen, and, most recently, the Umami phenomenon. L.A.-based chef Sang Yoon has already given us Father’s Office gastropubs in Santa Monica and Culver City; could more locations–or an expansion of his newest restaurant, Lukshon, be on the way? In advance of Yoon’s visit to Zócalo, we presented a few worthy Angelenos with a challenge: You have several million dollars at your disposal to start up a new restaurant chain in L.A. What is its name, what does it look like, and what’s on the menu?

Tiki bar meets Cheesecake Factory

Having just returned from a belated honeymoon to Bali and Hong Kong, I have tropical on my mind. In Bali, decked-out clubs like Mozaic Beach Club and Potato Head Beach Club on Seminyak Beach, which offer a beach and pool paradise–without the expense of staying in a hotel–are all the rage. My L.A. take on these restaurants would be decorated with teak beds with flowing white curtains, authentic rattan chairs with colorful batik cushions, and glowing candle-lit globes that create a sybaritic Garden of Eden. Brazilian, Cuban, Jamaican, and Haitian music–plus the Beach Boys–would soothe the soul (or create the mojo) and whet the appetite. The food would be beach cuisine from around the world: camarones enchilados from Cuba; satays from Southeast Asia; papaya salad from Thailand; seafood paella from Spain; crispy cod fritters from Portugal; tzatziki, hummus, and pita from Greece; different tagines from Morocco; ceviche from Peru; fish tacos and burgers from Southern California; cioppino, the fish stew from San Francisco; crusty thin pizzas from Napoli; lobster rolls from Maine … You get the idea. These dishes are to be consumed with vast quantities of mojitos and daiquiris from Cuba; margaritas from Mexico; piña coladas from Puerto Rico; the best chilled rosés and Chablis from France; caipirinhas from Brazil; mai tais from Hawaii; and of course, ice cold beers from around the world. The name, inspired by L.A.’s iconic beach movies? Gidget’s HideAway.

Olga Garay-English is executive director of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

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A few of my favorite things

After considering and discarding a few ideas–a Hungarian restaurant (I’m desperate for good langos in L.A.) and a Korean sandwich shack (an idea I had long before the Kogi truck and wanted to call the “Kim Jong Grill” or “DMZ: Delicious Meaty Zone”)–I realized my restaurant chain needed to have broader appeal. Thinking about my favorite foods, I reduced them (like a veal bordelaise sauce) to three fundamental genres: sandwiches, pie, and beer.

This seemingly simple concept offers plenty of room for improvisation and variety. Nearly every culture makes some sort of sandwich, opening the door to deli staples like house-cured, thick-sliced pastrami as well as modern hybrids like bulgogi subs on chewy French rolls topped with kimchi, cochinita pibil tortas, pâté-smeared banh mi, Argentine choripanes, and Philly cheesesteaks.

I would feature a rotating assortment of seasonal fruit pies and basics like banana, chocolate, custard, and pecan. I’d offer a few specialty pies each month. (My marzipan, dark chocolate, and pear tart is a family favorite.) I’d also serve savory pies like a classic pot pie, a lamb shepherd’s pie, a chili-mac pie (that’s mac ’n’ cheese topped with chili), and my specialty, a turkey curry pie (my post-Thanksgiving staple).

Each brick-and-mortar location would have anywhere from a dozen to 50 local and craft beers on tap. It would be an upscale fast-casual joint, hitting the same price point and targeting the Mendocino Farms and Tender Greens crowd.

The name? SPB. Scrumptious. Primal. Beguiling. If you know anyone who wants to make SPB a reality (I’m talking to you, Evan Kleiman), call me.

Elina Shatkin is a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine. Previously, she was a restaurant critic for LA Weekly and a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. She is inordinately fond of bacon, dogs, bicycles, and unicorns.

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A working man’s prix fixe

One thing I’ve learned in six years of writing about food: if you’re hanging out (and making enemies) with restaurant industry folk, keep your good ideas to yourself. That said, I’d put my millions on this: a Comida Corrida joint.

Comida Corrida is the working man’s prix fixe menu, a four- to five-course meal that is usually eaten for lunch all over Mexico. It typically includes a huge Styrofoam cup of agua fresca, a vegetable soup, soft tortillas, a seasoned pasta, a meat stew, and a light dessert. A comida corrida is always du jour, filling, and made available for around 40 pesos. Its allure lies in the home-kitchen flavor imparted by the grandma who cooks it and the wild card aspect of a menu that changes daily.

My restaurants would be minimalist, with maybe a few earthy, industrial tables with padded seats and hamacas available for the siesta afterward–a Mexican American’s take on Mexico’s traditional fondas. They’d have take-out and sit-down service, a chalkboard with the day’s only menu (including an accidentally vegan Mexican dish for vegetarians), and they’d serve pulque at the bar from our very own Cabral Maguey orchards.

The name? Hmm … Comida Corrida “La Yerbabuena.” In honor of my mother’s birth ranch in Zacatecas, Mexico.

Javier Cabral is responsible for TheGlutster.com (formerly Teenage Glutster), a food, booze, music, and general desmadre blog. He is currently a half-time student at Pasadena City College and freelances for Saveur Magazine and LA Weekly.

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Would you like a microscope with that?

Such a generous investment presents the perfect opportunity to communicate the wonders of science through food in an experimental restaurant chain (with no stipulations about making a profit …).

The name: Science & Food Café.

What it looks like: The main restaurant design is crisp and minimal with a smattering of scientific accessories like whiteboards, centrifuges, and microscopes. While you’re waiting for your food, you’re invited to partake in The Daily Experiment, a simple lab exercise that teaches diners about the food they’re about to eat. You may even be able to meet one of the Visiting Chefs who drop by to make use of our equipment and try something new. There is also a reading section where you can sit and enjoy an espresso while perusing books on the scientific aspects of crema or how to craft a flaky piecrust. Mobile satellite restaurants–think a cross between a food truck and a bookmobile–also contain microscopes and help spread the joy of being curious about food.

What’s on the menu: Dishes are crafted to make you think about the molecules we eat. Fresh cheese is made at your table and served with an accompanying microscope–isn’t it amazing how our food assembles itself? Norwegian-farmed salmon is served alongside wild Coho, and is delivered to your table with a mini-lecture on the origins of these fish and their environmental impact; which do you prefer? You can also choose from a selection of simple, delicious foods, such as cherry pie with the flakiest piecrust (step-by-step instructions are available to take home), and seasonal cocktails, such as a nectarine old-fashioned infused with thyme by nitrous-oxide pressurization, a method for breaking apart individual cells that we have been optimizing in the lab.

Amy Rowat is Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology & Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also founder and director of Science & Food, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting knowledge of science through food, and food through science.

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A place to gather

Being asked to put together a new restaurant chain makes me feel like a four-year-old being asked to describe her dream house–there are so many things I want to include that my house would quickly become a multi-turreted, swimming-pool-laden monstrosity sure to tumble into the Pacific at the first sign of a quake. I want local ingredients! Well-crafted cocktails! Cheap beer! Healthy food! Comfort food! Fancy ingredients! Affordable meals! Mashed potatoes served sculpted just like the ones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind! (Topped with Teri Garravy.)

But in some ways, the menu is less important than the rest of what the restaurant serves up. I’m less interested in the type of restaurant Los Angeles might “need” to fill a culinary gap, and more more interested in a restaurant we could use--a place where people can come together and visit without feeling rushed, a place that encourages conversation.

Thus, my restaurant chain is called Gather–a term that can be applied to both people and seasonal food. I’m imagining a beer-garden-style space–big and open, but partially roofless so it never gets too loud. There are board games available at the bar but no TVs. I’m not going to be the jerk who bans cell phones, but I won’t complain if one location is built at the base of some beautiful, reception-blocking hills.

And while I’d want Gather to be inclusive and fun, don’t worry–the restaurant wouldn’t actually serve punny foods like Teri Garravy. Unless it’s Philip Seymour Stroganoffman, because how could that not be awesome?

Meg Favreau is a food writer, a comedian, and Senior Editor of the frugal living and personal finance site Wise Bread. She is also the author of Little Old Lady Recipes: Comfort Food and Kitchen Table Wisdom (Quirk Books).

*Photo courtesy of carlaarena.

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Americans have never had as many food choices as they do today. Nor have they ever relished food more for its own sake. It’s all very haute, this attention to cuisine, and it’s good for the restaurant business. It’s also easy to forget that, only a few decades ago, a good meal was hard to find outside of a major city, and, if you ordered pineapple salad, odds were you’d get pineapple suspended in Jello. But that doesn’t mean everything has changed for the better in the world of food. So in advance of “Does Foodie Culture Do Anyone Any Good?“, a Zócalo event, we asked several notable names in the world of food to offer their thoughts about what, from the era when salad meant Jello, we should be saddest to have lost. Should we miss anything?

We Should Miss the Garish Showmanship

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as happy as the next guy to lean against a dumpster and down a proper New England-style lobster roll. I can glibly debate the relative merits of various San Gabriel Shanghainese dumpling houses. And I’ll occasionally join wealthier foodies in a spare, too-loud dining room to ooh and ahh over a celebrity chef’s balsamic-drizzled heirloom tomato. But I increasingly miss what made L.A.’s famous restaurants unique: not their cuisine, but their Hollywood attitude toward dining out. Whether they served “Scalloped Chicken a la King” under a giant brown hat, “Beef Foo Yong” in an outrigger-bedecked “Polynesian” restaurant, or crispy, ground-beef “Rolled Tacos” amid a menagerie of plastic parrots at a “Spanish” cafe, L.A. restaurants used to know how to dress a set. Like the movie palaces and Busby Berkeley musicals of the same era, our iconic eateries were big-budget extravaganzas that tended (literally) toward the cheesy. Their emphasis was on sheer entertainment value, not historical accuracy or nuance. Was the food in any way “authentic”? Today’s foodie would say no, but I say: absolutely. It was authentically Hollywood.

Today’s foodie-fied L.A. cuisine is more flavorful and varied, but there’s little that distinguishes its flagships–Osteria Mozza, Providence, or Urasawa, say–from restaurants in San Francisco, New York, or Tokyo. Sure, some of the old idols survive. You can still consume a “Tahitian Pastrami Sandwich” and a Mai-tai surrounded by fishtanks at Bahooka, and Ricky’s Fish Tacos hasn’t sent El Coyote’s parrots packing. But Yelpers seem to have a zero-tolerance policy toward Thousand Island dressing, and the dinosaurs are on the decline. Even if some survive, the blockbuster Hollywood mojo that created them is lost. And that, foodies, is on you.

Jess Winfield is a writer, producer, and author of, most recently, My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drug, and Shakespeare. He blogs about food at L.A. Food Crazy.

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We Should Miss Mushy Veggies

What I miss most are vegetables cooked to melting tenderness. I like crispness as much as the next person–there’s nothing like a satisfying crunch in the mouth. But the foodie insistence on barely cooked vegetables leaves me, like the veggies, cold. Worst of all are the nearly raw green beans that are ubiquitous in restaurants with high aspirations. These beans may look bright and appealing on the plate, but they need cooking to eliminate their basic vegetal taste and bring out their natural sugar.

When beans are really fresh, in the summer, I’m all for crisp-cooking them, but when eating out I hate having to wield a steak knife on them. What I long for are comfort beans to warm the soul, the kind most restaurants wouldn’t be caught dead serving these days: green beans cooked southern-style for hours in a cast-iron skillet or pot, with a ham hock or bacon. You can cook them dry in a skillet or simmer them in water, but slow-cooked country beans need a good three hours to develop deep flavor and a soft texture, so soft they really do melt in your mouth.

Darra Goldstein is the founding editor and editor in chief of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. For more information visit www.darragoldstein.com.

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We Shouldn’t Miss Much–Except For Dining Cars

“Pre-foodie culture?” Is that supposed to mean we’re in a foodie culture now?
You say “salad meant jello,” but Native Americans and the Chinese who built our railroads never used those terms. The Spanish, Dutch, and English landed on the East Coast but it took a while to get west. (As colonial communities and civilizations took over civilizations and communities that were living from the earth, they found themselves trying to fill a void that their ancestors destroyed.)

If you are talking about Western foodie culture, we should realize that the Russians had a lot to do with the way we eat. That’s because we learned about the modern restaurant from the French, but the French in turn had learned from the Russians. The French, as amazing as they are, used to eat everything at once. Full, elaborate platters of food got plopped down on a massive table and everyone went to town. Then Antoine Careme, one of France’s pioneers of haute cuisine, adopted the Russian technique of serving courses one at a time.

The next step was the codification of recipes by Auguste Escoffier.

So when did salad become Jello?

First, gelatin is actually a meat from an animal. Molds for jellies date back centuries in England, before the edible green even became an option. When we started referring to Jello as salads few of us even understood we were eating meat.

What is “foodie culture” anyway? Is it what started in the early 70s in Berkeley, Ca? Or is it living off of the land like the farmers in New England, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Ohio, where families ate what they sowed? What about the Creole in the Bayou, as descendants of slaves mixed with the French to create a true regional cuisine?

To really be a foodie is to believe food can never be forced into a labeled way of living. I reject the idea that we’ve moved to a post state from a pre state. We are in no state.

But the question was: what do I miss?

I really miss the old dining cars of the early 20th Century, if you really want to know.

Roy Choi, godfather of the food truck movement, is also the founder of the restaurants Chego (in Palms), A-Frame ( in Culver City), and Sunny Spot (in Venice).

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We Should Miss Not Caring About Food

Foodie culture has caused Americans to think much more deeply about food–its origins, its social dimensions, its production, and its preparation in the kitchen. Part of what we’ve lost as a result is the liberty not to think about it. Food consumption used to be central to our days but simultaneously beneath our radar. People didn’t know why they loved Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Those things were just the familiar and unexamined fabric of their existence.

But the foodie vision reaches beyond the dining room and enters into politics and views of materiality. It requires education and judgments about what food habits are desirable and undesirable–or acceptable and unacceptable. It’s a worldview that lays claim to a political, even moral, high ground. Inevitably, it alienates those Americans who couldn’t care less about the life their hamburger led or the labor system that produced their Snickers. If something has been lost in foodie culture, it is food’s apolitical innocence.

Paul Mullins is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, President of the Society for Historical Archaeology, and author of books including Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (2008) and The Archaeology of Consumer Culture (2011).

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We Should Miss Clean, Fresh Food

This question implies that in the past food was terrible but now it’s fantastic. Not everyone ate Jello salad, and in many ways the food available to most people has deteriorated. Sure, there are upscale restaurants and foodie delicacies for those with money, but the prevalence of junk food, fast food, and convenience food suggests that most of us are eating even worse than our forebears did.

What we should be saddest to have lost is good, clean, fresh food–with whole ingredients, and not genetically modified or packed with flavor-enhancing chemicals–that people actually had to cook. Raw ingredients and the skills to cook them have been disappearing in the past decades. People cook less because the food industry has convinced them that cooking is a nasty chore that corporations should do for us. Advertisers say, “Who has time to cook?” Well, everyone should make the time. Go back another generation, before the 50s, and look for a good pot roast, a pot of simmering greens, real mashed potatoes–food that people actually had to cook at home without shortcuts or anything to compromise good, honest taste.

Ken Albala is professor of history and co-author of The Lost Art of Real Cooking and forthcoming The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home.

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We Should Miss Less Than You Fear

The culture of food is ever-changing. I’m not so sure that it’s food that shifts or our take on it. We may think we’re so much more evolved now, but snicker not! I guarantee that what is new and exciting today will produce eye rolling and laughter tomorrow.

I recently received a book called Menu Design in America. It’s a collection of restaurant menus from the past 135 years. Some of the menus were so preposterous (naked women everywhere) or clichéd (fillets of Boston Sole Belle Meuniere, Cotes de Porc with a Béarnaise sauce) I had to laugh. Then, mid-chuckle, I realized that everything I was laughing at I’d considered current and important 30 years ago while in cooking school.

Some of the old “bad” food I sort of miss. I mourn the passing of my mom’s Velveeta cheese dreams, her Wonder Bread toast with peanut butter, chutney, and Baco-Bits, and her icebox cakes with lady fingers. But I have a sneaking suspicion they’re not really gone. I think, with some updates, they’ll cycle back around in time for another curtain call. Don’t believe me? The “new” hot drink sweeping the country is Pabst Blue Ribbon with a shot of Jameson.

If that isn’t 1947, then I don’t know what is.

Susan Feniger, owner of Susan Feniger’s STREET and co-chef/owner of the Border Grill Restaurants, is a chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, radio and TV personality living in Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of faster panda kill kill.

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