I purchased the wok, dusted off my Jennifer Brennan book and whipped up a delicious Balinese pork curry, which duly impressed my 17-year-old daughter Zoe, who loves Asian food of all varieties. My old one died a few years back so this seemed like fate. Recently, around the same time I went searching the Internet for the Chin Chin salad recipe, already deep in the throes of 90s California nostalgia, I ran across another Joyce Chen wok, on a sale table at Crate & Barrel. We were also on a quest during this period to master the perfect lemon drop martini so sometimes the quality of our food took a back seat to our cocktail mixing practice sessions, if you know what I mean. We spent hours in our apartment’s galley kitchen in Sherman Oaks attempting to stir fry, steam, bake and fry our way into Asian cuisine proficiency, with a respectable amount of success. – and a pantry filled with bags of Japanese and Thai rice and packages of wonton wrappers. I also began amassing a spice cabinet filled with newly discovered concoctions – cloves, five spice, garam masala, mace, turmeric, etc. By the late 90s, gourmet food had become as much a part of this worldview for me as wearing the right clothes, reading interesting books or demonstrating a nuanced view of global politics.Īs I set out to cook my way through this fascinating book, I acquired a Joyce Chen wok at the Bristol Farms grocery store in South Pasadena (one of my favorite places to shop for supplies). I will save my love for this latter spot and my increasing passion for Italian food during those years for another post.Īll of this represented another level of sophistication that I had been seeking my whole life, stemming all the way back to my younger years in Mississippi poring over New Yorker magazines at my grandmother’s home, fascinated with the advertisements and cartoons representing a studied and worldly posture that could only be possible in places like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Miami. We hit a number of our favorites, or least those still remaining, including the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Irvine and the Il Fornaio Italian eatery in Pasadena. Last year, pre-pandemic, Abby, Zoe and I were back there for a college visit. How I would love to go back and re-explore the LA of the late 90s, knowing what I do today. Los Angeles provided a bounty of culinary discoveries. For more background on the development of California Cuisine, I highly recommend Andrew Friedman’s “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession.” What I did not know about the salad, at least until I went looking for the recipe – see here – is that its origin story connects this dish to the source of the California Cuisine movement at the renowned Ma Maison, where Puck and others got their start working for Patrick Terrail. No kidding, we were expecting to be overwhelmed by vegetarian restaurants serving bean sprouts and healthy salads, all located next door to yoga studios. Neither of us had spent any time in LA prior to our arrival, and we showed up with an image of the city, including its food scene, based solely on watching movies and television. California Cuisine, one of America’s two great original food traditions, the other being Southern food, of course.Ībby and I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles (Sherman Oaks to be exact) in the summer of 1998. The abiding connection between all these restaurants is their respective roles in defining the New American Cuisine, a.k.a. Abby and I also took our lunch regularly at the Border Grill in Santa Monica, established by co-chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken. I met Wolfgang Puck personally at the latter. and the subsequent flagship restaurant in Beverly Hills. We were lucky enough to have dinner at both the original Spago on Sunset Blvd. Abby and I missed the final days of Jeremiah Tower’s Stars when we visited San Francisco in the late 90s (we wouldn’t have had a clue at the time). I’ve not yet dined at Chez Panisse (it’s on my bucket list), nor Michael’s in Santa Monica.
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