Select publications
Photo: Rick Loomis
How your Korean sashimi gets there: From sea to tank to plate
Los Angeles Times — July 2016
Outside of Seoul, Los Angeles is one of the best places in the world to eat Korean sashimi. As with the Japanese style, this involves a parade of raw sliced fish, often of different varieties, the utterly fresh fish accompanied by various Korean dipping sauces. However, unlike most Japanese sushi, Korean sashimi prizes live fish — swimming in restaurant tanks often just moments before it arrives at your table.
Photo: Kayla Rocca
Meet Canada's Brisket Whisperer
Saveur — October 2019
On the corner of an otherwise indistinguishable big-box strip mall in Markham, a suburb of Toronto, you'll see signs for a Jewish delicatessen. It's a predominantly Chinese neighborhood, but Sumith Fernando, a Roman Catholic Sri Lankan immigrant, saw an opportunity: The rent was low, and he knew through a previous deli job that the Chinese shared a penchant for fatty cuts of smoked meat. Called Sumilicious, his deli, which is also halal to appeal to the area's Muslim population, primarily serves Montreal-style smoked-meat sandwiches, for which he laboriously cures and wood-smokes the brisket himself. Why? To this improbable deli man, the answer is obvious: "I love this food."
Photo: Nathan Seabrook
A Little Bit Funky: Eric Wareheim
The Gourmand — 2019
Eric Wareheim has his death row meal all planned out. Although—as far as I can tell—he hasn’t committed any felonies serious enough to warrant capital punishment, he enjoys imagining the vicissitudes of his final culinary experience. In fact, imagining a death row meal is a game Wareheim, 42, likes to play with his friends, a cadre of artists who live mostly in Los Angeles and New York City—between which Wareheim splits his time. Fatty tuna belly, or chūtoro, would comprise Wareheim’s first course—but it’s a very specific preparation he would demand: it’s from the restaurant Sawada in Tokyo, he explains. “They give you this piece of chūtoro, and in the background, these embers are burning the whole time you’re there. It’s like a four-hour meal. And then the chef’s wife takes those embers and puts it over the piece of chūtoro and sears it. It’s crazy. It makes me wanna tearup.” Wareheim’s second course? “A piece of Willy Mae’s Scotch House fried chicken from New Orleans. That’s how I’d wanna go out.” Besides attesting to his deep knowledge of and passion for food and travel, this mix of high and low—of bourgeois and street, artistic reverence and idiosyncratic playfulness— encapsulates his life and work.
Photo provided by Massimo Bottura
Massimo Bottura Wastes Nothing
Mosaic — October 2017
The modernist Italian chef Massimo Bottura is famous for his provocative and inventive riffs on the classical cuisine of Emilia-Romagna. A palm-sized, green, red and white “chip” evoking just the “crunchy” part of the lasagna, for example; a deconstructed mortadella sandwich where the cured meat is served as a foam with pistachio powder and liquid garlic; a smashed lemon dessert called “Oops! I Dropped The Lemon Tart.” Bottura’s 22-year old restaurant Osteria Francescana in Modena has earned three Michelin stars.
Photo: Garrett Hoom
Are bagels the new lattes? Toronto’s Primrose Bagel Company thinks so
The Globe and Mail — January 2020
Inside Primrose Bagel Company, opening its doors in Toront’s St. Clair West neighbourhood on Jan. 10, there’s a large picture window with a view directly into the kitchen. There, at almost any poin in the day, one of the bakery’s staff memebers labouriously rools bagels by hand. It’s a rare sight for a bagel shop — but that’s the point.
Photo: Oriana Koren
The Underground Chefs of
South L.A.
California Sunday — August 2017
The parking lot of Millenium Shoes, a sneaker emporium in Inglewood, was packed. From afar, it looked like a music festival. Hip-hop played over the speakers, and the line to get in, even by the end of the day, was 40 to 50 people long. But up close, everyone was eating. Banana pudding. Fries topped with chicken and barbecue ranch sauce. Garlic shrimp noodles. Turkey and pastrami sliders. The event, called The Block: Urban Gastronomy Experience, was the first of its kind, a chance for people to try food from different underground chefs all in one place.
Photo: Aubrie Pick
This Food Writer is Chrissy Teigen’s Other Significant Other
HEEB — March 2016
Swimsuit model Chrissy Teigen is super into food—and not just alfalfa sprouts and lemon water. The Utah-born model with Thai roots has a drool-worthy recipe-filled food blog, an epic Instagram following where she charts her kitchen trials and triumphs, and now a cookbook (published by Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House), Cravings: Recipes for all the Food You Want to Eat—think Frito Pie Bar, Dump and Done Ramen Salad, or French Toast Casserole with Salted Frosted Flakes. Teigen collaborated on this debut cookbook with Jewish food writer and recipe developer Adeena Sussman: Teigen even calls Sussman “her other everything” (her “first everything” being her husband John Legend).
Photo: Lara Rabinovitch
This Buddhist Temple Serves Some of the Best Thai Food Outside of Bangkok
Vice — March 2015
Deep in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, is some of the best Thai food in the world. This food isn't found in a restaurant, and it's not in someone's home, either. It's in a parking lot adorned by giant, gold, and ornately decorated anthropomorphic yak statues regally standing in front of a thatched red roof Theravada Buddhist temple that's out of Thailand. Since the late 1980s, the 37-year-old Wat Thai—or Thai Temple—of Los Angeles—has operated an outdoor food court in its parking lot.
Photo: Oriana Koren
From Naples to Hollywood
LA Magazine — January 2017 | November 2016
It’s pizza as sex, and only an Italian could have dreamed it up. Shaped like an eight-pointed star, the carnevale is the creation of third-generation pizzaiolo Attilio Bachetti, who brought his recipe to Desano Pizza Bakery in Hollywood from his pizzeria in Naples. Liofe, or at least pizza, hasn’t been the same since. Though not the only unusual pizza style to wow L.A. recently, it could be the most coveted: You can already picture the dripping sauce and globs of ricotta on you fingers.
Illus.: Helen Tseng
Street Food Laws
Lucky Peach — May 2014
What role does the law play in regulating taste? According to some aficionados, and plenty of hawkers the world over, the fewer regulations governing street-side food vending the better (or as one prominent LA restaurant critic told me: the best tacos in town are in Tijuana). Unregulated street food meccas like Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City certainly support this theory. But in places like Singapore and Portland, Oregon, where strict rules govern but encourage vending, the street food remains top-notch.
Photo: Bobby Fisher
Six Lessons from Street Food Pioneer Roy Choi
GOOD — November 2013
Deep in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, is some of the best Thai food in the world. This food isn't found in a restaurant, and it's not in someone's home, either. It's in a parking lot adorned by giant, gold, and ornately decorated anthropomorphic yak statues regally standing in front of a thatched red roof Theravada Buddhist temple that's out of Thailand. Since the late 1980s, the 37-year-old Wat Thai—or Thai Temple—of Los Angeles—has operated an outdoor food court in its parking lot.
Photo: Shutterstock
Falafel Nation
Tablet — May 2014
Israeli expat Yael Raviv argues in her new book Falafel Nation that food has been an Israeli “marketing tool” since the initial wave of Zionist pioneers arrived more than a century ago. As Raviv illustrates with old postcards and other ephemera, members of that “First Aliyah” grew such “fruits of the land” as grapes and olives to forge “a more direct and powerful link with the land of Israel,” by literally putting down roots.