LA trends

[reggie_212]

Hi Russ,

Thanks for participating on our little message board.

I was wondering if you might provide a brief description about how you see the LA dining scene in comparison to other cities like NY or Chicago. Are there maybe general trends you see in LA that are not apparent in other places, or vice versa. Granted, great restaurants are great restaurants no matter where they are. But it would be interesting to see if there are some generalizations you can make regarding how current tastes and trends vary from locale to locale.

[russ parsons]

I am not a great traveller, I've probably spent more time in Fresno over the last couple of years than I have in Manhattan. But I do try to keep up. So I'll try to answer that question based on what may well be some half-baked assumptions.

The Los Angeles dining scene has been on a roller coaster since ... well, maybe since there was one. Before the '84 Olympics, the assumption was that Los Angeles was a culinary wasteland. About that time we started getting some notice for restaurants like Spago, Trumps, Michaels, Valentino, etc. Some of these were good restaurants, some of these (not these specifically, the scene in general) benefited from the "talking dog" syndrome: At first, the news is the dog can talk, only after a while do you start paying attention to what he's saying. And in truth, there were a lot of restaurants that weren't saying a whole helluva lot ... same as any other town. But the culinary media, having built LA up, moved on to teh second wave, tearing it down.

At about the same time (we're talking early '90s), Los Angeles was hit by an almost Biblical visitation of pestilences. We had earthquakes, we had fires, we had riots. And we had a horrific recession caused by the collapse of the military-industrial complex that fueled so much of the middle class here (we're not all in THE business). Bottom line: the house I bought in 1992 only regained its original worth in 2001. Fine dining is the most disposable of income expenditures. It only took one or two restaurants hitting the rocks before everyone pulled in their horns. We ended up with a lot of people following the Spago mold of casual dining, and casually good food ... except I think that a lot of restaurants learned that that is a pretty difficult act to pull off consistently.

Things are looking up in fine dining now, I think. The success of Bastide, a really fine restaurant that makes absolutely no compromises (not open for lunch, not open on weekends, all-French wine list, no BYOB), bodes well.

To me, the real glory of Los Angeles dining, though, is not the big-deal restaurants but what we used to refer to as "ethnic". The Japanese restaurant scene here has exploded and there are terrific places (if you live around here, you ought to check out the South Bay, Western around the Toyota and Nissan offices). The same with Thai (Thai Town), Chinese (San Gabriel Valley, for god's sakes), Indian (Artesia), Vietnamese (OC), and Korean (Koreatown). I am constantly going to these places, having amazing, beautiful food for under $50 a person and coming out wondering how in teh world does a fine dining restaurant compete at three times the price?