Food columnist Lucas Kwan Peterson hosts ‘Off Menu,’ a new food show premiering Oct. 15. New episodes every Tuesday.and yams cooked in steel barrels on the street. My co-workers at the hotel where I worked, initially wary of the strange, vaguely Chinese-looking American skulking around in the employees-only areas, warmed after we all went out, got drunk and had hot pot together. The couple of times I went on dates, I dressed to impress and went to Pizza Hut or TGI Fridays.
Years later, working as a volunteer in rural El Salvador, I encountered similar issues with culture shock and loneliness and, as in China, food allayed and consoled and, maybe more than anything, helped create memories. I remember blisteringly hot cheese- and loroco-stuffed pupusas shared with fellow volunteers in San Vicente after our daily training sessions. And a woman in my small town who, unprompted, left me a stack of tortillas every morning when I moved into my cinder-block house.
pushed the idea that that the city’s perceived weakness — its vast, fractured layout — may actually be its greatest strength. Instead of disparate neighborhoods in search of a unifying urban center, like Pirandello’s six characters wandering haplessly around a stage, the city is more like a series of incubators for different cultures’ cuisines. He argued that Los Angeles isn’t a great food city in spite of its geography, but because of it.
To love the city is to embrace the vastness and the diversity. It means blindly going to a neighborhood you’ve never heard of before, much less been to. It means not merely realizing but celebrating the fact that half of L.A. County is non-white. It means starting with leek and chive dumplings on one end of the San Gabriel Valley and then heading to Tarzana for Sri Lankan fish curry before ending up in West Adams for tacos.
It’s in this spirit that I created “Off Menu,” the first online video series produced at the Los Angeles Times. Over the next 10 weeks, we’ll cover a lot of ground: Hollywood, the San Gabriel Valley, Koreatown, Orange County. We’ll eat, talk shop with some of the city’s best chefs, chat up the odd celebrity and even leave the country for some tacos.
lucaspeterson looking forward to watching the talented observer weigh in on television lucaspeterson
so Anthony Bourdain but not?
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