Best of the Buzz : Shindler's Dish

Shindler's Dish: Amy Pressman's Market Burgers

BuzzEditor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:39:00 GMT

When word spread across the blogosphere that Nancy Silverton was planning to open a hamburger stand in the original Farmers Market in Los Angeles, my reaction was: well, of course she is. Nancy made her bones by redefining (and refining) bread in Los Angeles at her iconic La Brea Bakery. After that, she changed the way we perceive pizza at Pizzeria Mozza. Then, she opted to fool around with mozzarella in its myriad forms at the adjacent Osteria Mozza. That she would focus her seemingly faultless sense of taste on the Great American Burger is natural. Indeed, if anything, she's a bit behind the curve – more than a few boldface names have foie grased and short-ribbed their creations already.

But there's no way that Nancy won't do something unique – it's not in her DNA to do the same old, same old. And so, we called her to find out where the process stands. But since chef Silverton would (famously) rather spend her time in the kitchen pounding bread dough, spinning pizzas and playing with soft cheese than actually talking about what she's doing, she had her partner in the burger project, Amy Pressman, call us back.

Amy, it should be added, may be the most famous chef in Los Angeles that you've never heard of. She's a diminutive sprite of a woman, who was one of Wolfgang Puck's original line cooks at Spago. In the years since, she's created the menu for the much-loved Parkway Grill in Pasadena (along with many of the other restaurants owned by the Smith brothers). For a decade, she ran the outlandishly indulgent Old Town Bakery. She's had her hand in a multitude of other restaurants, always behind the scenes. But when it comes to Nancy Silverton's burger joint, she's the designated spokes-chef. She's also having the time of her life – reinventing the burger is a lot more fun than reinventing the wheel.

Merrill Shindler: Amy! You and Nancy! All these years after you worked together at Spago – you're back together again!

Amy Pressman: Nancy is a partner in the burger place. She's intimately involved with the food. But she's not going to be behind the counter every night, like she is at the Mozzarella Bar at Osteria Mozza. Our arrangement is she'll be there as much as she can, and I'm happy to have her there as much as she can be. But right now, she's deep into it – we're figuring out every aspect of burger. The meat, the bun, the toppings, the cheese – there are lots of parts.

MS: Where in the market will it be?

AP: It's in the old Du-Par's Bakery. It's a two-story building – a stand downstairs, sit-down upstairs. The upstairs will open up, so it's sort of a crow's nest. You'll be able to look over the market, not just into it. At the moment, we call it Market Burger. We were thinking of Grass Burger, but Market Burger is what we're calling it right now.

MS: How did you and Nancy come together on burgers?

AP: We did a burger night at a small restaurant called Canelé. It was really fun. And we both share the same passion, always searching for the best of everything, and making it ourselves if we can't find it.

MS: Have you had fun researching burgers?

AP: I'll tell you, I've probably eaten more in the past six months than in the five years before it. It never ends. We've tried every component we could get our hands on. I'm extremely passionate about the possibilities of using grass-fed beef from Sonoma Direct. And Nancy has come up with a blend of Harris Ranch beef that's fabulous. We're dealing with some really juicy, delicious hamburgers.

MS: Where have you been going to taste burgers? You've got to do research after all...

AP: I grew up in Pennsylvania, eating at a place called Charlie's. It doesn't exist anymore. But I can still remember what it tasted like. It was the best. I've gone to every place that people recommended – and especially to taste the Daniel Boulud burger in New York. He started the upscale burger trend. It's an amazing thing – foie gras and ribeye in a burger. You'd be hard-pressed to finish it, and feel good afterward.

MS: What's feeling good afterward got to do with it?

AP: I'm much more into feeling good after you eat something than Nancy is. That's been a point of disagreement for us. But then, Nancy never finishes what's on her plate. She's a taster, just eating a bite. So, it's not an issue for her. It is for me – I finish everything. I used to eat the double cheeseburger with chili, bacon and a fried egg at Fatburger after a night of working at Spago. The whole burger.

MS: What makes a great burger?

AP: It's all about the proportions. The meat, the cheese, the bun, the crunchiness of the bun, the toppings – everything has to work together. Get one element out of whack, and it falls apart. I was at a place the other day, the burger was really good. But the bun was so over-toasted it cracked when you bit into it. That ruined the experience. It's all got to work.

MS: And when do you open?

AP: Not till next summer. The building is a tear-down. We're building it like a burger – from the ground up.

– Merrill Shindler

Peel(ing) Back to Basics

BuzzEditor — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Two decades after he opened his LA landmark Campanile with his then-wife Nancy Silverton, Mark Peel has a new cookbook called New Classic Family Dinners (written with Martha Rose Shulman) – an unexpected title from a chef famous for his refined Mediterranean fare. But then Peel has always harbored a secret love for down-home American cooking. One of his first jobs was as a fry cook at a 24-hour freeway truck stop in the San Gabriel Valley (where he grew up) called Cindy's. And he says that in a lot of ways, the more than 200 deeply American recipes in New Classics is simply a summation of everywhere he's been – and where he thinks cuisine is going.

Merrill Shindler: Mashed potatoes? Mac 'n' cheese? Chicken pot pie on the cover? Say what?

Mark Peel: Honestly, this is my home cooking. Chefs get lazy on their day off. After a week cooking, maybe you broil a chicken, you grill some ribs. And what I realized was that I loved cooking the clichés and making them fresh again. So many of these dishes began with the old tired recipes from 50 years ago. I love those old recipes – they say so much about a fresher, more innocent time. Chicken cacciatore, clams casino, eggplant parmigiana. They were done and overdone so much, we forgot they could be good. But at some time, at some point in the past, they were really good. Once upon a time, they were cooked with passion.

MS: Do you cook these dishes at Campanile? I mean...meatloaf?

MP: I've cooked a lot of them, especially at the family-style dinners we do on Mondays. We offer three courses for a set price, with all the plates in the middle of the table like you're eating at home. It's been very successful – people like feeling as if they're eating with their family. Over the year, I've tried to work those meals around themes. I'll do a few weeks of Greek dishes, a few weeks of Italian dishes. And I've found myself gravitating to old-fashioned American cooking. Like mashed potatoes – real mashed potatoes with a lot of butter, a lot of cream. I use obscene amounts in my mashed potatoes.

MS: So, you're the Maestro of Mashed Potatoes. But most of us know you as the Guru of Grilled Cheese...

MP: Thursday night is grilled cheese night. It's so much fun. Everyone understands grilled cheese – butter a pan, put cheese on a slice of bread, cook until melted. So, we raised the bar. We use really good bread from La Brea Bakery, the country white, which is perfect for grilled cheese. We use cave-aged Gruyère, the best butter. Just starting with that, you've already got a great dish. But then, we have add-ons – marinated onions, whole grain mustard, you can get it open face with burrata, stewed garbanzos with roasted tomatoes, crisp garlic chips, you can go on and on. Grilled cheese is like a fugue – you can do so much with it.

MS: Ok, there's a lot of wiggle room with grilled cheese. But c'mon – mashed potatoes are, you know, mashed potatoes. Right?

MP: It's so easy to do them right. But so many people do them wrong. You peel them. Then you steam them instead of boiling them. They come out drier that way – you want them drier. Then you combine two parts mashed potato, one part cream and one part butter. Puree them by pressing them through a sieve. A masher works fine if you don't have a sieve.

MS: So...that's 50% potato...and 50% cholesterol. Sounds like my type of dish. But I'm lazy. How about putting it through a Cuisinart?

MP: Don't put it in a Cuisinart. The machine breaks up the starch cells. The result is the potatoes seem greasy. You can put in all the butter and cream you want, and it won't seem greasy. But the Cuisinart is too rough. And I've got to emphasize that the potatoes have to be dry. Otherwise, the dish is too watery. Great mashed potatoes are halfway between a solid and a sauce. They're so soft, so good and so easy.

MS: I grew up on Kraft mac 'n' cheese. What could be better than that? I mean, it glowed in the dark.

MP: Sorry, but Kraft ruined mac 'n' cheese. Mac 'n' cheese is a casserole, not a fluorescent thing on a plate. I love variations – adding Gorgonzola, truffle oil. A great mac 'n' cheese is made from good macaroni, the dry stuff in the box is fine, cooked al dente. Then, you make a béchamel, a thickened cream sauce. You swirl in good cheese, like cheddar or mozzarella. I love wild mushrooms in my mac 'n' cheese, though they're not absolutely necessary. Fresh or dried – they're so different. They're like a drug.

MS: Years ago, you told me you were a fan of the roast chickens kept on the hot shelves at Ralphs supermarket. Is it as good as the roast chicken in the book?

MP: The roast chicken in the book is great. But Ralphs is just down the block from the restaurant. After a long day in the kitchen, it's really close.

– Merrill Shindler

Building a Better Bel-Air

BuzzEditor — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:05:00 GMT

The Bel-Air's famous swans will be taking a trip this fall.

Photo: courtesy of the hotel

As we recently reported, Los Angeles' Hotel Bel-Air will close September 30 for an 18-month renovation. Since its conversion to a hotel in 1946 (it was originally built by oil tycoon and real estate developer Alphonzo Bell as his office space), this shaded oasis on Stone Canyon Road has provided an island of serenity in the midst of the urban chaos of Los Angeles.

Over the years, it's been a haven for bold face names, including Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, John and Jackie Kennedy, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Oprah Winfrey, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Martha Stewart, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Michael Jackson – among many others. Zagat Buzz chatted with the hotel's general manager, Tim Lee, about what people can expect when the hotel reopens in 2011.

Merrill Shindler: The Bel-Air may be the most iconic hotel in Southern California. Why mess with perfection?

Tim Lee: The last renovation was in 2006. It was just a refurbishment, just soft goods. The guestrooms need modernization. There's no cell phone access here in the canyon. Our guests need their cell phones to work, it's a hardship for them to have no access – we're going to correct that. There are so many details that need to be upgraded. To us, every guest that steps across our bridge is a celebrity.

MS: One of the biggest changes is that you're building a spa.

TL: We're adding a spa because our guests do not like to leave the property – once they're here, they stay here. There'll be seven treatment rooms and three spa suites. The spa will be surrounded by the beauty and landscaping of our grounds. We're also adding seven new villas on the property.

MS: How are the guests who have reservations after the hotel closes dealing with the shock and the pain?

TL: We've contacted all our guests with reservations beginning October 1. We don't want [them] to live through construction noise. They come here for a magical setting – it's calm and tranquil. Luckily, the Dorchester Collection has a sister property in town, the Beverly Hills Hotel, so they'll be staying there until we restore this grand old lady. Our guests have been coming here for years. They take as much pride in the Bel-Air as we do. And we'll be pampering them at the Beverly Hills with massages and spa treatments and the beautiful bungalows.

MS: How about the neighbors? They can't be happy to have a major construction project going on in their well-tended backyards.

TL: Our neighbors are completely supportive of what we're doing. We haven't had a single complaint. In fact, our immediate neighbors are timing their renovations to coincide with ours. [Some] are even letting us use their property for parking. We have no problems. Once we close, the quicker we can finish. We're keeping our construction to nine to five, so the noise won't bother anyone.

MS: I'm worried about the swans. Will they be going to the Beverly Hills Hotel as well?

TL: Our swans Chloe, Athena and Hercules – eight-year-old mute swans – are our signature and our logo. We have a special veterinarian who takes care of [them]. We're finding a home for the swans where they can live well while we remodel. We've talked to several reserves. The swans will be back when the renovation is finished, in excellent shape.

MS: And what sort of shape will the bar and the restaurant be in? They rank No. 1 in Zagat surveys for Appeal and Decor, respectively. How can you possibly make them better?

TL: The restaurant redesign is being done by the Rockwell Group. [The rooms are being redecorated by Alexandra Champalimaud.] Changes are important. But we're not making changes for the sake of making changes. Our main focus is that we don't alter the magic. There is no other place in the world like this. There's never a good time, but, if ever, this is the best time. We hope to come back with the economy in full bloom. Eighteen months – and we'll be back.

– Merrill Shindler

Getting Bazaar With José Andrés

BuzzEditor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:13:00 GMT

José Andrés

Photo: Jason Odell

Since the opening of The Bazaar by José Andrés in Beverly Hills' SLS Hotel, this hydra-headed assortment of restaurants (Bar Centro, Rojo y Blanca, Patisserie, Saam) has been the hottest ticket in a city of hot tickets. And bouncing in and out of town to make sure it all works is the cheerful Mr. Andrés, who like any celebrity chef worth his sea salt, had time to toss off a few tasty bon mots:

Merrill Shindler: The news is filled with gloom and doom. But your menu is awash with high-end items like Iberico ham and caviar. Are we still spending on luxury items?

José Andrés: They are luxuries, but they can be affordable luxuries. I love Iberico ham and caviar for the same reason – they are pure flavors. Even the most expensive caviar is just the eggs and salt. And I'm fascinated by the eggs from fish other than sturgeon, by trout eggs, which are very affordable. And we try to do something very different with them. My director of creativity went to China to research steamed buns. We serve our caviar on steamed buns, with crème fraîche. Steamed buns take nothing away from the briny, salty flavor.

MS: There are dozens of tapas dishes on the menus at The Bazaar. Is there one that makes your heart beat faster, that amazes you every time you taste it?

JA: There is one that is a tribute to my mentor Ferran Adrià – you must remember the people you learned from. It is our liquid olives. They're Willy Wonka olives, made with olive oil, rosemary, garlic – they explode in your mouth. There's a bubble, a thin membrane holding inside the liquid of the olives. For me, it's edible art.

MS: Some of your dishes have been reconfigured completely beyond recognition. For instance, some of your salads…

JA: They are what I call organized salads. The salad is usually the most disorganized thing – to eat a salad can be very complicated. So I turned it into, like, a sushi roll, you have the whole salad in one bite. It's wrapped in jicama with a salad inside. I make many organized salads; my organized Caesar salad is very popular.

MS: Nothing you make seems simple. Doesn't your kitchen go crazy trying to churn out hundreds of orders of such complex dishes?

JA: It's true, the dishes take a long time to make. They are very labor intensive. That's why I'm always late for meetings – I'm so busy cooking. I've been working around the clock for so long, I haven't had time to get to any of the farmer's markets in Los Angeles, which are so famous. And I have to fly in many of my ingredients – the Iberico ham, the Manchego cheese. Certain ingredients are non-negotiable.

MS: You recently put out a cookbook (Made in Spain: Spanish Dishes for the American Kitchen, Clarkson Potter). But it's a lot easier to just go to one of your restaurants than to spend a day trying to create one of your molecular concoctions…

JA: You can learn my cooking from my cookbook, though not everything. It's true, I want people to come to my restaurant. But if they want to try, it's in the book. Many of the recipes a good cook can do. But not all of them. My Philly cheese steak, made with Kobe beef…we can only make that in my restaurants. At home, no one could make it. No one could make my gazpacho either. You have to understand the tradition of gazpacho. Without that, it's just soup. Maybe a good soup. But not a José Andrés soup.

– Merrill Shindler

Shindler's Dish: Use Your Noodle

BuzzEditor — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:54:00 GMT

photo: Yajico

The word "noodle" comes from the Latin “nodellus,” meaning "little knot,” maybe because of the way they get all twisted up in the bowl. But noodles have come to mean many things to many people, most of them pretty cheerful. For those who can’t get enough of the stuff, here's a guide to the many incarnations found around LA.

Japanese Noodles

In Japan, noodles are a way of life, and a great place to get a taste in LA is Yabu. Both soba (the thin buckwheat noodles) and udon (the chubby wheat flour noodles) are served, either hot or cold, and amendments include egg, thinly sliced Japanese mushrooms, chicken and onion, and tempura crispies (which are so good, they should be released as a breakfast cereal). Extra broth is brought to the table in cube-like pitchers called yuto. The cold noodles are served atop a bamboo platform, with a small bowl filled with soy broth kept nearby. The drill is to lift the noodles into the bowl, then slurp them out of the broth. It's considered wholly appropriate to make lots of noise while doing so. And do wear washable clothing – this can be a sloppy process.

Chinese Noodles

Though no one is entirely sure of where and when noodles first saw the light of day, we do know for a fact that in 1279 Marco Polo brought a to-go order of noodles from China to Venice. Noodles are part and parcel of any proper meal at a Chinese restaurant, and Mandarin Deli (in Northridge and Monterey Park) is no exception. About a third of the menu is dedicated to noodle dishes, many of which are served in soup – pickled vegetable and shredded pork noodle soup, the special square flour noodle soup and the noodle with pork corn starch soup. Then there is the unutterably simple cold noodles with spicy chili, a big platter of thick, rich-tasting noodles tossed with the sort of chili sauce that opens your eyes – wide.

Thai Noodles

There's hardly a Thai restaurant that doesn't serve a wide assortment of noodles dishes, usually including the crispy creation called mee krob. The textbook rendition is the one served at East Hollywood's always-crowded Jitlada, which manages to make one of the few mee krobs in town that isn’t so sugary it could double as dessert. Oddly, mee krob is very hard to find in the restaurants of Bangkok, where restaurateurs point out that it's too complex a dish to make in a restaurant. Be that as it may, the mee krob served at Jitlada is a perfectly balanced creation, very crispy, with little flavor explosions in every bite of lime juice, vinegar, garlic, shrimp, pork and chicken. It's another clean-plate dish, which never survives long enough to to be eaten at home the next day.

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Vietnamese Noodles

Written on the menu at Pho Café: "Bu Bang, a famous Vietnamese writer and also a food connoisseur, ranked pho as the best Vietnamese dish...To appreciate pho requires more than just loving to eat it...A good bowl of pho should stimulate all your senses...A good bowl of pho is one you can smell before you see it." And Pho Café should know, as folks pack the place to indulge in bowls of noodles in soup, flavored variously with steak, flank steak, tendon, brisket and tripe, with bowls of bean sprouts, fresh mint and coriander, lime slices and chili slivers along with soy sauce, vinegar and two types of hot sauce. These are DIY noodles, flavored to your personal needs.

Jewish Noodles

Outside the dairy restaurants of New York's Lower East Side, it's doubtful that you'll find a lot of lokshen kugel (noodle pudding), kasha varnishkes (noodles with kasha barley) or any of the other many filling noodle dishes that are part of the basic canon of Jewish cooking. You will, however, find a chicken noodle soup of excellent breeding at the venerable Nate 'n Al's in Beverly Hills, a deli that's managed to withstand the stings and arrows of all sorts of rude competition, and still emerge from it all smelling like, if not a rose, at least a pastrami. Instead of the clear, amber liquid found at most delis, the version here is almost opaque, a soup that looks like it was made with a real chicken, by someone's mother, with plenty of soft and fragrant noodles floating within. It's Jewish penicillin, Beverly Hills soul food.

Breakfast Noodles

Perhaps the most popular breakfast dish, or at least the most memorable, at Hugo's is a dish called Pasta Mama. It's a ridiculously filling scramble of eggs, spaghetti, garlic, parsley, sautéed onions and Parmesan cheese – sort of a pasta carbonara turned inside out. Add bacon, chicken sausage and scallions, and you've got Pasta Papa; make it with avocado and tomato, and you've got Pasta Emilia. What we have here are noodles as comfort food, eaten at the beginning of the day, before you even know you needed comforting.

– Merrill Shindler

Talking Turkey

BuzzEditor — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Let us consider the turkey, that curiously hyperbolic fowl that an uncommonly large number of us will be forced to consume tomorrow. Turkey is a creature that one either loves, or doesn't love, with only a very few left sitting on the proverbial fence. One of the greatest fan of the turkey was gastronome and chef Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in his landmark volume The Physiology of Taste that:

"When the vine-grower or ploughman wants a treat on some long winter evening, what do we see roasting over a bright fire in the kitchen where the table is laid? A turkey. When the hard-working artisan invites a few friends to enjoy a holiday which is all the more precious for being rare, what is sure to be the principal dish of the feast? A turkey, stuffed with sausages or Lyons chestnuts. And in the high places of gastronomy, at those select gatherings where politics are forced to give way to dissertations on taste, what do the guests hope for and long for as the second course? A truffled turkey!"

Brillat-Savarin obviously liked his turkey. On the other hand, William Connor, who wrote under the named "Cassandra" in the London Daily Mirror back in the '50s, was not much of a fan of the bird at all. He wrote:

"The turkey has practically no taste except a dry fibrous flavour reminiscent of warmed-up plaster of Paris and horsehair. The texture is like wet sawdust and the whole vast feathered swindle has the piquancy of a boiled mattress."

Myself, I agree more with the Brit than the Frenchman. More often than not, it is a dry thing, eaten with untoward haste so that we might return as quickly as possible to watching the 27 millionth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street. The whole Thanksgiving meal is a true oddity, for it is not so much savored as it is inhaled – 12 hours of cooking devoured in 12 minutes at the table. Years ago, I suggested to some friends that our Thanksgiving feast be eaten in courses, rather than in one trip to the trough. They regarded me with the sort of shock that might have been appropriate had I suggested we do our dining in pink tutus.

Still, there's no denying the undeniable historical solidity of the turkey. Despite New Yorker scribe Calvin Trillin's argument that we should be eating spaghetti carbonara to honor Thanksgiving, rather than this large, unwieldy, notably dumb bird, turkey seems to be with us to stay. And, turkey is about as native as anything we eat.

The bird was first introduced to the Old World by any number of Spanish conquistadors – either Miguel de Passamonte, Francisco de Cordoba, or Hernando Cortes, all of whom sent turkeys back to Spain from Mexico – where it was known as the "Rooster of the Jesuits."

The Aztecs who raised the bird called it a "peru," which is odd, for turkeys are not found in Peru. But then, they're not found in India either, which didn't keep the French from calling them the "Bird of India" – d'Inde, which metamorphosed into the word "dinde," French for "turkey." Both the Germans and Dutch also thought that turkeys came from India, calling them Calecutische Hahn and Kalkoen respectively. It was the English, fuzzy as ever concerning geography, who named the bird the "turkey," in much the same spirit that they turned Jerez into "sherry."

If old Ben Franklin had had his way, the turkey would be the national bird today, instead of the eagle, and probably rightly so. Though of course, there's a good chance then that someone would try to instigate a constitutional amendment making it a federal crime to eat a turkey. And don't forget to eat yours with fenberry sauce and misickquatash – far more colorful names than the latterday monikers of cranberry sauce and succotash.

– Merrill Shindler

Shindler's Dish: My Diets Are Bananas

BuzzEditor — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:38:00 GMT

Let's talk about hobbies. Some people collect stamps. Some people build model airplanes. Some like to clean the barnacles off their sailboats. I go on diets. In fact, I'm on a diet right now. This strikes some people as odd because I'm only about five pounds over my optimum weight. But those are just numbers. When I walk past a mirror, I see a huge bloated disaster area –a heart attack waiting to happen. And so, I'm on a diet. Oh, and I should add that it's a Fad Diet. I only go on Fad Diets. Weight Watchers works just fine. So does Jenny Craig. But really, what's the point? If the diet doesn't give me fodder for cocktails parties, why go on it?

Right now, I'm on the Morning Banana Diet. It's all the rage in Japan. And since the Japanese are notoriously skinny, I thought I'd go with it. Actually, it's so popular in Japan that merchants have complained of banana shortages ("Yes, we have no bananas…"). The diet is absurdly easy. For breakfast, you eat between one and four bananas. You can wash the bananas down with a glass of warm water. And... that's it.

After that, you eat whatever you want for lunch and dinner. The only proscription is that you can't do any eating after 8 PM at night. And you have to go to sleep by midnight. The pounds are supposed to just melt away. But they haven't – possibly because I'm not Japanese. Or, possibly, because I've been cheating on the diet. Just the other day, I caught myself spreading butter rather thickly on a muffin. It was a BANANA muffin, which I guess doesn't count. Or maybe it's just the fact that I'm still not Japanese.

I come by my love of diets honestly. My mother was always on a diet. My wife is always on a diet. My in-laws are always on diets. They call me to announce the latest diet they've discovered, some of which are dandies – remember the Cabbage Soup Diet, where all you ate was a giant pot of cabbage soup? You could get rickets on a diet like that. But it sure kept Joe the Plumber busy.

My diets go through a fairly predictable series of stages, a bit like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. They begin with my announcement that none of my clothes fit and that I'm going to live on fruits and vegetables until I can get into those black Armani pants I love so much. I then fill the fridge with lots of produce, and get down to the business of subsisting on rice cakes and coffee for breakfast, popcorn and coffee for lunch, and a sort of chopped salad and tuna fish regimen for dinner. Or, just a lot of bananas. Or bacon. Or rice. Or pineapple. Or cabbage soup.

I usually do well on my diets. Or at least as well as you can do on a diet you stick to for only one day. Inevitably, by the second day of the diet, boredom sets in. I'll decide to go out for something to eat, preferably salad or grilled fish. I'll announce that even though I'm going to a restaurant, I'm going to be "good." And anyway, as long as I've had a banana, the sky's the limit.

The last time I tried this, I went to a branch of the Souplantation salad bar chain for lunch. I piled my plate high with sliced mushrooms, kidney beans and garbanzo beans, which seemed like a good diet combination. Then, since this was the SOUPlantation and not the SALADlantation, I treated myself to a bowl of corn chowder topped off with a double fistful of grated cheese, and a bunch of pasta salads accompanied by a mess o' croutons and sundry muffins and breads. With butter. I figured all those items were fine on the Banana Diet. I had had a banana for breakfast; I was set for the day. The next day, after my banana I went out for Mexican food. I finished two baskets of chips and had to be restrained from ordering a second bowl of guacamole.

Perhaps I'm just not eating enough bananas.

The bottom line is my black Armani pants are still tight. And getting tighter. And I'm tired of bananas. But I'm not tired of diets. And hey, I just read about the Maple Syrup Diet. For two weeks, you eat nothing but maple syrup mixed with lemon juice, water and cayenne. It worked for Beyonce. She looks great – and I bet she could fit into my black Armani pants with ease. Biggest problem: What am I supposed to do with all these leftover bananas?

– Merrill Shindler

Santa Barbara's La Super-Rica is Super

BuzzEditor — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:46:00 GMT

One goes to the shrine at Lourdes in order to be healed. One travels to Vichy to take the waters and recover from the sundry ailments that assail the body and soul. But one goes to the Santa Barbara's La Super-Rica Taco to be born again in the bosom of the best Mexican food found in the state of California and possibly the whole United States of America. Don't just take my word for it – Julia Child, who lived nearby, said it was the best. And she should know.

I don't think there's a time I've driven through Santa Barbara, when I haven't taken the convenient Milpas Street off-ramp, and gone the mile or so up the road to the small stand at 622 N. Milpas (11 AM–8 PM daily; 805-963-4940). Actually, La Super-Rica is a stand that has expanded into a covered dining room in what was probably the parking lot at one point. It all looks very homegrown and organic, as if it's been at that particular Santa Barbara intersection since dinosaurs roamed the earth. I've never tasted a dish at La Super-Rica that isn't the Platonic ideal of what that dish should be. Pardon me for growing hyperbolic, but this is probably as good as Mexican cooking gets in California. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to name a place as good in Mexico.

If anything, La Super-Rica reminds me of the legendary Fonda El Refugio in Mexico City, a shrine to the regional cooking of Mexico, one of the few restaurants in the country that pays homage to dishes from Guadalajara to Oaxaca to La Paz to Merida. At La Super-Rica, they also pay close attention to the regionalities of Mexico, though mostly in terms of those ubiquitous appetizers called antojitos. This is a grazing restaurant, one where no fewer than four or five dishes per person will do.

What one orders here is the astounding quesadilla filled with authentic Mexican cheese and musky chunks of chorizo sausage. Or you go for the guacamole, recently mashed by hand, filled with chunks of avocado and tomato, produced as spicy as you want it to be. Those who get the beans will be rewarded with beans unlike any they've ever tasted before – whole tender pinto beans, served in a broth thick with chunks of chorizo and Mexican bacon, which is to smoked meats what beluga is to Caspian caviar. And then there's the chorizo especial, the house variation on queso fundido, which is melted cheese in a crock, cooked with an excess of that super-rica chorizo.

As a main course, there are assorted soft tacos, served on tortillas made for you as you stand at the counter waiting. With lightning speed, a small woman drops a ball of kneaded cornmeal onto a press, turns it flat as the earth used to be, then cooks it on a grill for a matter of seconds. On top of this are placed strips of charbroiled steak (taco de bistec), chunks of top round (taco de costilla), pork steak (taco de chuleta), marinated pork (taco de adobado), strips of grilled pasilla chiles (taco de rajas) and more. On different days of the week, there's hominy and pork soup (pozole) in the style of Jalisco (with lots of red chiles); and an assortment of tamales filled with vegetables, fish, chicken or pork, served with a fruit-and-milk drink called atole. For dessert, there's a rice pudding, as creamy and cinnamony as any I've ever tasted. As a beverage, there's horchata, a rice/cinnamon/vanilla drink that tastes exactly like the rice pudding.

That's what they serve at La Super-Rica Taco. But that doesn't answer the question of exactly why the food is so good here. The answer is the one it always is: This is food as it's made at the source, rather than food which has been filtered through the needs of an alien population. No concessions are made at La Super-Rica to American taste – if you don't like horchata, don't order it; if the trio of freshly-made salsas are too hot, don't pour them on your food.

Over the years, La Super-Rica has become a mecca for hungry students from the nearby University of California at Santa Barbara, for the rich and the super-rich who take time off from their polo matches in nearby Montecito and even for Mexican-Americans, who show up at La Super-Rica in droves to eat the food they left behind South of the Border. It stands out as a gem in a world of ersatz Mexican restaurants, where the size of the margaritas mean more than the quality of the tortillas. They don't served margaritas at La Super-Rica Taco; they just serve beer, and Mexican beer at that.

– Merrill Shindler

Hotter Than Hades

BuzzEditor — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:21:00 GMT

Chili Peppers

Photo: Phil Zrimsek

A recent story in London's Telegraph told the sad tale of a fellow in Edlington, Doncaster, who accepted a bet to make a chili so hot no one could eat it. Thirty-three-year-old Andrew Lee won the bet – he was apparently the only person who could eat it. Unfortunately, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died the next morning, with only the chili to blame as he had recently been given a clean bill health.

Now, I’ve never eat a dish so spicy that I’ve had to call the paramedics. But I have come close. I like to think of myself as a tough guy with a stomach of galvanized aluminum, the kind of stomach you could put all sorts of bad news into without needing to drink a Brioschi afterward.

For those who feel the need for some real science, let me explain that hot peppers, chiles and the like are hot because of the presence of an alkaloid called capsaicin, a bitter compound with the formula C18H27NO3. The net effect of all those letters and numbers is an extreme irritant, which literally burns the skin. (Rub a hot pepper on your hand and within a few minutes you'll feel a burning sensation and your skin will redden – in scientific jargon, the effect of the alkaloid is rubefacient and hyperaemic).

Nutritionally, peppers are surprisingly good for us – they contain reasonable quantities of vitamins A, B and E, and lots of C (pound for pound, hot red peppers contain more than 10 times as much vitamin C as oranges). Eaten in moderation, they're said to aid digestion. Eaten in excess, they become a challenge to the human spirit.

It’s possible that the hottest dish I’ve come upon was a creation called Spicy With Spicy, which was served at a four-table hole-in-the-wall in the SoCal (San Gabriel Valley to be exact) that vanished many years ago. But the memory of that dish has never faded; I think I can still taste it, in the way that nightmares recur in Stephen King novels.

It actually should have been called Spicy With Spicy and More Spicy. It was basically a pile of peppers, that allegedly included pork, though it could have been almost anything for the pork was buried beneath an avalanche of peppers fresh and peppers dried, peppers pickled and peppers fermented.

There was a lot of salt in there too, though it's hard to say – my mouth went into vapor lock after the first bite. I could no longer taste anything; it completely froze my tastebuds. Which was a pity – I hadn't yet finished the last of the peanuts with anchovies. Technically I was alive. But my mouth was dead. And it stayed that way for days.

If Spicy With Spicy seems a bit hardcore for you, consider the life-changing pepper dishes at Chung King, a small storefront on the unfashionable southside of Garvey in Monterey Park, CA. The most popular dish at the restaurant seems to be Chung King–style hot chopped chicken, a plate that seems to appear on virtually every table. It’s so devastatingly hot that to eat more than a mouthful is fool hardy. Like Spicy With Spicy, it can lead to a total shutdown of the ability to taste anything.

What I found was that mixing the chicken with rice, about one part chicken to 10 of rice, created a dish that radiated heat, but was at least manageable. In general, the trick to eating at Chung King is to mix the intensely spiced dishes (which, based on the little pepper icons on the menu, are about 90% of the choices), with the handful of milder dishes – or at least with the pepper icon dishes that are less fiery than the hot chopped chicken. On the less incendiary side of things, there's the cold chopped chicken with spicy sauce, the braised bean curd casserole, the wonderful celery with ginger sauce, the cucumber in garlic sauce, the Chung King–flavored noodles, any of the soups and any of the crisp rice-crust dishes (essentially sizzling rice).

And then, there are the items listed under the headings of "Dishes with Sichuan Pickled Peppers" and "Boiled Dishes in Hot Sauce." The boiled sliced chicken in hot sauce sounds reasonable enough – but the sauce cut deep into my consciousness, a startling hotness, a dish that made me gasp with pleasure and pain. Pickling seems to quadruple the intensity of the peppers, which may or may not be an illusion.

What's not an illusion is that pickling increases the sodium considerably, making this one of the saltiest dishes I've ever tasted – even carefully separating the stir-fried fish, the sliced beef and the eel from the peppers didn't reduce the salt and spice – these peppers are that powerful. It's constantly overwhelming. It's like music played at its maximum volume; sooner or later, you long for peace and quiet. Which is why a big bowl of ice cream isn’t just a pleasant dessert; it’s an essential remedy for the peppers that ail you.

– Merrill Shindler

Breaking Bread With Its Preeminent Scholar

BuzzEditor — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:47:00 GMT

Steven Kaplan in France, where he investigated collective bread poisoning for his latest book

Photo: courtesy of Steven Kaplan

Good bread can be hard to find. At least it is if you've got the lofty standards of leading bread historian Steven Laurence Kaplan, who reveals that he tends to BYOB (bring your own bread) even at fancy restaurants. Kaplan, a Cornell professor, has written Good Bread Is Back and, more recently, Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread), about a collective bread poisoning that occurred in a small town near Avignon. He recently spoke at Breadbar in LA, and the Buzz caught up with him to glean further crumbs of knowledge. The man sure knows his baguettes, but the wonder is he knows his Wonder Bread as well.

ZB: The press release for your appearance at the Breadbar describes you as "the world's leading expert on French bread" and "the world's preeminent bread scholar." Not to be too irreverent – but are there others contending for those titles?

SK: Irreverence is an excellent posture for an interviewer. Let's call it skepticism, to be more elegant or neutral. I have worked with and on bread for 40 years. It is unlikely that there is anyone else on the planet – unless he or she lives in a cave or operates clandestinely – who has combined the practical experience in the bake-room with the infinite investment in archival research, who has articulated the practices of the artisan and the intellectual. Were you to query experts in France, I think they would concur with the Breadbar's ostensibly hyperbolic appreciation.

ZB: Did you grow up eating Wonder Bread?

SK: Yes, alas. Yuck. Powerful memories of the crystallization of a robust aversion.

ZB: Is Wonder Bread properly bread?

SK: To the extent that it incorporates flour, water, some salt and a fermenting agent, yes. To the extent that it combines all sorts of supplementary additives, technological auxiliaries, improvers, and myriad other chemicals, fortifiers, preservers, etc., and that it is manufactured in hyper-industrial conditions, to call it bread requires a magnanimous generosity of spirit.

ZB: What drew you to bread?

SK: On the sensual plane, the accident of an encounter in a Paris bakery the first day I set foot in Paris 45 years ago drew me to it. Intellectually, it was the search of a doctoral thesis "problem" or framing theme that touched on all aspects of the human experience from politics and social relations to economic growth and state construction; from religion and collective psychology to culture and agriculture, etc. The one nourished the other. The hedonic spurred the scholarly appetite. The two have operated in fruitful complement for many decades. I am convinced that truly exalting pleasure cannot be mindless. Even if one is not preoccupied with origins, influences and evolutions, bread must be good to think before it is good to eat, to paraphrase the great French anthropologist [Claude] Lévi-Strauss.

ZB: Do you nibble on bread the way others might smoke a cigarette?

SK: No. I respect bread too much to nibble on it mechanically or casually. Yet I cannot avoid tasting it and assessing it whenever I encounter it. When I buy a baguette, for example, if it is truly enthralling, I risk devouring half before I reach home.

ZB: Is there a hidden aesthetic to bread?

SK: Good bread is predicated on an aesthetic of rigor and truth that yields beauty and pleasure. It is anything but hidden. It is the mark or test of artisanal creation and realization.

ZB: If a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine, what is a meal without bread?

SK: A meal without bread is very much in the same idiomatic relation of necessity that your aphorism describes. It is more than a mere complement. It opens a whole organoleptic front. It enriches and delights.

ZB: Which restaurants have the best breads?

SK: You know, I have been spending much more time in France than in the U.S. over the past few years. Even in France, I often bring my own bread to fine restaurants. Restaurants there propose sumptuous dishes and engaging wine lists, but are often indifferent to or disdainful of bread. I take this as a personal affront. I try to shame them into obtaining better bread. Making bread is a separate craft from cooking, and is rarely done well by chefs – who are busy doing other things.

Beyond Breadbar, in the USA, I have never tasted acceptable restaurant bread.

ZB: Well, then, what are your favorite breads at LA's Breadbar?

SK: My favorite Breadbar breads are the baguette (Tour de France), the canonic measure of excellence in classical baking, and the sumptuous Millstone (or Tourte).

– Merrill Shindler

Milking a Trend

BuzzEditor — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:23:00 GMT

We know that two incidents do not make a trend. But still... First, Hans Locher, proprietor of the Storchen Restaurant in the resort town of Winterthur, Switzerland, announced that he wanted his stews, soups and sauces to be prepared with mother's milk: "We have all been raised on it. Why should we not include it in our diet?" He went on to explain, "I first experimented with breast milk when my daughter was born. One can cook really delicious things with it. However, it always needs to be mixed with a bit of whipped cream, in order to keep the consistency."

Before Zurich’s food regulatory body and the Association of Swiss Milk Producers axed the idea, to maintain a steady supply, he paid the equivalent of $5.40 for 14 oz. of milk from local women – culinary wet nurses, as it were. Even though the officials against the practice won, it's apparently legal. According to Rolf Etter of the Zurich Food Control Laboratory: "Humans as producers of milk are simply not envisaged in the legislation. They are not on the list of approved species such as cows and sheep. But they are also not on the list of the banned species such as apes and primates."

Now, that would seem to be strange enough. But then just a few days later, Tracy Reiman, Executive Vice President of PETA, sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield – Ben & Jerry – arguing that they shift from chow's milk…to human milk. Turns out, PETA was very impressed by the use of mother's milk in Switzerland. And they argue that, "The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense. Everyone knows that 'the breast is best.' So, Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch…"

In a statement that dazzles with its ability to walk a fine line, Ben & Jerry's said, "We applaud PETA's novel approach to bringing attention to an issue. But we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child."

But I'm willing to bet the marketing department was really disappointed. Just think of the possibilities for clever names: Mother's Milk Marshmallow, anyone?

– Merrill Shindler

LA's Philippe the Original Turns 100

BuzzEditor — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:33:00 GMT

Photo: Courtesy of Philippe the Original

On October 6th, Philippe the Original will celebrate its 100th anniversary with bands, speeches and a rollback of prices to 1908. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fans will show up to pay homage to the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles. And most of them will be there for one dish: the French dip sandwich, which will only cost $0.10 that day.

In other cities – cities with a greater sense of history – 100 years is just a sliver of time. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco all have restaurants that passed the century mark a long time ago. But Los Angeles is endlessly re-creating itself. And in the process, generations of restaurants have come…and gone. But Philippe Mathieu’s sandwich shop has persevered, thrived and entered the realm of legend.

It sits at the cusp of what little history has been preserved in LA. Olvera Street is on one side, Old Chinatown on the other. Across the street is Union Station. Up the hill is Dodger Stadium. And more than a few fans of the Dodgers stop at Philippe for a bite on their way to a game – it’s the perfect combination, a Philippe French dip sandwich followed by a Dodger Dog with everything on it.

The story is that the French dip sandwich was invented by accident one day, when Mathieu inadvertently dropped a sliced French roll into a roasting pan filled with meat juices. When he started to redo the sandwich, the customer – a policeman – told him not to bother; he’d take the sandwich as it was. He returned the next day with some friends, all wanting their sandwiches "French dipped."

A century later, everyone who goes to Philippe gets their sandwiched dipped. Whether filled with beef, pork, lamb, turkey or ham, it arrives soaking with juices. Some also get their sandwiches slathered with the terrifyingly hot mustard that’s a house signature. There are pickled eggs as well, along with pig’s feet and an unexpectedly good selection of wines. There’s sawdust on the floor, and long, well-worn tables that you share with strangers. Or rather you share them with your fellow Angelenos, people who you’d never meet stuck on the freeways of Los Angeles. Philippe does the wondrous – it makes us into a city. Which for Los Angeles is both something old... and something new.

– Merrill Shindler

Is Squirrel Fishing Truly Common in the US?

BuzzEditor — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:18:00 GMT

Browsing through the online edition of the Times of London the other day, I came upon a seemingly fascinating story titled "Top 10 Ways to Forage for Free Food".

It's a guide (of sorts) inspired by an interview with British food writer Prue Leith in the U.K. version of Good Housekeeping, in which she describes the pleasures of lifting the eggs from the nest of a wild Canadian mother goose and turning them into a tasty omelette – an act the article from The Times makes clear is very illegal. ("Bad, bad Prue.")

And so, instead of stealing eggs from the nests of protected species, the article suggests a double handful of perfectly legal forms of foraging – many of which are just as horrifying, if not more so. It begins with "Squirrel Fishing," which we're told is "common in the US." Apparently, the trick is to tie a peanut to a string. The squirrel is tempted by the peanut, begins to toy with it – and is grabbed and bagged. The result is "a supper of grey squirrel."

Now, I don't know which is more horrifying – the notion of snagging a squirrel for dinner in the park…or the contention that this is "common in the US." But honestly, it seems less irksome than the notion of wild goose eggs. And it's followed by a bunch of suggestions for gathering your own food that make a burger at Mickey D's seem quite pleasurable by comparison.

We discover that 25 dandelion roots are enough to make one cup of dandelion coffee – which is caffeine-free, so what's the point? Nettle tea is apparently quite pleasant as well. (Ick!). Fresh-picked mushrooms are a pleasure – unless you pick a bad one, in which case they make for a last supper that friends and family will speak about for years. ("Remember when Uncle Morty ate the mushrooms and turned blue?") Snails are, of course, a treat – as long as you spend several days detoxing them from the Snail Death you've spread over the garden.

And then, of course, you can save a fortune on perfumes (according to the article) by making your own with rose petals. All you've got to do is collect handfuls of petals, and boil them in water for two hours. Then, strain them through cheesecloth until the mixture is clear. Add alcohol. Keep in fridge. Blackberry juice on the lips and cheeks will give you "a healthy, antioxidant flush." Which leads us to at least two realizations. Foragers have a lot more time on their hands than the rest of us. And they have a complexion that comes from a diet of mushrooms found under trees – sallow and pale.

– Merrill Shindler

Asian Meets Cajun in Cali

BuzzEditor — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:31:00 GMT

Crawfish

Photo: Isaac Wedin

Even in a land of Curious Culinary Trends, the new wave of Asian-Cajun restaurants that's swept across SoCal is an eyebrow-raiser. Its California incarnation seems to have begun in the Vietnamese community of Westminster in Orange County, where Cajun-style crab joints began popping up several months ago – down-home restaurants with names like The Cajun Corner, Rockin' Crawfish and The Boiling Crab. Those hunting for a taste of Saigon at these spots will find little if any, for these are the sort of unpretentious, cut-to-the-chase eateries found along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

What began in Orange County has spread like wildfire to Los Angeles County, with Asian-Cajuns popping up along Valley Boulevard in the San Gabriel Valley. There's a branch of The Boiling Crab in Alhambra just a few blocks from Boathouse Cajun Boiled Seafood, which is just a short hop from a mall in San Gabriel that's home to not one but two Asian-Cajuns – Captain Crab and Fisherman's Wharf – and just north of the wonderfully named Crabulous in Rosemead. And, as I found on a recent Saturday night, they're all full, mostly with Asian diners who have taken to gumbo with relish…and hot sauce.

Ordering at any of these restaurants is an exercise in madcap excess. The mudbug of choice is the crawfish, usually ordered in two-pound increments. That's because you get a cob of corn and two sausages for every two pounds of crawfish, so you may as well maximize the intake in between ripping the funny little things to pieces.

Now, I did not grow up in a land where crawfish were eaten – by anyone. And so, the joys of crawfish are a bit foreign to me. They're brought to the butcher paper–covered table still bubbling in large plastic bags. The bags are dropped on the table and you're pretty much on your own. Reach into the bag, pull out a bug and start…doing what?

You pull the crawfish apart, and what you find inside is a small plug of meat, which is pleasant enough, but even two pounds of them aren't quite enough for a fellow who likes to eat his shrimp and crab by the tankful. Which is why it's also a good idea to order additional plastic bags of shrimp, blue crab and Dungeness crab, perhaps some fried catfish with french fries, gumbo with rice (thick as mud), fried calamari and Cajun onion rings.

The shellfish bugs come in a choice of sauces – garlic butter, lemon pepper and a variety of sauces with names like "Ragin' Cajun" and "Cajun Sensation" – further amended as mild, spicy or suicide, which is hotter than seems humanly possible. Dip your fingers into the sauce enough times, and they begin to marinate. Your fingers turn a reddish-brown color that doesn't come off for about a week; the aroma stays with you no matter how much soap you use. And be sure to wear something either washable – or disposable. It's a terrific meal, wholly interactive and downright primal.

– Merrill Shindler

Shindler's Travels

BuzzEditor — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:31:00 GMT

One problem with living in a ''global village'' (as Marshall McLuhan so succinctly defined our world) is that eventually regional and ethnic differences begin to fade away, and a sort of one-world grayness sets in. Standardization and conformity become the name of the game as the world becomes one big Holiday Inn, a happy-go-lucky package trip for the unadventurous tourists of the world. This sameness has afflicted airlines, hotels, ships; but worst of all, it's run rampant and unchecked throughout the restaurants of the world.

Here in Los Angeles, we're blessed with a virtual mini-universe of ethnic restaurants, each of them passing a particular foreign cuisine through the intensifying filter of the immigrant experience in America. In other words, what we eat here is food as people remember the cuisine they grew up with in their native lands, altered through the use of American ingredients, cooking techniques and tastes. Which is why, when I'm abroad, I like to find out how the dishes I've been eating here for so many years are cooked over there, what they're really like at the source. But what I've discovered is that finding the source is a heck of a lot tougher than you'd imagine.

Some years ago, for instance, I went on a trip to Taiwan. I figured I'd finally get a chance to find out what Chinese food is all about. I told this to my guide, who looked at me like I was crazy. ''We have very good Chinese food here,'' he told me, ''the best in the world. But we also have the best food from many countries. I will prove it to you.'' For days after, he took me to American restaurants (which means steak, steak and more steak), German restaurants and British restaurants; the only way I got to eat Chinese food was by sneaking out when he wasn't around.

Trying to eat native food in Hawaii can be even more difficult. Hawaii is the land of surf 'n' turf, where the indigenous cooking is viewed with a sort of mild disdain. Apparently, the only Hawaiian dish that's been approved by the tourist bureau is mahi mahi, a mild fish that regularly appears on steakhouse menus. Restaurants that serve poi, lomi lomi salmon, kalua pig and so forth are rarer than proverbial hen's teeth. Hawaii has become proof positive of the corollary to the old expression of ''A tourist is someone who travels 5,000 miles to have his picture taken in front of his car.'' The corollary is ''A tourist is someone who travels 10,000 miles to eat the exact same food he eats at home.''

The final proof of all this can be found on the island of Jamaica, where the local food has virtually vanished from public view. Here in Los Angeles, you can find good Jamaican food at places like Cha Cha Cha, Bamboo and Prado. But down Jamaica way, they've determined that tourists aren't especially interested in curried goat, or in ackee and saltfish.

Probably the most popular restaurant in Montego Bay is a place called The Diplomat – a massive white mansion high above the city, with a commanding view of the Bay, and the Caribbean beyond. You dine either on the veranda, cooked by the prevailing winds, or inside in a vast dining room filled with nostalgic reminders of the long lost days of colonial splendor. The food is certainly good, and carefully prepared. But it's also the stuff you can find anywhere in the world – filet of beef with parsley butter, grilled chicken with mushrooms, baked brook trout (trout? in Jamaica?), grilled lamb chops. Many of the ingredients are imported from the United States. Even the lobster came from Maine.

After much nagging, I finally found a real Jamaican restaurant, though I was warned that I wouldn't like it – ''Mostly locals eat there,'' they told me. It was called Cosmo's, and it was nothing more than a thatched hut at the end of a dirt road, right next to the beach. The entire menu consisted of conch soup, curried conch, curried goat, curried lobster, chef's salad and steamed milkfish. It was one of the best meals I've ever had, eaten on mismatched dishware with an assortment of bent and battered utensils. As I recall, it cost under $10 – for two. There wasn't another traveler in the place – just locals and me. I hope it's still there, this last outpost of Jamaican cuisine in Jamaica. But I figure by now, it's probably been replaced by a McDonald's.