A completely personal restaurant guide to Los Angeles, Part 1.
One holiday from multiple perspectives. Words by Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Tandoh and Feroz Gajia.
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A completely personal restaurant guide to Los Angeles, Part 1.
In February 2023, Vittles columnists Jonathan Nunn, Ruby Tandoh and Feroz Gajia spent 14 days in Los Angeles and ate at over 100 restaurants, ice cream parlours and taco stalls, and just generally had a very good time. What follows is sort of a guide but also a very biased and subjective account of that trip, told through multiple perspectives. Part 2 will be out next week.
A pilgrimage to the San Gabriel Valley, by Jonathan Nunn
Going to the San Gabriel Valley was, for me, like a singer visiting Graceland. It’s where the discipline I work in was essentially created, of seeking to re-include neglected suburbs into the mythology of the city by documenting their food culture. Like all suburbs, it is extraordinary, ugly, beautiful, surreal, and deeply mundane: the remarkably cheap and well-placed Hilton where we stayed was almost solely filled with middle class visitors from China seeing family or checking out schools (next to the 24/7 gift shop, you can find a college consultancy firm as well as organise trips to the Ronald Reagan Ranch Centre).
One thing which visitors get wrong about the San Gabriel Valley is calling it the largest Chinatown in America. The word ‘Chinatown’ seems wholly inadequate when describing the SGV because it has none of Chinatown’s artifice. Rather, it is a whole, autonomous Chinese town that just happens to be in Southern California. The Flushing Chinatown in New York is comprehensible, although it may give you an superficial sense of dislocation when you first visit, with its Simplified Character signs giving you the impression that you might be in a mid-level Chinese city. But the SGV, with its Spanish revival malls in Lynchian American suburbia, with Chinese businesses and an Alpine backdrop, has by far a deeper sense of dislocation, one which is difficult to shrug off.