Newsletter: Italian cuisine, Italian chefs and Mother’s Day meals
Happy weekend. Mother’s Day is Sunday, and if you haven’t booked a reservation at your mother’s favorite mimosa watering hole, it’s not too late to cook her breakfast yourself. We have recipes, unsurprisingly, including strawberry shortcake, Belgian waffles, croque madame — and Momofuku’s crack pie. If your mother isn’t really an eggs Benedict and Champagne person and prefers food trucks and Hainan chicken, as some of us do, then you might take her downtown to our Night Market, which runs through Sunday night as part of Food Bowl, our month-long food festival.
Or you could head to chef Scott Conant’s latest Italian restaurant in L.A., as Jonathan Gold has been doing: His new review is of the Ponte. In other stories this week, Noelle Carter talks to Mario Batali about ugly food, and what he does in his own Italian restaurant kitchen to help cut down on food waste. Local cookbook writer Martha Rose Shulman gives recipes for making your own rice bowls, we have grilled cheese pro tips, a story about aging beer (yes, really), and news about a new Father’s Office. So welcome to mid-May: Check out what’s happening at our food festival, and at your nearby farmers markets.
More fun with spaghetti
Chef Scott Conant has been here before — with his late Beverly Hills restaurant Scarpetta — and so has his twenty-something-dollar spaghetti. At the Ponte, the chef returns with a version of that dish, as well as other Italian dishes, as well as flights of tiny Negronis. “Does it mean anything in particular special when a chef is identified with the most basic dish in the Italian repertoire? It is awfully good spaghetti.”
A Q&A with Mario Batali
The famed chef was in town recently for Food Bowl, as part of a panel discussion with chef Massimo Bottura about food waste — and of course to visit Mozza, the restaurant he owns with Nancy Silverton. So Test Kitchen director Noelle Carter caught up with Batali, to ask him about sustainable kitchens, ugly foods and what we can all do about the $165 billion worth of food that goes to waste every year.
Beyond brown rice
Now that we’re all eating so many grain bowls, food writer and cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman considers the kind of specialty rice that we can put in them these days. Black rice, red rice, even pink and purple rice — there’s a lot more than white and brown rice that we can cook with. And yes, she gives recipes.
Grilled cheese pro tips
Among the many food trucks and restaurants that have been gathered at Grand Park for the Food Bowl Night Market: the Grilled Cheese Truck. Noelle talks to chef Dave Danhi about the art of the grilled cheese sandwich, as well as why we all love the stuff so much, grilled cheese no-no’s, and how many he estimates he’s made over the last eight years.
How to age beer
You’ll be forgiven if you think that aging is something that should happen to good wines and spirits — rather than craft beer. Quite the opposite, as mostly we’re told that beer should be as fresh as possible. But beer writer John Verive says that aging beer is actually a thing, and a very good thing at that, in certain circumstances. (Sour ales, high abv, etc.)
Father’s Office to open in DTLA
Deputy Food editor Jenn Harris talks to chef Sang Yoon about his third Father’s Office, set to open later this year in the Arts District. And in other food and drink news: The Pasta Sisters are taking over the now-closed Bucato space in the Helms Bakery complex; and chef Chris Phelps from Salt’s Cure has opened a new breakfast-only restaurant called, helpfully, Breakfast.
The Los Angeles Times Food Bowl: Want to spend 31 days exploring the food of this city through a Night Market, forums, dinners, films, pop-ups and more dining and drinking? Our month-long food festival runs through May 31. What’s happening this coming week? A screening of the James Beard documentary; Filipino Food Night; and Beast Feast, with Fergus Henderson, Dario Cecchini, Nancy Silverton and more.
Goldbot: you can now talk to Jonathan Gold any time you want — or at least the robot version of him that now lives on Facebook Messenger. You can ask Goldbot for a personal restaurant recommendation based on location, type of food or price. The bot will also deliver Jonathan Gold’s latest reviews straight to your device.
The Daily Meal, the food and drink website under the editorial direction of Colman Andrews is now one of our partners. Check out its 101 best pizzas in America and other stories, recipes and videos.
Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants, the authoritative annual guide to local dining, is online for subscribers and now features his 2016 Best Restaurants. If you didn’t get a copy of the booklet, you can order one online here.
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