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Serious Eats City Guide: Los Angeles
I third or fourth or whatever we're up to the recommendation of Scoops for best ice cream. Pazzo Gelato in Silverlake is not even worth mentioning in comparison. Because of Tai Kim's willingness to experiment and to draw on his Korean background in a community with the largest Korean population after Seoul, Scoops is also a uniquely Angelino experience in a way the other three places named are not.
The recommendation of Mozza as the best pizza joint is, sadly, right. Sad not because Mozza's bad-- it's terrific, if pricey, and not the casual experience that most East Coasters associate with the best pizza-- but because its always seemed weird to me that a city with so many Italians and Italian-Americans should be unable to come up with a first rate, affordable pizza joint. Odd to recommend the Meyer lemon ice cream pie over the salty butterscotch budino, which is what gets the raves.
Not mentioning either Apple Pan or Pie n' Burger, the two usual contenders among locals for one of LA's culinary strong points, also seems odd.
And, I also think something is wrong with picking an Austrian's fusion restaurant over the many, many first rate Chinese contenders as "best Chinese." A search of Jonathan Gold's LA Weekly articles and posts by Jerome on Chowhound's Los Angeles Area message board will turn up a long list. Triumphal Palace deserved to go out of business.
I have a topic to propose for Serious Eats if it's going to get serious about Los Angeles: Pico Boulevard. You can capture much of what's great about the city's food scene in a walk (which a group of us did a couple of years ago) down its entire length, from downtown to the coast.
Serious Grape: Five Must-Have Wine Books
For tasting guides and winery notes, Hugh Johnson's guides are our household favorite. Pithy and pointed, with a more restrained aesthetic than Robert Parker, and less didactic than many wine writers.
Cook the Book: Hamantaschen
In the cookie variety of hamantaschen, I prefer something tangy like lemon juice or orange juice to vanilla as the flavoring agent, maybe because the oil used is generally margerine rather than butter, which makes for a pretty insipid pastry dough. But, am I alone in prefering the yeast dough hamantaschen to any kind of cookie?
For fillings, I think that poppy lekvar is the classic that in part explains the punning name: hamantaschen in yiddish = haman's pockets, and also ha-mohn taschen (the poppy seed pockets).
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The hotteok stand is outside California Market, at the corner of 5th and Western. I used to stop by all the time when I worked at Wilshire and Normandie, until I had to stop, for flub-reduction reasons. It may have been Jonathan Gold who was described these as sort of like pancakes with syrup, inside out. Really a pretty brilliant little treat.