Fajita pitas, Octopus Tacos, and the Birth of California Cuisine

17 Without anybody quite noticing, Nobu Matsuhisa sneaks some dishes onto the menu of his neighborhood sushi bar that are influenced by the time he spent cooking in Lima. Innovation in sushi is nothing new in Los Angeles — the ubiquitous California roll was invented at the Little Tokyo restaurant Horikawa just a few years ago — but Matsuhisa’s takes on Peruvian ceviche and the lightly marinated tiradito, along with his own ideas about seafood salad and “new-style” sashimi drizzled with warmed olive oil, take hold. Within a couple of years, Matsuhisa will have re-defined the modern restaurant kitchen as a place with a sushi chef instead of a hot line at its core, and his influence will stretch all the way back to Japan.

18 When Campanile opens in a converted Hollywood apartment court, The Village Voicecalls it the last restaurant of the ’80s, which in a certain way it is. Chef Mark Peel grows his own lamb, makes mozzarella to order and drives down to Chino Ranch himself twice a week to pick up the produce. Nancy Silverton not only transforms America’s idea of dessert with her entrée-structured pastries, but makes the country’s best bread in her spare time. Manfred Krankl’s list of obscure Italian, Californian and Austrian wines is so far out in front that only now are the rest of the restaurants in town beginning to catch up. A few years later — its moment — it finds itself joined at the hip to the Santa Monica Farmers Market, and the exotic Persian mulberries, Meyer lemons and chiogga beets, for the first time, find a Los Angeles restaurant home.

19 The first Johnny Rockets on Melrose, which from the start is mobbed by the sort of Hollywood guy who has bought his Harley-Davidson with an American Express card, represents the perfection of the faux restaurant, which is to say a blurry photocopy of the Apple Pan menu transplanted to a Happy Daysfantasy of a ’50s diner, a vision so compelling that most of the remaining real ’50s diners are redesigned to resemble it completely, right down to the pink neon and the chrome. Is it progress to be able to visit a Los Angeles–style restaurant in Kuwait City? Apparently so.

20 The Los Angeles restaurant scene had long suffered the effects of Spagonomics — which is to say, the inability of any restaurant in town to get away with charging more for its food than Spago did for a meal of pizza, pasta and salad (really good pizza, pasta and salad, true) because Spago was where everybody really wanted to eat. Then Puck himself moves to the old Bistro Garden space in Beverly Hills, and instead of pizza, he serves a crawfish-and-beet salad that might have come out of the playbook of a three-star restaurant in Strasbourg; instead of chopped salad, a foie gras platter; instead of sticky “Mandarin” quail, pan-roasted black bass with fava beans and rosemary. This is the sort of move a chef in France has to make if he aspires to coax a third star out of the Michelin inspectors, but few American restaurateurs — besides, perhaps, Sirio Maccioni at New York’s Le Cirque — have dared to dismantle so popular a place.

21When the world’s great food cities, Paris and Taipei and Rome, are being discussed, it may not be unreasonable to include among them . . . San Gabriel, California, population 39,804, which up until a decade before had been noted chiefly for the patty melts at Sandi’s Coffee Shop. Consider this: The city of San Gabriel has at least 50 restaurants worth recommending, far more than Beverly Hills or Cincinnati, and scarcely fewer than Los Angeles’ entire Westside. In San Gabriel, you can find the cooking of almost any Chinese province. In Taipei, San Gabriel is almost as famous as Hollywood or Disneyland. And the big event in San Gabriel, the locus of Chinese eating in Southern California, is the opening of San Gabriel Square, a gleaming, sweet-smelling Oz of a shopping mall with a Chinese department store, a tremendous Chinese supermarket, boutiques and bakeries, and Chinese restaurants of every description: Islamic, Taiwanese noodle shop, dim sum, Shanghainese, Chiu Chow, northern Chinese, Cantonese deli and a cook-your-own buffet, among others. Where does one eat well in San Gabriel Square? Everywhere.

22 Pan-Latin? Nuevo Latino? Caribbean cooking? Whatever you call it, the cuisine arguably gets its start at Cha Cha Cha, a tumbledown ex–gas station on the far end of Melrose where Toribio Prado parlays a thatched patio, salsa mix tapes and a first-rate corn-chowder recipe into something resembling an empire, plantains on the side.

23 Half the bottles in Valentino’s wine cellar, perhaps the biggest and deepest in Los Angeles, plummet to their deaths in the Northridge quake. More than one grape nut contemplates positioning himself outside the doors of the restaurant, ready to lap up the errant torrent of glass-laced La Tâche.

24 If you grew up in L.A., you probably expected a certain kind of restaurant to be around pretty much forever, the leather-booth, caesar-salad, big-martini places with rolling service carts, Hollywood pedigrees and captains who looked like Joe E. Brown. But in the ’70s, boom, they all begin to disappear. Scandia — gone. The Cock and Bull, whose bar was the first to serve vodka in America — torn down. The Brown Derby — dismantled, the crown of its landmark hat-shaped dining room ignominiously hoisted onto a Korean mini-mall, where it sits like the wart on a witch’s nose. And when a supermarket finally replaces Chasen’s, the ancient Hollywood restaurant that functioned as a clubhouse for everybody from Humphrey Bogart to Ronald Reagan, it isn’t only the hobo steak, the banana shortcake and Pepe Ruiz’s famous Flame of Love martini that are mourned.