Tracy Chabala

One of the 54 fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People Issue 2015. To command the pastry kitchen at Spago, you've got to be somewhat superhuman. The sheer volume of diners, private parties, VIPs and special requests makes it easy for a mere mortal to snap. But that's not how......

It’s cold and flu season, and everyone’s doing their best to avoid getting the bug — especially the cooks at your favorite restaurant. Of course no one wants to get sick (and we doubly wash our hands and binge on vitamin C to avoid it), but many people don’t consider......

If you're at a South American bakery and see a sweet in the display case that looks like an imploding planet Krypton, don't be alarmed. It's only postre chaja, a relatively obscure and luscious Uruguayan sponge cake filled with peaches, whipped cream, sometimes dulce de leche, and topped with delicate shards of French......

Syphons look cool, the French press allows you to ingest a quart of coffee in public while appearing chic instead of addicted, and the recent influx of "pourovers" is a slick way to charge $5 for a cup of plain-old drip coffee.  But there is something magical about the viscous......

If you live in L.A. and have even a modest sweet tooth, chances are you've tried a tres leches cake. And if you've tried a good one, you know it's one of the dreamiest cakes on earth. Drenched in three milks — sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream......

Meet the alfajor, the French macaron of South America. The original alfajor  - an ancient Spanish-Arabic pastry born in the Andalucian city of Medina Sidonia in the southernmost region of Spain -  bears little resemblance to its South American counterpart.  Derived from the Arabic alfahua, or "honeycomb," Spanish alfajores are long cylindrical......

Pancakes done right are nothing short of virtuous, and we feel the establishments serving the best ones deserve medals for their public service from the City of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the city doesn't have pancake sampling at the top of its to-do list, so we've eaten our way through not......

If you aren't familiar with Dia de los Muertos, you really should be. Arguably one of the most badass holidays on the planet, it featured dancing skeletons before Social Distortion played their first chord or Tim Burton picked up his first Super 8. This life-affirming Mexican celebration is so aesthetically......

At the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Torrance you can buy a Louis Vuitton bag, eat out of a meticulously composed bento box, get a makeover at the Shiseido counter, and buy Pocky in bulk from the grocery section. You can also find many iterations of Hello Kitty -- dolls, towels, bags,......

Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 3), we'll be bringing you periodic lists of some of the best things we've found to eat and drink around town. Ice cream sandwiches and bowls of tsukemen, fish tacos and dan dan mien, cups of boba and......