Andrew Froug

Reporting from Tokyo, where just last week FoodEx, the largest food and beverage exhibition in Asia, welcomed more than 73,000 attendees over four days. Samples were flying off the tables, gobbled and chugged ravenously, as suppliers and distributors from around the world wooed potential clients. We saw models and dancing......

Our Venn Food Diagram series has studied the people of Thailand, Armenia, Vietnam and most recently California, comparing what they actually eat with what Angelenos believe they eat. In this edition, we turn our attention to Japan, looking past ramen and sushi to see what foods Angelenos have left to......

The toughest, most bruising running back in the NFL has been fined $10,000 for wearing Skittles shoes. Nicknamed "Beast Mode," Marshawn Lynch is most widely known for running through eight defenders in a 67 yard touchdown run to beat the Saints in the playoffs last year. The Seattle Seahawks player......

Only the best for the King. So went the line of thinking when a $3,000 birthday cake was deemed unworthy of Miami Heat basketball player LeBron James and promptly discarded. And now no one's left to pick up the tab. The Miami Herald reports that Boca Raton baker Alethea Hickman......

Lost in the smoky haze of cigarettes and Korean BBQ that envelops much of Koreatown is the most civilized, most quiet, most splendidly restful tea shop in town, where straw mats hang from the ceiling, separating tables, where chairs are covered in pillows and where lanterns are strewn throughout the......

Keep chewing. Close your eyes and the scene is clear: You're eating pizza in Bologna, a softly lit neighborhood haunt, where in the corner rests a majestic oven built from the soil of Mount Vesuvius. Open your eyes and the illusion disappears: You're eating at Eatalian Cafe, in a cavernous......

Most good fried food is crispy. But crispy catfish at Ganda Siamese Cuisine is an entirely different fried animal: not really crispy at all. The fish is sliced up and fried past an inch of its life and covered in a fiery red paste full of galangal, chiles and Kaffir......

Unstoppable force, meet the immovable object; or so we believed when we saw that pastry chef Karen Hatfield put a chocolate mint frozen pavlova on her dessert menu. Coming from one direction is perhaps the most talented, precise and intelligent pastry chef in town. Coming from the other is sweetened......

"I know the perfect dessert place in K-Town." Armed with knowledge of Koo's Ho-tteok Cart, these are magic words for a 20-something on a date. In a city full of faceless, members-only bars and superclubs, there's something especially sweet about waiting in the cold outside a Korean supermarket for a......

What if the best things in restaurants -- like in life -- were free? This is the parallel universe imagined by Hatfield's every time the bartender sets down a bowl of complimentary popcorn in front of you. Hatfield's, a special occasion restaurant on Melrose that becomes its own special occasion......