Michelle Huneven

There is a problem with the smart new Cafe Talesai, on Olympic just a few blocks west of Doheny. The space is certainly pretty enough: The gleaming, glass-walled room at one end of a small mini-mall has all the allure of an outdoor cafe, with all the virtues of a......

Chadwick is the fourth restaur-ant at 267 S. Beverly Drive that I‘ve reviewed in the last decade. Since the cozy Chez Helene vacated the address some years ago, the ill-fated Chez Gilles and Bistro K have come and gone. But Chadwick’s investors have made a far bigger commitment. The new......

I have just returned from Paris and am suffering from a particular kind of withdrawal. I had grown quite fond — perhaps overly so — of the commonplace French sandwich, a skinny baguette sliced lengthwise and inlaid with a few slices of jambon (ham) and Gruyère. No mustard, no mayo......

”I’m so happy,“ said my friend Kate on approaching the salad bar at the new Brazilian restaurant Picanha in Burbank. ”This is my kind of place.“ Kate is on a diet, one of those no-carbohydrate diets everyone seems to be on lately, where you can eat meat and many vegetables,......

Walking into Le Saigon, I smell the cool, watery green scent of cucumbers. And indeed, from my seat I can peek into the back of this tiny Vietnamese cafe and see, behind a bamboo screen, a man chopping cucumbers into fine julienned strips. He‘s chopping heaps of slivered cucumber, with......

A friend and I are sitting on the patio of Le Petit Zinc. We are trying to talk to each other, but there is a distraction: At the table next to us, a couple in their late 40s, if not their early 50s, are passionately making out. ”Where do they......

Pasadena‘s Old Town is a theme park, a marketplace, a date destination, a parking nightmare. It is a strange comment on what constitutes “old” and “town.” You could conduct your entire love life in Old Town and never go someplace more than a decade old: Meet at Barnes & Noble,......

When I was 18 I was a fast-food cook at a takeout stand in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, called the Pig ’n’ Puppy, a name so clumsy and unappealing that I had a difficult time admitting I worked there. (The Pig stood for barbecue and the Puppy for hushpuppies —......

This is not a restaurant review. It started out to be one: That is, I went to a fledgling restaurant with the intent of writing about it, but I won’t be doing that, at least not specifically. At least I won‘t be mentioning the restaurant by name. But what I......

Some time ago I interviewed Marion Cunningham, author of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, among many others, and an ardent spokesperson for home cooking. In the course of several hours, we talked about food in many different capacities, and one of the more surprising revelations of the day had to do......