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A Pretty Good Chinese Restaurant

Jonathan Gold
We all have spent a certain amount of time in the last decade in pursuit of the great Chinese restaurant, the mythical Taiwanese café or the swank Cantonese seafood Valhalla we instinctively know must exist among the several thousand Chinese restaurants in the Los Angeles area. And though that ideal......
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Wrap Party

Jonathan Gold
All India Café This place is at its best when you bring the fewest preconceptions to the table, when the food least resembles its regional roots. The restaurant’s signature dish is probably the "frankie," a Bombay street snack that the Westside Bombay Cafe brought to Cal i fornia and perfected,......

Nature Boy

Sara Catania
Adam Werbach fidgets in his dressing room, swilling bottled water and waiting to tape a talk show called The Couch. A wardrobe guy pops in to eyeball Werbach’s corduroy cargo pants and his wide-lapeled Naugahyde blazer, donned en route to the Burbank studio. The guy nods and Werbach relaxes —......
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Lingua Britannica

Steven Mikulan
John Dos Passos opened his U.S.A. trilogy of novels with a freewheeling inventory of what made up the United States ("a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins, a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery") and what it meant......
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Sweet Heart

Tom Provenzano
With Elton John’s music in Disney’s The Lion King, followed by Barry Manilow’s musical, Harmony, and Paul Simon’s score to the upcoming Cape Man, a renewed fusion of pop and show tunes is breathing life into both forms — hearkening back to half a century ago, when there was hardly......
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An Open Stance

Sasha Anawalt
Mikhail Baryshnikov, father of four. Baryshnikov, who has lived 10 years with the same woman, Lisa Rinehart. How is it that the paparazzi (even the dance-magazine paparazzi — benign, persuasive) have not leaped upon him through the bushes of his home overlooking the Hudson River and stolen snaps of him......

Rights Reversal

Alex Katz
The federal civil rights challenge to oil giant UNOCAL, first hailed as a landmark case that could influence the conduct of business throughout the world, foundered in federal court this week. U.S. District Judge Richard Paez declined on Monday to issue an injunction barring further investment by UNOCAL in Burma,......

Limited Access

Mark Cromer
It’s a blustery day in December, and it feels good to enter the shadowy calm of Union Station, heralded by urban planners in 1939 as America’s "last great train station," and later revamped as the hub of mass transit in Los Angeles. But it’s a matter of minutes before we......

Sacked and Sued

David Cogan
The University of Southern California drop-kicked football coach John Robinson after a subpar season, but it’s sticking with the longtime coach on the legal gridiron. The school is defending itself and Robinson against a lawsuit alleging that he sexually harassed former administrative assistant Norma Navarro. In the suit — filed......

Family Values

Howard Blume
A quiet milestone was achieved last month when L.A. school board member Jeff Horton won election to the executive committee of the California School Boards Association, putting him in line to be the group’s first openly gay president. If past practice holds, Horton will become president-elect next year, and the......