CITY OF OUT-OF-TOWNERS : L.A.’s Charm Reflects the Backgrounds of Its Residents, Many of Whom Are Imports

If you grew up in Los Angeles, you are probably accustomed to sitting down to poker games with tablesful of Montanans, going to lunch counters that cater to the exact junk-food cravings of ex-Chicagoans, listening to Arizona State grads complain about the local Mexican food. When you go to rock clubs, you are surrounded by crowds of former Austin residents or onetime Parisians, who take great trouble to explain just why their hometowns are superior. And that doesn’t even take into account the great swarms of New York guys who smirk about California’s lack of night life, even as they stay home evenings with their cartons of takeout Chinese food and their taped “Seinfeld” episodes.

It is more or less a rule of thumb in Los Angeles: When you are in a room with eight people, six of them will be from out of town, and one of the other two is lying.

The reason Los Angeles in many ways is a more interesting restaurant city than New York or London, for example, owes less to the average Angeleno’s cosmopolitanism than it does to the desire of homesick expatriates to reproduce exactly the tastes, the smells of their hometown. Here you can find the cooking not only of China, or even of metro Shanghai, but of Yangchow; a specific African-American style of tamales unique to a few Mississippi counties; the odd sour-sweet tang of fermented cactus drinks unknown outside a 10-mile radius of the proprietor’s coastal Mexican hometown. Los Angeles sometimes seems less a place than a context.

The Southland’s vocal inflection is considered less an accent than standard American English. The local cooking is known to the world at large via McDonald’s and Taco Bell. The home-grown entertainment, from the Stone Temple Pilots to “Terminator II,” is the only stuff in the world never labeled as “regional.”

It’s true that you never feel so much an Angeleno as when you’re someplace like Boston or Seattle, where “Los Angeles” is almost always shorthand for “too much money, not enough moral values,” and where some people still insist on talking patronizingly about riots and earthquakes at dinner parties when they find out where you’re from. Sometimes on the telephone to someplace like Brooklyn, you can inspire a small amount of envy by pointing out that the party on the other end is snowed in and where you are it’s 75 degrees and you can see all the way out to Catalina. But it is safe to say that the phrase “she’s so L.A.” is rarely meant as a compliment, even around here.

I had the odd experience the other day of sitting down to dinner with eight people, seven of whom had actually grown up in Los Angeles, and we talked about the drive-ins we went to after high school basketball games, about visiting the old alligator farm in Buena Park, about going to see the giant wisteria in Sierra Madre when we were small. It was nice to have the same shared history as the other guys for a change, not the usual culture-centered conversations of X shows you might have seen together at the Whisky in 1979, Dodgers pennant seasons or the faded glory of the Giulini-era Philharmonic, but shared knowledge of dumb stuff: CIF football powerhouse St. Paul, the roadhouse shaped like Mt. Baldy, the giant baked potatoes down on old Route 19, early benders at Rosemead tiki lounges, the fries at the Shrimp Boat. Still, I doubt that anywhere in the world is there a place called Joe’s Grill and Los Angeles Bar. And if there were, I have no idea what kind of bar it might be.