A City of Eaters

Editor’s note: This fall The Times will publish its first major cookbook in 10 years, “Los Angeles Times Modern California Cooking.” A collection of more than 300 recipes, the book highlights some of the best appetizers, main dishes, salads and desserts published in The Times Food section over the last 15 years. This is an excerpt of the introduction by Times Food Editor Russ Parsons.

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I am a born-again Californian.

They say that no one believes so strongly as the convert, and I am certainly in no position to dispute that. In fact, I offer myself in evidence.

It’s all because of food. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1986, I found a city full of people who were as obsessed by it as I am.

It seemed that everywhere I went, people were talking about food. In California, I found, sharing food is something that everyone does. Workplace potlucks might hop from Korean noodles to carne asada to Boston baked beans, and nobody really thinks much about it.

Everyone gardens or knows someone who does, so fresh herbs are not considered the exotic ingredients they are elsewhere. On top of that, with our moderate climate (Mediterranean, we like to brag), they are available all year round. Basil in February, just imagine.

Of course, to a newcomer in the 1980s, the most obvious thing was the restaurants. Los Angeles was in the process of transforming itself from a graveyard of culinary dinosaurs into one of the most exciting dining cities in the country--maybe the world.

Encouraged by a population flush with boom-town money, chefs played a dizzying game of one-upmanship, vying to top one another in the lavishness of their restaurants, the exclusiveness of their ingredients, the inventiveness of their techniques.

The stars went to Patrick Terrail’s and Wolfgang Puck’s Ma Maison and pretty soon, everyone else wanted to. True foodies--in those days, that meant the French kind--preferred Jean Bertranou’s L’Ermitage. From those wellsprings emerged Spago, Patina, L’Orangerie, Citrus, Michael’s, Trumps, Valentino, Saint Estephe, Campanile.

All of this high-end dining had a broad trickle-down effect. A few chefs and some of the more adventurous foodies began venturing beyond the old boundaries of fine dining and started exploring the city’s rich assortment of ethnic restaurants.

Los Angeles became known as the place trends come from. Thai cooking was the first big thing, and the common question soon became: “What’s the next hot cuisine?” (ignoring, of course, that every cuisine is hot at home). Regional Chinese restaurants in Chinatown and Monterey Park soon found their popularity was no longer limited to their own neighborhoods. The same happened with Mexican restaurants.

And then it was off to the races. Caribbean, Cambodian, Peruvian, Persian, Lebanese, Indonesian, Indian--even Uzbek. If you could find a country on a map (and even if you couldn’t), odds are there was a restaurant of that type in Southern California. This interest in ethnic dining has had two big effects.

It introduced people to tastes that were outside their experience, erasing many preconceptions of what good cooking is all about. It also democratized restaurant dining. Because these ethnic restaurants are almost always much cheaper than the usual run of big-deal restaurants, you no longer had to be members of the platinum-card set to eat well.

And then, of course, there is home cooking, again and always. Having been exposed to the subtleties of fine dining, newly fluent in half a dozen menu languages, an army of ardent amateurs moved back to reinvigorate the home kitchen.

This spurred a boom in shopping for food that is shared not only by gourmet stores and high-end groceries but also by ethnic markets--which began to notice the same crossover phenomenon the restaurants had--and by farmers markets.

From 1985 to 1995, the number of farmers markets in Southern California nearly tripled. You no longer had to drive miles to find a farmers market; odds were there was one in your neighborhood at least once a week.

Again, there was a significant trickle-down effect. The mainstream supermarket, which had been cruising along selling much the same inventory since the 1950s, began stocking many of the same ingredients found in ethnic markets. This was true not only in terms of pantry ingredients like soy sauce and tortillas but also in more sophisticated offerings of meat and produce: smoked pork and collards in black neighborhoods, thin-sliced beef and cleaned cactus paddles in Mexican ones.

Even the recession of the ‘90s, which was felt long and hard in Southern California, helped build the food scene. Though it stunted the growth of fine dining, it fueled a wave of Italo-philia quite unlike anything the city had seen before.

For almost a decade, it seemed that every other new restaurant was called Trattoria Something or the Other. Though most of them focused on food cost--a plate of pasta makes a hefty return to a restaurant’s bottom line--there were always cooks focusing on the simple, elegant perfection of great Italian cooking.

At the same time, the farmers market movement continued to boom, tripling yet again from 1990 to 2000. No longer is it a matter of finding a market in every neighborhood; in some neighborhoods you can find a farmers market almost every day of the week.

In fact, today you could say we have it all. There are wonderful big-deal restaurants for special nights out. There are intriguing neighborhood places where you can explore cuisines of faraway lands for little more than the price of an afternoon movie.

Best of all, we have never before known a time when so much high-quality food was so readily available to take home to cook for our friends and families.

Is it any wonder that our cult keeps growing?

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“Los Angeles Times Modern California Cooking” will be published in September. To order a copy, send a check for $22.45 (including shipping and handling), to Los Angeles Times, P.O. Box 5425, Chatsworth, CA 91311. You can also call (800) 246-4042 or go to https://www.latimes.com/bookstore. Look for it in bookstores in September; retail price will be $21.95.