Newsletter: Counter: The fried chicken and pizza edition
Sometimes pretty, repeating tasting menus and dishes that look like still-life paintings just aren’t what you feel like eating. Sometimes you just want a plate of hot and crazy-crunchy fried chicken, maybe with a side of fried pickles, or a pizza the size of a hubcap. Maybe it’s the playoff season; maybe it’s all that free floating election anxiety. Either way, this week we’ve got nothing about haute cuisine — but plenty on serious comfort food.
Jonathan Gold considers a place that specializes in fried chicken, plates of it, followed by a slice of chess pie. (If you prefer Asian fried chicken, then he’s written about that; and Nashville hot chicken too.) Then we think about what pizzas around town aren’t getting enough love: pies stuffed with ricotta, or loaded with ‘nduja, or mortadella, or clams. What to drink with all those pies? We’ve got some bottles of wine to recommend. Or if you’re a craft beer drinker, we have some new L.A. beers too, just in time for Dodgers playoff baseball, and Week 5 of the NFL in Los Angeles.
Fried chicken in Arlington Heights
Jonathan heads to Gus’s Famous Fried Chicken, a branch of the original (and very famous) fried chicken restaurant in Mason, Tenn., that’s in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of L.A. This is not Nashville hot chicken, but batter-fried and deeply addictive.
5 ways of looking at a pizza
Deputy Food Editor Jenn Harris considers five pies that you might not be eating enough of: under-the-radar pizzas from places such as DeSano Pizza Bakery and Kettle Black. Detroit-style pizza? Got that too, thanks to the folks at Unit 120 in Chinatown.
More than Chianti with your pie
Wine has always been a traditional pairing with pizza, and so wine writer Patrick Comiskey checks out five bottles that match up pretty well with your favorite pie. Yes, there’s that bottle of Chianti, but there’s also, say, the sparkling wines of Franciacorta.
Hello Kitty wine? Not kidding.
Of course, if you’re a big Hello Kitty fan, you might want to score some bottles of Hello Kitty wine for your next pizza party. Yes, it’s real stuff: Sanrio, the company that created the character, teamed up with Torti Winery in Italy to produce a line of wines under a Hello Kitty label — both a white and a rosé.
A Little Saigon food crawl
If you find yourself in Westminster and Garden Grove, you could do worse than to check out some of the many fantastic Vietnamese restaurants — the neighborhood is called Little Saigon for a reason. Food writer Esther Tseng checks out where to find great nem nướng̣, rice cakes, bowls of pho and, yes, Viet coffee.
Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants, the authoritative annual guide to local dining, is online for subscribers. And because you’re probably wondering, Gold’s 2016 Best Restaurants list will be out in late October, along with our annual Bite Nite celebration.
“City of Gold,” Laura Gabbert’s documentary of Jonathan Gold’s Los Angeles, is now available on Amazon.
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