Best Food Writing 2013 (46 page)

One day I visit with Bowien shortly before the lunch-hour rush. His staff buzzes around us, pulling down chairs from the dining room rafters, where they're stored for the night—one of many workarounds required to make this tiny space viable. “I went to Noma recently,” Bowien tells me. “There was this sense that everyone there was just pushing toward this common goal. The servers—everyone. Everyone was going to bat and trying to make something honest and good. That's what resonates.” Mission could hardly be more different than René Redzepi's spare, pricey Copenhagen mecca. But both embody their founders' singular ideas of what a restaurant should be. Mission's food reflects Bowien's adventurous, irreverent tastes, and consequently some of it is going to toast your taste buds. The wait staff look like they were rounded up at a Hayes Valley bus stop and are prone to bringing you a bowl of rice porridge you didn't order and forgetting the sizzling cumin lamb that you did. But they're always in motion and unfailingly friendly—“Be nice” is another core tenet of Bowien's belief system (and another rationale for importing people from California). Mission's ambience, too, is pure Bowien, from the soundtrack (golden era hip-hop, metal) to the keg (“If people are going to stand here and wait, let them drink free beer”) to that vintage Jordan poster (“I wanted that poster when I was a kid and never got it”). The place isn't for everyone, but it's authentically its own, and that speaks to a clientele that's learned to sniff out (thrift-) store-bought, hand-churned idiosyncrasy.

There's a risk that as Bowien branches out, it will be harder to imbue each new place with his philosophy. (Also, you can't fly back from Paris to man a wok every time a cook calls in sick.) This is a risk that any entrepreneurial chef would face, but it's an especially acute one when your formula is a lack thereof, that exciting sense that you and your crew are making it all up as you go along. Bowien, though, seems constitutionally ill-suited for stasis. I arrived for an early dinner one night to find him sitting at one of the tables in the dining room, ear buds on his ears, working on changes to a menu that a long line of people were waiting outside to sample. Bowien explained that the tinkering is as much about keeping his staff happy as anything
else. “I have to keep all these cooks motivated back there,” he said. “Cooks get very weary after a while. They want to make this food and next thing you know they want to make regional Italian food, so they go to another restaurant.” At Mission, the cook in charge is more restless than most.

 

 

T
HE
K
ING OF THE
F
OOD
T
RUCKS
H
ITS
H
AWAII

By Jonathan Gold

From
Food & Wine

Los Angeles Times
restaurant critic Jonathan Gold was an aficionado of food trucks long before the rest of America caught on, singing their praises in his Counter Intelligence column for
LA Weekly
magazine, and along the way earning a Pulitzer Prize–the first ever for a food writer.

H
onolulu is littered with fancy restaurants, where dishes like sea urchin-garnished jumbo shrimp are a fixture on 12-course tasting menus. It also has its share of breathtakingly expensive sushi spots. Those are not the kind of places that appeal to chef Roy Choi.

As I sit with Choi over dinner in a Waikiki
tonkatsu
parlor, contemplating a $30 sliver of Japanese fried pork, we are talking about Spam
musubi:
rectangular bricks of vinegared rice stuffed with pink, glistening slabs of the lunch meat, then wrapped in seaweed. Spam
musubi
is a crucial totem of what Hawaiians call “local food,” the shotgun marriage of Polynesian ingredients, Asian flavors and American specialties that you find at drive-ins, bowling-alley coffee shops, lunch trucks, mall food courts—pretty much anywhere the regulars tend to outnumber the tourists. Spam
musubi
is quintessential gas-station food—you see it in a cooler in the back, near the Red Bull and the Coors Lite.

I think we should try the
musubi
at He'eia Pier General Store & Deli, which was just reopened and has been getting good notices
for its reinvented lunch specials made with organic, island-grown ingredients, or at least at Iyasume, where
musubi
is the specialty of the house. Choi thinks we need to go down the street to a 7-Eleven. I'm not sure I agree with him, but I admire his style.

Even if you think you know everything about chef culture, Choi is that
other
guy—his gaze intense, his Lakers cap skewed, his sartorial style somewhere between skate-punk, Koreatown dandy and East L.A.
veterano.
Born in Korea, he grew up shuttling among Los Angeles neighborhoods with his scholarly dad and restaurateur mom, who always managed to prepare multicourse Korean breakfasts no matter how many hours she worked. He was the speaker of his class at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and spent a decade as an executive chef at grand hotels.

Choi first came to prominence when he left the mainstream food world to start Kogi, the Korean taco truck that not only jump-started the national food-truck craze but also the rush to elevated street food. He logged time at Le Bernardin, but he cooks like a dude as obsessed with carne asada picnics as he is with his mother's kimchi. Instead of expanding his Kogi franchise, he's opened a series of inspired places: the rice-bowl spot Chego, the Hawaii-inspired A-Frame and the small-plates-style restaurant Sunny Spot, loosely based on Jamaican roadside dives. He has an intimate knowledge of Koreatown in Los Angeles, and he was an
F&W
Best New Chef in 2010, but his favorite destination is neither Paris nor Korea but Hawaii, which he first got to know as an adolescent dumped off for a summer at an aunt's house in Honolulu. He has visited almost every year of his adult life. It's where Choi feels at home, and where he finds inspiration for everything from his restaurants to his upcoming book,
Spaghetti Junction: Riding Shotgun with an L.A. Chef.
“I translate Hawaii as a place where people make sure I'm having a great time, eating terrific food, without any expectation of anything in return,” Choi told me. “It's a place for people to be happy. It sounds corny, but in Hawaii, it's not; it's uncorny.”

Honolulu is a multiethnic city where currently fashionable things, like Asian-inflected European cooking, are as likely to show up in a construction worker's lunch box as in a tourist's four-star dinner. Supermarket staples like chuck steak, flown in from the mainland,
cost almost as much as great local tuna. And the line dividing canned lunch meat from spectacular local shellfish is occasionally finer than one might wish.

In the Honolulu calculus that splits food into what is eaten with a plastic fork and everything else, it is clear which side of the plate-lunch divide Choi stands on. Deprive him of
malasadas,
shave ice or
laulau
(taro-wrapped pork), and he is an unhappy chef indeed.

So the next morning finds us in a rented car, creeping through morning traffic, on our way to the first of three breakfasts: the beginning of a hundred-thousand-calorie journey around Oahu that will fuel Choi for the rest of the year.

We pull into the parking lot of Leonard's, a cramped bakery that's the home of Hawaii's best-known
malasadas
: slightly sweetened beignets, best eaten scorchingly hot, dusted with granulated sugar. The line inside is endless, snaking back on itself, slowed by customers who take forever to decide among the hundreds of pastries in the long glass bakery cases, even though they inevitably end up with
malasadas.

“The karma's coming back to me,” says Choi, whose trucks generally inspire even longer waits.

We eat leaning against the wall outside. A bus full of Japanese tourists pulls into the lot. Each of them takes pictures of the vintage neon. Tour guides distribute
malasadas,
one each, daintily folded in napkins. The Japanese do not look thrilled.

We double back to the Rainbow Drive-In, draped with banners proclaiming its 50th anniversary. It's a fast-food place with outdoor tables and a cantilevered shade—a famous center of “local food.” We order far too much: a teriyaki plate, chili rice and something called long rice, which is thin, slippery glass noodles cooked in chicken broth. We also try the local-food specialty
loco moco
: an enormous plateau of rice topped with a well-done hamburger patty, drenched in a viscous, dark-brown goo and topped with a fried egg.

“This isn't delicious,” says Choi. “Or, rather, this is a different kind of delicious. When you come out of the ocean after surfing all day,
loco moco
is the best thing you ever tasted.”

We stand in another line at Helena's Hawaiian Food, often said to serve the best plate lunches in Honolulu, where Choi is treated like a movie star by a California newscaster who frequents Kogi and
I am drawn into an argument about the best hand-pulled noodles in the San Gabriel Valley. In the world of plate lunches, Helena's is stunning: a profoundly smoky version of the traditional luau dish
pipikaula,
made from short ribs that have been dried on racks in the kitchen; fried butterfish collar; tripe stew with homemade chile pepper water; squid cooked down with taro leaves; and
lomi
salmon, which is like a mild salsa with cubed fish tossed in with the tomatoes. For dessert, there are jiggly cubes of
haupia
pudding, made with coconut cream. We are happy, and we are full.

But five minutes later, we are at the Shimazu Store, a battered storefront a mile or so down the street, for the first of many cracks at Hawaii's famous shave ice, a kind of giant, fluffy snow cone flavored with homemade syrup that seems to be an obsession of Choi's: guava,
lilikoi
(passion fruit), lychee, milky green tea, durian. Shave ice is always found in a storefront a little out of the way, and it's always served in portions far too big for one person to get through before the ice collapses over your hand with a splash. The pavement for blocks around each store is stained with dead shave ice and weeping children. I finally talk Choi into going back to the hotel for a nap.

Dinner that night is at Side Street Inn, a 20-year-old bar in an alley. Side Street is kind of a prototype of the modern
izakaya
that has been popping up in large American cities for the last couple of years, an aggressively multicultural house of big eats that just happen to be served on shared platters, lubricated by oceans of beer. Choi has been coming here for years. We are greeted effusively by owner-chef Colin Nishida.

“People keep asking me for my pork chop recipe,” he says. “It is very short—garlic salt, flour and cornstarch, that's it.”

“I thought I tasted Lawry's salt,” says Choi.

“Nah, although I love the stuff.”

“No egg wash?”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

Ninety minutes later, we've gone through enormous platters of Japanese fried chicken, kimchi fried rice and sweet-sticky baby back ribs with a thick hoisin glaze that Choi adores. He has also come to agree with Nishida about the crunchy fried pork chops: Why the hell would he use egg wash?

Outside of Honolulu, which resembles a typical midsize American
city in a lot of ways, Oahu is a not-immense place where the great American road trip quickly runs out of road. Among other things, I wanted to taste the definitive version of a local specialty,
huli huli
chicken. I found it within an hour of leaving the hotel, in the parking lot of a Malama Market, where Ray's Kiawe Broiled Chicken truck sets up on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I had imagined a guy cooking out of a van, but the grill was as long as a semitrailer, shaded by a dented tin roof, heaped with fuming kiawe charcoal over which spun 30 to 40 chickens threaded onto special rotating spits. Choi finds Dino, the owner's son; he tells us the chickens go from raw to cooked in just 25 minutes. But he has to keep a lot going at once in case a tour bus drops by, an event that's both lucrative and unpredictable.

Down the street, Matsumoto Shave Ice—home of the most famous version in the world—is totally set up for the tourist trade, an old grocery channeled for the sale of dripping ice cones and T-shirts. Choi is recognized by a Kogi fan from Oakland, a young Filipina in the area for a friend's wedding, who pumps us for information on restaurants both in Honolulu and back in California. The rainbow shave ice, we all agree, is grainy and second-rate.