A Tale of One City, Divided in Half

Even though Latinos are the overwhelming majority of the minorities in this city, soon to be emerging as the overwhelming majority...period, its culinary influence has reached a peak.

As many listeners and readers know, we moved this weekend from the Latino stronghold of East LA/Hollywood, to the homogenized Whitebread 'paradise' of Santa Monica. Home of the Homeless. Each side of the city is culturally segregated into the main populations who live there. If you count homeless as a racial group, and why not?

Of course, there are exceptions. While East LA is notably Mexican, and features some of the best and oldest authentic Mexican food in the city, Koreatown certainly cannot be ignored...although it largely is outside of the Korean community. Why has K-Town fallen off the map for all except ravenous gourmands? I know, I know, I'm making gross generalizations, but K-Town occupies a huge swath of land from Wilshire-south and everything east of Western. It's a city within a city, like every other community in LA.

So why have we glossed over the Eastside Asian influence? 'Cause we're white, I guess. Because it's easier to compartmentalize areas by one particular group instead of acknowledging that Hollywood is both Armenian and Thai. We allow international borders to screw up our perception of peaceful commingling of different people. Ok, I'll grant you that Glendale is Armenian. Period. You want good kabobs and a place to get your car fixed and someone to hook you up with affordable stereo equipment, Glendale's your place.

Hollywood isn't known for a damn thing except hookers and heroin addicts, but there is a respectable Thai community with some great grocery stores from which to stock up on your lemongrass and durien. So why is East LA tagged as Mexican?

Well, the overwhelming majority of taggers are Mexican, but I did see Sushi scrawled on my lightposts and sidewalks of Los Feliz before I left. So you see, the tagging culture is even being wrestled away from Mexicans, and Asians are slowly assimilating into this dubious tagging culture. Nice job!

The Middle City -the flyover surface streets between Western and La Cienega- are a hodgepodge of mixed levels of cuisine, short-shrift chop-shop fusions of French-Asian, Asian-Fusion, Cal-Asian. Notice a pattern? Again, the Mexicans, who comprise the majority of population here in Southern California, are getting -at least culinarily- squeezed out of the game. There is no Mexican-French fusion or Mexican-Asian fusion...but there should be.

The two largest cultural groups in California (next to Whitey) are Asian and Mexican. Now, I realize that's a generalization since Latinos come from a checkerboard of countries south of the border, and Asians come from a nice quilt of their own countries. For the sake of simplicity, let's just pretend there's one Asian country and one Latino country.

But, you scream, you just posted a breakout not too long ago of the different Asian food. Right you are. I am a hypocrite for the sake of this argument. Mexico has, I dunno, many different states, each originating its own brand of unique regional dishes. What do we get here in LA? Tacos and burritos. Carne Asada. Supersweet Coca Cola. The occassional Oaxacan restaurant. But mostly, tacos and burritos.

That's like saying all Asian food is noodles and raw fish. There's just so much more to the food than that. But nobody has bothered elevating or breaking out the regional cuisines of Mexico. Or El Savador for that matter, Brazilian, Columbian or Nicaraguan. Belize? I don't even know how to spell Belize.

Perhaps it is so integrated into our California culture that we would never bastardize Mexican food. After all, California at one point was Mexican territory. By geological standards, Asians are recent immigrants. So, does the relative age of an immigrant culture open it up to fusion more than a rigidly ensconsed cultural cuisine? Perhaps.

But I think the reasons are more insidious than that. It's because Mexican food has not yet elevated itself to stylized cuisine. The best example I could force out of my tired and aging brain is Border Grill, and even that is more Southwestern than Mexican. I happen to know Susan Fenniger is a big fan of Mexican food from all regions, so I think their hearts are in the right place. The Border Grill is doing its darndest to elevate Mexican/Southwestern food into something more elegant.

Asian food already enjoys that posture, and it's a relative newcomer. Chinese food has been Americanized and franchised in the form of PF (Paul Flemming) Chang's. Most of us accept, prima facie, sushi and other Japanese restaurants are upscale (the prohibitively expensive pricepoint for sushi is the launching ground for that theory). But, as I noted before, Korean food hasn't gone mainstream yet.

A simple answer is that many Korean BBQ places are cook-it-yourself, and that just turns people off becuase they are dealing with raw meat, and they are being put to work. At it's core, Whitey is a lazy beast. Also, harkening back to a previous post, many Asian restaurants don't bother glossing over the menu with euphamistic terms, so grilled chicken heart will be called Grilled Chicken Heart on the menu. Marketing, fellas, marketing will do wonders for Korean food.

And there is the matter of dog. Like it or not, the Korean culture has been blessed with the honor of eating dog, and that is a sales killer to anyone who is not up on current Korean-American culture.

That aside, Mexican food has been mainstream for a while. It is probably the first non-European food to be mainstreamed, Americanized, homogenized, packaged in a styrofoam box and handed to you in a branded paper bag. Mexican food has suffered from marginalization. Even restauranteurs like Susan Fenniger and Mary Sue Miliken, or assholes like Bobby Flay, shroud their Mexican influence by calling the food Southwestern food.

So, in this case, we have two major cultural food groups that are mostly overlooked. Korean, which has been denied the proliferation it deserves, and Mexican, which has been overproliferated and watered down. There are a couple of exceptions, naturally, but overall, they are undersold.