Month: July 2023

Where to find Mexican history in L.A.

Where to find Mexican history in L.A.

Published by Sam Flores

The history of Los Angeles is complicated, and there’s no better example of this than Olvera Street. Located downtown in the L.A. Plaza Historic District, the popular marketplace is lined with Mexican restaurants, stores and kiosks selling everything from T-shirts to pottery to statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe. For decades, many have believed that Olvera Street was the historic Mexican center of Los Angeles. In reality, it was created in 1930 by Northern California transplant Christine Sterling, who fell in love with a romanticized Old Mexico filled with strolling guitar players in sombreros and women in colorful peasant dresses. The Ávila Adobe on Olvera Street is one of the oldest houses in Los Angeles. Today, it’s a popular museum. (Ringo Chiu / For De Los) The city’s first Mexican immigrants came to L.A. from the states of Sinaloa and Sonora in Mexico during the Gold Rush and settled in an area that became known as Sonora Town. It wasn’t located on Olvera Street but several blocks away, in what is now Chinatown. What happened …

Best doughnut shops in Los Angeles with international flavors

Best doughnut shops in Los Angeles with international flavors

Published by Sam Flores

A generous dusting of matcha powder. A drizzle of taro icing. A filling of red bean paste. The ingenuity of scrappy doughnut shop owners has made Los Angeles the unofficial doughnut capital of the United States, with 680 shops in L.A. County alone. And from the moment doughnuts hit Southern California, this creativity has been tethered to immigrant culture. Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy touched down in San Diego’s Camp Pendleton on a military jet in 1975 with his wife and children. Months later, Ngoy signed himself up for a managerial training program at Winchell’s Donut House, his heart set on owning his own shop one day. Not only did he achieve that goal when he bought a Christy’s Donuts shop in La Habra, Calif., in 1977, but Ngoy began making small changes, tweaking existing recipes and frying multiple fresh batches of doughnuts a day instead of just two. As a result, Christy’s Donuts became more popular than ever and, by 1980, he owned 20 Christy’s Donuts locations. Also the first to package doughnuts in light …

“Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake”: An indicator of just how little class money can buy

“Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake”: An indicator of just how little class money can buy

Published by Sam Flores

In Bravo’s latest offshoot from their “Real Housewives” franchise, “Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake,” “RHONY” alums Luann de Lesseps and Sonja Morgan package themselves as modernizations of Laverne & Shirley or Thelma and Louise in adventurous “fish out of water” scenarios that find them a-wrasslin’ and a-catchin’ catfish with their bare hands in a lake in Benton, Illinois called “Crappie Lake” — referring as much to the type of fish found within (pronounced Craw-pee) as to the odorific sewage plant nearby. But, to my recollection, neither of the buddy duos mentioned above are known for blasting out farts in public or aggressively propositioning local municipal workers as Luann and Sonja are. Not like there’s anything wrong with doing that. Or not doing that for that matter. These are just points of distinction that money, so it seems, really cannot buy you class, but classlessness does make for great reality television. Ask the cast of “Vanderpump Rules” about their new Emmy nominations to prove this point. To give some background on the “Crappie Lake” stars, Luann is a 58-year-old former …

13 delightful things to do in Solvang beyond the tchochke shops

13 delightful things to do in Solvang beyond the tchochke shops

Published by Sam Flores

Stroll through Solvang, Calif., the largest town in the Santa Ynez Valley, and you could almost believe you’re in Denmark, or a Disney-esque version of it. The streets are lined with Danish bakeries, restaurants, boutiques and lodgings designed in an old-world Danish architectural style of half-timbered facades and (faux) thatched roofs. Establishments are often staffed by locals in Danish folk costumes. There’s even a replica of Copenhagen’s “Little Mermaid” statue, an homage to Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. But Solvang, population 6,000-plus, didn’t always look like a Danish fairy tale. Danish immigrants founded the town as a farming community in 1911, establishing a folk school and a Lutheran church. “Those were among the few buildings constructed in a traditional Danish architectural style,” said Esther Jacobsen Bates, the recently retired executive director of Solvang’s Elverhoj Museum. That changed in 1947, when the “Saturday Evening Post,” one of the most widely read weeklies at the time, described Solvang as “a spotless Danish village that blooms like a rose … a special place where old-country charm and customs …

Where to find famous TV sitcom homes in L.A.

Where to find famous TV sitcom homes in L.A.

Published by Sam Flores

When my college roommate Mark came to visit me in L.A. for the first time, almost 25 years ago, he had something very specific on his must-visit list. “I want to see ‘The Brady Bunch’ house,” he said. For the record: 3:24 p.m. July 28, 2023The address for the home used as Phil and Claire’s house on “Modern Family” has been corrected to 10336 Dunleer Drive. A previous version of this story had the wrong house number. After a little bit of digging (the information superhighway seemed more like an unpaved one-lane road at the time), he was standing in front of the familiar facade grinning from ear to ear, throwing a thumbs-up sign while I snapped his picture. We both knew full well that “The Brady Bunch” had actually been filmed on a studio lot and that the house we were standing in front of was a bit of Hollywood magic, appearing only in establishing shots. But it felt special. And more important, it felt accessible. We could drive right up and see a …

Anthony Bourdain was right about Guy Fieri

Anthony Bourdain was right about Guy Fieri

Published by Sam Flores

When a photo published in July 2023 of celebrity chef Guy Fieri warmly greeting former president Donald Trump ringside at Las Vegas’ UFC 290, hosted in the T-Mobile Arena, Seattle-based chef Eric Rivera posted it on Twitter with a simple caption: “I’ve been trying to tell you about Guy Fieri, but a lot of you didn’t want to listen.” Since Fieri first hit the national culinary scene during his successful run on the second season of “The Next Food Network Star,” which aired in 2006, there have been clues to his political beliefs, the most memorable of which veer unsavory. About a decade ago, for instance, a former producer on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” one of Fieri’s long-running Food Network programs, alleged via a lawsuit that the host was openly homophobic and lewd on set. As Gothamist reported in 2011, the producer, David Page, said that “anytime any woman mentioned ‘cream,’ Guy went into a sexual riff” and that Fieri reportedly told show producers, “You can’t send me to talk to gay people without warning! …

The best tacos, drinks and classic restaurants in Mexico City

The best tacos, drinks and classic restaurants in Mexico City

Published by Sam Flores

The first day I visited Mexico City, my host picked me up at the airport with a paper sign and took me directly to the enormous wholesale market Central de Abastos, which is about the size of 600 football fields. There, I tried my first barbacoa taco, tender and aromatic, and a bowl of barbacoa broth, from a tarped stall in the middle of everything. The goat was cooked in banana leaves right there in a ditch in the ground before us. That initial experience was utter sensory overload and a complete refutation to everything I thought I knew about Mexican food, and the art of eating itself. I knew there would be no turning back. Everyone has a city they consider a second home, and “D.F.,” as I still call it, is that city for me. I wrote a book about the experience called “Down & Delirious in Mexico City” and hosted food videos from Mexico for Vice Media that I still get messages about nearly a decade later. These incursions in the culture …

14 things to do in North Park, San Diego’s liveliest hipster haven

14 things to do in North Park, San Diego’s liveliest hipster haven

Published by Sam Flores

At Lovesong Coffee, the bold and beautiful gather to sip caffeinated concoctions and peck at laptops in a space as bright and minimal as a stage set. A few blocks away at sleek ramen restaurant Underbelly, a well-tattooed young customer sits at the bar in snug jeans and a crop top displaying the words: “I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison.” Meanwhile, workers put the finishing touches on the LaFayette Hotel, a lavishly redesigned midcentury landmark reopening tomorrow with several on-site restaurants and bars. One room looks like a Parisian salon, another like a ’40s diner, another like an old Mexican church, the light filtered through stained-glass windows. “This is either going to be something really special,” says co-owner Arsalun Tafazoli, “or one of the biggest flameouts in San Diego hospitality history.” This neighborhood, Angelenos, might be the liveliest corner of San Diego that you’ve never heard of, a place with more beer, more resilience and less parking than you’d suspect. To get in on the action, head north of Balboa …

11 picturesque places in L.A. to have a summer picnic

11 picturesque places in L.A. to have a summer picnic

Published by Sam Flores

The trek to Echo Mountain is a favorite for good reasons. It’s a quick, steep, moderately difficult route into the San Gabriel Mountains, and it gives you a chance to wander among the ruins of the Echo Mountain House hotel and Mount Lowe Railway, a once-sprawling complex of wilderness resorts and attractions that stretched deep into the mountains. The four-story hotel burned in 1900 and the railway shut down in 1938. Nowadays the Echo Mountain hike via the Sam Merrill Trail is 5.5-mile round-trip experience (with about 1,400 feet of altitude gain) on a very popular, occasionally narrow trail. Along the way you find many historical markers, but only scattered bits of foundation and metal equipment to remind you of the sprawling operation that once was here. There’s a picnic table, but you could also eat while sitting on the steps of the old hotel. And before you descend you might want to try to use the Echo Phone, also at the mountaintop. Hiking expert Mary Forgione describes it as “a black metal megaphone mounted …