Learning from Los Angeles

Coterie: an Unsolicited Response to Jonathan Nunn

Mar 09, 2023

views from the harbor gateway north bus stop for the j silver line, between downtown la and the metro green line subway platform, under the 110 and 105 freeway interchange | spring 2022

Introducing a new section to the Drafting Curbside space:

Coterie /ˈkōdərē/ (n.) “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with a unifying common interest or purpose”, first recorded in 1730-40; from French, Middle French: “an association of tenant farmers”.1 I’m taking forward the “who associate with one another to advance a common purpose”, but leaving behind the “exclusive of other people”. Coterie will be an unsolicited response to pieces put out by writers, thinkers, makers, and artists weaving compelling narratives and focused on critical issues. I’m aiming for a generative space that provokes diatribe and discussion between comrades working in a shared constellation of concerns. Please send what you’re reading my way; I’m here for the hot takes and unpopular opinions!

Today I’m writing to Jonathan Nunn of Vittles, who put out a piece Friday before last called “Ten Things London’s Restaurants Can Learn from Los Angeles (And Five Things Los Angeles Can Learn from Us)”. The original article is behind a paywall and was shared with me by Alicia Kennedy, but I’ve been a paying subscriber to Vittles and recommend supporting the writers and work that they put out!

photo from jonathan nunn’s february 24th vittles essay comparing los angeles and london

In short, Nunn’s piece is a list of ten gripes with Los Angeles or London, comparing and contrasting an assortment of attributes between the two cities. Nunn contends that London’s “walkable neighborhoods in the suburbs” have allowed for “an actual variegated multiculturalism,” which is reflected by a diversity of neighborhood restaurants. He makes the case that Londoners should use public transit to seek out restaurants further from the city center, and that restaurants making “mediocre but shiny versions of stuff that already exists” should not be so celebrated in the food media landscape. He argues that “fine dining” in London ought to be “more closely connected to the city’s vernacular restaurants,” and that chefs should focus the design of their menus on the “individuality” of their food rather than on a prescribed notion of “authenticity.” On the basis of two weeks eating in LA, Nunn asserts that London restaurants should fry food more, have more late-night eateries open, and more “informal eating” in the form of sidewalk stands, street carts, and food trucks. Nunn states a need for “multi-vocal” “insurgent media” in the London food media landscape, and for a “collective mythologising” and “self-promotion” of its restaurants.

I do not begrudge Jonathan Nunn his thoroughly-researched and well-fed opinions after “20 days visiting LA,” as they pertain to London. His framing reduces LA to merely a foil for London, and London to merely a foil for LA, which is arguably the purpose of this reactionary piece about a short trip. But Nunn’s reductive notes on LA fall conveniently into the usual caricatures and familiar stereotypes of the city. That these are easy and overused talking points we’ve already heard from tourists and outsiders throws even his more lucid points of analysis into question.

The piece is far more revealing of Nunn’s intractable subjectivity than it is useful for gleaning anything meaningful about LA. He complains that the service at high-end dining establishments he’s chosen to visit is “so stilted and scripted;” bemoans *getting got* by restaurants serving mediocre food for an expensive price, all while distracting him with storied histories and celebrity photos hung on the walls; and denounces an extravagantly overpriced grocery store that he’s chosen to prioritize on his itinerary. A bougie grocery which, by the way, I’ve never gone to, or heard talked about by anyone I know in LA, only by tourists who love to characterize Los Angeles through its grotesque image. (By coincidence, this same week I had just written about the ubiquity of this phenomenon, where the boutique grocery is a product of images proliferating on the internet, gentrified minds, and global supply infrastructures.) Nunn divulges his inability to find a good place to grab a beer in a county with a thriving culture of breweries, and his failure to locate a sceney wine bar “where you can dip in for wine and a small snack” in a city that is saturated with them.

Nunn’s notes about LA hinge on the perennial argument that LA “isn’t walkable” and that LA’s public transit is hard to navigate. When we travel, we situate ourselves by comparing and contrasting the unfamiliar with what we know. But to implement this framework as grounds for criticism places us undiscerningly close to our own biases, as evidenced by Nunn’s quippy list of complaints which masquerade, in a perfunctory way, as analysis. By framing Los Angeles and London in contradistinction to one another at the outset, he limits the scope of his observations and impressions.

In the “Fortress LA” chapter of his seminal leftist treatise City of Quartz, a book that constructs Los Angeles from both its myths and its histories, Mike Davis details how public space in LA is increasingly designed to be inhospitable, intentionally depriving unhoused people of access to resources, safety, or any form of shelter. Written in 1990, Davis is clear-eyed about the classist policing of the public realm and the “conscious ‘hardening’ of the city surface against the poor.”2 What Davis here refers to as a “sadistic street environment,” some might call “unwalkable.” The hostile design of public space deliberately prevents the free mixing of people and discourages “democratic intoxications, risks and unscented odors.” In spite of these militarized tactics, Davis asserts that by gathering in public we maintain the possibility for

“social mixing of crowds in normal pedestrian circulation…where pure heteroglossia could flourish: that is to say, where Chinatown punks, Glendale skinheads, Boyle Heights lowriders, Valley girls, Marina designer couples, Slauson rappers, Skid Row homeless and gawkers from Des Moines could mingle together in relative amity.”

Not dissimilar from many sprawling, car-centric American cities, the most celebrated aspects of LA’s rich food culture and multifaceted social fabric are created and maintained by its persistent walkers. Selling from food carts and sidewalk stalls, maintaining their Chinatown and Lincoln Heights street vending operations, organizing regular weekend swap meets and other informal economies; the foot trafficked paths of city dwellers becoming regulars at their corner markets, laundromats, cafes, and barber shops; the thriving multitude of Angelenos reliant on public bus systems to move between home and work; whether out of necessity or by choice, and in spite of obstacles crafted by city planners and developers, undaunted pedestrian movement shapes LA.

Certainly, cars and their movements have driven the formation of Los Angeles neighborhoods and infrastructure, enforced the centrality of freeways, obliterated public space in the city, and destroyed the homes of largely poor and non white communities. The impact of redlining, predatory lending, eminent domain, and specifically, the strategic destruction of neighborhoods through highway construction, continues to shape the city today.3 In the familiar refrain of tourists visiting LA, Jonathan Nunn claims, "If you can't drive a car then the city doesn't treat you like a citizen." The flippant manner by which Nunn complains about LA public transit while centering his own London perspective belies a foolhardy bravado. LA's public transit system is extensive, and relied on by many Angelenos.

I am keenly aware that in LA, as in many major cities in America, access to public transit is heavily concentrated in affluent parts of the county. Often, the most underserved populations and places are those that most rely on transit. LA’s three year pilot program Metro Micro aims to fill some of these gaps between bus and metro lines, a car service that drives riders almost door-to-door (pickup points are at the closest bus stops, and controlled from an app). To ride costs only $1, and although the technology is certainly a barrier, most of the riders who I run into regularly are older Filipino and Latino nurses and careworkers who live in the neighborhood and take advantage of this affordable service. To insist on using LA’s necessarily flawed transit systems and pedestrian thoroughfares, rather than merely bemoaning their flaws, is an exercise in our own agency over the ways we engage with the city.

As a pedestrian in LA, you can walk between teardrop-shaped Everett Park overlooking downtown and Echo Park lake, and hit up two or three gallery openings along Sunset Boulevard. Vista Hermosa park is a short distance from Chinatown restaurants or Grand Central Market, and plenty of the breweries, wine bars, cafes, and restaurants within Koreatown, Highland Park, or Atwater Village are within walking distance. Buses run between Culver City, Palms, and Santa Monica that facilitate an afternoon’s work at a coffee shop near the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and then a hike at Kenneth Hahn. There are hikes starting in Altadena that will take you clear up into the Western San Gabriel Mountains. People are often out walking in Virgil Village, Los Feliz, Boyle Heights, El Segundo on the beach, and Eagle Rock or Glendale close to the Verdugo mountains. To frivolously compare the “walkability” of “Los Angeles” in its entirety –either the county or city proper, as Nunn uses both interchangeably– with the “walkability” of other cities is laughable given its vast scale. We need designs for public space that favor people, not vehicles, yes. We need more extensive public transit, definitely. But LA’s neighborhoods, according to so many family friends and elders I know around the county, are walkable, and indeed more walkable today than they were mere decades ago.

To introduce my own intractable subjectivity, I’m second generation from Manhattan Beach, close to Lawndale and Hawthorne, adjacent to Hermosa, El Segundo, and Redondo Beach, and to the largely Asian American enclaves of Torrance and Gardena. I have not lived in Los Angeles in over a decade until the past two years, and although I drive, I’ve never owned a car in my adulthood, instead favoring public transit and a secondhand bike attained at somebody’s garage in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn in 2017. That for years my weekly grocery runs have taken me on literal New Jersey highways, or through Manhattan rush hour and out to Queens commuting to work, or up the Schuylkill river from Mantua West Philly to a farm in Roxborough where I was an artist in residence, has certainly shaped my willingness to bike in places not explicitly designed for it.

In LA, I bike across Pasadena or Koreatown, weekly through Chinatown and along the Elysian Valley stretch of the river, to Los Feliz and Echo Park, through the LACC campus for Tenant Union organizing meetings, past onramps and under freeways, and along Sunset Boulevard. When I first moved back to the city, my friends, life, and work was in East LA, although I was in-home caretaking for elderly relatives in the South Bay, just south of LAX in West LA. I would take the metro multiple times weekly from the Redondo Beach end of the green line, transferring to the blue line just south of Watts Towers, transferring again to the gold or purple, to my offices in Pasadena and Koreatown. My determination to take transit and bike in LA is far from unique; cycling group Black Kids on Bikes organize the Freedom Ride Project for group rides across LA county, and my dad commuted by bike for years along the westside of town when he was my age, while also working at a bike shop and organizing group rides south through Palos Verdes.

an image pulled from the Harbor Gateway North Neighborhood Council Facebook page and various public transit views around LA | summer 2022

Los Angeles is uniquely characterized by fragmentation. Although I was born in LA, I only started to contend with this spatial dimension seriously while living in San Francisco in my early twenties, after living in the East Bay. 2015 San Francisco grappled with a uniquely suffocating tech dystopia, famously caricatured by the long lines of people –Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech employees– standing at street corners. The juxtaposition of the city’s public transit infrastructure with enormous luxury buses exporting city dwellers for an hour-long commute, snacks provided, made me consider seriously how geographic sprawl and the pocketing of immigrant enclaves allows for the development of individualized communities and food cultures across the East Bay, west towards Dublin Pleasanton, south towards Fremont and San Jose, in contrast with the highly pressurized, rapidly gentrifying, limited space of San Francisco proper, isolated by its surrounding waterways with the bay to the east and ocean to the west. Similarly, I think about the Portuguese, Sri Lankan, Cuban, Brazilian, and Syrian restaurants I’ve heard about or visited in the northern part of New Jersey, on recommendation via word of mouth from friends who live in Manhattan or Philadelphia. Seeking out the foods of the periphery, in a strictly geographic sense, in the face of rapidly gentrifying city centers, is not unique to LA.

In a loosely diagrammatic sense, the separation of different neighborhoods in LA due to the development of freeways has allowed informal economies and independent restaurants that “cater to their own immigrant community” to develop uniquely individuated identities and foods. A scholar curently writing the book Unassimilable, Bianca Mabute-Louie articulated the concept of an “ethnoburb,” specific to the context of LA, in a series of tweets responding to the recent lunar new year shooting in Monterey Park, in the San Gabriel Valley, or SGV. Paraphrasing research from Min Zhou, Yen-Fen Tseng, and Rebecca Y. Kim, Mabute-Louie notes how “Monterey Park as an ethnoburb troubles the American imagination of an immigrant, assimilation, and integration. Ethnoburbs are not a “staging ground” for somewhere better or whiter. The ethnoburb is the final desired destination where our communities thrive.”

I can appreciate the distinction Nunn articulates between “segregation” and “an actual variegated multiculturalism” when distinguishing between LA and London. And while the SGV as an ethnoburb, with its “conspicuous and diverse first-generation, unassimilated immigrant presence” is so singularly unique to LA, I’m sure he understands London to have its own analogue to ethnoburbs that hugely impact its food culture as a whole. In resisting the urge to cleanly catalogue any city’s geographic specificity against another’s, and the attendant colonizing attitude that accompanies such an urge, I can also appreciate that Nunn’s LA notes are too few words per capita to address the complexity with which sprawl has facilitated thriving immigrant enclaves and the vibrant foodways that supply those neighborhoods.

When I consider the study of sprawl in an urban environment defined largely by cars, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s 1969 student trip to Las Vegas comes to mind. When Nunn states his aspiration to “translate the way Angelenos think about food into a language that makes sense for London,” I think of Scott Brown and Venturi’s thirteen Yale students walking the Las Vegas strip to learn from the architectural form and spatial reality of that car-centric place. “Deadpanning,” an attitude which does not criticize, merely documents, is a form of observational study that Scott Brown and Venturi borrowed and adapted from the work of contemporaneous Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha.4 In the context of its time, this posture had the transformative, if often inadvertent, impact of bringing anti-establishment ideas into the academy. Even so, Italian Marxist architect and historian Manfredo Tafuri called out Scott Brown and Venturi’s “facile ironies,” naming their refusal to take a stance or make a judgement as a shirking of responsibility, an evasive refusal to draw out an analysis, or stake a claim, based on all this observation. I find it useful to consider this continuum between “passivity,” or non judgemental observation, and highly opinionated statements, or fully-fleshed out conclusions, whenever traveling, whether abroad or between my apartment and the corner store in my hometown.

While Nunn’s notes with regard to LA lack complexity, they are rife with contradiction. In two instances, he explicitly negates his own argument. The first concerns the gentrification of restaurants serving diasporic foods, and their relationship to immigrant-owned, hole-in-the-wall, or mom-and-pop restaurants. Nunn oscillates seamlessly between vilifying and celebrating these establishments as suits his argument, without acknowledging the nuances underpinning this reality. The second concerns “pubs,” and the highly localized experience of cheap brews and good conversation in public. On the one hand, Nunn makes a case against coveting the food culture of another city out-of-context, arguing that each LA and London have something inherent that is “worth celebrating and developing.” In sharp contrast to this case for idiosyncratic placemaking, Nunn complains about not being able to find a pub, a distinctly London typology, in LA.

Nunn lambasts the food media landscape in London for “celebrating mediocrity,” which he has specified as the gentrification and homogenization of restaurants at city centers.5 Seemingly, his gripe is with the idea that a centrally located restaurant, dressed up to suit whatever homogeneous restaurant aesthetic is currently in vogue, will get rave reviews in place of restaurants further out from the city center with less shiny faces to show. In this same vein, Zarina Muhammad wrote in 2020 on the way “curry houses of the past were defined by colonial history,” where “food was subservient to British taste,” and how today restaurants like those described by Nunn “engage with regional specificity to repurpose it into a blander, whiter version of itself.”6 Muhammad describes this restaurant culture as “representative in a hollow and painful way; of an aspirational and urbane Asian middle class, that is divorced from their ancestral history and culture, actively seeking assimilation and acceptance from a white establishment.”

I’ve heard one Alhambra restaurant laughingly described in precisely these terms by several friends, some specifically from the San Gabriel Valley, of Chinese and Taiwanese descent, cooks and industry workers themselves. Nunn is unrestrained in his admiration of the “clean precision” at this restaurant, as “recognisably a riff on things you might eat in a more direct, less pristine way elsewhere in the San Gabriel Valley.” He describes a Silver Lake restaurant meal as a “higher definition” version of the same one in Rosemead. It’s giving 2016 Bon Appétit “pho is the new ramen”!7 This characterization is recognizably a riff on the same tired narrative about cleaned up Chinese food that we’ve heard many times over, “feeding into racist stereotypes about Chinese food and Chinese-owned restaurants being dirty and unhealthy.”8 Per Jenny Yang’s iconic bit satirizing this predictable pattern in food media, “the white part is the best part.”9 I’m not seeking to read Nunn in bad faith, but I will openly criticize this heedless use of language. And while I’m not interested in policing the choices of non white chefs catering to white taste or gentrified aesthetic sensibilities, I am interested in complicating the false binary that Nunn sets up in his narrative about cleaned up, gentrified eateries, which in London exasperate him, and in LA enchant him.

I would guess that in London, as in LA, there are many “upscale,” “fine dining,” or whatever euphemism you prefer for “expensive,” restaurants that are rooted in the diasporic food traditions they serve and deeply connected to the immigrant restaurants serving those foods at the city periphery. And in both London and LA, there are expensive restaurants marketing “ethnic” foods that are wholly removed from the realities of immigrant-owned and operated small businesses. But as Muhammad describes, the upscale establishment of an aspirational Asian middle class is not easy to ridicule or venerate, but complicated in its motivations, successes, and failures. Many immigrant restaurants strive towards the kind of economic security promised by gentrified aesthetics and an appeal to white taste. There isn’t a clear-cut delineation, or a binary opposition, between what Nunn characterizes as the “mediocrity” of the gentrified city center and the “authentic” family-owned restaurant of the suburban periphery.

Photographer Emanuel Hahn wrote a piece last fall about “four iconic LA Asian Restaurants,” including Al-Noor, my family’s longtime go-to takeout spot in Lawndale, the closest Pakistani and Indian restaurant in our local neighborhood.

“For the wide-eyed immigrant looking to pursue their dreams, restaurant work is often the most accessible starting point. Amidst the relentless climbing and falling entailed in such a journey, the restaurant offers a safe space to commune with one’s kin. The family meal is a ritual that allows these strivers to step out of the foreign world and transport themselves to their ancestral land, where they can remind themselves of who they are. For a brief moment, they don’t have to deal with patrons unfamiliar with their food, or strain in their incomplete English to explain what cumin or gochujang is.”10

It’s these restaurateurs to which Nunn is referring when he mentions collective mythologizing by “people who were brought up in the suburbs, or who have lived in overlooked communities,” who self-promote their food through word of mouth. Jade Wok, one of my favorite Chinatown haunts –that I take M to, where we listen in on the group of seniors practicing in the barber shop next door, a miniature orchestra out of tune, off beat, and charming, or that I’ll point my cousin and their partner to when they ask me to recommend a weekend dinner– self advertises their “homemade bean curd” as the “best tofu in town.” (It is.)

And while I’ve brought up family game night favorite Al-Noor –whose particular take on baigan bharta, palak paneer, chana masala, and most especially their bhindi masala, has informed my cravings for Indian food from a young age, when all nine of us cousins would eat together on holiday between games of scrabble– I’ll address Nunn’s flagrantly inaccurate statement that “the primary topic of conversation among Angelenos who seemingly have it all is the lack of good Indian food in a county of 9.8 million people.” Mayura in Culver City is a longtime favorite, and just down the street Annapurna Cuisine is the westside analogue to the local favorite in my neighborhood, India Sweets & Spices. In the tradition of many Indian restaurants I’ve most loved to frequent in the States, India Sweets & Spices “began in 1984 in Culver City as a small Indian grocery and vegetarian restaurant.” Like International Foods and Spices on Walnut Ave in West Philly, or Simpang Asia in Palms, these Indian, Pakistani, and Indonesian restaurants serve food cafeteria-style alongside a corner market supplying groceries. It’s a commonly held non-secret that much of the best food in LA can be found, per KM, inside of the Filipino grocery in Glendale, or, per an outing with EL, in the food court of a mall basement in Koreatown. According to one (LA-based, with London family, South Asian) subscriber to Vittles, “Little Bangladesh bangs out a very respectable biryani, as does Zam Zam in Hawthorne. In the SGV, Bhanu’s is excellent if not standard Punjabi fare. And it’s a pity you missed Artesia, aka Little India, the largest Indian enclave in SoCal where mithai shops outnumber taquerias (for once).”

In part due to this thriving multitude of enclaves and ethnoburbs, Nunn’s observation that Los Angeles restaurants and small food businesses are more focused on “individuated” cuisine than any prescribed notion of “authenticity” is well-taken. So many local pop ups in Los Angeles including Sarah of Biri Bibi, Jess of Pickle Pickle and Gu Grocery, Susan of Lazy Susan, Jen of Bakers Bench, Tiffany of Vegan Banh Mi Thao, Kym of San and Wolves, Chantael of Mother Taste, Malia of Lola’s, to name just a few, are focused on incredibly specific ideas about food that go beyond merely an aspiration to “accurately represent” or “authentically replicate” a regional cuisine. All of these creative food entrepreneurs are inventing new ways for us to gather and eat together. For instance, in a public plaza on a cold february sunday evening, listening to a jazzy track created uniquely for the experience that features the “percussive sounds of sesame seeds roasting” and mimics the cloud-like levity of dumplings suspended in hot chocolate. These artists are all inventing their own irreplicable ideas about their cultural foods.

Nunn argues that, in his view, the accurate representation of regional authenticity sought by London restaurants, perhaps more accurately by London restaurant critics, is a “straightjacket.” I would go further and argue that authenticity itself is merely a construction of whiteness. The notion of authenticity is produced by framing the “other” in contradistinction to the colonizing force that seeks to control, commodify, and organize it. Per James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, “the utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”11 The desire for a grid, in this case, is what Nunn has described in his food writing as “bland urbanism,” where “the decor of the restaurant was chosen to mimic the street food culture of that country, but with a modern, comfortable twist so you know you're not really sitting by the roadside.”12 The red herring of authenticity, in contrast with individuated aspirations for our creative endeavors, is a construct against which we all struggle daily.

Whereas Nunn calls on London critics and restaurant goers to “stop celebrating mediocrity,” I’m less interested in policing the published opinions of food critics or media outlets. As T recently put it, "I hate when coworkers come into the office raving about this one spot that they went to one time, dropped a hundred dollars on a meal, never go back to, but will keep talking about it for months.” I’m more interested in mediocrity by another meaning, in the sense of the everyday, in becoming a regular. As my dad said recently in conversation, “I am of the opinion that the only useful food writing (for me at least) is positive food writing. And the only way positive food writing can be done is when you’ve eaten at a place at least a half a dozen times and you’ve craved it.” There is real value in the everyday, in the mediocre, in becoming a regular someplace, not in the sole opinion of a critic.

To this point, I appreciate Nunn’s argument for “multi-vocal” “insurgent media” outlets and individuals. In a literal sense, I’m glad that his quippy list has served as an invitation to articulate this sprawling litany of thoughts! It goes without saying that a range of perspectives and diversity of opinions underscores any valid criticism or analysis. But Nunn’s observation that Soleil Ho or Tejal Rao, or any other non white “women or non binary” food critics have left their positions at highfalutin institutions of food criticism, is besides the point. Those of us who were reading Soleil Ho long before her SF Chronicle days aren’t batting an eyelash. Before Extra Spicy, there was Racist Sandwich, and there will continue to be much else besides. This is the purpose of insurgent media, to exist outside the bounds of establishment expectation. Lamenting the disinclination of non white women and nonbinary people to stay in the suffocating environment of an established food media landscape, and its attendant institutional oversight, seems misplaced to me.

Onward to Jonathan Nunn’s temper tantrum about pubs, which is funny for two reasons.

Why do I have to take a seat to order? Why do I have to watch college basketball from every angle? Why is a Guinness $12 plus tip? Why does it take ten minutes to flag someone down to pay? This is not a pub, this is hell.

One, it is patently absurd to complain about being incapable of locating a good spot to sit down with a beer in a city with a dearth of excellent breweries, in a city in a county with a dearth of excellent breweries. Two, Nunn’s argument at the very top of his piece is that London should learn from the “form” of LA, not adopt the “content.” As I understand it, Nunn is trying to say that Los Angeles foodways have developed out of a series of site-specific conditions, including the prevalence of various diasporic foodways in relation to one another, and the geographic situation of the city itself. What he characterizes as “form,” I would rename “process,” and what he terms “content,” I would term “end product.” Rather than being fixated on London needing “tacos and Mexican food,” —a culinary export from cities in Mexico to LA, and to numerous cities across the South American continent besides— Nunn holds that London has “things we should be celebrating and trying to develop,” rather than copying the “end product” coveted from another city.

Nunn doubles back and negates his own argument by declaring that something LA “should learn from London” is the “pub,” which remains a distinctly Irish or British typology. I would similarly note the specificity and absolute irreplicability of the Parisian or Italian cafe, where you can order an espresso in a gently warmed white ceramic cup to quickly throw back on your morning walk at 9am, next to several elderly gentlemen downing glasses of cognac with a cigarette first thing in the morning; the 2am pit stop after dinner and the jazz club, at a what my New York mindset would clock as a bodega-type corner store, for a couple drinks outside at the wooden picnic table on a cobblestone street, before hitting the beachside basement club in Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa; a rainy evening drink at a Japanese whiskey bar in Bangkok, with subdued lighting and precisely prepared bar snacks; or the spatial and acoustical intimacy of an old jazz club in New Orleans, just south of Tremé, towards the river. I’m sure there are aspects that I’ve mischaracterized after such brief encounters. That these images relentlessly stick in my mind is a product of their absolute specificity.

Back to the pub. There is an easy analogue for this typology, cheap beer and good conversation, something casual and familiar, where the regulars are chatting like old friends, and the bartender starts to know your taste. Ever heard of a brewery, my dude? Van Nuys in the Valley is famously home to MacLeod Ale Brewing Co, which has had a location near Eagle Rock in East LA for years now. Homage Brewing in Chinatown, the Hermosillo and Highland Park Brewery, in Inglewood there’s Common Space, on the river Frogtown Brewery, in Lincoln Heights Benny Boy Brewing, in Koreatown Southland Beer. As somebody who frequents these places, I have a hard time imagining that there’s a closer analogue to this pub culture for which Nunn is so plainly homesick.

Nunn’s other complaint pertaining to casual public drinking is that LA needs to learn from London the “casual wine bar, where you can dip in for wine and a small snack.” In a strip mall off Sunset Boulevard, wine bar the Ruby Fruit just opened the same week-end that Nunn put out his piece, the “first full-time lesbian establishment in Los Angeles since 2017 when the Oxwood Inn in Van Nuys closed.”13 Opened jointly by three longtime industry workers, and owners of the shop Psychic Wines in Echo Park, Cafe Triste in Mandarin Plaza is a weekly haunt where I write every Friday at the end of the workday, with a glass of red, a handful of enormous green olives, and slices of bread. LA has been host to the buzzy atmosphere and slightly sceney, performative, self-conscious culture of places where “the sidewalk out front is packed, a see-and-be-seen scenario where people stand around with glasses of gamay till midnight,”14 citing Voodoo Vin in Virgil Village as another instance. Decidedly, the wine bar is not a typology that LA need learn from London.

One more note! How’re you gonna go talking about late night food in Los Angeles without mentioning BCD Tofu House??

“NO PEDESTRIANS” no context | summer 2022, edited spring 2023

I find it distinctly amusing that Nunn’s short list of things that “LA could learn from London” includes, up top, “Humility.” Perhaps the only throughline of Nunn’s LA notes is an utter absence of humility. Throughout, he makes declarative statements, often readily disproven, like “Los Angeles is so cucked by the automobile that good wine bars can’t exist en masse.” Rather than learning from LA, it’s as though for the duration of his short stay, he’s already rejected entirely that there could be anything here for him to learn. “My main takeaway, though, was this: the grass is not greener on the other side.”

I hope to never be so brazenly devoid of humility so as to compare and contrast a place where I spend a short series of days with a place I know intimately as home, and rely on that as the basis for analysis. When I am fortunate enough to travel, it is an invitation to broaden my mind and offer myself more humility, a satisfying sense of smallness that I can sometimes struggle to access in my day-to-day life. As a second generation Angeleno who has been to London a grand total of two times in my almost-thirty-year lifespan, I have plenty of impressions of the city that I will readily discuss conversationally. These are opinions that for the most part, I know to be bad takes, projections based on my own experiences, about imperialism and socially-repressed people. But I would never take these impressions as grounds for valid criticism, or purport to know something of the city that I do not have access to.

In London, what I recall most distinctly is a late night trek for Chinese dishes served family style and several rounds of cheap Tsingtaos in South London at Silk Road, a “simple and small restaurant, famous for its long wooden tables,” including Sichuan-style dishes but mainly focused on Xinjiang specialties.15 Here I’m citing directly from the source, so you can get a taste of Silk Road’s own self-mythologizing, per one of Nunn’s principal aspirations for London restaurants. That this memory stands out more than any of the irritating or petty experiences I've had in London is a conscious choice. I clock memories that are the product of my own presuppositions, and take the place as it is, from my perspective as an outsider, tourist, and visitor.

In part, to travel is to displace ourselves from context. There is levity gained by being somewhere for a short time, with limited access and understanding, humbled by the specificity of our own subjectivity. When I take trains between Osaka and Kyoto, between Berlin and Köln, between Paris and London, or the metro routes particular to any of these aforementioned cities, it is my more embedded and lived experience of the New York subway, Bay Area BART, Philadelphia’s SEPTA rail, and the LA metro that are top-of-mind, and figure prominently in how I perceive the cities I visit. (It was just pointed out to me last week how transit systems in Japan from this 2019 research trip to Osaka, Tokyo, and Kyoto informed my design proposal for community owned kitchens in the Bronx, New York.) Situating ourselves through comparison and contrast is helpful until it descends into reductive caricature and unhelpful stereotyping, leveled with the heavy-handed, inordinately-authoritative tone of a know-it-all tourist, and I’m always looking out for the moments when I cross that line.

Per Jimmie Fails and Joe Talbot’s 2019 The Last Black Man in San Francisco, “you don’t get to hate it unless you love it”.16 The line is delivered in the unmistakable context of a San Francisco Muni bus line, the bane of our existence for those of us who have called the city home. The interaction is contextually precise, situated in the mundane space of public transit, so as to convey a universal message. The simultaneity of frustration and loyalty, enchantment and embarrassment, disapproval and desire; to make a home out of any city is to hold these contradictory opinions. My love for anyplace I’ve visited only a handful of times, I’m sure, rings hollow to anybody from that city. And I’m not interested in love as a feeling of affection or fondness, only as a verb. With regard to cities, love is just a word to describe giving our thorough attention to nuance and detail, to learning a place through careful, sustained, and consistent observation.

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