The Brief

A certain politician recently declared that the White House would smell like curry if their opponent won the election — like it was a bad thing. I thought that after Bridgerton, we were done with the curry jokes. Because curry can’t be reduced to a cartoon stereotype. It isn’t just one specific dish. It’s a culinary titan.

“Indian curries are an intricate tapestry, woven with a vibrant medley of spices that harmonize to craft a culinary masterpiece,” said Chef Sujan of newcomer Indian molecular gastronomy sensation Baar Baar.

Goan Coconut Shrimp Curry at Kahani in Dana Point

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Courtesy Kahani

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Worldwide, the word ‘curry’ is a kaleidoscope, evoking the identities and cultures of people with their own versions of the dish. In L.A., Indian, Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and Japanese arrivals brought their own recipes with them, infusing the city with their own aromatic contributions.

Angelenos — it's time to release this exuberant creation from its narrow cavern and embrace its magnitude. Here’s your journey across curries and cultures.

The history

When writing my own book on Indian spice blends, Masaleydaar: Classic Indian Spice Blends, I found early references to ‘curry’ in mid-19th century British and French cookbooks.

This loose term (which originates in South India) referenced sauce-based dishes containing spices like turmeric, ginger, and pepper. Some offered shelf-stable curry powder recipes, but no two recipes for curry powder were alike, and some contained as many as 20 ingredients! And yet, the word stuck, minus cultural or geographical references, and continued to define many dishes originating across Asia.

Shrimp Malwani Curry at Baar Baar in downtown Los Angeles

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Courtesy Baar Baar

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Chinese and Thai curries

While colonial powers continued to appropriate and profit from Asian cuisines, many Chinese immigrants came to Los Angeles to feed California’s Gold Rush. By the mid 1950s, many Thais also came to the city. As with any immigrant community, some returned to their home countries, others stayed.

Buddhist places of worship served both these communities. Celebrity chef of Thai origin, Jet Tila, observes the overlap between religion and food.

“For Thai people, curry symbolizes the influence of Buddhism. Curry and Buddhism almost go hand-in-hand because they both are from India and are ubiquitous in the culture," he said. "We don't make Masala, we've adapted the idea of curry into a herb paste, more indigenous to the geography of Southeast Asia.”

Where to go:

Wat Thai temple in North Hollywood

Established in 1979, Wat Thai has long served Buddhist Thais. Now, every weekend their parking lot transforms into a robust and lively food market, as local vendors showcase unique Thai dishes. This is the best place to sample homestyle Thai delicacies like (Kaeng) Tai Pla Curry, fermented fish from Southern Thailand or Northern style Thai Khao Soi, a yellow curry broth with egg noodles, pickled mustard greens, chili oil, and chicken legs. Go hungry.

Fo Guang Shan Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights

In contrast, Fo Guang Shan Hsi Lai Temple offers a respite from the high-octane energy of Greater Los Angeles. This serene meditation and learning space showcases Chinese culture and Buddhism within its expansive complex of tan, tiled-roofed prayer halls surrounding grand courtyards. Unlike Thai Buddhists, many Chinese Buddhists are strictly vegetarian, so the modest dining hall serves only vegetarian meals during limited hours. Its ambience and food reflect the peaceful harmony of the temple.

Japanese curries

By some records, the Japanese community was part of Los Angeles at a few thousand strong even in the early 1900s. Jane Matsumoto, director of Culinary Arts at the Japanese American Culture & Community Center, said “Japanese food culture in the United States has undergone significant evolution since World War II,” adding that classic Japanese foods are often seen only during traditional celebrations.

Where to go:

Coco Ichibanya

The popular Japanese food chain boasts four locations in metro Los Angeles. Well known for customizable Japanese curries, rich with cinnamon and chili powder, they're served with rice, or surprisingly, naan, which is perfect for soaking every saucy droplet from the bowl. They even offer two unique condiments: pickled radish and tobikara. Tobikara is a dusting spice that reminds me in both taste and texture of mealtime accompaniments in Indian homestyle meals: a spicy methkut from my home state of Maharashtra, western India, or a podi from my husband’s home state in Tamil Nadu in southern India. Tasting something so close to home, in an L.A. Japanese chain, warms my heart.

Malaysian and Vietnamese curries

All immigrants cook with a bit of nostalgia for their home countries. Irvine resident and board member of Les Dames d'Escoffier International, Anita Lau, grew up in Malaysia. She would cook Japanese curry for her son because it was milder. While Japanese curry remains her son's comfort food, Lau prefers the more robust Thai, Malaysian, and Indian curries.

"There is a great deal of care towards the preparation of the spice base… they have a good bit of heat, and complexity… my favorites,” Lau said. She isn’t wrong.

Dishes from Kahani's menu

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Courtesy Kahani

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Vietnamese refugees came to L.A. in the mid-1970s and have created a robust Little Saigon in Westminster, capable of teasing the taste buds into deliriously dizzying heights. Like any Indian grocery store, the spice aisles are stocked high with pre-assembled spice blends for different kinds of pho and Vietnamese curries, with familiar spices like black pepper, black cardamom, and bay leaf.

Where to go:

Brodard in Fountain Valley

Brodard offers a few varieties of curries for those who aren't ready to cook just yet, including a goat curry served with a classic baguette, perfect for dunking into the fragrant and decadent sauce. An additional express location in John Wayne Airport (Gate 13/14, Terminal B/C), makes Vietnamese food even more accessible.

Burmese curries

Where to go:

Mandalay Morning Star

Mandalay Morning Star in Covina is worth a detour to the eastern edge of L.A. County. Started by Burmese refugees in 1995, it not only offers prepared meals and prepared foods for take out, but is also a mini grocery mart. It prides itself in close-to-home flavors, like the saporous breakfast street food from Mandalay, Nan-Gyi Mont Ti.

A plate of rice noodles tossed in chickpea flour and topped with sliced chicken, garnishes and a bit of Burmese curry sauce comes to the table with a bowl of clear chicken stock, the breakfast of champions.

Indian curries

Eventually, however, all these curry interpretations use similar spices (albeit in unique combinations), and connect diners to a cuisine thousands of years old — Indian cuisine.

Weaving through time, geographies, trends, social status, embracing migrations and change, Indian food continues to evolve. Indians have been in California as far back as the Chinese, first in the farming sector, and embracing all of California by the mid-60s. With it, they brought the breadth of Indian cuisine, and made it available to all.

Where to go:

• BAPS Shayona in Chino Hills
  Food interpreted through the lens of sectarian dietary guidelines of the Swaminarayan communities.
  15100 Fairfield Ranch Rd, Chino Hills
  
• Any Sikh gurudwara
  Free langar, or community meals.
  
• Rajdhani, Anjappar, or Bhoke in Cerritos
  Hyper-regional and classic Indian dishe which give you a taste of the breadth of home and community meals.
  
• Kailash Parbat
  Street-fare forward international restaurant franchise
  4517 Chino Hills Pkwy E, Chino Hills
  
• Yellow Chili
  Celebrity chef-led cuisine
  2463 Park Ave, Tustin
  
• Nanking Indo Chinese
  Celebrates border cuisines with Indian, Chinese and Nepalese dishes
  18349 Pioneer Blvd #5532, Artesia
  
• Khan Saab
  Hearty Indian-Pakistani fare which asks us to leave our politics squarely at the door.
  229 E Commonwealth Ave Unit A, Fullerton
  
• Cali Chili
  Globally inspired Indian-Southeast Asian restaurant
  4111 N Viking Way, Long Beach
  
• Kahani
  Classic and Indian-inspired dishes
  1 Ritz Carlton Dr, Dana Point
  
• Baar Baar
  Modern Indian innovator which takes diners into the mad minds of classically trained chefs pushing diners to explore Indian cuisine through their creative lenses.
  705 W 9th St, Los Angeles

Chicken Makhani at Baar Baar in downtown Los Angeles.

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Neetu Laddha

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Courtesy Baar Baar

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Curry is an emotion, not a single recipe. Through its many global interpretations, it showcases narratives of family, tradition and nostalgia and ties in what is here and now. It is the pulse of a community, chronicling their joys and challenges while nourishing their collective soul. It defines 'home' for millions of people, no matter where they are.

Indian cuisine is not not one dish and it is not just one curry. It never was.

A long-awaited vision for Huntington Drive is finally coming into focus. In the future, the busy corridor will have dedicated bus lanes, protected bike lanes, two lanes of vehicle traffic in each direction, a thin median and wide sidewalks.

This was the plan chosen by the City for the Huntington Drive Multi-Modal Transportation Improvement Project, which runs on an approximately four-mile stretch of the street between North Mission Road near LAC+USC Medical Center and Alhambra/South Pasadena. This had much more public support than the competing alternative, which featured a wide median rather than wide sidewalks, according to Mary Nemick, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Engineering.

Nemick said the next step is to hire a consultant to create design and engineering documents. This phase is expected to take about two years before groundbreaking can occur.

Currently, Huntington Drive has three vehicular lanes in each direction, the bike lanes are unprotected, and about 25% of the corridor lacks sidewalks. Though pedestrians and bicyclists account for only 1% of peak-hour trips, they account for 54% of severe or fatal injuries from traffic collisions, according to a project document.

The design budget is about $10.5 million, Nemick said, and the overall project cost will be determined after designs are completed.

The project is being funded by some of the money previously allocated for the construction of the 710 Freeway extension, which was abandoned in 2018 after decades of local opposition.

The Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey held a groundbreaking ceremony Monday for a roughly 40,000-square-foot expansion that will include indoor and outdoor science learning areas and space for special exhibits.

The centerpiece of the buildout will include an interactive display of the Inspiration space shuttle mockup, where visitors can go inside the cargo bay.

Built in 1972, the 35-foot-tall model made of wood, plastic and aluminum functioned as a prototype and fitting tool for all of the orbiters that launched into space.

“We’re super excited to be able to put it on display for the public, really for the first time in forever,” Ben Dickow, president and executive director of the Columbia Memorial Space Center, told LAist.

The expansion will also allow for educational areas, where students can learn about the pioneering engineering and design work that went into building the model at Rockwell International in Downey.

The backstory

Last fall, after sitting in storage for more than a decade, the full-scale model was moved a few blocks to a temporary home.

The Inspiration space shuttle mockup was moved in sections to a temporary home last fall

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Courtesy Columbia Memorial Space Center

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The Space Center said renovation work on the mock up will take months and include rehabs of its 60-foot cargo bay and flight deck.

Dickow said Downey is where all of the Apollo capsules that went to the moon and all of the space shuttles were designed and built.

“This is part of the L.A. story as much as entertainment or anything like that,” Dickow said, adding that it’s a legacy he feels like Angelenos sometimes forget. “The space craft that took humanity to the moon, the space craft that brought humanity into lower earth orbit and built the international space station, these are human firsts... and they all happened right here.”

What’s next? 

The Space Center is looking to raise $50 million that would go toward building plans, special exhibits and more.

Dickow said the new building that will house the space shuttle mockup should be open to the public in about two years.

By early next year, he said the plan is to have the shuttle model available for bi-monthly public visits as it undergoes renovation.

Pacific Palisades homeowners looking to sell high-end properties after the January fires could escape the city’s “mansion tax” under a proposal advanced Monday by a key committee of the Los Angeles City Council.

Measure ULA is a voter-approved tax on real estate selling for $5.3 million or more. The city uses the revenue for rent relief, eviction defense and affordable housing construction efforts.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Palisades, said she has heard from hundreds of homeowners who say the tax is affecting their post-fire recovery plans.

“For some, recovery is going to mean leaving the Palisades,” Park said during Monday’s meeting of the Ad-Hoc Committee for L.A. Recovery. “In those instances — where a sale is by no means voluntary — I don't think we should impede that objective.”

Vote follows direction from mayor

Measure ULA levies a 4% tax on properties selling for more than $5.3 million, and a 5.5% tax on properties selling for more than $10.6 million.

Last month, Mayor Karen Bass sent a letter asking the City Council to pass an ordinance giving the city’s director of finance the power to exempt Palisades homeowners from Measure ULA within three years of the fire.

In her letter, Bass wrote: “After adoption of the ordinance, I will issue an executive directive instructing the Director of Finance to promulgate a temporary exemption that provides much needed relief for those Palisades residents who owned and occupied residential property in the Palisades at the time of the fire, avoids unintended loopholes, and furthers the purpose of ULA.”

Bass’ office said the letter was sent following a meeting she had with Rick Caruso, the billionaire real estate developer, former mayoral candidate and founder of Steadfast L.A., an organization focused on fire recovery.

How we got here

Any final tax exemption would still need further action from the City Council and Mayor’s Office to take effect.

The proposal cleared Monday’s committee in a 3-0 vote. But it needs further consideration by the full City Council before any ordinance is passed. Bass would then need to issue an executive directive with full details of the post-fire tax exemption.

This isn’t the first effort to cancel the “mansion tax” for Pacific Palisades homeowners. A state bill introduced days before the end of Sacramento’s legislative session would have carved out sales in the fire zone.

But the exemption would have only gone through if efforts to repeal the tax either failed to qualify for the ballot or were dropped by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, an anti-mansion tax group. The bill also would have sought to address concerns about depressed housing development in the city by lowering the tax on sales of recently constructed apartments.

Bass said she asked Sacramento lawmakers to shelve the bill so more amendments could be made in the upcoming legislative session.