The Brief

Picture this: a scene I've watched often as an Armenian American who's attended barbecues since childhood.

In a park, a cheerful scream of children rises as a light smoke fills the air. Picnic tables are covered with white linen, where women peel the charred skin off the vegetables.

Next to them, a group of men rotate metal skewers with carefully arranged equal pieces of pork, chicken, and beef on a mangal — a grill made for Armenian-style barbecue.

A pungent smell of charred meat and the piquant fragrance of onion and pepper rises from the grill.

The conversation touches on the latest political developments in Armenia, as some complain about the current government and others are protective.

Often, voices rise, but someone quickly suggests a toast, and all are friends around the sparkly fire once again.

To cook over an open fire

“Armenians call their style of barbecue ‘khorovats’, [which] translates into ‘cook over open fire’," says Ara Zada, chef and co-author of Lavash, a cookbook about traditional Armenian food and recipes.

Ara Zada, a chef and co-author

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Ara Zada

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“It’s more like a dance around the mangal — to know where to put meat and vegetables, where the charcoal is,” Zada adds. ‘’Your meat goes on at a different time, your chicken, your vegetables. And as you’re putting it on, moving it around on the coal itself. ”

Commonly, vegetables are cooked fast on the open fire, while the meat is added later to be charred when the fire is low, giving it its smokiness.

During Zada’s visits to Armenia, where he traveled to different villages and cities, he learned about the dishes his ancestors cooked for thousands of years and his country's barbecue history.

Chicken and beef being grilled Armenian style on a mangal grill

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Liana Grigoryan

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“In the north of Armenia, I met a barbecue champion who won most of his competitions by taking rose stems and laying them over the coals. You got little touches into the meat as it was grilling,” remembers Zada.

Armenians take khorovats so seriously that they hold festivals and contests around it — and have even dedicated a song to it, which is often played at weddings and other major happenings.

The United States of barbecue

“Barbecue is the quintessential American food,” says Jim Auchmutey, the author of Smokelore, a Short History of Barbeque in America. In his book, Jim Auchmutey tells the story of the United States through the lens of barbecue, from the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, and immigration to the present day.

But what is American barbecue? And how did it become American?

Auchmutey has the perfect definition: everyone who uses fire and meat in this country, wherever they come from in the world.

“The way the American barbecue tradition started was because of the mingling of different cultures,” he says, pointing to the arrival of European settlers and enslaved Africans.

Brisket, ribs and all the fixings

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Since then, immigrants have brought their own food cultures and grilling techniques and introduced them to others. Today, new styles are born in backyards and parking lots, developed by family pitmasters and skilled chefs.

“They are all the different branches of the family tree of barbecue. These different grilling styles are just being generalized under the word barbecue since that’s the word known in the United States,” says Auchmutey.

“It’s coming around as a full circle,” he says.

Twisting Traditions

“Everyone at one point, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, Black, Native American, Chinese, Japanese, someone killed an animal, took a hunk of meat, put it on a stick and put it on fire. And it tasted so much better!” says Logan Sandoval, the chef and co-founder of Zef BBQ, an underground popup that started from Logan’s garage in Simi Valley during the pandemic.

Sandoval has had an extensive career as a chef with Hyatt Hotels and Resorts. He is one of the participants in the Netflix original series “Barbeque Showdown,” a competition where contestants showcase their grilling skills and techniques in non-traditional settings.

Logan Sandoval of ZEF BBQ

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ZEF BBQ

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“To me, barbecue is anything that can go into the fire. There is a fire and food; you just need to make it on your own," he says. "I want to make food that makes me feel good, food that I want to eat."

The most important part, he says, is feeding food he loves to other people.

Sandoval learned about flavors and how to properly use spices from his step-grandmother, an Apache woman. She made everything from scratch: tamales, enchiladas, Spanish rice.

“I was 10 or 11 the first time I started having a fascination towards food and realized that food can be so much more than a tuna casserole or hamburgers,” he says.

Hot chiles, sauces, moles, and other vibrant flavors help Zef BBQ stand out, like the pork belly burnt ends, boldly seasoned with Chinese five spice and Sichuan peppercorns, and the short rib curry, soaked in house-made panang curry with the delicate taste of cinnamon.

Barbecue taught Sandoval a lot about patience with cooking, which can last up to 14 hours: “There are no shortcuts. If you want to do it the right way, there are no shortcuts.”

He shows his daughter, who will soon be 7 years old, how to build fire and how not to be afraid of fire.

“In this age of instant gratification, when we get everything from Doordash, McDonald's and others, I am trying to teach her that good food comes from good preparation and good technique. We want her to grow up and learn to care for herself.”

East meets West

American barbecue is often defined by its origin, whether coming from Memphis, Texas, or Kansas.

But Winnie Yee-Lakhani, known as the Smoke Queen, is crafting a new narrative by adding her own style of Asian barbecue. With her “When East meets West” slogan, Yee-Lakhani introduces the flavors she grew up with, including cumin, garlic powder, paprika, and sesame oil, in her non-traditional Texas-style smoked brisket and Cantonese crispy skin pork belly every Sunday at Smorgasburg.

Winnie Yee, Smoke Queen BBQ

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Courtesy Smoke Queen BBQ

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“The barbecue is very primitive, very romantic. It’s a cooking technique that involves the whole community," she says. "Anytime there is a gathering, everybody’s thinking about cooking outside. It’s not just cuisine. It’s a culture in which we infuse our heritage."

Yet, she adds, in her native Malaysian-Chinese cuisine, there’s not a lot of slow cooking involved. Most food is “hot and fast,” she laughs.

Yee-Lakhani, who used to run a franchise of restaurant chains operating inside Hilton hotels, got her start during the pandemic when all the restaurants she used to work with were shut down.

She decided to stretch herself by exploring barbecue and learning smoking techniques. With many trials and errors she finally learned how to barbecue using her Chinese and Malaysian heritage and the spices she used to have in her own kitchen.

She says going into the barbecue business, she’s encountered various stereotypes — one being a woman, the other being Asian.

“Doing American barbecue is very niche. I was always afraid that the fact that I was Asian would hurt my business. But I overcame that," she says. "It’s been three years now. I am also receiving a lot of comments for doing a barbecue from other women who think that it’s a man’s thing.”

This fall, Winnie’s long-awaited restaurant in Garden Grove will debut. In this house-converted kitchen, she will offer the hospitality and traditions prevalent in her cooking. With this project, Winnie hopes to recreate the model of the similar restaurants she’s been to in her homeland in Malaysia, where everyone is warmly welcomed, treated as a family and offered homemade food.

“In a way, this all comes back to what’s important in the barbecue community. Preserving the history, architecture, and design of that neighborhood will definitely be worth it,” Yee-Lakhani adds.

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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Hedy Torres

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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Julia Barajas

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LAist

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.