Topline:
Flask & Field, a downtown L.A. wine and spirits shop, has become a go-to for free natural-wine tastings.
Background: Former entertainment lawyer Miriam Yoo opened in 2018 and has gone through many reinventions. Yoo pivoted to an online storefront and a COVID-safe outdoor booth when foot traffic vanished early in the shutdown. She's since leaned into the fast-growing nonalcoholic category, expanding into de-alcoholized wines and botanical spirits as demand climbed.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
Life’s all about taking risks, and sometimes a single bold choice can change everything. Just ask Miriam Yoo. Eight years ago, she traded her successful career as an entertainment lawyer to pursue her entrepreneurial dream and launch Flask & Field, a wine and spirits shop.
Since then, she’s never looked back. “It’s all of the things that a job could be and so many things that I could never have expected to experience,” Yoo told The LA Local.
Nearly a decade later, Flask & Field has become a downtown L.A. go-to destination for wine hangs, the point of the day where Yoo and her staff offer complimentary pours during select hours.
At Flask & Field, visitors are instantly transported into Yoo’s dreamscape of spirits, wines and nonalcoholic bottles with custom-made tags that are ever so thoughtfully detailed and creatively amusing. At every corner, you’ll find a selection of gifts like artisanal chocolates, specialty teas and mixology tools, as well as quirky finds like a pickle wine stopper or an olive hair clip.
For customers looking to shop and unwind late in the day, Yoo and her staff uncork two or three new bottles from Thursday to Friday between 4 and 6 p.m. She calls these “natural wine happy hours,” where they talk about the wines, share opinions and offer samples while chatting with customers.
On Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m., the tasting events are more structured. Brand representatives and winemakers are there to answer customers’ questions about their products.
“It gives our partners a chance to sort of communicate directly with our customers, introduce themselves, tell them about their brand and their business,” Yoo said.
Best of all, tastings are free and include discounts on featured wines.
Flask & Field
Where: ROW DTLA, 767 S Alameda St #180, Los Angeles
Ultimately, Yoo’s goal was not just to open a wine and spirits shop but to create a space for people to hang out, chat and feel a little bit of a respite.
“It’s super rewarding,” Yoo said, “because ultimately, you’re selling things that help people enjoy their lives or gather with their friends and family.”
Yoo worked as an entertainment lawyer for nine years while she fantasized about opening a place like Flask & Field.
Yoo would picture herself in an adorable, rom-com-type scenario: a solo shopkeeper in a perfectly curated wine shop, greeting regulars with a smile and savoring whimsical moments.
In 2018, Yoo’s dream of opening her own brick-and-mortar shop had finally become a reality, but it wasn’t a rom-com. It was actually a lot of hard work, she said. She had to struggle to stay afloat especially during the early days of the pandemic. But that rough time forced her to constantly evolve.
During the shutdown, for example, Yoo and her team pivoted to having an online storefront; sales skyrocketed. In-person foot traffic halted, but they found a way to meet new and regular customers by setting up a small, COVID-safe booth, so there was still a shopping presence for those visiting Flask & Field.
That spirit of constant evolution is still part of the way Yoo does business. To keep up with the latest in craft beers, mezcals, soju, whiskey, wines and more, Yoo and her team set up meetings with buyers to collaborate, organize weekly tastings and forge relationships with small businesses.
They regularly use Instagram to post about alcoholic drinks and non-spirits, as well as flyers. Currently, they are creating social media videos where they show off new bottles, give insight into where they come from and share their honest reviews.
“Knowledge is the currency. We want to just know everything that’s out there and how it’s tasting this season,” Yoo said.
Part of that currency is getting to know their customers, especially their views on certain brands.
“Something that we noticed was that the younger generation, in general, cares more about farming practices, labor practices and price point. That’s also very important,” she said.
In 2021, Yoo saw growing interest in alcohol-free beers and wines, as more people traded hangovers for deliciously vibrant zero-proof crafted beverages as a healthy alternative. As demand grew, Yoo embraced innovation and expanded her selection to include botanical spirits and de-alcoholized wines.
“The brands have done such a good job being creative, and the products now are so much better than they were in 2021,” Yoo said.
Topline:
45-year-old Raz Chowdhury was moved off the streets into interim housing through an Inside Safe operation. A week later, he was found dead in his hotel room.
The backstory: L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ office said it does not disclose the locations where an individual is placed following an Inside Safe operation. According to Ktown for All, Chowdhury died at the Mayfair Hotel in Westlake, which is used for interim housing.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said the case is still under investigation and Chowdhury died at a hotel in the 1200 block of West 7th Street.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
A week after 45-year-old Raz Chowdhury was moved off the streets into interim housing through an Inside Safe operation, he was found dead in his hotel room.
Chowdhury had spent years living on the streets of Koreatown, moving between encampments along Sixth Street and Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.
Sherin Varghese first met him three or four years ago. Chowdhury would reach out to Varghese, a volunteer with Ktown for All, an advocacy group that provides direct aid for people experiencing homelessness in Koreatown. He would ask her for tents, tarps, clothes and other supplies. More often than not, she said, they weren’t for him.
“He would always go above and beyond to take care of the people around him,” Varghese said at a vigil for Chowdhury on Saturday, Aug. 29.
Once, after Chowdhury lost his phone during a sanitation sweep, he searched for Varghese online and found her work number. He called to ask if she could bring tents and tarps for him and other people whose belongings were lost in the sweep.
“He was resourceful, he was reliable, and he was so thoughtful about the way that he talked about how all of this affected him and affected his friends,” Varghese said.
On June 25, Chowdhury was among 31 people moved into housing during an Inside Safe operation at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office.
A week later he was dead.
According to Ktown for All, Chowdhury died at the Mayfair Hotel in Westlake, which is used for interim housing.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner said the case is still under investigation and Chowdhury died at a hotel in the 1200 block of West 7th Street on July 2. His cause of death is listed as deferred and the case is under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which oversees the Mayfair, would not say if Chowdhury was a resident when he died. An agency spokesperson said they cannot confirm an individual’s enrollment in a LAHSA-contracted program without a written release from next of kin.
LAHSA’s latest Inside Safe report shows that 6,406 people had entered interim housing through the program as of July 31. About 1,750 people remained in interim housing, including 289 at the Mayfair. Meanwhile, 1,802 people, or more than one in four who entered the program, had returned to homelessness. Another 126 people, or about 2%, were listed as deceased.
Bass’ office said it does not disclose the locations where an individual is placed following an Inside Safe operation.
Once someone is connected to interim housing, ongoing services and case management are handled by a LAHSA-contracted service provider, mayor spokesperson Jieun Kim said.
The people who knew Chowdhury gathered last week to remember him at the site of the encampment where he had lived at Wilshire Boulevard and Manhattan Place.
A little more than two dozen people attended the memorial, where they placed flowers at the base of a small tribute to him.
Planters now line the sidewalk where the tents once were. Several people cried as they shared memories of Chowdhury, who they said spent years looking out for others living on the streets of Koreatown.
Cynthia Zhang, who has volunteered with Ktown for All for about four to five years, remembers visiting an encampment where Chowdhury was staying after the Los Angeles fires. Newly displaced people there told her they felt safer with that community than they did at shelters.
“I think Raz was really instrumental in helping create that kind of space,” Zhang said at the vigil.
The last time Zhang saw Chowdhury, he had moved again and did not have a lot of his stuff. But he had a new puppy named T-Rex and seemed to be in good spirits.
“He had a really lovely smile,” Zhang said. “I just remember him skateboarding around … all these little things, maybe because I didn’t see him every day, it really does feel like I’ll be walking around and I’ll see him in one of our old spots.”
David Strugar, another longtime Ktown for All volunteer, said Chowdhury was often the person volunteers went to when they wanted to know how people in the area were doing.
“I would always point him out and say, ‘That’s the mayor of this area,’ because wherever he was, he was just the center of it, and he took care of people,” Strugar said.
Chowdhury would tell volunteers who needed what and help distribute supplies, Strugar said.
A few weeks before he died, Varghese said, she and Chowdhury were looking for places where he could stay outside a 41.18 zone, where the city restricts sitting, lying, sleeping and storing personal property in certain public rights-of-way under specified circumstances.
Then Inside Safe moved him indoors.
“I hoped that he’d be one of its success stories, but a week later, he was gone,” Varghese said. “The program is called Inside Safe, but for Raz and 125 others, it wasn’t that. And it was never going to be Inside Safe, and it was never going to be easy to be inside alone for someone who had so much to give and always surrounded himself with people to take care of.”
The last time Strugar saw Chowdhury, he had his dog T-Rex with him. Ktown for All volunteers don’t know where T-Rex is now.
Chowdhury believed he had the right to community and companionship, Strugar said.
“And there are so many people who have so much and won’t give anything,” Strugar said. “And Raz kept having everything taken away from him, and he still ended up being the person to give.”
He added, “I just keep expecting to walk around the corner and see him, and I’m angry that I won’t.”
Topline:
Radiologist Hong Pham has an unusual side hustle — cooking and selling Peking and roast ducks from his South Pasadena backyard.
The backstory: That Peking Duck Guy started out as a social media account documenting Pham's culinary journey to make the perfect duck. It then became a side hustle when strangers and neighbors offered to buy his birds.
Read on ... to learn about how Pham got started and how he cooks his ducks.
Got a taste for ducks cooked the Chinese way? Your quest may take you to a quiet suburban backyard in South Pasadena.
That's where That Peking Duck Guy cooks and sells his birds. His clients, he said, include Phil Rosenthal and Roy Choi.
The guy behind That Peking Duck Guy is Hong Pham, who started the social media account in late 2025 as a way to document his latest culinary obsession: making the perfect duck, be it Peking or Pipa (deboned and flattened into the shape of the namesake Chinese string instrument).
The intention was not to sell. "I have a day job," Pham said. A radiologist, to be precise.
"I was actually making so many that neighbors wanted to claim it and offered to buy it," he added. "So I'm like, 'OK, that makes it easier 'cause I don't have to eat it all.'"
Soon came DMs from strangers asking for the same thing.
These days, That Peking Duck Guy caters events and holds takeout pop-ups where people can purchase and pick up a duck (which comes with sides and duck soup) from his South Pasadena backyard — right where he cooks them.
Duck is not his first rodeo. Pham said he and his wife are foodies who've always been curious about delving into Vietnamese and other Asian culinary traditions. For Pham, that also means replicating some of these dishes at home, from scratch.
He'd gone on a tofu bender — making gallons of the stuff, as blocks, drinks and pudding — and also a bánh cuốn spree, or Vietnamese steamed rice rolls. He landed on duck as his latest subject only because he had wanted to make better heo quay, or Vietnamese roasted pork belly.
He researched how to get that extra crisp online and landed on an oven people in Asia use to make roast and Peking ducks.
Pham hosts takeout pop-ups from South Pasadena backyard. Follow That Peking Duck Guy's Instagram for updates.
Visit the official website for catering requests.
"It was called the Apollo oven 'cause it looks like an Apollo space capsule," he said.
He bought one and then another. In between, he experimented cooking different meats with the new oven to get a feel before turning to the waterfowl.
He even got advice from Top Chef winner Mei Lin, whom he messaged cold: "She's like, 'Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Keep it traditional.'"
Hundreds of ducks later, Pham said he still learns something new. That's one reason why his side hustle has stuck around.
"I didn't create like, you know, That Bánh Cuốn Man," he said. "Yeah, duck's gonna last."
Pham starts 7 to 10 days before cooking. Here's the preparation process:
When does he know they're done? "Well, you know the color, we're looking for that beautiful mahogany glistening skin, you know?" Pham said.
Topline:
SoCal has become a proving ground for some of the country’s fastest-growing Asian and Asian American retailers, giving chains like Miniso and 99 Ranch Market an early test of broader U.S. appeal.
Growing fast: On the National Retail Federation’s 2026 Hot 25 list, Miniso ranks No. 1, Daiso No. 3, Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing No. 6 and 99 Ranch Market No. 15.
Backstory: All four have had a Southern California presence for years, giving them experience in one of the country’s most diverse and competitive retail markets.
Southern Californians who’ve long shopped at Daiso, Miniso, Uniqlo or 99 Ranch Market may not be surprised to see the Asian-rooted chains expand across the country.
But that growth is now showing up in the numbers.
The National Retail Federation’s Hot 25 Retailers list ranks retailers by U.S. sales growth from 2024 to 2025. Miniso tops the list, with sales up nearly 53%.
The Chinese chain of gift shops opened its first U.S. store in Pasadena’s Old Town more than nine years ago and is now aiming to grow its American footprint to nearly 500 stores this year.
“If you can make it in Southern California, that's great,” said David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology at Kantar and an author of the NRF list.
Marcotte says succeeding in California’s highly competitive retail market can teach chains lessons that translate elsewhere.
“The stone-cold reason is quality. The second one is experience,” he said. “Those are the two things that when shoppers go into any retailer, they’re looking for.”
Daiso ranks third, with growth of nearly 26%, while another Japanese company, Fast Retailing — the parent company of Uniqlo — comes in sixth.
99 Ranch Market, an American supermarket chain founded in Orange County that specializes in Asian groceries, comes in 15th.
Marcotte says Southern California has been a logical landing spot for these companies because of its proximity to Asia. But Marcotte says it can also be an unforgiving place to launch because of the competition, and he often encourages the clients he advises to consider smaller markets.
“I said if you open in Southern California, open one store, get it right,” Marcotte said. “If you get it wrong, you're dead. You'll never recover. You'll have to leave the country and come back in.”
The supermarket industry is particularly tough to break into because customers here, he says, have plenty of alternatives if the quality, selection or experience falls short.
He also emphasizes a retailer in California focused on Asian goods will see more success serving Chinese, Filipino and other Asian customers rather than designing around a particular ethnic group.
“That type of diversity of Asian customers that you have to address in the same store is what really proves to be the difference for an Asian retailer in the California market,” Marcotte said.
That’s part of the business model for 99 Ranch, which was founded by a Taiwanese immigrant who opened the first location in Westminster's Little Saigon in 1984.
Topline:
Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.
Why it matters: A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes.
Why now: This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.
Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.
The clues, they say, lie in the murky space between genes and disease — where key proteins come together and interact.
A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes. This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.
"It's an unprecedented resource for the field," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology, and psychiatry at UCLA who was not involved with the study. "A lot of people interested in understanding autism and drug development are going to be using this."
For families affected by profound autism, it offers hope for eventual drug therapies. "This is the kind of scientific advance we have been waiting for and praying for," says Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation, who has a daughter with severe cognitive impairment. "There's still a lot of work ahead, [but] this paper makes the path from genetic discovery to treatment much clearer."
The work builds on progress made in recent years to identify single genes that harbor mutations found in a subset of individuals with profound autism.
People with profound autism often live with severe intellectual disability and require around-the-clock care. They're nonverbal or minimally verbal, and often have serious medical conditions like epilepsy.
Pinning down the biology behind profound autism has always been a complicated endeavor — while both genes and environmental factors play a role, those factors can vary widely from person to person.
In the past decade or so, some genetics researchers have had remarkable success in identifying high-impact genetic differences in a subset of people with profound autism.
"They've discovered several hundred genes and corresponding mutations that are prevalent in [these] individuals," says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco.
"But they kind of hit a wall," he added — because scientists haven't been able to turn those gene discoveries into many promising drugs and treatments.
"There was this huge missing piece," says Dr. Matthew State, a clinical psychiatrist and geneticist at UCSF: The genes serve as blueprints for making proteins that drive brain development, but researchers lacked visibility into how those proteins do the work.
State has been a pioneer in identifying high-risk genes, and the mutations in those genes, that are associated with profound autism. Krogan has been at the forefront of using new technology to look into protein interactions.
More than a decade ago, the two researchers were introduced by their mutual boss, the chancellor at UCSF, who encouraged them to collaborate. "[State] had the genes and the mutations. I had the technologies to look at the corresponding proteins," Krogan says.
They focused on filling a knowledge gap. "What we've been missing is the mechanistic understanding of how these mutations [on the genes] are seemingly resulting in autism," Krogan says. "In order to understand that, you need to go to the proteins."
Proteins are the complex molecules that come together to build the body, based on instructions encoded in the genes. "What makes an eye cell an eye cell, and a muscle a muscle, are the proteins and how they work together," State says. "They are the machinery of life."
In this case, the researchers wanted to find the molecular machinery of profound autism — to understand which proteins came from those high-risk autism genes, and how those proteins worked together.
The research was slow at first, but more recent advances in technology — including artificial intelligence — have sped things up.
To start, the researchers went on a "fishing expedition" for protein interactions. They chose 100 proteins from these high-risk autism genes, injected them into lab-grown cells, and then pulled them out, along with the additional proteins that attached to them.
Then, they used an AI system called AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, to help determine which proteins in the clumps were directly touching. "Where AI is playing an important role is being predictive about who's talking to who," says Krogan. "Sometimes they take years to figure out. Now, we can get these insights in an hour." While imperfect, the system has worked well enough to save significant time and money, Krogan says.
Then, they wanted to see what happened to the proteins when the genes got tweaked. They introduced mutations that appear in patients with profound autism, and assessed what changed. "We broke the proteins in the way that they're broken in autism," says State. "That allows us ultimately to answer the question of, when they're going wrong in autism, how are they going wrong?"
They conducted this research in frogs and in organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that model the human brain. In one example, the mutations weakened the connection between two proteins related to which genes turn on and off in a cell. Then, one went rogue, turning on other genes that led to neurodevelopmental defects in organoids.
There are hundreds of rare, high-risk autism genes, acting in more than a thousand different ways.
But in mapping more than 1,800 protein interactions, the researchers found that many of them moved along shared biological pathways — particularly those related to early brain development, such as how synapses get constructed, and which neurons develop and when.
The convergence found in this study aligns with other recent publications, adding to an emerging understanding in the field, says Dr. Geschwind of UCLA.
"If we look at multiple mutations and they converge on the same process, that's strong evidence that you're dealing with the things that you want to treat," State says.
Identifying this more limited set of protein complexes that likely contribute to the development of profound autism could change the approach to treatments, says Singer with the Autism Science Foundation. "We've been working gene-by-gene to correct mutations," she says.
And if future drugs could target these shared protein pathways, she adds, "we may not need that separate therapeutic strategy for every autism gene."
It takes years to go from a biological discovery like this to an approved drug that treats humans. The findings would need to be translated into drug candidates, then tested for safety and effectiveness.
"It takes time and a lot of persistence and focus," State says. "This [paper] is unlikely to lead to therapies tomorrow — but it lays an important foundation for them."
Most human drugs are made to target proteins, Geschwind at UCLA says, so the newly published map of protein interactions offers an accessible entry point for pharmaceutical development.
And researchers hope to combine recent technological advances in ways that accelerate that progress even more. "When you put together the ability to borrow from successes in other fields [such as cancer treatments], and the development of AI, we're at an inflection point that will hopefully shorten the time cycle," State says.
Last week, Krogan's Quantitative Biosciences Institute received a $46 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative, funded by philanthropist and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The researchers are already working on next steps.
Copyright 2026 NPR
