RH Greene on the Walking Man of Silverlake ... Dinner Party Download ... Cooking for 5,000 aboard the USS George Washington aircraft carrier ... Upton Sinclair Reconsidered ... Todd Carpenter - a real painter of light, in the dark.
Pasadena's New Cooking School - Ecole de Cuisine
Chef Farid Zadi, from La Cachette and Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, has opened his own place ... a cooking school where students can get the basics of French cooking, or fill in the gaps in their knowledge. It's called Ecole de Cuisine, and Off-Ramp's John Rabe attended the press opening luncheon. CLICK THROUGH to see a video of Chef Zadi demonstrating how to cut an onion!
Chef and New Citizen Roibrenn Arlante of Glendale
... and not just any chef. Seaman Roibrenn Arlante (Glendale Senior High Class of '08) works aboard the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, so he's cooking for 5,000 men and women. This past weekend, he became a US Citizen, and the ceremony was conducted aboard ship.
RH Greene on The Walking Man of Silverlake
A film and a blog got writer and filmmaker RH Greene thinking about the odd celebrity of the late Walking Man of Silverlake, Marc Abrams, who apparently killed himself this summer amidst a reported investigation into prescription drug distribution.
Photo by GelatoBaby and used via Creative Commons
Lauren's movie:
Upton Sinclair: Author, Vegetarian, and Candidate for Governor?
Anyone who went to high school in the last 50 years no doubt knows Upton Sinclair for his Chicago meatpacking expose "The Jungle," but he was much more than an undercover muckraker.
Sinclair moved to California in 1915 and by 1934 he had run for two congressional seats, formed California's ACLU and got the Democratic nomination for governor of the state. Off-Ramp's Kevin Ferguson talked to The Nation's Greg Mitchell, whose newly reprinted book "The Campaign of the Century" focuses on Sinclair's run for governor, and how the campaign gave birth to the modern American political campaign.
Rabe drives New Mercedes Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car, Doesn't Get Ticket
Mercedes Benz's Sascha Simon, in charge of the company's advance product planning in the US, met Off-Ramp host John Rabe by LAX to let him drive the new Mercedes F-Cell car, which is like an electric SUV without, as Simon puts it, "range anxiety." (It is quite fast off the line, by the way.) Mercedes is sending a shipment of the cars to California for testing by consumers, who'd lease them for up to three years.
CLICK THROUGH to see Simon showing you the real guts of the car.
Todd Carpenter, actual "painter of light"
Todd Carpenter's day job is teaching photography and neural science to architects. In his spare time, he creates small, focused paintings of Southern California landscapes in shades of gray that are surprisingly evocative and even colorful ... in your mind.
His show, "scaped," opens Saturday, October 16, at LAUNCH Gallery at 5412 Wilshire. (The party's from 6-10p.)
The Mezcal Renaissance
...or renacimiento, if you prefer. KPCC's Adolfo Guzman Lopez tastes a Mezcal cocktail with the drink's namesake, Bricia Lopez. Mezcal is a special kind of Tequila made from the Maguey plant in Oaxaca, Mexico.
A few years after World War II, a Los Angeles liquor distributor created a marketing campaign for the margarita cocktail. It helped make tequila an ubiquitous item in U.S. bars and restaurants. Now, another obscure Mexican hard liquor is gaining popularity. People in the know predict it could win a lot of fans in these parts.A neon sign atop a building at the corner of Pico and Normandie marks the entrance to L.A.'s Byzantine-Latino Quarter. "Historically this used to be Koreatown," says Gabriel Martinez, who immigrated to Los Angeles from Oaxaca, Mexico as a teenager, "but then lately people have been describing it as Oaxacatown."
Oaxacan culture reaches into many parts of the country now, he says – and that’s created a demand for Oaxacan food and drink. "Cheese, the Oaxaqueño cheese, quesillo. Oh my God, it’s in demand everywhere. Mole, you will go everywhere and people will ask for mole," he said, and for mezcal. That’s the strong distilled liquor from Oaxaca.
KPCC's Adolfo Guzman Lopez tastes a Mezcal cocktail with the drink's namesake, Bricia Lopez. Mezcal is a special kind of Tequila made from the Maguey plant in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Later, at a restaurant, Martinez takes out a mezcal bottle in a woven palm leaf sleeve with no label. He’s just brought it back from Oaxaca. He offers me a taste. It’s smooth as it blankets my tongue and potent as it tingles my scalp. This mezcal's smoky nuances are nothing like the gasoline-harsh touristy bottles with the dormant worm that I swore off years ago.
Todd Richman of Frederick Wildman and Sons is helping lots of other people get acquainted or re-acquainted with tequila’s southern cousin – also born of the agave plant. He markets a new brand of handcrafted mezcal from small producers in Oaxaca. He’s hosting a mezcal tasting event at Association near the corner of 6th and Main Street in downtown L.A. It's a bar so tony and exclusive, you won’t find the name near its creaking black door with the brass lion knocker.
Richman says mezcal appeals to people in search of an artisan-distilled spirit that’s not mass produced. "It’s very different from tequila in that the agave is cut up after it's harvested and roasted underground and smoked, and some are smoked heavier than others, and they’re all very different styles it’s from village to village. It’s closer to wine," Richman says.
One of the showcase mezcals on this night is called Ilegal Mezcal. Its distiller, 32-year-old Australian Steven Meyers, says the small-batch quality of his and other new mezcals on the market will help change popular perception of the hard liquor. "Quite often the only experience people have had has been with the worm in the bottom as a teenager and waking up with the mother of all hangovers," he says.
A bottle of high-end mezcal can cost up to $200 in the United States. Meyers says his brand’s name refers to his bootlegging the liquor in Coke bottles and cans between Oaxaca and the bar he ran in Guatemala about a decade ago. "We brought back more and more, sometimes through unofficial channels, as it were, running across rafts over the river, dressing up as priests from time to time, and created this brand," Meyers says.
If mezcal can make it big in L.A.'s burgeoning bar scene, Meyers says, it can make it anywhere. To that end, Meyer and his distributor have enlisted the help of Bricia Lopez, a 25-year-old Oaxacan-American. "I am a restauranteur in Los Angeles. I have Oaxacan restaurants in Koreatown, Lynwood and Huntington Park and tonight we’re doing a Bricia cocktail crawl," she says.
This college-educated woman has inspired cocktail names at four different bars: The Bricia Blanco at Association, the Bricia, across the street at the mezcal bar Las Perlas, Brisa de Oaxaca at Descarga, and the Sweet Bricia at 320 Main in Seal Beach.
Lopez’s father immigrated to L.A. and found himself selling Oaxacan food door to door. He saved enough money to bring his wife and kids to the U.S. Her father’s restaurant, named Guelaguetza after the Oaxacan cultural festival, has given her the visibility to start her own eatery. She says she’s proud to see her home state’s liquor featured in high-end establishments. "It puts Oaxaca in such a high level. It’s worth having a place just for mezcal, it’s not like a cheap place," she says.
Many people drink mezcal for the buzz and to get drunk, Bricia Lopez says. But if even a small portion of people who drink it think about the liquor’s humble origins, she says, her family’s success in this country will be all the sweeter.
Dinner Party Download dines with Paul F Tompkins
Find out how to win your dinner party.
Paul F. Tompkins is a popular comedian. He was a co-star on the cult sketch show Mr. Show and he is the proud parent of Pod F. Tompkast — a new podcast that’s already topping the charts. He tells Rico about his terrifying new hobby and why comedians don’t like joking around.