The New York Times kicked up quite the proverbial dust storm last year when it published a story titled "Los Angeles and Its Booming Creative Class Lures New Yorkers."
The piece described how artsy types from the East Coast have been flocking to Southern California, lured by warm weather, cheaper rents and L.A. finally becoming a "cool" place to live.
Among those making the migration, the musician, DJ, photographer and restaurateur known simply as Moby.
Moby made the move to L.A. from his native New York five years ago. Now he's got a new eatery in the city's Silver Lake neighborhood that opened in November. It's a vegan restaurant called Little Pine. It's a non-profit too with 100 percent of the profits going to animal welfare organizations.
Interview highlights:
Why make the move from New York to L.A.?
When I realized about eight years ago that it was time to leave New York, I came up with a very rational list of criteria, what I was looking for. And I wanted a city that was mainly populated by creative people, that was warm in the winter time, that had relatively affordable real estate, and easy access to nature. And L.A. is quite literally the only city on the planet that satisfies all that criteria.
Did L.A. meet your expectations?
From my perspective, the wonderful things here are unparalleled both in history and in the world. Meaning, like if we take a step back and we look at Los Angeles with a degree of objectivity, you see a city or a county with over 2 million acres of mountainous wilderness, almost every interesting, odd musician, writer director on the planet, probably some of the best 20th century architecture on the planet, and a place where you can grow oranges in your backyard and make fresh grapefruit juice in February. Like, none of that has ever existed before.
So that's the good side. The bad side is it's a sprawling, borderline developing nation city. There's so much chaos, the infrastructure barely works... So I feel like unfortunately there's a bureaucracy in Los Angeles that almost works counter — like the things that make Los Angeles great, have very little to do with the governance here.
What's your recommendation for someone's first visit to Little Pine? What should they order?
[For lunch], the thing I'm a little obsessed with right now is, we have a sausage and fennel sandwich...And it's taken our chefs months to come up with a really great sausage recipe and it's so good, like they've nailed it... the days of Woody Allen and Annie Hall at The Source restaurant ordering a plate of mashed yeast, I think those days of veganism are long past.
To hear the full interview with Moby, click the link above.