Harmony of style – The Bluewater Grill is a classic fish house, down to the last detail
by Richard Foss Restaurant designers have plenty of strategies to choose from, one of which is theming the décor around the menu. I’ve been to vegetarian places plastered with images of tomatoes the size of basketballs, steakhouses with cows on the open range, a barbecue place decorated with piggy banks and a larger-than-life effigy of […]
Chinese, simplified. Dan Modern Chinese does a few things very well
by Richard Foss Some people find ordering at traditional Chinese restaurants intimidating thanks to the overwhelming number of items on the menu, some of which have metaphorical names. One might guess that Buddha’s Feast is a vegetarian dish because the founder of a religion that forbids meat wouldn’t want to set a bad example, but […]
Get your French on at The Crepery and Pinwheel Cafe & Bakery at the Peninsula
Two breakfast and brunch cafes offer different tastes of France by Richard Foss The phrases we borrow from French say a lot about our opinion of their way of life. People who couldn’t understand street directions in Paris routinely wish us bon appétit, call someone a bon vivant, or speak of joie de vivre. We […]
Seashore Chinese Restaurant Local Chinese, native flavors
by Richard Foss Depending on which set of statistics you look at, Chinese food is either the most popular restaurant cuisine in the U.S. or in second place. That includes high style fusion places, down home eateries, and take-out counters all lumped into the one category, but one statistic proves the appeal. There are more […]
Quietly, everything changed
By Richard Foss When Chef Tin Vuong opened the first Little Sister restaurant in 2013, the food was an unusually personal expression of his family’s history. As the South Vietnamese regime teetered, uncles and cousins scattered to whatever country would give them refuge, winding up all over South Asia. They reunited in the USA, IN […]
The universe beneath our feet
By Richard Foss Rolling Hills resident Kathy Kellogg Johnson tells the story of the founding of her family’s garden products company as though she were there, even though it happened in 1925. A young man with a new engineering degree from USC didn’t have much money or land. His father had lost his fortune […]
R10 Social House in Redondo marina is a name worth remembering
by Richard Foss Hermosa had a bar and grill called Fat Face Fenner’s Falloon that everybody knew because once you heard the silly name, you remembered it. Other odd names were more problematic – BamBiBu was hilarious to anyone who understood Japanese puns, but forgettable by everyone else, and even the staff at Les Joues […]
In Remembrance: Redondo Beach’s Charlie’s loses its namesake
by Richard Foss The South Bay lost a pillar of the local restaurant community with the death of Charles Byrd two weeks ago. Byrd, known universally as Charlie, co-owned and operated Charlie’s on Pacific Coast Highway since1992. Byrd moved from New York to Hermosa Beach in the 1980s and worked at Naja’s and then at […]
A leisurely meal at Sand Bar 66 in Manhattan Beach
by Richard Foss The South Bay is full of older homes that have been added onto so many times that they acquire quirks – a switch somewhere that is on a different circuit than everything around it, pipes that come out of the wall and go right back in, a patch of wall where […]