Search Results: richard foss
by Richard Foss I have only known one person who disliked pasta in all of its forms – my father. During World War II he was a crewman on a destroyer escort where a vast amount of the stuff had been loaded by mistake. To hear him tell it, everyone suffered through meals of over-boiled…
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I like to look back at old menus and reviews from groundbreaking places to compare with what they’re doing now. Some are still serving the same food as when they opened, often because that menu was designed by a consultant whose creativity departed when they cashed the check and packed up their knives. Others underwent…
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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…
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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…
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by Richard Foss At the outset of 2021 I wasn’t expecting improvement in the local dining scene. Openings in 2020 had been better than expected, but those projects were already in the pipeline, and one might expect few new ones to be planned. Surely investors would be cautious due to the ban on indoor dining,…
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I took my wife, who doesn’t enjoy highly spicy food, to a Korean restaurant. It wasn’t with the expectation that she would suddenly change the preferences of a lifetime, or that she lost a bet. We had family in town for the holidays, and one of them craved the famously flavorful cuisine that they had…
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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…
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People who grew up in Mexico City find the way Americans eat tacos to be peculiar. Tacos there are a bocadillo, a snack, and making a meal of them would be like eating an entire can of the little Vienna sausages usually found impaled on toothpicks on cocktail party trays. I’m sure people have done…
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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 Chinese restaurants in…
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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…
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I am old enough to remember the pre-internet age, and still marvel at some of the changes. If you wanted to know when a restaurant was open you had to call and ask, and if you were curious about what they served you had to hope the person on the other end of the phone…
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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…
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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…
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Logic and expediency: The typical business pattern for South Bay restaurants involves a lot of openings early in the summer to take advantage of the tourist season. That schedule has been blown to pieces by a labor shortage, building materials shortage, and city and county permit services that are running months behind. As a result,…
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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…
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