Mark Peel, the owner of Campanile, the seminal Los Angeles restaurant he founded in 1989, is pictured in the upstairs of the restaurant in 2012. He always wanted the food to be perfect; he didn’t care how long it took.” Food Mark Peel helped codify the notion of American ‘urban rustic’ cooking If you whittle down the list of restaurants …
If you whittle down the list of restaurants that shaped modern Los Angeles dining culture — the places where the now-stereotypes of California cooking were once fresh revelations, from which influences continue to ripple even if younger generations have no knowledge of their origins — Campanile would hover in the top five, maybe even the top three. With his mastery …
L.A. dining culture thrives on plurality. The Kogi team opens its first bricks-and-mortar restaurant, Chego, and labels it an “L.A.-in-a-rice-bowl spot.” In a mention of the dish Hot Buttered Kimchi Chow in his roundup of the year’s best dishes, Jonathan Gold writes presciently in L.A. Weekly: “Is this the year of metacuisine? Evan Kleiman, chef and host of KCRW’s weekly …
