Diner Theory's American Odyssey - Part I: New York, New York

For so many years, LA lived in the culinary shadow of New York. LA was seen as an unserious place, no doubt fueled by stereotypes about the city's supposed superficiality. New York, on the other hand, was the center of the world, and its residents hardly ever thought about what people were eating in LA. Now, to their credit, many staple American foods have mythic origins in the immigrant communities of early 20th century New York, from hot dogs and pizza to regionally specific items like Manhattan clam chowder to fine dining classics like eggs benedict or the nearly forgotten chicken a la king. In addition, for decades New York restaurants were nearly the only ones that prominent food critics paid attention to. San Francisco might get an occasional mention, but the thought of LA having anything to rival Le Cirque, Le Pavillon, or the Four Seasons was laughable.

But things have certainly changed. It started with the rise of California Cuisine in the 80s; a trend I have extremely little fondness for, but which I cannot argue got the critics paying attention to what chefs in California were up to. And certainly other champions of regional American cuisine helped knock the Big Apple from its pedestal; Paul Prudhomme and Edna Lewis, from the South, were big players, the latter of whom was poached for the head chef position at the legendary Brooklyn restaurant Gage & Tollner. Even still, LA itself was not conceived of as having a distinctive native cuisine worth mentioning. But beginning in the mid-90s, two things began to happen. Taco trucks began to skyrocket in popularity among gringos, offering an eating experience that was undeniable in its virtues, and at the same time was incredibly cheap and accessible. They would eventually become the bedrock of LA food culture in the popular consciousness of the 21st century. The other thing was Jonathan Gold, who helped shine a light on the LA food scene as it existed beyond the confines of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

Nowadays? New York has by no means been marginalized, but it's gotten a little more self-conscious. In my five years living there, I lost count of the number of times I witnessed an influencer or Eater writer claim that "finally, at long last, New York has a taco stand that beats LA." Never have these claims been true, of course.

And that's the thing about New York. There is some kind of irrepressible need to have a little of *everything.* In a way, that’s one of the things that's truly great about it. You can, in fact, have just about anything your tongue or stomach could call you to acquire. LA's not like that. But what LA does have, it excels at like no one else. Sure, you can get Persian food in New York. But LA has no fewer than half a dozen places that all blow the best of New York out of the water, and dozens more that compete quite favorably. Same goes for Korean BBQ. Or sushi. Or regional Mexican food.

New York is about a universal possibility that anyone will find a place for themselves. LA, on the other hand, is not necessarily for everyone. You might not find a place, but one thing we can guarantee (housing crisis notwithstanding) is that there is SPACE for you here. LA is a great expanse, a vast territory, 4,084 square miles teeming with hundreds of discontinuous micro-communities that are likely to go unnoticed if you don't care to delve beyond LA's supposed superficiality. If you don't spend much time in Jefferson Park, you might not ever know we have a Little Belize, perhaps the only one in the continental US. Conversely, a Japanese person living in Gardena could have all of their day to day needs taken care of without ever needing to speak English or leave Gardena. Without a willingness to dig a little deeper, you wouldn't have the faintest idea about West LA and Santa Monica's historic Oaxacan community. If you are easily deterred by freeway traffic, you might never realize the greatness of Long Beach's Cambodian restaurant scene. And without an occasional detour through LA's backstreets, away from the freeways, you might never connect the dots between such similarly named burger stands at Tommy's, Tommie's, Tomy's, Tomboy's, Tam's...

I guess what I'm saying is, LA is so damn big that there's an awful lot of places for stones to remain indefinitely unturned, so to speak. In New York, everything gets “discovered” eventually. By now even casual tourists can be expected to know that the best Italian food in the city is up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, or that distant Flushing (over an hour from downtown Manhattan by subway) is a destination for modern Asian food. But you can't be celebrated without first being discovered. Which is, at least in part, why New York has hogged the limelight for so long. The greatness of LA's vast cuisine can, for a while at least, fly under the radar, hidden behind the blinding glare of what people expect from us - celebrities and models and plastic surgery disasters with the depth of a puddle, who are invariably guilty of the New Yorker's greaest insult against us - they are “FAKE.” But let me ask you: what's fake about Whittier? Or Huntington Park? Or San Fernando? Or all the great things they have to offer?

For all this, though, there are a great many things that New York does in fact do much better than Los Angeles. For one, they honor their history far better than we do. To the point that they almost take for granted that their beloved institutions will never change. They can and do change, of course, but enough of the old sticks around there that it really puts LA to shame. Indeed, if I had never lived in NYC, without the perspective on how the great people of New York relate to food and to history, there may never have been a Diner Theory. But by the same token, Diner Theory never would have worked in New York, or at least, could never have originally come to be in New York. Old restaurants get enough legitimate respect and adoration from both the masses and the media intelligentsia that Diner Theory would be pretty much superfluous. Whereas a place like LA needs a champion for the dives, the holes in walls, the storied institutions that may have seen better days but still have something to offer. Too many people here take for granted that, because we are a relatively young city, change is both inherent and inherently good. But if there is a soul, a vital essence, to the city of Los Angeles, then it is important to honor our history, lest we lose sight of who we are completely - a very real possibility these days, I reckon.

It is with this in mind that I'd like to take a few lessons from New York and its classic restaurants. I want to show firsthand just what makes the the traditional cuisine of New York City so great and so deserving of adoration. Although of course there are things it doesn't do as well as LA, but what it does do well, it is unquestionably great at. The classics here are classics for a reaso. With so much competition for real estate and for palates, you simply cannot afford to be mediocre if you want to stand the test of time. And even what is mediocre here, if it endures, it is because it is great at mediocrity. Take for example the dollar slice, or the bodega bacon egg and cheese. Thems are not good eats, but it would be to miss the point if they were. They are cheap, they are ubiquitous, in the case of the former can be had at nearly any hour, and every single nieghborhood has their own defender of the faith that any true local would fight to defend as New York's best. And probably all of them are absolutely right. There is no "best" dollar slice. There is only your dollar slice, and it is the best because it's yours. That's how you make a place for yourself here. Or perhaps, in all its grit and grime and performative brusqueness, it is in this way that the city may just make a place for you.

So keep an eye on my substack - I'll be posting full-length reviews of iconic New York restaurants over the next month or so as I begin my journey across America in search of the country historic, traditional, regional cuisine, culminating in a trip on Route 66!