MrLA

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

L. A. Cuisine-The (Fast Food) Buck Stops Here!

This has been the hottest, longest summer on record and it promises to still be a scorcher for this weekend, when fall should be falling.  The hot weather hasn't kept MrLA's appetite down, so much so he has started working out again.   Restaurants, good and bad, keep hopping all over the city, maybe not as many opening as before the new Great Depression but enough to make Los Angeles one of the most culinarily interesting cities in the world.  We have almost every nation represented in food here.  Mexican and Thai foods are basically American foods, so common, pervasive, and longstanding they are to eating in Los Angeles.  Want to taste Mongolian yak, Colombian tamales, Burmese Papaya Salad.  Of course, anytime!!!  Just put your car in gear and go.  This isn't true for most of the rest of the United States.  Despite all of this culinary abundance (or, maybe, because of it) and all the praise that superstar and unknown chefs get about food in Los Angeles, Easterners (New Yorkers and Bostonians, especially) spread the myth that Los Angeles is all about imported foods, just like it's imported, invented culture, they say.   Philadelphia has the cheesesteak;  Chicago wouldn't be Chicago without it's Polish sausage or deep-dish pizza.  San Antonio mothered fajitas and San Francisco thinks of itself as the American version of the Cordon Bleu but L.A.? They think food is a ten-inch taco with a cheeseburger chaser.   Big Macs, burritos, chili fries, Wendy's, In-N-Out, McDonald's, Cobb Salad? Korean tacos? As American as the apple pie, right?  RIGHT and invented in L. A.!

That's right!  We have our own cuisine, as unique unto Los Angeles as that of any food to a city.  Burritos were the poor Mexican's sandwich, filled with anything handy (usually beans) and a cheap, easy-to-make meal was made.  Was it invented in Mexico?  Is it as common in Mexico as the chili pepper?  Absolutely not.  It was made in south Texas but developed in Los Angeles.  What would American cuisine without the burrito, especially the breakfast burrito which revolutionized breakfast eating in America the way that bagels and yogurt did in the mid-1970's.  In Mexico, burritos are American food!

Those of a certain age remember the catchphrase, "CHEE-bear-ger!  CHEE-bear-ger! CHEE-bear-ger!" from "Saturday Night Live".  Only the original hamburger is more American than the cheeseburger.  There isn't a truck stop, town or tract-home development that doesn't feature its own beloved form of what McDonald's so sensuously promoted as an all-beef patty, special sauce, lettuce,cheese, tomato, on a sesame-seed bun" when its  Big Mac first hit mouths across America. This beauty ws the result of a diner cook who accidentally dropped a wedge of cheese on a hamburger and the customer didn not only not mind, he was the first of many to rush and buy enough cheesburgers to feed the planet 25 times over.  Where did that cook commit that mistake?  In a long-forgotten diner in Downtown Los Angeles, sometime in the mid-1920's.

Los Angeles' growth along with cars and highways and the great weather made drive-in restaurants and fast food almost inevitable.  There are older drive-ins and fast food joints all over the country than the ones started in L. A. but Los Angeles became not only the entertainment capital of the world but the home of international fast food.  Food culture in L. A. changed the world and continues to influence it.

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