new york discovers its inner los angeles

Apparently, one of the effects of the September 11th attacks was me never writing for the site again. Well, not ever - just for a while. But we're back, and how better to re-launch than with more blather about Los Angeles? Read the fragmented diaries from the latest sojourn or not.

The Modern’s recent move to Queens has the local media chattering non-stop. Even in the colonies (Los Angeles and Chicago), the Friday arts section featured cover stories on this major happening.

Say what you will. It is a major happening. If you’re at all familiar with Queens Boulevard in the 30’s, you know that it’s about as far removed from West 53rd Street as you can possibly get. A faceless collection of factory buildings and fast food joints, scrap heaps and junked couches that never got picked up.

In other words, it looks like a lot of Los Angeles.

One of the pleasures of L.A. is having a car to get to all kinds of interesting restaurants that New Yorkers would never consider visiting, simply because our dependence on the subway dictates that it’s all out of our reach.

As in, I know that there is a growing Thai community in Elmhurst, where I can find spicy dishes that remind me instantly of anything I ever ate in LA’s Thai Town or even at Renu Nakorn in Norwalk.

But ask me how often I get to Elmhurst, which is about four or five miles as the crow flies from my Brooklyn home, and even closer to my office.

Never.

We complain endlessly here in New York, those of us who have eaten real Mexican food, that no such thing exists in this town that is supposedly supposed to have everything.

Well, you can eat Oaxacan specialties at a little shack on the street where I live. Just so happens, unfortunately, fifty blocks to the south. Have I been there yet? No. Taking a twenty-five minute bus ride to dinner is not high on my list of things to do at the end of a long work day.

This is the never-ending complaint of the New Yorker. So popular, that to afford real-estate anywhere within reach, you’ve got to please the masses. In effect, if you’re an authentic ethnic restaurant, you’re not going to open up shop in Midtown. If such a thing exists, it’s been there for nearly twenty years, and the food tastes as if it’d been made around the time the joint opened.

But now, with MoMA next door to a diner that serves Dominican specialties, and across the way from one of the best Turkish restaurants in town, where I used to eat when I lived in the neighborhood, hard by a place where you can get a tofu hot pot for just about no money, will New Yorkers finally discover, en masse, the wealth of good cooking that awaits beyond Manhattan’s borders?

We’ll see.

For now, it's exciting to see an article in the New York Times that reads as if it were one of S. Irene Virbila’s minions on the prowl in Koreatown or somewhere on Pico Boulevard, reads as if it were Jonathan Gold of the Weekly out in San Gabriel Land looking for the best Sichuan cuisine.

It’s a beginning. Because honestly, while our Mexican, Chinese and Thai food may never reach the just-off-the-boat immediacy and authenticity that the Southland is so rich in, we have so much in common.

Yes, yes, yes it’s the car thing. LA can hop in their personal transportation units and drive eight miles to Guelaguetza on Olympic Boulevard, or to one of the better Monterey Park joints, or to Norwalk for Thai, or Long Beach for Cambodian.

LA drives to East LA for burritos. To Leimert Park for ribs. To Artesia for chicken tikki masala. Northridge for Afghan kebabs. Garden Grove for pho. We’re still learning that it’s okay to take the subway to Queens.

Where you can find all of the above.

Hopefully, we’re on our way. Then, all we'd need is a mountain range running through New York, and nobody would ever want for Los Angeles ever again. Too bad that’s not quite so easily fixed.

 

Email: davidr@lifeingotham.com

Next Update: July 15

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