Fortune Live Media via flickr

Mary Sue Milliken, at a food event earlier this year

Mary Sue Milliken, as always, is in the midst of a zillion things. The food activist, TV personality and chef-owner with Susan Feniger of Border Grill has been a vocal advocate of passing Proposition 37, the ballot initiative that would make the labeling of GMO products law in California.

Milliken has a brand new chef at the Border Grill's downtown location. The WCR (Women Chefs and Restaurateurs), the professional organization she helped found, is coming up on its 20th anniversary. And recently, she's become part of the American Chef Corps, part of the State Department's new Diplomatic Culinary Partnership. We sat down last week and talked to Milliken about how she expects to serve in the Chef Corps, and having new blood in the kitchen at Border Grill.

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Vartan Abgaryan

Where the Chefs Eat will be an ongoing series in which we ask a local chef to give us his or her favorite spots for everyday or cheap dining options. This week, Vartan Abgaryan, chef at Hollywood's Public Kitchen and Bar, tells us his favorite spots in L.A.

On eating and cooking with his family: "I grew up in a traditional Armenian household [Abgaryan's family moved to the States when he was 10], so food was a huge part of our lives; we celebrated with food. If someone came to our house, there was no way that they would leave without having eaten. If I had to pick my favorite thing to eat on my day off, it'd be my dad's home cooking. I have one day off a week with my family and I look forward to it every Sunday."

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Cooking Channel

Ching-He Huang diplomatically avoids ranking U.S. cities when it comes to best Chinese eats, but will allow that San Gabriel Valley (and New York's Flushing) gives San Francisco serious competition for what she calls tastes of home. She'll even name examples available in the neighborhood: chou doufu (stinky tofu), jianbing (fried pancake), and daoxiao mian (knife cut noodles). It's genuine praise coming from the 33-year-old host of Cooking Channel's Easy Chinese and Chinese Food Made Easy whose background alone criss-crosses the world several times over.

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J. Ritz

Andre Guerrero at Maximiliano in Highland Park

Andre Guerrero can't imagine living anywhere other than Los Angeles. Save for his earliest years in the Philippines and a couple spent in San Francisco when his family initially moved to the United States, Guerrero has essentially been a lifelong L.A. resident.

Over the course of a 30-plus-year career as a chef and restaurateur, Guerrero's restaurants have spanned the city, from downtown to Woodland Hills to Malibu. These days the Glassell Park resident owns two restaurants (in partnership with others, including his two grown sons) within a few miles of where he went to high school, as well as Little Bear in the downtown Arts District.

The Oinkster in Eagle Rock and Maximiliano in Highland Park have become recession-appropriate fixtures of their respective neighborhoods; they also reflect where Guerrero is at in his career, and where he thinks our collective food culture is headed. He had a couple days to recover from Burger Week at the Oinkster before sitting down to chat with us in the dining room at Maximiliano.

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Anne Fishbein

Chef Shi shaving noodles

JYTH Restaurant has long been a favorite among seekers of handmade noodles in Los Angeles. It's one of the few restaurants in Los Angeles that makes Shanxi knife-shaved noodles (dao xiao mian 刀削面), and chef Shi Peng does it with a thin metal blade he made himself.

The restaurant has been part of the Los Angeles noodle scene for more than 20 years,
but its rise to fame was escalated by a Weekly feature back in 2009.

Shi picked up the craft in the States while apprenticing under the original owner of JYTH's predecessor, Shanxi Dao Xiao Mian.

Squid Ink sat down with Shi and manager Phillip Fu to talk about noodle-making and their business three years after its rise in fame. We even got video of Shi knife-shaving the ball of dough. Turn the page.

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A. Scattergood

Roy Choi outside Handsome Coffee Roasters

On a bench outside Handsome Coffee Roasters in downtown Los Angeles' arts district, after the requisite coffee inside and under the (also requisite) California sun, Roy Choi sat down late last week to talk about, well, lots of things. He wanted a cigarette, or a few of them. He wanted to be close to the L.A. River. It had been a long few days, with a post Choi wrote on his blog Riding Shotgun generating a sudden media storm (Eater, The Huffington Post, even the New Yorker) of speculation that he was giving up meat, giving up Kogi, giving up cooking altogether.

All this left Choi (Kogi, Chego, A-Frame, Sunny Spot, the world), he said, humbled. It also seems to have left him a bit baffled. By the perceived controversy, but also -- and more interestingly -- by the level of emotion and influence he can generate in his hometown. Choi has become, for reasons that still escape him, a pivotal figure in Los Angeles, both in the food world and beyond. Most people date the current food-truck revolution to his Kogi BBQ truck, but it's more than that. He is, to quote Dana Goodyear, our David Chang. He has revitalized the industry, given voice -- and menu -- to a moment, and mobilized both literally and metaphorically the food culture in L.A.

All this has left him having what might be described as an existential crisis. Or maybe it's just a moment of clarity, the thinking man's necessary response to hitting critical mass. Maybe we should all sit down, get a cup of coffee and a cigarette -- or a Sriracha bar -- and think about what's going on more often than we do. Turn the page.

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courtesy Jeremy Fox

Chef Jeremy Fox

The last place you'd probably expect to find a chef with a Michelin star under his belt would be Mid-City's Paper or Plastik, a neighborhood café that's a favorite of locals but not known as a place to host nationally acclaimed chefs.

But that's exactly where former Ubuntu chef Jeremy Fox has planted himself after helping launch Freddy Smalls earlier this year, with help from Bay Area alum Charlie Palmer. In between time spent working on his new cookbook -- the working title is Seed to Stalk: A Modern Culinary Handbook -- due out fall 2013, and consulting on a new market-driven menu for Paper or Plastik, Fox is scouting for a space for his newest restaurant in Los Angeles.

Fox's rise to fame began at San Francisco's Ubuntu, where he garnered national acclaim for his stellar vegetarian tasting menus. Critics including Frank Bruni, Ruth Reichl and Jonathan Gold were effusive with praise. (Bruni called it "the Angelina Jolie of restaurants.) In 2010, though, Fox abruptly left Ubuntu behind, working for a brief summer stint at Daniel Patteron's Plum in Oakland before moving south to settle in Los Feliz late last year. From there the rumor mill swirled, speculating as to when Fox would finally confirm his newest endeavor, the elusive Los Angeles restaurant.

Even though Fox's menu at Paper or Plastik just began rolling out this week, he already has one ardent fan: café owner and dance instructor Yasha Michelson. "He has the intensity of a genius inside him," Michelson says. "I never believed it when people compared food to art, but when I see him work, it becomes clear."

We talked to Jeremy Fox about his life so far in L.A., his reasons for leaving Ubuntu and what's in store for his upcoming restaurant. Turn the page.

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Mike D + Roy Choi

Prior to his days covering the city's tastiest (and unhealthiest) lunches under $10, Los Angeles food blogger Zach Brooks of Midtown Lunch worked as a music programmer at Sirius Satellite Radio in New York. But when Brooks went bicoastal two years ago, he didn't give up his love for music but instead channeled it into a site called "Food Is the New Rock", which just launched its first "preview" podcast yesterday.

When the podcast officially launches next month, Brooks and co-host KCRW DJ Chuck P -- a figure who is something of a local legend among music geeks -- will host a special guest each week to discuss "the places where food and music intersect in pop culture." So what type of crowd is Brooks hoping to attract to the show? "We might talk to a musician about food, or a food person about music, or maybe just a random person who likes food and music," he says.

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© WilliamNorton.com

Suzanne Goin

When you cross the beautiful threshold of Lucques, Suzanne Goin's Melrose Avenue restaurant, her first -- of now many, including A.O.C., Tavern and the recently opened The Larder at Maple Drive -- you are at once reminded of how profoundly relevant both that restaurant and, more importantly, the chef behind it are to this town. While trends and other restaurants and other chefs come and go, Goin remains a constant, her food neither static nor wildly changeable but persistently just right, not unlike the farmers market produce that informs the dishes themselves.

Goin and her longtime business partner, Caroline Styne, do more than just open restaurants (which they do at the same kind of organic pace). They do fun things like host the president when he's in town and organize fundraisers for laudable projects like Chefs Move to Schools, which encourages better eating habits (vegetables! fruit!) for kids, including a Lunch Break gor Schools fundraiser lunch today, Feb. 27, at Tavern in Brentwood. Because wouldn't you rather eat a ficelle sandwich built with market vegetables or a bowl of tomato soup with piquillo peppers and Cheddar crostini and raise money for a good cause than sit at the In-N-Out drive-thru for an hour? That should be a rhetorical question.

So it seemed like the perfect time to sit down with Goin at Lucques and ask the chef about her current projects: cooking with her own kids -- Goin and chef David Lentz (The Hungry Cat, or rather Cats, as there are three now) have three young children -- and her restaurants, her new book (yes) and her circuitous career path. It was not your average path, if you don't know the story, and included not a few knocks on not a few doors. Of course Goin picked the right doors, starting with Ma Maison. Add the doors of City and L'Arpège, and consider that she talked and cooked her way into the not-too-shabby kitchens of Chez Panisse and L'Orangerie and Al Forno in Providence as well, and you begin to have some sense of why Goin has accomplished what she has. Turn the page.

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marcopierrewhite.org

Marco Pierre White in Afghanistan

One of the beautiful things about journalism, not unlike therapy, is that you get to talk to people about themselves. In this case, we have the enormous privilege of being able to take our notepads and recorders and iPhones into the kitchens and restaurants -- or hotel lobbies and neighborhood coffee houses -- of chefs and cookbook authors and other people in this industry. We ask them about their food, their projects, their lives, and they answer -- sometimes telling stories far beyond this plate or that menu. It is a joy, sometimes even an honor.

So to mark the end of the year (yeah, yeah, we're in full Dick-Clark-Anderson-Cooper mode here) we've collected 10 of our favorite interviews from 2011. Oh, and while it is true that one of these technically took place in 2010, once you see who it is, you'll get why we fudged the dates a bit. Wouldn't you?

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