Anne Fishbein

Pizza and Lardo at Pizzeria Mozza

Bon Appétit magazine has come up with the foodie answer to the weekend music festival: a monster three-day tour of restaurants, bars and music venues it's calling the "Grub Crawl." It's debuting in three cities this summer: Brooklyn (natch), New Orleans and, to our pleasant surprise, Los Angeles.

The paragraph detailing the Los Angeles tour, which takes place July 13-15, starts off with one of those classic backhanded compliments: "The City of Angels is swiftly emerging as more than just a sanctuary for celebrities." Right. Thanks.

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Screenshot of Food & Wine's Magazine's Twitter page

Yesterday Time Magazine named its 100 Most Influential People in the World, proving yet again that lists are more important than real news. Among the 100 super-important people are two chefs, both of whom unquestionably deserve to be at the top of any list that includes foodists. (One could not say the same about other people on the list, regardless of sphere of influence. Tim Tebow? Anonymous? Chelsea Handler??) So who were the chefs? Guess.

OK, don't guess. Rene Redzepi (Noma) and José Andrés (The Bazaar, Jaleo, Made In Spain, etc.) made the cut. Congratulations! And because Time got interesting and happily relevant people to write the prose that goes along with the naming, we also get to read Ferran Adria on Redzepi ("We often talk about the best chef in the world when in reality, cuisine -- like other activities -- cannot be measured, quantified or calculated.") and Anthony Bourdain on Andrés ("I was holed up in my room in a nearly empty hotel in Haiti, waiting for the hurricane said to be headed our way.") Worth the price of admission there.

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Granted, you may be the sort of person who reads Lucky Peach and daydreams about Arzak eggs and impossibly rich pork broth instead of salad, but you might want to start checking out Cooking Light anyway. No, this is not an intervention. (Unless you want it to be.) Cooking Light is about a lot more than, well, cooking light. And the magazine is adding two new columnists in the coming months. Who? Well, that's what's interesting.

Rozanne Gold, a four-time James Beard Award-winning chef and cookbook author, will begin writing a column called "Radically Simple Cooking" in May. And in June, Naomi Duguid will debut her column, "Global Pantry." Duguid is the author or co-author with Jeffrey Alford of a great many books, including Beyond the Great Wall, Mangoes & Curry Leaves and Seductions of Rice. A food anthropologist -- specializing in the food of Southeast Asia -- as much as she is a writer of cookbooks, Duguid is the sort of writer who could make us read TV Guide or Popular Mechanics, if she suddenly decided to write for them. Not a bad idea, really.

Flickr/dailyfood

a bagel -- with goat cheese

The headline of Josh Ozersky's April 4 Time broadside "Are Foodie Kids the Sign of End Times?" is so weird it almost made us choke on these morels and white asparagus tips in abalone dashi we're scarfing down for breakfast. To keep it brief, Ozersky thinks that there is a trend of kids getting too posh about food. In his mind, parents are obnoxiously encouraging their children to have gourmet tastes before they're old enough to tie their shoes; fancy restaurants are catering to them; and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times are peddling annoying, cheery stories about the whole thing.

Ozersky seems to consider it snobbery, another way for elitists to peer down the edges of their brandy snifters at the rest of us. He suggests that it's "wrong" to "encourage prepubescent epicureanism in a country where 46 million people are on food stamps," and thinks kids ought to spend more time in kitchens and less in restaurants.

"I'm not against kids enjoying good food, even grown-up food like sushi or goat cheese risotto balls ... [b]ut being a foodie means having an aroused and rarefied interest in unusual foods," Ozersky writes. "And that, inevitably, means an implicit detestation of regular, crappy foods."

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My Last Bite

Dungeness crab, broccoli mayo, broccoli "kimchi" at Ink.

Michael Voltaggio's Ink., which our own critic described as "the most eagerly anticipated brick-and-mortar opening in years," has been named the best new restaurant in America by GQ.

The magazine's editors, along with restaurant critic Alan Richman, today debuted their annual list of the 10 Best New Restaurants in America. The pleasantly un-New York-centric list spans the country, from Portland, Ore., to Nashville, Tenn. (Mostly, we're impressed -- and jealous -- that any print publication has the $$ to fly writers around the country to eat.)

Ink. isn't the only Los Angeles restaurant to make the cut. Picca came in sixth. Full list of winners after the jump.

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Screenshot of Saveur's Twitter page

caryatidxx/flickr

Ingredient No. 1 in Tacos "Culver City"

Last week, Good. Food. Stories. compiled a few highlights from the early '90s alt-teen mag Sassy's Eat This column. The highlights? Evan Dando's "Morning Noonan Knight" chocolate sauce for ice cream and Kim Gordon's recipe for tuna fish tacos "Culver City." The husky-voiced Sonic Youth bassist developed the latter when she was a student at the Otis Art Institute (now known as the Otis College of Art and Design) in the early '70s.

Hinging on a can of "white, dolphin-safe" tuna, a "glob" of mayonnaise and "as-fresh-as-you-can-find" corn tortillas, the recipe is rudimentary, and yet the sort of satisfying, low-cost, low-effort concoction many of us associate with student days. For some, it's egg sandwiches on hot dog buns; for others, it's Hamburger Helper without the hamburger. We're not making that up. A college housemate prepared it on many occasions, filling our shotgun flat with noxious, powdery fumes. In light of such crimes against lunch, Gordon's tacos seem positively refined.

The New Yorker

"The Missionary" by Dana Goodyear

Misión 19 in Tijuana, chef Javier Plascencia's first independent venture, is celebrating its one-year-anniversary. Read "The Missionary," a profile of Plascencia by Dana Goodyear in this week's New Yorker, and you'll learn why that matters.

Plascencia's mission is to bring innovative but authentic cuisine to the notorious border city where he grew up, Goodyear writes. And he's created Misión 19 as an ultra-hip spot to draw locals and tourists alike into the fold. His ambition is no less than to spur a culinary renaissance in troubled but vibrant Tijuana.

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If you're stuck in the check-out line right now, you might want to look further than the latest issue of People -- Lamar and Khloe are in Dallas anyway, so what do you care -- and pick up the new Saveur. This month's issue is the Saveur 100, in which that magazine's editors pick out a hundred of their favorite foodish things. Restaurants, recipes, cookbooks, ingredients, chefs, kitchen tools, etc. etc.

This year's list is pegged as "The New Classics," which in this case means everything from Brazilian confections (#1) to Zurich wine bars (#5) to the New Stockholm Cuisine (#40) to old issues of Gourmet (#66) to Frito pie (#85). One could go on, but why when you can read it in real life. There are also recipes for many of the items on the list, which is very, very cool. (Yes, that includes one for Frito pie.)

Oh, and the usual disclaimer that Saveur's editor-in-chief James Oseland was once, a very long time ago, an LA Weekly proofreader. Cheers.