LexnGer

A restaurant is a place where people pay to eat meals. That applies to all the variations: café, bistro, diner, pizza parlor, gastropubs, etc. We all know what we're getting when we go to one of those versus another.

But what about all the off-the-grid dining establishments? What can you expect when you show up to a pop-up or a home restaurant? How about a secret supper club or a private restaurant? What you're walking into can be a little murkier. To that end, we felt it was important to apply some definitions to the myriad alternate options. This list isn't exhaustive, but it's a good place to start. Turn the page.

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Anne Fishbein

Bill Esparza in downtown L.A.

Even if you're not one of Bill Esparza's Street Gourmet LA readers (who are legion), many of whom have accompanied the musician-as-food-blogger on his famous border-crossing culinary pilgrimages, you might want to check out today's feature food story. Of course, you may want to read the story -- again, carefully -- if you have been on one of Esparza's trips, since you might have been too far gone on tequila to remember it properly. (Manta ray tacos! Gabachos borrachos!) Occupational hazards being what they are.

At one point I took a dining group of mostly middle-aged women from L.A. to tour Tijuana. These were the kind who might be attending a tea service or visiting a honey farm, yet here they were in Tijuana crowding around a vendor on Avenida Revolución for street churros. They couldn't believe how amazing the street food was, and many had never experienced Mexican fine dining. Then we ran into some trouble: There was practically a mutiny because I hadn't included a coffee stop before the long ride to the first eats of the day. To this day, one woman from that trip won't even look at me.

Read the full story.

Willpowder

Willpowder

Molecular gastronomy was born from the never-ending quest by certain chefs to expand the boundaries of cuisine. Innovators borrowed tools from science labs and incorporated industrial food additives to manipulate the texture and appearance of what goes on the plate, allowing them to showcase ingredients in new ways. And voila, foie gras foam was born.

As recently as three years ago, most of the magic powders required to make all this happen were the providence of only a small handful of high-end restaurants. Now, thanks to a few daring entrepreneurs like Willpowder, you too can own a spherification kit or a jar of Versawhip to play with at home. With just those two items, you can wow your friends and family with lightly gelled olive oil paired with pine foam at your next dinner party.

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2011 was quite a year in the Los Angeles dining scene. If you had told us a year ago that we'd be eagerly wolfing down plates of alligator schnitzel, polenta sushi, and corned beef tongue sandwiches from a Michael Voltaggio shop with the word "sack" in its title, we wouldn't have believed you. The future may seem unpredictable, but this year we plan on using our powers of prognostication to show you exactly, with 100% certainty, what next year holds in store. Turn the page for our top 10 food predictions for 2012.

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Patrick McMullan

Questlove's Fried Chicken At the BA Kitchen Launch Party

Bon Appétit magazine announced this week the opening of "BA Kitchen" in New York City. The space is "a modern cooking and entertaining space," according to a press release, located across from the Frank Gehry café in the Conde Naste building (now that's a good looking corporate cafeteria). More on Gehry, who lives in Santa Monica, in a moment.

As for the BA Kitchen, this is not, as we had hoped, a second Bon Appétit test kitchen opening to meet a sudden resurgence in recipe testing demand. Nor was it designed by Gehry. Alas, millions of hungry Google cassoulet searchers will continue to click on untested, and often unsuccessful, recipes in the great Internet abyss. No wonder Americans' satisfaction with life (cassoulet?) in general remains so low.

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Flickr / yewenyi

Taking photos at Restaurant Hakka in Kuala Lumpur.

Looks like we can chalk up the surge in online food photos to good ol' narcissism. Digital marketing agency 360i recently conducted a study of food pictures posted to Flickr and broke down the distribution of photo types as well as pervasive trends. The most common type of photo? "Food diaries," photographs with no other use than to catalog a day's meals. The second most common? "Documenting self-creation: showing off a finished product, or the process of creation." Almost half the photos studied fell within these two categories.

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El Bulli

Can you find the vending machine in this flow chart?

Ferran Adrià does like to play with products. And the El Bulli chef has a history of innovation and unlikely pairings. But Pepsi? Recently PepsiCo announced a partnership with Adrià, to work on procedures and techniques for new snack foods, breakfast options and convenience alternatives. Imagine. Molecular gastronomy meets a 7-11.

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S. Bonar

Ask any women's magazine, and they will tell you with sadistic glee that it is "bikini season." But fortunately, companies have come up with a plethora of food-like products that claim to help you lose weight without all that tiresome dieting and exercising. One item, called Skinny Beach Sticks, even purports to help you get tan and lose weight. Another, SlenderPops, promises to melt the pounds off while you suck on a fruit-flavored lollipop. (Lollipops for weight loss; that's kind of like cigarettes for lung disease.)

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Screenshot of Food Desert Locator

map of area food deserts, in pink

If you live in Los Angeles, you may sometimes feel like you're in a food desert. It is often maddeningly hot. You may find yourself bereft of food trucks, or good ones at any rate. You may be reading this right now from the overheating concrete of a Denny's parking lot in Monrovia. But you are not in a real food desert, as pissed off and as hungry as you may be. A food desert, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is an area where people do not have easy access to affordable, healthful food. Which is not, as much as it may seem sometimes, where you likely are right now. It's also a lovely term that, as we've noted before, sounds more like a Ben Marcus short story than a USDA category.

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Nubi Yogurt: Pistachio and tart with miniature chocolate chips

Until we moved to Los Angeles, frozen yogurt made us think of youth and summer: cardboard cones, vanilla peaks dripping into puddles that dried stickier than Velcro, and swims to wash away the stickiness. Now, we think of tart acai berry-pomegranate swirls, shiny pharmacy-clean counters, gleaming batteries of self-serve spigots, oceans of colorful toppings, scales, weird space age plastic chairs, and free Wi-Fi. Frozen yogurt has come a long way.

Thankfully, there is a yogurt shop hugging approximately half of this city's more yuppified street corners, so we don't have to actually travel a long way to put it in our face. This week, temporarily car-less and steaming in our hot apartment, we decided to enjoy a yogurt-y experience at three yogurt chains within walking distance of our abode. We didn't go to the best places in town, we are sure, but we were limited to foot-power. Turn the page...

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