T. Nguyen

Diep Tran

Diep Tran, the chef-owner of Good Girl Dinette, talks in paragraphs. Nice paragraphs, punctuated by a lot of laughter and a story or two, often about growing up in the back of one kitchen or another: Her family started the Pho 79 restaurant chain after they immigrated to the United States from Vietnam, and, at home, her grandmother was a formidable cook.

Maybe it's not a surprise, then, that Tran riffs off the idea of grandmotherly comfort food at Good Girl Dinette; there are her rightfully popular pot pies, of course, but also thit kho, a bowl of caramelized pork that you don't see too often in most Vietnamese restaurants precisely because it's just that homey. For Tran, though, it encapsulates the Dinette perfectly: It's the sort of dish, she says, that "your grandma makes, puts in the fridge and always gets replenished."

Good Girl Dinette celebrated its fourth anniversary this year, and last weekend launched a brunch that includes a terrific turmeric dill hash, eggs and bacon cured in Red Boat fish sauce and lovely seasonal hand-pies. We talked to Tran about her new brunch menu, but not before she noted that she tends to get asked the same type of questions during interviews. Which opened the door to a conversation about how one resists or subverts stereotyping and the food media's irksome tendency to fetishize foods and neighborhoods. Plus, notes on the difficulties of managing a restaurant while writing poetry, how Victorian and Vietnamese cultures overlap and hosting a weekly supper club well before the so-called underground dining scene took off. Turn the page.

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courtesy: Christy Wilhelmi

Christy Wilhelmi in her garden

What is it about Christy Wilhelmi's three-minute tip-of-the-week podcast Gardenerd that makes it feel like essential listening? Is it that it's so short and informative? Or maybe that Wilhelmi's pealing bell voice makes everything garden-related -- even getting rid of pesky powdery mildew -- sound easy? Whatever it is, just as the former private school fundraiser turned full-time professional garden expert was preparing to start another draft of a gardening novel she'd been working on, Massachusetts-based Adams Media commissioned her to write a how-to handbook.

Published last month, it's called Gardening for Geeks, and has a subtitle that comes with a promise: DIY Tests, Gadgets, and Techniques That Utiltize Microbiology, Mathematics, and Ecology to Exponentially Maximize the Yield of Your Garden.

Recently we spoke to Wilhelmi, who held forth on all manner of garden-related subjects, including the best starter crop for newbie gardeners, why growing your own grain might be ultimately unsatisfying, and what she discovers during house calls.

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Anne Fishbein

Chef Micah Wexler at Mezze

Hot off his 10-week, sold-out residency at Umamicatessen, chef Micah Wexler is already planning a new series of dinners. The dinners consist of a weekly, themed meal at a central kiosk at Umamicatessen, which has been transformed into a chef's table for up to 12 guests. The residency that just ended was themed "Live and Dine in L.A." and explored various neighborhoods, cultures and time periods in Los Angeles. For his next series, beginning June 6 and continuing weekly through July, Wexler will explore the theme "dead chefs."

The former Mezze chef (Mezze closed in October after a series of issues with a nearby construction site) is on his way to Istanbul today for a working vacation, but we caught up with him before he left to talk about the new series of dinners, how he came up with the theme "dead chefs" and whether we're likely to see a full-time restaurant from him anytime soon.

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Sarah Bennett

Jeremy Raub, with beer

There's a common misconception that craft beers are exclusively high-alcohol beverages and that the world of microbrews only includes boldly flavored and anti-macro styles like IPAs and imperial stouts. But spend a whole evening washing down full servings of these big beers and you'll soon realize that in large quantities, they're more likely to have you drunk and puking than savoring the essence of each.

Behold, the session beer: an umbrella term for low-alcohol, easy-drinking brews that can be consumed in multiples over the course of a drinking session without leaving you running to hug the ivory throne. It's a term that originated in Europe -- where beer is less a means to a drunk end than, well, a social experience -- and has been lovingly adopted by the American craft beer scene to refer to any beer that helps you to actually remain present for the entire session.

Eagle Rock Brewery co-owner Jeremy Raub says that session beers take way more guts to make since imperfections can't hide behind heavy smoked chocolate malt or a 10% alcohol content. That's part of why he invented Session Fest three years ago as a way to educate people to these often overlooked small beers.

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Andrew Meade

Ingrid Hoffman

Rice and beans, pork, pupusas, fried plantains, cheese and tortillas. These might be the core of most of the Latin food you're familiar with, at least in many of the Mexican, Central and South American joints in this town. Ingrid Hoffman takes the rustic cooking styles of these hearty Latin staples that she grew up on and redefines them, giving them slightly lighter makeovers that are easily reproduced with everyday ingredients.

Hoffman, the Latina chef of Univision's Delicioso and Food Network fame, wants you to know exactly that. The popular Colombiana just published Latin d'Lite: Delicious Latin Recipes with a Healthy Twist (complete with 150+ recipes), the health-conscious prequel to her first book, 2008's Simply Delicioso, and is out on a mission to change the often waist-unfriendly perception of her beloved cuisine. Squid Ink caught up with her while she was in Los Angeles for a brief interview. Turn the page as she talks about her own food struggles and reveals a day in her personal diet -- plus a recipe for her rendition of Pescado Veracruzano.

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Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

Cecilia Chiang, Alice Waters

Back in 2011, when it seemed like the entire Bay Area was seized with Chez Panisse 40th anniversary fever, Hong Kong-born, San Francisco-based filmmaker Wayne Wang (Chan Is Missing, Joy Luck Club, Smoke) asked Chez Panisse's founder, Alice Waters, if there was a role he could play. Waters suggested Wang train his camera on then-92-year-old restaurateur Cecilia Chiang as she prepared and hosted a banquet in her home apartment. Chiang is credited with bringing authentic Chinese cuisine to the United States, an achievement Waters has famously compared to Julia Child's introducing of French cuisine to everyday American palates.

Once Wang began filming Chiang, however, he couldn't stop. Before he knew it, his film-clip assignment had blossomed into a full-length documentary in which food writer Ruth Reichl provides context and Alice Waters beams so lovingly at Chiang that it's clear that the food world regards Chiang as a national treasure.

Called Soul of a Banquet, Wang's quiet documentary is all things: a history lesson in Chinese food in America; a heartbreaking tale about a woman separated from her family; and in the second half, when Wang studies Chiang and other chefs as they cook, a mind-bendingly hunger-inducing piece of you-are-there filmmaking.

Now's the time to block out a couple of days to schedule a quickie road trip to San Francisco: Soul of a Banquet will be shown for the first time on Wednesday, April 10, at the San Francisco Film Society, followed by a multi-course meal by chef Andy Tsai and Yank Sing Restaurant. Fittingly enough, the proceeds will benefit Waters' Edible Schoolyard Project.

Recently, we caught up with Wang, who explains how he fell in love with the project, where to get sweet and sour pork and, thrillingly enough, he weighs in on the age old question: Where does one get better Chinese food -- San Francisco or here?

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Doug Hyun

El Tepeyac in Boyle Heights

When it comes to knowing Los Angeles' food mainstays, those who are visiting for the first time could do themselves a big favor by studying episodes of TNT's Southland (which also happens to be the best cop show on television). There are a handful of main characters on this Peabody Award-winning ensemble series about the lives of LAPD beat cops and detectives: Ben, Sammy, Coop and the sleep-deprived new mom, Detective Lydia Adams (played by Regina King, whose poignant performance, veteran Los Angeles crime reporter Michael Krikorian has often said, is the best part of Southland).

And while it's the screeching car chases, breathless foot races and thudding perp tackles that give this hourlong drama its crackling energy, the air of unvarnished authenticity also has a lot to do with the ramshackle taco stands, dimly lit holes-in-the-wall and noisy barbecue joints where the show's cops pull over to grab a bite. Recently we caught up with Mike Haro, a Southland associate producer and location manager, and quizzed him about what it takes for a restaurant to be cast on the show, where the real-life Southland gang meet for dinner and whether TNT will grant this criminally underrated gem another season.

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Anne Fishbein

Lou Amdur at LOU

See also: L.A.'s Wine Bars Are Better Than Ever. Here Are Our Seven Favorites

Lou Amdur, may have sold his cozy, Laundromat-and-Thai massage parlor adjacent Hollywood strip mall wine bar, LOU, last March. But he still has that gift for being able to effortlessly hold forth on all things wine and food. Want proof? Recently, we got him on the phone to discuss appropriate Easter meal wine pairings. Along the way, he managed to squeeze in mini-lessons in what not to do with country hams, a definition for the Yiddish word gedempte, what a California Chardonnay could do to earn the descriptor of "slutty," as well as a tiny bit of news about Lou 2.0.

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Bantam

Nancy Harmon Jenkins

For many of us whose idea of good food is a bowl of olives, a plate of mezze, a huge dish of paella or Catalan soup or lamb with couscous, Nancy Harmon Jenkins' cookbook The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, or her newer The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, is one of the basic books of the kitchen. First published almost twenty years ago, Jenkins' book was groundbreaking in its simplicity, with the book's subtitle -- "A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health" -- a promise that recalibrating what we eat away from fast and processed food to the ingredients of Mediterranean cooking could not help but yield healthful and delicious results.

Filled with recipes that read more like Yotam Ottolenghi's idea of food than WeightWatchers, Jenkins' book meant "diet" in the basic sense of the word: what we eat, what we should eat, what we used to eat, at least if we lived along the shores of the Mediterranean, where olives and vegetables and fish and grains and wine were once basic, ordinary fare.

When the results of a 5-year study were published recently by the New England Journal of Medicine, showing that 30% of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease could be prevented in people at high risk if they switched to a Mediterranean diet, Jenkins' book came into focus again. We caught up with her by phone in Maine this week, where she was happy to talk about her book, the new findings, her upcoming book on olive oil and whether her views have changed. (They have not.) She was also pretty happy to be decamping for Italy from her native Maine, where it had been snowing for much of the last week. Buon appetito! Turn the page.

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Susan Bell

Sarah Portnoy at Guisados with co-owner Armando de la Torre and students

We all eat for pleasure. Some of us also eat in pursuit of academic knowledge. "Food studies" is a burgeoning field where scholars consider food a potent tool for illuminating a vast range of topics and issues. Among L.A. colleges and universities, you'll find classes on "Animal Ethics," "Restaurant Culture," "Food Politics," and "Science and Food," among others. One emphasizes L.A.'s Latino community -- professor Sarah Portnoy's "The Culture of Food in Hispanic Los Angeles" at the University of Southern California. As a class in USC Dornsife's Spanish department, students spend ample time developing language skills. (Such as writing blogs in Spanish.) But the culinary twist means they also examine issues related to history, immigration, and cultural values. We spoke with Portnoy, a Houston native, over margaritas at Yxta Cocina Mexicana to hear her take on L.A.'s diverse and fascinating Latino food scene.

For more academic discussion, join Portnoy and other food experts at USC's Doheny Memorial Library tomorrow, Friday, March 1 at 11 a.m. for a panel discussion entitled "Just Food and Fair Food: A Multidisciplinary Exploration." Admission is free. The panel will be followed by a "fair food bazaar," and lunch courtesy of Mama's Hot Tamales and Homegirl Café.

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