A. Scattergood

David Chang at UCLA

So what did David Chang pass around at last night's UCLA science and food lecture? After Rene Redzepi handed out seaweed ice cream at the previous lecture, expectations were perhaps higher than they'd be at a normal university event, where people do not generally get experimental snacks. The Momofuku chef, who gave a talk entitled "Microbes in My Ramen?" with fellow Momofuku cookbook author and Lucky Peach writer Peter Meehan and Momofuku lab's Daniel Felder, instructed the crowd to eat samples of pistachio miso and powdered MSG.

"You basically ate the same thing," Chang told the audience, then launched into what might best be described as an apology for MSG, or monosodium glutamate, the oft-maligned ("I just think it's psychosomatic") stuff that is held responsible for "Chinese restaurant syndrome." An evening with David Chang is many things, but sedate is not one of them.

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R. Ritchie

gathering for the Urban Food Crawl

Unless you live in some sort of vegan utopia where all your friends are herbivores (or Portland), it's almost a guarantee that dining out with meat-eating friends is going to be a disappointment for at least one of the parties involved. Either the vegan eats a bland salad at a steakhouse or the carnivore pretends to enjoy kale, seitan and carob. Whatever the case, someone ain't happy.

This conundrum is exactly why the weekly Urban Food Crawl tours are successful, fun and most certainly worthy of the $65 tab. Operated by Jen Bardekoff and Sheri Wheeler (with the help of two tour guides), the L.A.-based company began last August as a way to showcase restaurants with vegan options and spirited ambiance. As crazy as this sounds, these two attributes aren't always a given when dealing with veggie-friendly joints.

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Clarissa Wei

Strawberry nachos

The California Strawberry Festival was a two-day berry celebration May 19-20 at Oxnard's Strawberry Meadows of College Park. "We have so much more real estate compared to last year," Daisy Tatum, executive chair of the California Strawberry Festival, said. "The park has been totally improved -- we are dust-free this year. There is so much space and now we can see where we can even expand."

More than 50,000 people turned out for the festivities and a whopping 1.5 million strawberries were consumed over the weekend. "We have everything here," Tatum said. "But for me, anything with strawberries and whipped cream will do." There was plenty of that. The "Build Your Own" strawberry shortcake tent itself used 8,000 pounds of sliced strawberries, 275 flats of whole strawberries, 3,000 loaves of pound cake and 1,500 cans of whipped cream.

In case you missed out on the festivities, Squid Ink headed out to the event on Sunday and snapped some photos. Though there were plenty of non-berry-related vendors to go around, it was the strawberry dishes that stood out. From strawberry pizzas to deep-fried strawberries with a cinnamon sugar layer on top -- the festival had it all. If the samples and desserts were not enough, visitors could even purchase a large crate of strawberries to take home. Turn the page.

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B. Hansen

Evan Kleiman

Angeli Caffe popped up Monday night with the same kitchen crew, the same servers, the same food and Evan Kleiman in charge, just as if it had never closed. Kleiman shuttered her Melrose Avenue restaurant in January after 27 years of service.

The pop-up happened at the Charleston in Santa Monica, where managing partner Jet Tila had asked longtime friend Kleiman to stage the gastrolounge's first pop-up dinner,

"It's so nice, we were all crying in the kitchen," said Kleiman, as she circulated in the dining room.

Servers were happy, too. "It feels great," said David Avanes, wearing his black Angeli T-shirt with angel wings on the back. The nights that Avanes didn't work at Angeli, he ate there. "It was like my kitchen," he said.

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G. Snyder

Lindy and Grundy's Erika Nakamura cuts a hog down to size

If the air seemed a bit heavier with the scent of bacon along the Sunset Strip last night, it was due to the pork-centric carnival that rolled through the House of Blues on Sunday: the second annual L.A. stopover in the nationwide Cochon 555 tour, an event combining five chefs, five whole heritage-breed hogs, and five winemakers together into one bacchanalian cooking competition. This year's venue further cemented Cochon's reputation as the rock concert of food festivals, featuring a well-lit stage where live hog butchery subbed in for screaming guitar solos.

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G. Snyder

Edible Garnish

If you happened to take a twilight stroll through downtown's industrial district last Friday, you may have spied a wild figure waltzing along the cracked asphalt, between the art houses, coffee galleries and bombed-out warehouses.

He was dressed in mismatched knee-high socks, a navy blue coat, a gold-rimmed admiral's cap, a fake mustache and a pair of black spectacles, all which made him look something like a jollified Hideki Tojo.

The man called himself Commodore Booty McHooters, official guide of the "We Love Lionel Ritchie Walking Tour," tasked with leading columns of bewildered fans on a short walk from one super-secret meeting place to an even more secret factory/loft dining room. Depending on how your 4/20 transpired, this may or may not have been the strangest thing you saw all day.

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G. Snyder

Thai Snacks

If your spirits were damped after leaving Pasadena's 626 Night Market this weekend without so much as a pancake roll in hand, a good way to curb any lingering craving for Asian street food might have been to head for the Wat Thai temple in North Hollywood the next morning, where the annual Songkran festival, a celebration of the Thai new year, took place over the weekend.

Granted, at Wat Thai you'll often find food vendors selling things like papaya salad and skewers of barbecued meat at weekend festivals interspersed throughout the year, but it's only during Songkran when L.A.'s Thai community can enjoy the fruits of its most devoted home cooks in full force.

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Javier Cabral

Let the food swapping begin

Imagine a place where food is your currency, where things like homemade Irish soda bread made with whole wheat and kefir or house-conched 75% chocolate bars are just as good as dollars and credit cards. Well, join a freaking food swap and watch your anti-consumerist wishes come true.

A group of about 15 people, including full families and sugar-hyped small children, showed up at a private residence along The Shops on Lake Avenue area of Pasadena yesterday with one thing in common: DIY food. Everyone had baked, cooked, curdled and packaged something laborious, to be swapped with another labor-intensive item of equal or lesser value. Everyone went home with at least breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next day.

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C. Soudry

It's been one year since the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In recent weeks, restaurants around town offered sake specials and discounts, raised funds and much more. On March 10, public appreciation event Japan Endless Discovery at the Grove, organized by the Consulate General of Japan in Los Angeles and the Japan Business Association of Southern California, featured musical demonstrations, samplings of miso soup, mochi, Japanese jams and piping hot wasabi crackers. The festival was light on food, but attendees slurped as much ramen as they could get ahold of and stayed for the cultural awareness, traditional tea ceremony and, naturally, Hello Kitty.

Turn the page for a preview in pictures and check out more photos from the day on Shannon Cottrell's slideshow:

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College of the Canyons/Jesse Muñoz

Anthony Bourdain, giving a rapt audience a window into making No Reservations.

We don't think any stone was left unturned by the end of Anthony Bourdain's speaking engagement last night at Santa Clarita's College of the Canyons.

We know his new "death row" meal (used to be bone marrow, but is now uni atop perfectly cooked sushi rice, preferably on a beach under a palm tree with a beer in his hand). We know how he keeps his 4-year-old daughter from the clutches of fast food's "the king, the clown and the colonel" (by stealing the head of her favorite Barbie doll, dipping it in chocolate and putting it in a McDonald's wrapper). We know the absolute worst thing he's ever eaten (Icelandic shark fermented in its own urine), and we know that working for him usually involves a certain amount of humiliation (such as one producer's accidental reveal that she'd worn her underwear inside out the day Bourdain removed a leech from her ass while filming No Reservations).

Yet none of these things were the most interesting thing we learned from Bourdain, either during his speech or in the chat we had with him beforehand. Here are the five most interesting things Bourdain schooled us on last night:

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