Kevin Scanlon

Growing up in a Korean-American family in Hawaii, Paula Daniels had a precocious awareness of the natural environment. When her 12-year-old friends made "slam books," soliciting salacious opinions about their classmates, Daniels focused her book's questions on water conservation. "Mine asked, 'Do you turn off the water when you brush your teeth?' " she says, laughing. "I have always, always cared about water."

Daniels majored in broadcast journalism at USC but was dismayed after graduation to find few opportunities for environmental documentary work. So she went to law school. She'd already made partner when, in 1989, she saw a reminder of her 12-year-old activist self: a Heal the Bay T-shirt. "They had this very hip message about ocean water quality," she says. "I knew I wanted to help."

Kevin Scanlon

When Guisados set up shop on Cesar Chavez Avenue, it wasn't simply another taqueria in a city -- and neighborhood -- dense with them. It was the culinary and cultural merger of two established Boyle Heights families.

Chef Ricardo Diaz's grandfather founded the El Siete Mares chain in 1976, while co-owner Armando De La Torre comes from a family well known for its East L.A. real estate holdings. Diaz grew up in Montebello and De La Torre in Monterey Park, but both spent countless hours working at their families' businesses in Boyle Heights.

Guisados, which opened in December 2010, quickly was lauded as one of the best taquerias in Los Angeles. While carnitas and carne asada are omnipresent in Los Angeles, few eateries serve guisados, the stewed tacos that are ubiquitous on the streets of Mexico City.

Kevin Scanlon

"Being a cook was out of the question," Gary Menes says of his childhood aspirations. The reason: his father. And why do you suppose Menes' father wanted him to become something, anything, other than a cook? Because, of course, he was one himself.

This was not a matter of pulling an heirloom white jacket out of the closet, dog-eared copies of Escoffier tumbling off the shelves. Menes' father was a Coast Guard cook, having joined the service to get out of his native Philippines, where his grandfather had himself been a Navy cook. His grandfather "used to brag about how he used to make soft-shell crabs for the admiral," Menes says.

Kevin Scanlon

It's a drizzly day at the Crenshaw Farmers Market in South L.A., and the small cluster of shoppers around chef Gill Boyd's booth gathers closer -- getting their heads out of the rain, yes, but also getting a better view. Boyd is warming avocado oil in a wok while behind him two students from Le Cordon Bleu chop carrots. He's demonstrating how to cook cabbage with feta cheese and almonds, one of five dishes he'll make today with cabbage as the main ingredient. His observers clutch yellow pieces of paper with Boyd's recipes printed on them, following along.

"I've never seen greens that young," one woman says. "They look great."

"You get them right over there from South Central Farmers," Boyd tells her, pointing to a nearby produce stand.

Kevin Scanlon

Meg Gill is not a Bud Light girl.

The Golden Road Brewing co-founder, 27, has had to correct this assumption time and again. The good-old-boy network within the beer industry has nothing on customers at promotional events, convinced that any young woman in attendance must be trading on her femininity to push a product.

Plus she prefers IPAs.

Kevin Scanlon

The most remarkable clue that you have arrived at Mariscos Jalisco, a lonchera parked on Olympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights, is in the air. A few blocks away, the climate is not unlike other corners in East L.A. -- waterfalls of smog emanate from the 5 freeway, pooling in the intersection, as trucks arrive to deliver loads to the old Sears building complex, adding thick brown puffs to the mix.

As you near the corner of Dacotah and Olympic, though, things change. Here the undeniably succulent scent of fresh shrimp frying in envelopes of corn tortillas wafts down the busy street. Here your eyes glaze over as you surrender to what will be one of the best lunches of your life.

Kevin Scanlon

It's hard to imagine upon meeting her, but Nyesha Arrington -- warm, friendly, quick to laughter -- used to be a thrower. Pans, mostly. But though she still works 14 hours a day, six days a week, and maintains excruciatingly high standards, Arrington, 22, is much less abrasive. A year in the Virgin Islands will do that to you.

When the Santa Monica restaurant Caché, where she was the chef de cuisine, closed in the summer of 2010 after only a year, "It was extremely devastating," Arrington says. "I took a lot of pride in the team that I built. When I had to tell them we were closing, it was totally heartbreaking."

Having never experienced that sort of failure, Arrington reevaluated her life. She ended up as the executive chef at Spice Mill in St. Kitts.

Kevin Scanlon

When Alice Shin's brother-in-law phoned her to say that he'd gotten his hands on a truck they could use to begin peddling tacos filled with Korean-style barbecued meats, as they'd discussed late one night on an East L.A. street curb, Shin looked to a deck of tarot cards. All of the cards turned up except for two, so she agreed to get on board with what would soon be known as "Kogi."

Three years, five trucks and two restaurants later, Shin, 29, is creative director for the ever-popular Korean taco trucks helmed by chef Roy Choi, as well as his brick-and-mortar restaurants, Chego and Sunny Spot.

Kevin Scanlon

The debut of Post & Beam, chef Govind Armstrong's Baldwin Hills restaurant -- which he had the chutzpah to open on New Year's Eve, of all nights -- was billed as a homecoming. Talented, telegenic and born in nearby Inglewood, Armstrong was tailor-made to star in a "local boy makes good" fable -- except that he is as local to Central America as he is to Inglewood.

The third child in a family of five, Armstrong was 3 years old when his father died. The family moved to Costa Rica, where Spanish became his first language. (His mother is of African, Costa Rican and Indian descent.) When he was 9, they returned to Los Angeles and settled in Encino.

If his provenance is intriguing, his path to the kitchen is even more so. At 13, Armstrong got his first job in the kitchen of Wolfgang Puck's newly opened Spago, an apprenticeship for which jealous culinary school grads twice his age would cut off and confit their own thighs.