theperfectlyhappyman.com

​In the last twelve months, the craft beer world has welcomed new flavors from a slew of emerging styles including the rye saison (Avery's Eighteen), the wheat IPA (El Segundo Brewing's Picket Fence) and the seasonal imperial pumpkin ale (Flying Dog's The Fear). But no new style was more exciting for lovers of intense beers than the delicious marrying of dark malts, floral hops and high alcohol content that is a Double Black IPA.

Also known an Imperial Black IPA, these beers are a boozy extension of last year's most recognized emerging style -- Cascadian Dark Ales, a Pacific Northwest creation that has also been called a Black IPA, India Black Ale or India Dark Ale (the semantic debate raged so hard that when including it as a judged beer style for the first time in 2010, the Great American Beer Festival decided upon "American-Style India Black Ale").

But if 2010 was the year of the CDA -- bringing attention to Oregon breweries such as Deschutes and Rogue -- 2011 was the year the style left Cascadia and got even darker and more bitter at the hands of brewers in California and beyond. Turn the page for the top 4 Double Black IPAs that saw their first release in 2011.

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marcopierrewhite.org

Marco Pierre White in Afghanistan

​One of the beautiful things about journalism, not unlike therapy, is that you get to talk to people about themselves. In this case, we have the enormous privilege of being able to take our notepads and recorders and iPhones into the kitchens and restaurants -- or hotel lobbies and neighborhood coffee houses -- of chefs and cookbook authors and other people in this industry. We ask them about their food, their projects, their lives, and they answer -- sometimes telling stories far beyond this plate or that menu. It is a joy, sometimes even an honor.

So to mark the end of the year (yeah, yeah, we're in full Dick-Clark-Anderson-Cooper mode here) we've collected 10 of our favorite interviews from 2011. Oh, and while it is true that one of these technically took place in 2010, once you see who it is, you'll get why we fudged the dates a bit. Wouldn't you?

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Anne Fishbein

Dan dan mian at Chuan Yu

​As 2011 clicks down, Jonathan Gold considers the 10 best dishes of the year, a list that reads like a hopscotch through the strip mall neighborhoods and stalled streets of this town. Marrowbones and tsukemen. Stuffed squid and bacon biscuits. Almost makes you hungry.

Dan dan mian is at its best dialed up to 11, reddened with tons of oily chile sludge and zapped with enough fresh Sichuan peppercorns to leave your gums numb for a week.

Read the complete story in Gold's Counter Intelligence, "Let's Dish," and check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery. Then maybe get in your car.

T. Nguyen

Clockwise: Pourover coffee at Coffee Tomo; an espresso from Handsome Coffee Roasters; siphon filters at Demitasse Cafe; a cappuccino from Broome St. General Store

​Like National Coffee Day, summing up the Year in Coffee compels a certain knee-jerk response: every year is the year in coffee. But, then again, not every year is a year in great coffee. With over a dozen new coffee shops, several new homegrown coffee roasters, and customers willing to learn about what's in their cup, 2011 was a great year for great coffee.

This great year was several years in the making, and we can credit shops Klatch Coffee, Jones Coffee Roasters, Caffe Luxxe, Venice Grind and Intelligentsia, among others, for laying the foundation. Crucially, once that foundation set, there still was plenty of room for innovation and experimentation: the great thing about the developing coffee culture here, we were told time and time again, is that L.A. is essentially a blank slate. Without the burden of a well-established coffee scene like, say, Seattle, shop owners had carte blanche to forge their own path and plant their own unique flags. And that they did.

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A. Scattergood

​It was a bad year for orange fruit (papayas, cantaloupes) and leafy greens (especially romaine). Ground turkey took a big hit (36 million pounds recalled), and raw milk products were pulled from shelves. Here's a look back at 2011 in food recalls, a year of E. coli conundrums, Listeria hysteria and Salmonella scares.

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Anne Fishbein

Maize cake Gambas at Playa

​Food photography, as most of us who read food blogs these days know, is a lot harder than it sometimes looks. Restaurants so dim you need a flashlight to see your menu. Irate dinner companions who do not appreciate your Diane Arbus jokes while they're waiting for you to shoot their food from a dozen angles. Cluttered tables. Main dishes hidden behind strangely unphotogenic garnishes. Broken sauces. Melting ice cream. Hunks of meat.

Anne Fishbein, who has been photographing food for the Weekly for the last dozen or so years, makes it look effortless. We've watched her stow her gear under a tiny chair in the cramped closet of an unpronounceable restaurant in Koreatown, click through a swiftly disappearing banquet -- no room to maneuver, bad lighting, questionable bowls of bubbling soybeans -- with results that could hang in a gallery. Which of course they have. Fishbein's photography can be found not only in these pages, but in the Art Institute of Chicago, New York's Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Canada, Norton Family Collection and the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art. Oh, and she has a book too, with some pretty amazing photos of Russian bakers, among other portraits. Turn the page for 10 of our favorites from 2011. (Something to think about the next time you're shooting your dinner with your phone.)

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Jim Thurman

Lamb soup with knife cut noodles, Shaanxi Gourmet, Rosemead

​2011 in the San Gabriel Valley restaurant scene witnessed the usual spate of openings and closings, some notable and some not so notable. With some 300+ Chinese restaurants alone, trying to compile a list of the year's openings and closings in the 626 area code was quite a task, but we managed it -- with some help from the kind folks at Chowhound and Tony Chen's updates at Eater LA.

Looking back on the area trends of 2011, an early surge of restaurants featuring Dongbei style cuisine was followed by the opening of more and more Sichuan style restaurants. Indeed, one restaurant opened Dongbei before switching to Sichuan in mere weeks. It was a year Xi'an cuisine debuted, a new duck specialist emerged, shaved snow spread rapidly westward and popular Taiwanese bakery and coffee chain, 85°C Bakery-Café, came to the area.

Dumpling 10053 closed only to re-open in a different location with a new name, Fortune Dumpling. Bamboodles closed to the dismay of its fans and the owner of Chuen Hing shuttered over the impending ban on their specialty, shark fin soup. It was a year when a place featuring Tianjin style breakfasts came and went so quickly as to become part of lore, a SGV Brigadoon. Turn the page for the list, and If we missed something, let us know in the comments or by e-mail.

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Taco Bell

Taco Bell gives thanks for being sued over the contents of its meat

​A look at this year through the lens of the food-related lawsuits is like watching the first season of The Killing: an exercise in frustration, bewilderment, and, occasionally, excitement. From the mother who sued Nutella for allegedly misrepresenting its nutritional claims (frustrating) to restaurants suing bloggers for bad reviews (bewildering) to a multi-jurisdictional raid on a members-only food club (exciting), we highlight ten of the year's best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) lawsuits. And eagerly look forward to next year, when we may or may not see who killed Rosie Larsen and the resolution of at least some of these cases.

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jgarbee

Still Life With (Good) 2011 Cookbooks

​Because if you still haven't gotten a gift for someone of genuine or obligatory importance on your list (your closest friend; your boss/mother in law), check those Amazon availability lists right now. Or better yet, stop by your local bookstore.

We've reviewed a lot of books this year, and we've already given you a few "favorites" lists. But here are what we consider The Best Cookbooks of 2011 (and one cocktail book for kicks). Not the best general cookbooks, practical as they are. These are those engaging (yet useful) cookbooks that for some reason, you just can't seem to put down. A motley crew of cookbooks on very different subjects for polar opposite audiences. The L.A. demographic in cookbook form, essentially.

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jgarbee

The Well-Stocked Cookbook Bar

​Because kitchen skills are exactly that -- skills that take time to master -- we offer the best three general cookbooks this year for three very different cooks. Even we never would have thought we would put Ferran Adrià's latest cookbook in the "general" cooking category. And for beginners. But hey, 2011 was that kind of year.

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