Is Bill Esparza revolutionizing the restaurant review?
Plus, a Bourdain biopic, the robots are coming, and so long Koda Farms.
LA FOODSTACK is a curated list of the week’s most essential food news through a Los Angeles lens. Prepared by The LA Countdown and The LA Food Podcast.
1. The Bill Esparza taco review is becoming appointment viewing
A couple of weeks ago award-winning food writer Bill Esparza caused quite the stir with his 30+ Instagram stories reviewing (okay, obliterating) Highland Park’s Villa’s Tacos.
Bill was back at it this week, dropping 3 taco reviews on his stories of acclaimed carne asada specialists around town. He shared his experiences visiting Bellflower’s Tacos La Rueda, Whittier’s Mochomitos Asador, and Tacos Los Cholos of Fullerton, Huntington Park and Anaheim fame. While the Instagram stories have since expired, allow me to spoil the ending for you - they were all pretty mid, scoring 6/10s across the board primarily due to a lack of smoke and alleged poor execution of the cook.
In my eyes, there are 3 interesting aspects of what Bill is doing:
He’s getting taquerias to embrace the age-old adage that there’s no such thing as bad press. Tacos Los Cholos ASKED Bill to come in and offer an honest review, probably due to the chatter and excitement Villasgate generated.
He’s bringing back the “appointment reading” review that we’ve somewhat lost since Jonathan Gold passed away. Look, Bill Addison is a great critic and I think we’re lucky to have him in LA. But his ascension has coincided with the atrophy of traditional media as an institution. I’ve heard from restaurateurs themselves that getting reviewed by the Times just doesn’t pack the same business punch as it used to. That’s the opposite of what we saw resulting from Villasgate, where despite the negative review, the crowds resembled those Kamala Harris draws to a tarmac (AI-generated or not).
Love him or hate him, he’s being 100% himself. Using Instagram stories as opposed to pitching a story to a traditional media outlet allows him to forego the editing process and tell the story exactly how he wants it to be told. In an age when social media has conditioned us to crave unfiltered authenticity, this seems like a smart move.
Bill’s not the first to do this. But he is one of the first legitimate food writers that I can remember taking to a new medium in such an intentional, methodical, and successful way. For our full thoughts on the budding phenomenon, listen to the latest episode of The LA Food Podcast.
2. Bourdain rolls over in grave
…might have been a more appropriate headline for Deadline’s article on the upcoming biopic Tony, which A24 is in talks to buy. Here’s a summary of what we know so far, adapted from an excellent write-up courtesy of Eater’s Jaya Saxena:
It’s a biopic of Anthony Bourdain’s life, though it’s unclear which part of said life.
BlackBerry director Matt Johnson (did anyone watch that?) is in talks to direct.
Dominic Sessa of The Holdovers and recent Hotels.com commercials is attached to star as Bourdain.
The script is written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, with the former having apparently penned a pilot about New York’s restaurant scene in the ’90s.
Questions abound about how the people in Bourdain’s life feel about the biopic, but the buzz around his posthumous documentary Roadrunner can’t be inspiring a ton of confidence. Personally, I will watch this movie, but I will under no circumstances allow myself to enjoy it. It’s what (I think) Tony would have wanted.
3. Yes, robot chef!
We’re all wondering when AI will replace us. At best, I am one or two more technological advances away from outsourcing all of my noodle reviews to a ChatGPT-fueled robot influencer called Nommy, or some shit. But what if the replacement has less to do with technological advances and more with how emotionally prepared we are as humans to let the robot bastards take our jobs?
Los Angeles-based reporter Meghan McCarron took a look at this emerging tension through a restaurant lens for THE New York Times:
Michael Giebelhausen, a professor at the Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business at Clemson University who studies the intersection of technology and hospitality, explained, “We should be thinking about not what jobs robots will take, but what jobs consumers will allow robots to do.”
So far, and perhaps surprisingly, much of the automation currently being rolled out in the United States is on the human-facing, service side — robotic bussers, A.I.-powered drive-throughs and the ever-proliferating touch screens.
But people come to restaurants to feel connected to other humans. They want to encounter people, not a chatbot, kiosk or mechanical arm. So successfully integrating robots is more than just an engineering challenge.
Professor Giebelhausen has found, for example, that consumers prefer human chefs to robot ones, in part because they believe that humans cook with love. In a paper currently under review, he and his co-authors found that if consumers had a friendly text chat with the robot, that preference faded.
While I truly hope that there’s something to the idea that consumers have any say in how and when robots replace us, color me skeptical. The thing to watch is the cost savings associated with robot-prepared food versus human-prepared food. Because once that delta becomes large enough, I’m not sure we’ll have much of a choice as to who prepares our ghost-kitchen burritos. Not in this economy.
4. It’s been rice to know ya
…is a punny headline that took me an embarrassingly long while to come up with. THE New York Times’ Tejal Rao wrote a moving piece on the imminent sunset of Koda Farms, a California-based rice producer famed for developing the Kokuho Rose variety and inspiring a nationwide appreciation of Japanese-style rice:
But this fall, there will be no new crop rice for sale on the family homestead. Koda Farms is closing up shop. “People really romanticize farming,” Ms. [Robin] Koda said, “but it’s becoming more and more challenging.”
She pointed to the soaring cost of water for farms in California, a surge in insurance premiums and the cost of organic fertilizer, gas and new equipment, along with the small and aging labor pool in rural Merced County. On top of those grievances, which are familiar to most farmers, Koda has been dedicated to growing a particularly low-yielding heirloom rice on poor adobe soil.
Kokhuo Rose rice has been a prized ingredient for many acclaimed chefs, including Minh Phan of LA’s late, great Porridge + Puffs. Lucky for them, the Koda family has licensed the rice variety to another producer who will keep up the good work. Only time will tell how the rice’s quality will or will not be impacted.
5. Best thing I ate this week? Spicy cold noodles from MDK Noodles in Koreatown.
I find cold noodles to be empirically inferior to hot noodles, and a quick Google search confirmed that I am a scientific savant. Cook’s Illustrated notes that “when food is heated to 98.5 degrees, the channels open up and TRPM5 sensitivity increases more than 100 times, making food taste markedly more…” something we’ll never know because the article is behind a paywall and I refuse to spend any more of my somewhat hard-earned money on media subscriptions.
The long and short of it is that you need help to make something cold taste delicious, and the jjolmyeon at MDK Noodles receives plenty of it. The bright red sauce is built with gochujang, garlic, vinegar, and sugar to achieve sweet, salty, spicy perfection. It envelopes a nest of hyper-chewy wheat noodles perched under a bounty of fresh vegetables and a seductively halved hard-boiled egg, and what you’re left with is a dish that simultaneously achieves refreshment and satisfaction. I highly recommend snagging a bowl before temps cool down.
Other stories to chow down on…
SF Gate’s Karen Palmer wrote two intriguing stories this week, one on the meticulous construction of Sonoratown’s famous burrito, and the other on the one-stop-shop responsible for the meats at your favorite LA sandwich shops.
Bill Addison reviewed Holy Basil for The LA Times, praising the Thai’s restaurant “visceral, full-throttled style of cooking.”
Also for The Times, Stephanie Breijo chronicled the opening of Belle’s Bagels in Highland Park, tracking its progression from bagel window to full-service deli.
Taste’s Matt Rodbard interviewed food writer Priyanka Mattoo this week and I’m torn on whether I loved or hated the conversation. So I’m leaving it here for you.
This week on The LA Food Podcast…
Father Sal and I discuss whether Bill Esparza is revolutionizing the food review or merely feeding his ego. We give our takes on the prospect of a Bourdain biopic and ponder how to avoid restaurants becoming fully AI-generated.
Plus, my interview with the CEO of First Light Farms Jason Ross. Jas and I discuss the benefits of grass-fed beef, whether regenerative farming is more than just a buzzword, and what activists for a plant-based lifestyle misunderstand about creating a more sustainable food system.
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