los angeles food coma.

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I ate quite a bit of food while I was home in Los Angeles last month. The photo above, of a simple-looking but deceptively complex green bean salad with nectarines and creme fraiche dressing, taken at Petit Trois, was how everything began. The rest of that meal, undocumented because my mother and I were too busy shoveling bites of steak frites and escargots into our mouths, was nothing short of spectacular — nothing revelatory in any avant-garde way, just straightforward French bistro fare done with great precision.

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In the following days, I managed to borrow my dad’s Pentax K1000 — a basic camera, but, with the 50mm/1.8 lens, a great little film camera with which to shoot food. Our first meal with it: a birthday dinner with dad at his favorite yakitori spot. It started so innocently with a mini-appetizer of roasted shishito peppers sprinkled with bonito flakes.

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Then they brought out the meats. SO MANY MEATS.

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Then I met my friend Ben for lunch at the Guerrilla Taco truck in the Arts District, just east of Little Tokyo. GOODNESS GRACIOUS, THESE TACOS.

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If you visit a city with a Din Tai Fung, home to some of the best soup dumplings on the planet, you go to that Din Tai Fung, and you OBVIOUSLY get an order of those soup dumplings. Manna, this.

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The shumai at DTF are no joke, either.

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I met my old college friend and roommate Travis and his daughter Esme for an excellent weekend lunch at Tasty Noodle House, a Chinese restaurant not far from the house where I grew up in San Gabriel. Their mapo tofu and scallion pancakes were out of this world.

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A friend of mine from NYC, en route to Samoa, found himself stuck with a 12-hour layover in Los Angeles while I happened to be home. So I picked him up from the airport and we headed to Gjelina, a place I’ve been dying to try for a couple of years now. It did not disappoint. Above: the excellent sauceless, cherry-tomato-topped pizza. Below: Wonderful (and colorful!) green beans and the stellar cured meat plate, complete with 3 different mustards!

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And on the second to last day of my trip, I ended the way I started (only this time with the Pentax in tow) — at Petit Trois, once again with my mom, to try out the second half of the tiny menu. Goodness me, we will be back again and again — everything was excellent, and the kitchen and bar staff was incredibly warm and accommodating.

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Prepping the Napoleons.

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Escargot heaven.

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Confit chicken leg. SO GOOD.

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And that, folks, was how I rolled, sideways, onto my flight back to New York City.

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