Robyn Johnson

writerly person

[robynelainejohnson]

Taco María and the Rise of Alta California

“Is it better than a taco truck?”

A friend put this to me as we talked about my recent à la carte lunch at Taco María—the current Los Angeles Times Restaurant of the Year and the last to be picked by the luminous Jonathan Gold before his much-lamented passing. It seemed my friend was edging into the protective stance many (usually white) Americans take regarding the authenticity of Mexican food. Namely, it must be cheap, fast, humble, and resistant to formal experimentation.

At his restaurant, nestled in a small corner of a rustic-meets-industrial mall in Costa Mesa, Chef Carlos Salgado has made a point of refusing to cater to convention. He’s become one of the vanguards of Alta California, a rising movement propelled by Chicano chefs, trained in the Michelin-starred kitchens of California cuisine, who are seeking to reinterpret their culinary histories inside an industry that’s hitherto overlooked their contributions. The resulting innovations present a syncretism of traditional Mexican dishes and our state’s famed farmer’s market-oriented approach, centering the local, seasonal, heirloom, humane, and sustainable. It’s an elevation that doesn’t denigrate heritage. It’s Mexican through the Californian lens and vice versa. It’s an immigrant’s story, second generation told.

At Taco María the inky blue tortillas demonstrate Salgado’s commitment to this heightened authenticity—the masa is nixtamalized and processed in-house from blue cónico maize grown by small family farms in the highlands of central Mexico. From my counter seat I watched a sous chef stationed at the press make these pliant yet sturdy tortillas destined for my tacos. Of the available choices I tried all except the fish, and while each one reflected a sure thoughtfulness, I’d revisit two if given the chance. The tocino taco’s thickly cubed pork belly, guacamole, and pluots were a study in complementary flavors and textures. And, the absolute standout, the vegetarian taco was deeply layered with crispy potato and queso fundido on top of a shiitake chorizo, which was a surprising amalgamation of umami, sweetness, and spice. On principle I avoid meat substitutes (let a vegetable be a vegetable!), but I’ll dream of that chorizo.

I leave the best for last, although it was my starter: the aguachile, a ceviche-inspired dish hailing from Sinaloa. A supersized amuse-bouche, Salgado’s take was a conical island in the midst of a lime and Meyer lemon sea. Each element—Hokkaido scallop, avocado, cucumber, sweet radish, and cilantro fringing the summit—was perched on one another so that to take a bite was to excavate the strata of flavor. It was by turns spicy, herbaceous, cool, creamy, and tart. While trying it I entered the moment, as once claimed by poet and gourmand Charles Simic, that often punctuates our lives more saliently than birthdays, weddings, and other conventional markers. My body was anchored in time by the perfect meal.

 /sample for East Bay Express

[robynelainejohnson]

Lords of the Samurai: The Legacy of a Daimyo Family

Former Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro stands before the press, soft spoken and modest. With his shock of grey hair and unbuttoned collar, he looks more like the famous ceramist and tea practitioner than the ex-leader of one of the world’s most powerful countries. Yet despite his unassuming demeanor, he occupies the highly revered position as head of an elite six-century-old samurai clan, whose heirlooms are being comprehensively exhibited for the first time in the United States at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

Mr. Hosokawa explains that unlike most other daimyos, or feudal nobility, his family had the good fortune of stability due to strategic political maneuvering, which kept warfare, and thus destruction of property, at a minimum. Consequently, the Hosokawas now have the unique privilege of possessing one of the most extensive daimyo family collections in Japan—around 6,000 items. These are some primo samurai antiquities.

However, it’s not all katanas and implements of war on display, though those items are represented. The show has a broader scope that complicates the romanticized stereotype of the samurai in popular culture, translated into Western imaginations as Japanese cowboys—violent, macho, and privy to a set of ethics beyond the pale of normal society. While samurais were fierce professional warriors who lived and died by bushido, or a code of conduct not totally unlike chivalry, and extensively trained in the martial arts, they also pursued cultural interests with an equal dedication. In fact, as gentleman warriors they were great connoisseurs and patrons of art, and would oftentimes resort to poetry contests and tea ceremonies to iron out diplomatic tensions rather than bloody battlefields. But then samurai tea parties and poetry slams don’t make for blockbuster action flicks.

The ideology of the period stipulated that one could not be a samurai without balancing bu and bun, or warfare and culture, each being a safeguard for the other. Granted, in a more practical and historical context it made sense for the samurai to take on the refinement of the court as their essential goal was to ascend the hierarchy—and the right to that power had to be legitimized largely by the imperial bureaucracy.

Calligraphed poems on wall scrolls, portraits, a go set, tea utensils of delicate design, masks and embroidered robes for noh and kyōgen theater, gilded screens depicting microcosms of rural loveliness and epic battles, and other objets d’art populate the exhibition. Some samurai were even accomplished artists themselves. Take for instance the picnic set created by Hosokawa Tadaoki, the second paterfamilias. Made of lacquered dark wood, the set comprises a small box topped with a large handle that also houses a sake bottle in the shape of an eggplant, complete with leaf-shaped cup. Whimsical yet still sparely elegant in its simple organic curves, it’s a charming piece of decorative art representative of the cultivated tastes of the military nobility.

All that being said, however, the implements of war do command a large part of the exhibition and titillate the collective imagination—especially the six suits of armor in their grand array. They range from a richly ornate revivalist style punctuated with peaches, reds, creams, intricate brocade, and gilt bronze to a relatively simple, more monochromatic contemporary style. The helmets are purely fantastical—donned with large metal protuberances like a butterfly proboscis, a boomerang crest, a roaring lion descending the brim, a perched dragon with wings splayed, or antelope horns. It’s hard to imagine anyone sitting upright, let alone conducting any type of combat in ponderous ostentation—a kudos to the samurais’ strength and agility. And their foresight. This over-decoration, while serving to boldly announce their presence on the battlefield, also doubled as funeral attire.

The show ends with Mr. Hosokawa’s personal ceramic pieces, earthy tea bowls and tableware, and one feisty lion ready to pounce. As the latest manifestation of the gentleman-warrior family, one wonders if he’s ever had a smidgen of a desire to try on any of the suits, even fleetingly. The antelope helmet, at the very least.

The museum will display a rotating selection of 166 pieces till September 20.

/originally for Buzzine Networks

[robynelainejohnson]

Meet Nona Lim: Soup Entrepreneur, Ex-Techie, (Almost) Olympian

Nona Lim has always adored food, nurtured as she was by the vibrant goulash of her native Singapore. But it took a journey around the world and a few other careers before realizing her calling to craft healthy and delicious soups convenient for modern life.

It’s pretty easy to develop a fine palate in food-obsessed Singapore--a country in which eating is jokingly said to be the national past time. Growing up, Nona savored the family ritual of visiting the hawker stalls--frenetic spaces bustling with eating and cooking and shopping. 

Even as she went to London to pursue a career in tech consulting and (because, hey, why limit oneself) train for the Olympic fencing team, her passion for food only grew. Under the rigor of her work and competition schedules, the importance of a good, well-balanced meal become quickly apparent. By the time she made her final move to Oakland, Nona knew she wanted to build a business helping others have access to healthy food while still maintaining an active lifestyle.

Collaborating with health advisors, Nona started her eponymous line in West Oakland where she continues to make everything in small batches using whole, organic, and responsibly-sourced ingredients. Nona only partners with local non-GMO farms and artisans who agree food should be simple, real, and delicious. Hodo Soy, Alhambra, Valley Ranch, and Community Grains are just a few of the regional companies featured in her soups.

As a slow-food lover, I try to hold up the pace of life enough to simmer stocks and soak beans, but those inevitable moments arise. Back-to-back deadlines. Unannounced family in town. April 14th. Nona Lim and her artisanal soups definitely come to rescue when responsibilities pile up, but you don’t want to sacrifice eating healthy, local food. With that in mind...

Click here to order your farm fresh groceries, along with Nona Lim’s handcrafted soups! Make sure to share your favorite flavors with us on Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #Farmigo!

With bowls lifted, Robyn and the Farmigo team

/sample copy for Farmgio

[robynelainejohnson]

Where Is the Love: A Blogger at the Prop 8 Protests

Tens of thousands took to the streets last Saturday in an unprecedented showing of support of the LGBT community and their right to the freedom of marriage.

From Los Angeles to Boston, Prop 8 protesters made it apparent that the fight for gay civil liberties is anything but a closed discussion. It also proved to be a tipping point in the public conscious.

[robynelainejohnson]

The Tastiest Place on Earth

Let us tell you about a magical place where the best of Southern California’s handcrafted beers are only $5 a frosty, thirst-quenching glass and the tastiest streetside eats are there for your snacking joy. 

A place where you can learn how to cure your own smoky bacon, bake your own pizza, jam your own jam, raise your own backyard chickens (can you imagine fresh eggs every morning?), grow your own balcony tomatoes, and more. All for free. We’re talking about a place built from hopes, dreams, BBQ, ice cream sandwiches, and beer. Did we mention the small-batched, handcrafted, local and sustainable, totally drainable beer?

Let us tell you about the most delicious, handcraftiest, freshest festival in the land: the Eat Real Festival.

We have food fun and flavors for every possible food geekery interest and tastebud’s desire. If you’re looking for a pickled paradise, we’ve got kickin’ kimchi and Moroccan preserved lemon demos, and the hands-on, one-of-a-kind Kraut-a-Thon. Do you roar for moar meat? Learn how to make a meat smoker out of a trashcan, grab a jar of bacon spread from Devils on Horseback at the Craft Marketplace, and then head to the big stage for the country-wide famous Flying Knives steer butchery contest. Wanna get baked? Gather ye round the community bread oven at the DIY Eat It area to learn all you knead to know about pretzels and more from the illustrious Aida Mollencamp. Then take your breads to Evan Kleiman’s tomato-processing demo for sauce-ome goodness as you dip your baked tidbits into sauces that till now only your Italian nonna knew how to make. If beer’s near and dear to your heart, we’ve got twenty on tap – at least. IPAs and saisons and porters and ales will all fill your beer dance card with Eagle Rock, Stone, Lost Abbey, and more local SoCal breweries in attendance. And the Bruery’s bringing their limited Provisions series especially for Eat Realers, with not one tasty drop available for anyone outside of their brewery besides us. And just when you’ve eaten, drank, made, and seen it all, we’ve got more – from goats and bees and the world’s biggest butter churning dance party. Nowhere else can you experience food in all its multitudinous, multifaceted wonderfulness. So come to Eat Real, where food dreams come true.

Eat Real LA, Helms Bakery District, July 16-17, Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.; Sunday 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. More deets here.

[robynelainejohnson]

By Robyn Johnson You have to take the dog for a walk anyway, right? Why not stop in at your friendly neighborhood dog bar along the way? A few local bars make a point of catering to the canine crowd; here are some places where your (well-behaved) pet is welcome.

[robynelainejohnson]

Waking Dreams: Max Klinger and the Symbolist Print

In the face of encroaching modernity, symbolists took refuge in highly internal and esoteric imagery to express personal dreams, psychological states, and emotions—particularly their anxieties.

Glancing around the prints in the small exhibition room, I can see these guys had girl troubles.

Félicien Rops, with his pornographic and decadent themes, presents an easy case. Dancing Death depicts a dancing woman, ironically dressed in only a sheer, flouncing skirt, heels, full-length gloves, and an ostentatious hat. Back turned to the viewer, the dancer reveals her emaciated and withered haunches, the strong etch marks emphasizing protruding ribs and puckered skin. She flirtatiously glances over her shoulder to reveal a… skull. Yawn. Marrying female sexuality with death isn’t all that new, even by 19th century standards.

But I’m rather fascinated with the centerpiece of the show,Max Klinger’s Paraphrase About the Finding of a Glove. Ten frames in sequence, the graphic narrative illustrates a man and his often tempestuous, and finally impotent, response to a found glove, presumably belonging to a woman he adores from afar. At points vainly chasing after the glove, or losing it, or seemingly tormented by it when faced with its immediate reality, one can palpably feel the man’s Prufrockian yearning and fear—his inability to bring the moment to its crisis, as it were.

Much as been written about the narrative’s anticipation of Freud’s fetishism theory, but I think that there is something more at play than a simple transposition of affection. A tension exists between the chase and elusion, the object and the desirer, with the passive and the aggressive personalities becoming interchangeable. Not merely a fetish for the beloved in absentia, the glove actively pursues him as well, making its slow arduous journey back to him after being carried away on a stormy sea.

Whether triumphantly riding a giant clam or reaching out to him in a surreal nightmare scene, the animate glove arouses a disturbing sense of the uncanny in a one-two punch. Firstly, it simply shouldn’t be alive. The mundane becomes bizarre, and thus creepy as hell—like Bruce Campbell’s disembodied hand from Evil Dead II. Secondly, the repetition of the glove in the seventh panel, Anxieties, adds to the supernatural dimension. Not only does it float to the disturbed sleeper with a flood of sea monsters, who also mirror the glove’s gesture, but a monumental glove lies behind his head, an oppressive, perplexing headboard.

Far from being a love token, the glove inspires repulsion as much as desire. In the Freudian sense, the uncanny effects projected onto the lady’s item perhaps reveal repressed impulses on the part of the man, sexual taboos that can only go unspoken.

Yet, in the end both figures are beset by complete impotency. The consummation can never take place, symbolically or concretely. The viewer never actually sees him make physical contact with the glove, nor the glove with him. Upon first retrieving it, he sits in the corner of his room, face held in grief, while it lies at his feet. In another panel, the devotional object, after returning from the sea, sits passively on a table in a relatively sterile show room.

Finally, the viewer finds the glove discarded and alone except for a dragonfly-winged Eros, who gives an almost dismissive backward glance. The shot of love either missed the mark or deflated any potential.

/originally for Buzzine Magazine

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By Robyn [email protected]