Can Food Really be Authentic? That was the topic last week at Zocalos Public Square moderated by LA Weekly’s Jonathon Gold. On the panel Nancy Silverton of Mozza, Roy Choi of KoGi, Jimmy Shaw of Loteria Grill, and Sarintip “Jazz” Singsanong of Jitlada. After Gold took entirely too long to introduce each person on the panel, the discussion was finally underway. Each chef discussed their own experiences with food, some authentic, some not. Do real ingredients make authentic food? Does an improvement on those ingredients make it inauthentic?
The crowd gets ready to dish on authentic food with Jonathon Gold at the Skirball.
Chef Silverton discussed how her food is inspired by her travels in Italy, and as J Gold noted, are slightly upgraded from its sometimes unglamorous preparation to impress the foodies who diverge on Mozza on a nightly basis. Chef Shaw talked about how LA lacked any real authentic taquerias as he knew them in Mexico City. So he opened up Loteria Grill in the Farmers Market to fill that “mex-mex” gap. Chef Roy from Kogi, well… he uses authentic Korean flavors and infuses them with Mexican influences. And we all know Jaz’s Southern Thai cooking at Jitlada is about as authentic as they come.
What came out of the discussion is that it’s authentic as long as you can’t put the word “cal” in front of it. In other words, cal-italian, cal-asian, and cal-mex. There’s a snippet of the video below, but you can watch the entire 80 mins at the Zocalo web site.
Sun, Mar 15, 2009
Food