Thank you, Mr. Gold

In the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, the Literature department offers (and demands, really) a class once a week to hear esteemed and published writers speak. Novelists, spoken word, poets, professors, and even alumni read their pieces to some 50 undergrad students for an hour, and indulge in a Q&A afterward. Though there were days where, at 4pm, all I wanted to do was get home to my apartment after hours of lit analysis, and I tuned the speakers out, there is one in particular who changed my perspective. That reader was infamous food critic for the LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold.

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Down and Dirty

Though I do like my fancy, upscale LA restaurants and am tickled pink by an artful drizzle of sauce around a delicately placed meal, sometimes it's good to get down and dirty with your food. I'm talking sauce smeared all over your fingers and mouth, devil-may-care face in the trough kind of eating. I'm talking about BBQ.

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Cheap Eats: Taqueria Jalisco

One of the perks of moving back to Los Angeles (after swearing I'd never return) is the abundance of what I like to call the cheap eats of LA. Scattered all around the city are tiny gems of flavor you'd never know where there unless you stumbled upon them or heard about them from a reliable source. My source, as you may know, is my boyfriend, a native of East LA and seemingly an expert on all the little tastes I've unknowingly been craving.

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Cheap Eats: Sunshine Thai

 

Having a boyfriend who lives in East LA has its culinary advantages. Quinn knows where to get these sinful little cinnamon-brown sugar pancakes from the Asian market, where to get $3 tacos al pastor or which Korean BBQ place uses the best spices. Each place seems relatively nondescript, nothing to set it apart from all the others like it, except that he recommends them. That, for me, is enough. This is how I discovered Sunshine Thai.

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