Some surprising realizations I had living in LA for 7 years, that were not mentioned in the article:
- Great cycling weather. LA has come a long way in bike lanes and buses that can carry your bike. It's not all about cars.
- It's basically working class due to the garment and aerospace industry. These are filipino and hispanic workers that have families and live generally outside of the trendy neighborhoods (or they do, but in cramped conditions). Most of HN will probably never interact with this demographic though.
- Your "LA is fake" speech as a disgruntled transplant is super lame and cliche, and lamer than actually being a fake/shallow Angeleno. Get over it. It's fake if you hang out with fake people. I found it refreshing to meet people who were not the standard tech bro who lifts weights.
- Great outdoors. Hiking, rock climbing, limited skiing. Take a sailing class thru UCLA.
Edit:
- LA food: Best East Asian (especially Chinese), Mexican, and Persian food in the country, and possibly the best Ethiopian. LA I thought had the highest density of high-quality but midrange ethnic restaurants that you could visit for a weekday lunch. It is not as good for technical haute cuisine that you'd find in SF, NYC, but it's the best for food that you could actually eat everyday.
I grew up in Hollywood and have lived in Los Angeles most of my life. I hated it growing up but upon returning had an experience of rediscovering my home town and finding I love it.
My favorite part of LA is something that is sadly gone with the rise of the LA tech scene, cannabis scene, and migrations from SF and NYC. LA was always a place where you could find a cheap apartment, studio, warehouse, etc, focus on your work (whatever that is) and disappear in the sprawl and then emerge as necessary to engage socially.
There was always an abundance of store fronts and warehouses easily converted into studio spaces and an abundance of fabricators and materials suppliers to feed all sorts of artistic practices. This was due to LA's rich history as an industrial center.
If you wanted to start a small gallery or little studio community you could essentially throw a dart at a map and find the perfect place for you and your friends.
Now with the real estate boom, the expanding tech startup scene, and the cannabis industry LA is becoming more and more expensive and options for creative lifestyles are becoming slimmer and slimmer.
I lost trust in the whole article when it came to the paragraph on food. LA has a great food scene, but I would put Tokyo, Bangkok, Barcelona, Chicago, and probably another 5-10 cities ahead of it. Saying "Los Angeles is the world’s best food city, and it’s not close" is myopic.
On Tokyo, Barcelona, and to a lesser extend LA, SF, I feel more confident to say something.
It is greatly a question what you are looking for, and the author quite apparently appreciates the variety.
And I have to give it to them, I do not think that Tokyo or Barcelona are in the same league there.
That is not to disparage the quality of the food.
I hold Tokyo in high regard, and would say it is the place I would most likely feel confident to go to a blindly chosen random Japanese restaurant. In Barcelona, you already have to filter out the tourist traps. (Hint: Paella & Sangria)
But in both places, it felt to me more dicey if would like some non-local food. It always seemed to be heavily adopted to the local preferences. But maybe my experience is outdated.
My armchair theory is, that both cities "suffer" from the fact of having a great culture of own cuisine. Not sure, if their customers do not appreciate the otherness, or the cooks are preemptively trying to "fit in".
As the author writes, LA is a melting pot, and I have eaten there great food from all over the place, especially when the menu was only half-translated. But then, it may be a prejudice, I am less confident that I can pick a random place, and receive the same quality as in Tokyo.
I've been to 2/4 on your list (Tokyo + Barcelona) and the only conclusion I can come to is that it's hard to name a "best" food city because food preferences can be so personal.
With that being said, NY + LA are my personal two favorite cities because these two cities combined cover such a large swath of the globe. No, the food is not as good as the country of origin, but it can get pretty close. And then you have such a variety. Just this past weekend (in LA) I had Jamaican food on Friday, Israeli food on Saturday, and Thai food on Sunday. And they were all pretty top notch.
I've heard Houston also has quite a diversity of food, I've heard Chicago is pretty good as well. To me, to be a best food city it is imperative to cover a broad section of different cuisines. By that metric, LA is world class and (for my taste and the kinds of food I like), unbeatable.
EDIT: One other thing I forgot to add. LA has a great spirit of innovation when it comes to food. You see people selling food out of their house, on the sidewalk, in parking lots just to get their idea out into the world without a lot of overhead. There's this feeling that if you try something new and capture people's attention you can make something big out of your food. And I think that's amazing (also it helps keep the costs relatively low for the consumer which is a bit of a bonus).
For some weighting of variety and quality it probably does very well. But yeah, this is best read as a love letter, where some qualities of the beloved are overlooked.
Similarly, "if you wake up at dawn in Los Angeles, and you have good time management skills, you can go for a walk on the beach, then go skiing in the afternoon, then fall asleep in the high desert at night" is probably true, but you'd better like the interior of your car, because that's where you'll be spending every other part of that day.
I think that’s a tough one to rank as not all great food cities are going to be great at all kinds of food. I’m not familiar with Tokyo for example, but I suspect the Mexican food scene there isn’t as impressive as in LA?
Proximity to fresh seafood and fresh produce as well as the strong immigrant communities mentioned in the blog do generally combine to make LA an excellent place to eat though.
If by best food scene, you were to take the top 20-25 cuisines of the world and look for good examples .. ?
Probably Melbourne, London and New York.
Have spent enough time in Los Angeles to know that it doesn’t reach the level of the above cities. It’s great at what it does - Mexican, Korean, Chinese, Salvadoran even, fusion - but the geography just doesn’t help it.
Barcelona is not a particularly great food City (sure, there are a few elite chefs but in general the food scene offers little of variety). Want good food in Spain, go to Basque Country.
Tokyo, San Sebastián, Lyon are cities which are insanely good at rocking their own cuisine which puts them in a different category of food cities. You might say ‘International’ v ‘Local’
International food cities -
Melbourne London New York
Sydney Los Angeles
(And probably Toronto Houston Vancouver but have never been)
The above cities are the great melting pots of the world
Something very special is happening in Melbourne’s food scene, especially in the last 10 years. Pick literally any Asian cuisine or food trend. you can name, even something super obscure, and you can find special examples.
Jonathan Gold was food critic for the LA Times, and is the only critic to win a Pulitzer. Michelin doesn't rate in LA any more though, then again Michelin has always been biased towards Western European high-end cuisine which is not really were LA shines.
As a Bay Area transplant to LA I would say that Los Angeles has a large and diverse food scene. There are lots of places to get good food, and because there are so many places it never felt that hard to get reservations. Even a place as famous as Bestia I was able to get same day reservations twice.
Contrast that with lines around the block to get good, but not life changing Ramen (Orenchi, South Bay Area). Or a near-mandatory hour wait for great Ramen (Ramen Shop, Oakland). Or giving up and never going because bots took all the reservations* (State Bird Provisions, SF).
* this is not fully accurate. A friends bot once went haywire and got too many reservations. I was able to attend on a spare reservation.
I disagree about Chicago. Good food in America is only where there are many foreigners, esp from Asia. Los Angeles and NYC have the best food (personally I prefer NYC). Outside of the US there are much better cities but if you're into diversity of different foods, then LA and NYC are excellent. Tokyo for example has way better Japanese food than LA but not so good Middle Eastern food for example.
LA also has the better access to a variety of fresh fruits and veggies because of its weather. That also influences the food scene.
As an angelino I disagree, and I say so because of logistics. LA has access to the world's nexus of food.
Almost every sprig of lettuce you eat comes from California, we get the food that travels the least and access to the best foods that have to travel the most, I say this because my brother is a food importer at LAX. I get to eat mangos from Pakistan, starfruit from Indonesia, and steak from Japan with ton's of frequency.
My point is, we serve as a nexus for food delivery and with choice of ingredients the best foods are made.
I wish people would specify how many restaurants they visited in each city they judge. I think 50 is the minimum before we can judge any city as a whole. NYC > Chicago > SF > LA > Miami.
Some of this depends on what you eat. I’m vegetarian, and yes I know Catalan food is supposed to be excellent, but I would just never personally put Barcelona in my top-10 for food.
I'd rather eat Japanese food in LA than American food in Tokyo, and it's not even close. But the average restaurant is probably better in Tokyo than in LA.
At the end of the day, this is an outlook of someone who enjoys the city, and I can get behind that. But there is not much in this article that wouldn't still hold true if you replaced Los Angeles with 'X well known metropolis in the world'. I moved to San Francisco a couple of years ago and had a negative mindset going into the move given my circumstances at the time...and you know what, I had a bad attitude that led to a worse experience. Ultimately, fantastic things can be found almost everywhere these days, we just have to go in with an open mindset.
> The average walking experience is poor, but the peak walking experience is marvelous.
I feel this applies to almost everything about Los Angeles - the average anything probably sucks, but the peak is probably ether than you’re gonna find almost anywhere. What makes LA so great for me is that you can get those peak experiences in so many different areas of life.
I grew up in Hollywood. The secret is to not try to do multiple outings across town in one day. You have to treat all the different neighborhoods as individual cities and just go somewhere for the day. Once rush hour hits, just expect to stay where you are and enjoy yourself until traffic lets off.
Not just because of the time. But because there is hardly anywhere to live that isn't filled with cars AND walkable.
It's nice that the city has become a lot more walkable - but it's not that enjoyable walking alongside what is basically a highway - I.E. Hollywood, Sunset, and Santa Monica Blvd.
It's such a shame that the city with some of the best weather in the country, and that would otherwise be great for biking, is the city with one of the strongest car cultures in the world.
I feel like the author covered this pretty well. If you have the luxury to organize your life around the terrible traffic (e.g. living and working in Venice) it's fantastic. If you need to get on a highway to get to work your experience will probably be much worse.
I've visited rather than lived there, but the overwhelming impression I've got is that LA is /weird/ - in all of the best ways.
That density of creative people - with a business model that actually supports them - plus areas of the city that are affordable (at least in comparison to the SF Bay Area) means LA has an abundance of quirky and interesting culture to it. And great food.
There is an entire area of LA full of prop rental warehouses which I am very keen to explore on my next trip there.
> My impression is that Los Angeles is the world’s best food city, and it’s not close. I have a galaxy-brained theory about why this is. Restaurants decline when they sell prestige, rather than food. (This is why Manhattan is often not a good place to eat.)
Stops reading and closes the window. Seriously, what the hell. LA is a great place to eat, but for the love of G... Paris? Tokyo? NYC also kicks LA's ass to the ground regarding food. I know my food, LA's great, but come on.
Anecdotally I have a French acquaintance who dreads his trips back home because the food is so terrible. Paris might be famous for fine dining at the extreme top end, but that doesn't necessarily make for the best eating.
“Best food city” has a lot of dimensions to optimize against. Are you looking for cheap-ish ethnic food? Haute cuisine? Prevalence of vegan options? High quality fast casual? IMO extremely difficult to rank cities in the top tier of food against each other absolutely and LA is def top tier.
It probably depends on how heavily you weight variety, casual vs fine dining, and whether having a food truck with an awesome cheesesteak is the same as "LA has awesome cheesesteaks".
LA never felt like a city to me because of the sprawl. I remember driving into downtown from the airport, and thinking to myself, “This is a suburb with tall buildings in the distance”. I chalk this up to me being from the East Coast and going to NYC a lot as a kid, and therefore seeing a “city” as something that’s dense and walkable.
As a fellow northeast-corridor-megalopolis-denizen this got me too (plus the straight-up enormous size of the blocks [0]), but then I realized you can see actual mountains from the actual city and my mind got blown in the other direction.
[0] It's like they're designed for drag racing so you can get up to 60 mph and still brake in time for the next light.
I found LA depressing on so many levels, everytime I've been there I can't wait to get home. I'd feel that cold mist on the Golden Gate bridge, and felt great immediately.
As a kid in high school, blonds (most are out of a bottle) were worshiped. I guess it was the beach Surfer thing? My cousin was so depressed because he looked ethnic. Women just wouldn't give him the time of day.
When he came to visit us in Norther California--he was a rock star. Women really liked him. I never saw him so happy.
It's weird how certain places are just different on so many levels.
No offense, but your comment sounds like you only know LA from what you read in your social media bubble online.
The "Hollywood" you are referencing is not geographic. Yes the film studios are in Los Angeles but hollywood celebrity culture is not a property of nor exclusive to Los Angeles the city.
And what about the homless population? Yes it is a problem that there are so many unhoused people. But is it really surprising that they would congregate in a city with such mild weather and access to social services? Do they not also have a right to live their lives?
carabiner|4 years ago
- Great cycling weather. LA has come a long way in bike lanes and buses that can carry your bike. It's not all about cars.
- It's basically working class due to the garment and aerospace industry. These are filipino and hispanic workers that have families and live generally outside of the trendy neighborhoods (or they do, but in cramped conditions). Most of HN will probably never interact with this demographic though.
- Your "LA is fake" speech as a disgruntled transplant is super lame and cliche, and lamer than actually being a fake/shallow Angeleno. Get over it. It's fake if you hang out with fake people. I found it refreshing to meet people who were not the standard tech bro who lifts weights.
- Great outdoors. Hiking, rock climbing, limited skiing. Take a sailing class thru UCLA.
Edit:
- LA food: Best East Asian (especially Chinese), Mexican, and Persian food in the country, and possibly the best Ethiopian. LA I thought had the highest density of high-quality but midrange ethnic restaurants that you could visit for a weekday lunch. It is not as good for technical haute cuisine that you'd find in SF, NYC, but it's the best for food that you could actually eat everyday.
angryasian|4 years ago
[deleted]
solomonb|4 years ago
My favorite part of LA is something that is sadly gone with the rise of the LA tech scene, cannabis scene, and migrations from SF and NYC. LA was always a place where you could find a cheap apartment, studio, warehouse, etc, focus on your work (whatever that is) and disappear in the sprawl and then emerge as necessary to engage socially.
There was always an abundance of store fronts and warehouses easily converted into studio spaces and an abundance of fabricators and materials suppliers to feed all sorts of artistic practices. This was due to LA's rich history as an industrial center.
If you wanted to start a small gallery or little studio community you could essentially throw a dart at a map and find the perfect place for you and your friends.
Now with the real estate boom, the expanding tech startup scene, and the cannabis industry LA is becoming more and more expensive and options for creative lifestyles are becoming slimmer and slimmer.
thesausageking|4 years ago
yokaze|4 years ago
On Tokyo, Barcelona, and to a lesser extend LA, SF, I feel more confident to say something.
It is greatly a question what you are looking for, and the author quite apparently appreciates the variety.
And I have to give it to them, I do not think that Tokyo or Barcelona are in the same league there.
That is not to disparage the quality of the food. I hold Tokyo in high regard, and would say it is the place I would most likely feel confident to go to a blindly chosen random Japanese restaurant. In Barcelona, you already have to filter out the tourist traps. (Hint: Paella & Sangria)
But in both places, it felt to me more dicey if would like some non-local food. It always seemed to be heavily adopted to the local preferences. But maybe my experience is outdated.
My armchair theory is, that both cities "suffer" from the fact of having a great culture of own cuisine. Not sure, if their customers do not appreciate the otherness, or the cooks are preemptively trying to "fit in".
As the author writes, LA is a melting pot, and I have eaten there great food from all over the place, especially when the menu was only half-translated. But then, it may be a prejudice, I am less confident that I can pick a random place, and receive the same quality as in Tokyo.
mylaaccount1|4 years ago
With that being said, NY + LA are my personal two favorite cities because these two cities combined cover such a large swath of the globe. No, the food is not as good as the country of origin, but it can get pretty close. And then you have such a variety. Just this past weekend (in LA) I had Jamaican food on Friday, Israeli food on Saturday, and Thai food on Sunday. And they were all pretty top notch.
I've heard Houston also has quite a diversity of food, I've heard Chicago is pretty good as well. To me, to be a best food city it is imperative to cover a broad section of different cuisines. By that metric, LA is world class and (for my taste and the kinds of food I like), unbeatable.
EDIT: One other thing I forgot to add. LA has a great spirit of innovation when it comes to food. You see people selling food out of their house, on the sidewalk, in parking lots just to get their idea out into the world without a lot of overhead. There's this feeling that if you try something new and capture people's attention you can make something big out of your food. And I think that's amazing (also it helps keep the costs relatively low for the consumer which is a bit of a bonus).
Uhhrrr|4 years ago
Similarly, "if you wake up at dawn in Los Angeles, and you have good time management skills, you can go for a walk on the beach, then go skiing in the afternoon, then fall asleep in the high desert at night" is probably true, but you'd better like the interior of your car, because that's where you'll be spending every other part of that day.
ytdytvhxgydvhh|4 years ago
I think that’s a tough one to rank as not all great food cities are going to be great at all kinds of food. I’m not familiar with Tokyo for example, but I suspect the Mexican food scene there isn’t as impressive as in LA?
Proximity to fresh seafood and fresh produce as well as the strong immigrant communities mentioned in the blog do generally combine to make LA an excellent place to eat though.
notreallyhere00|4 years ago
Probably Melbourne, London and New York.
Have spent enough time in Los Angeles to know that it doesn’t reach the level of the above cities. It’s great at what it does - Mexican, Korean, Chinese, Salvadoran even, fusion - but the geography just doesn’t help it.
Barcelona is not a particularly great food City (sure, there are a few elite chefs but in general the food scene offers little of variety). Want good food in Spain, go to Basque Country.
Tokyo, San Sebastián, Lyon are cities which are insanely good at rocking their own cuisine which puts them in a different category of food cities. You might say ‘International’ v ‘Local’
International food cities -
Melbourne London New York
Sydney Los Angeles
(And probably Toronto Houston Vancouver but have never been)
The above cities are the great melting pots of the world
Something very special is happening in Melbourne’s food scene, especially in the last 10 years. Pick literally any Asian cuisine or food trend. you can name, even something super obscure, and you can find special examples.
carabiner|4 years ago
er4hn|4 years ago
Contrast that with lines around the block to get good, but not life changing Ramen (Orenchi, South Bay Area). Or a near-mandatory hour wait for great Ramen (Ramen Shop, Oakland). Or giving up and never going because bots took all the reservations* (State Bird Provisions, SF).
* this is not fully accurate. A friends bot once went haywire and got too many reservations. I was able to attend on a spare reservation.
nomrom|4 years ago
tinyhouse|4 years ago
LA also has the better access to a variety of fresh fruits and veggies because of its weather. That also influences the food scene.
chews|4 years ago
Almost every sprig of lettuce you eat comes from California, we get the food that travels the least and access to the best foods that have to travel the most, I say this because my brother is a food importer at LAX. I get to eat mangos from Pakistan, starfruit from Indonesia, and steak from Japan with ton's of frequency.
My point is, we serve as a nexus for food delivery and with choice of ingredients the best foods are made.
MrGando|4 years ago
in3d|4 years ago
jdavis703|4 years ago
dry_soup|4 years ago
mym1990|4 years ago
jayd16|4 years ago
djrogers|4 years ago
I feel this applies to almost everything about Los Angeles - the average anything probably sucks, but the peak is probably ether than you’re gonna find almost anywhere. What makes LA so great for me is that you can get those peak experiences in so many different areas of life.
timavr|4 years ago
The biggest problem in LA is the traffic, plus that you need a car to go anywhere.
Try to go on average day from Griffith Park(Observatory in the picture) to Santa Monica(surfing). You will hate your life.
People who live in LA are kinda used to crazy traffic, but if your value your time, LA is not the place to be
solomonb|4 years ago
onlyrealcuzzo|4 years ago
Not just because of the time. But because there is hardly anywhere to live that isn't filled with cars AND walkable.
It's nice that the city has become a lot more walkable - but it's not that enjoyable walking alongside what is basically a highway - I.E. Hollywood, Sunset, and Santa Monica Blvd.
It's such a shame that the city with some of the best weather in the country, and that would otherwise be great for biking, is the city with one of the strongest car cultures in the world.
ng12|4 years ago
simonw|4 years ago
https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/los-angeles-califo...
I've visited rather than lived there, but the overwhelming impression I've got is that LA is /weird/ - in all of the best ways.
That density of creative people - with a business model that actually supports them - plus areas of the city that are affordable (at least in comparison to the SF Bay Area) means LA has an abundance of quirky and interesting culture to it. And great food.
There is an entire area of LA full of prop rental warehouses which I am very keen to explore on my next trip there.
MrGando|4 years ago
Stops reading and closes the window. Seriously, what the hell. LA is a great place to eat, but for the love of G... Paris? Tokyo? NYC also kicks LA's ass to the ground regarding food. I know my food, LA's great, but come on.
twinkletwinkle_|4 years ago
0xB31B1B|4 years ago
ipnon|4 years ago
jayd16|4 years ago
bowmessage|4 years ago
[deleted]
jdhn|4 years ago
InitialLastName|4 years ago
[0] It's like they're designed for drag racing so you can get up to 60 mph and still brake in time for the next light.
hellbannedguy|4 years ago
As a kid in high school, blonds (most are out of a bottle) were worshiped. I guess it was the beach Surfer thing? My cousin was so depressed because he looked ethnic. Women just wouldn't give him the time of day.
When he came to visit us in Norther California--he was a rock star. Women really liked him. I never saw him so happy.
It's weird how certain places are just different on so many levels.
(best Mexican food there is though.)
nickthemagicman|4 years ago
If I had millions of dollars and could live anywhere I would probably live in LA.
magwa101|4 years ago
[deleted]
8458e112e7b2|4 years ago
solomonb|4 years ago
The "Hollywood" you are referencing is not geographic. Yes the film studios are in Los Angeles but hollywood celebrity culture is not a property of nor exclusive to Los Angeles the city.
And what about the homless population? Yes it is a problem that there are so many unhoused people. But is it really surprising that they would congregate in a city with such mild weather and access to social services? Do they not also have a right to live their lives?
mym1990|4 years ago