“I used to say I hate making cakes,” Hannah Ziskin says. Now, slices of her slab cakes sell out in minutes, and people drive across Los Angeles for whole cakes in blood orange and carrot, crowned with minimalist flourishes of buttercream and delicate edible flower petals. She wasn’t supposed to be baking for a living anymore. But, as with so much, the pandemic upended everything.
When Ziskin, a pastry chef with a long resume in San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2018, she thought she was done with the restaurant industry and its long hours, low pay, and casual harassment. She even learned to code. But when a chef she admired, Melissa Perello, called to talk about a gig at her new Los Angeles restaurant the Michelin-starred chef’s first in the city Ziskin decided to take on one last pastry chef job. Several months later, COVID hit, and M.Georgina shut down.
Print
As restaurant jobs have disappeared during the pandemic, there has been a boom in informal food pop-ups in Los Angeles, a rapidly evolving culture that has brought us smoked brisket and roti filled with chicken curry, fried bananas with salted caramel and lemon olive-oil cake. Every week, it seems, chefs post new menus listing creative, compelling takeout fare.
For the food-obsessed in pursuit of a great meal, it’s been an opportunity to experience some of the best food Los Angeles has to offer. For chefs and bakers, however, it’s been a time of great uncertainty and stress. Many started pop-ups by taking orders through direct messages on Instagram, which can quickly lead to chaos and seemingly endless questions: How do you streamline menus and orders? What’s the best way to deal with payments?
Food|Cooks Turned Instagram Into the Worldâs Greatest Takeout Menu
Credit.Video by The New York Times
Sections
Cooks Turned Instagram Into the Worldâs Greatest Takeout Menu
During the pandemic, entrepreneurial chefs have reshaped food culture across the country with tiny, homegrown pop-ups that thrive on social media.
Credit.Video by The New York Times
Jan. 26, 2021
LOS ANGELES â Working as a cook at Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, Calif., Jihee Kim made dimpled, tender malfatti, and green pozole bobbing with mussels and clams. But all the while, she dreamed about opening her own place.
It would be like her favorite banchan shops in Busan, South Korea, where she grew up. Ms. Kim would sell starchy Japanese yams braised in soy sauce, delicate omelets rolled into perfect spirals with seaweed, and cucumber fermented with sweet Korean pears.
Listen 9 min MORE Evan Kleiman says everything from Cake Monkey is good, from cookies to their mini-dessert specialties. Photo courtesy of Cake Monkey.
Food media is inundated each year with holiday cookies packages not packages of actual cookies but pitches on each periodical’s group of cookie recipes. This year’s packages have been overwhelming, but stick local on this one.
If you are planning to bake cookies, start with this year’s holiday collection from the Los Angeles Times. Cooking Columnist Ben Mims has put together a group of recipes from local pastry chefs and cooks who hail from all over the world. This is not a group of icing laden sparklers. Evan Kleiman isn’t a fan of the highly decorated, icing loaded cookie. These recipes and the list of cookies you can buy focus on what cookies you want to eat because, hello, cookies!