Katsuya by Starck Opens in Laguna Beach

I don’t want to sound grateful for the pandemic. It’s been awful, and I welcome its demise. But if COVID-19 hadn’t dramatically disrupted the restaurant scene — and my job along with it — I likely wouldn’t have discovered some of the more...

Delicious times three. Photo by Edwin Goei Clack-clack-clack. Sizzle-sizzle-sizzle. As soon as I stepped into Navarro’s Taqueria, I heard the familiar and comforting noise of a metal spade pushing and scraping seasoned bits of fried meat across a...

Photo by Edwin Goei Before I talk about the food I tried at Wreckless, the new restaurant in Fullerton by chef Cody Storts, I must mention the branded merchandise. There was an entire wall of it: T-shirts and trucker hats, shot glasses and flasks,...

“What comes in this one?” I ask, pointing to one of the many pictures of udon on the menu at Meiji Siemen in Costa Mesa. The menu doesn’t contain many words but relies instead on dozens of tiny pictures, each one barely distinguishable from the...

If you’ve been spending more time than usual on Instagram lately, you might have noticed the emergence of an underground world of food for sale, the result of an army of out-of-work chefs turning to the internet to make ends meet during the...