Asian Food

THAT beautiful leaf, artfully placed under your toro (tuna belly) sashimi, isn't just the Japanese equivalent of an old-school sprig of parsley. It's a captivating herb that's sort of cinnamon-y, sort of basil-ish, kind of anise-like. You might catch a note of cumin or curry leaf, along with a hint of citrus. That leaf is shiso, called by a host of other names as well.

Rafael Anguiano takes his corners gingerly. He has to -- he's driving an aquarium on wheels, a lumbering delivery truck carrying 3,000 pounds of live fish in large, sloshing tanks. One sunny afternoon, he sweats freely as he hustles hundreds of flopping fish into the Lucky Seafood Market inside a rolling rubber trash can. Breathless, he dumps five buckets into the store's tanks, the sturgeon, catfish and carp slashing and struggling like salmon surging upstream.

The culinary tag "Southeast Asian" has cachet in American foodie circles even though it has not yet achieved the all-purpose buzzword status of "Mediterranean" (though I seem to recall that someone has invented a "Southeast Asian turkey burger"). Books about the food of this vast and complex region are multiplying fast. And as with Mediterranean, surveys that encompass at least a few locales somehow get cooks grasping principles faster than ones focused on the food of one place.

Thwack-thwack, thwack! Rafael Diaz hits the side of a wooden moon cake mold twice against his work surface, flips it over and hits it again so that the small, hefty cake pops right out. A longtime employee at Chinatown's Phoenix Bakery, Diaz's regular duties usually have him decorating the strawberry-whipped cream layer cakes that the bakery is known for. This time of year, he's shaping moon cakes for the annual Moon Festival, a harvest festival celebrated...

Two decades ago, Laura Diaz Brown was dining with her family at the posh Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles when her dad, the owner of several Mexican restaurants, made a simple request: Do you have any hot sauce? Their waiter was stumped, but the largely Latino kitchen staff had stowed a bottle of salsa picante for their own use and offered to share it. "That was only 20 years ago when you couldn't find products like that in mainstream restaurants," said Brown, a professional chef.

Only 3 years old, Leon Gustavo Davila Hinojosa is still learning to speak Spanish. But the precocious youngster already knows a bit of Japanese: "Maruchan." That's a brand of instant ramen noodles that to him means lunch. Leon's grandmother stocks them in her tiny grocery store in this hamlet 40 miles southwest of the capital. The preschooler prefers his shrimp-flavor ramen with a dollop of liquid heat. "With salsa!" he said exuberantly at the mention of his favorite noodle soup.

Stacked two stories high at a food importer's warehouse in Commerce are cardboard boxes filled with packets of rice vermicelli, cans of coconut milk and bottles of chili sauce -- ingredients as common in Southern California's Asian community as mustard and ketchup in the American kitchen. The products shipped into Southern California from Asia are worth $250,000 but are weeks, perhaps months, away from finding their way onto supermarket shelves and dining tables.