Corned Beef

"Even if you don't like it, you'll eat it. Even if you're not Irish Catholic, you're going to have it," says Martin Silver, vice president of sales and marketing for Hebrew National. Have what? Corned beef on St. Patrick's Day, of course. But why corned beef? Was St. Patrick, the 5th century apostle credited with converting the Irish to Christianity, a corned-beef-and-cabbage kind of guy? Did the Irish embrace him and his culinary repertoire and ultimately take the whole meal to America?

Corned beef is infinitely flexible, appealing to cooks of nearly all backgrounds and adapting gracefully to their whims. This corned beef recipe, from former Times Food Editor Ruth Reichl's mother, is emphatically not Irish. It's hard to say exactly what sort of corned beef you'd call it, though its sweet and sour flavors and combination of meat with fruit does seem decidedly Middle European. Big deal. The essential thing is that it's delicious.

Ireland never has been famous for its food, but things may be changing. Some Irish food is taking on a European flair--partly because more Irish citizens are traveling to Europe and bringing culinary influences home. Nowadays, for example, potatoes often are replaced with pasta--rarely eaten in Ireland years ago.

Art's Deli was the kind of place where the customers could sign for their bills and movie deals were hatched next to neighborhood romances. The owner was known to take a load off and join his customers for a roast beef, pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich. The 37-year-old Studio City restaurant succumbed early Tuesday to the second half of a one-two punch--fire folded in the ceiling 24 hours after the quake crumbled the front wall.

Welcome to the Maraschino Cherry Orchard. The new kids on the block are replacing the Old Order in "The King of the Kosher Grocers" (at the Old Globe's Cassius Carter Centre Stage), but it's the same old syrupy sitcom Fantasyland we see nightly on television. Every cloud has a silver lining and every mini-crisis has a facile resolution. The check is always in the mail, old men revive their moribund sexuality, and matzo can sit on the shelf for 50 years without getting stale.

Confronting our first full plates of food at Quality, a small, pretty new cafe on 3rd Street near Fairfax Avenue, a person at my table said, "Are you sure this place isn't called Quantity?" Quality Food and Beverage is brought to you by the same people who created the ultra-hip Olive.

Ireland may boast the world's best oatmeal, a glory known as corned beef and cabbage, and an addictive concoction of potato and onion called champ (which you can taste at Gilliland's in Santa Monica), but Irish cuisine is still widely considered a mirage, a spate of blather with nothing behind it. Timmy Nolan's may do little to change people's minds, but this Toluca Lake pub has an energy that makes it a destination.

Should you decide to light a lantern and go in search of an honest corned beef on rye, don't go after sundown on Friday, since the deli that serves the best one, Western Kosher in La Jolla, unfailingly closes in time to observe the Jewish Sabbath.