Ethnic Foods

Across the town of San Fernando, in kitchens where pigs' feet hang from clothespins and caldrons bubble with murky soup, families are gearing up for a historic event that may put this city on the culinary map: a menudo cook-off. The soup made from cow's stomach, pigs' feet and hominy is quintessentially Mexican, and this Sunday San Fernando will sponsor its first menudo festival to celebrate its Mexican American heritage.

For 25 years, the Lucky K.T. Noodle Factory in El Monte has been making fresh rice noodles for hundreds of Asian restaurants and supermarkets in Los Angeles and around the country. But a state law requiring manufacturers to refrigerate the pasta instead of allowing it to be stored at room temperature threatens to alter a long-held Asian tradition, said factory owner Tom Thong. "The health inspectors don't understand our culture," said Thong, 53. "We've been eating it this way for thousands of years and we've never had a problem.

Italian sausage and flan aren't threatening frankfurters and apple pie as yet, but Americans seem to be increasingly willing to experiment in their diets. Members of the post-World War II baby boom generation are leading the revolution in food tastes. Contributing to the nation's changing diet are the trend toward smaller households and an increase in the median age, both of which tend to lead to increased use of restaurants and prepared foods.

The turtle tank at Nam Hoa Fish Market is empty, but not to worry: The manager of this bustling Chinatown store says he has plenty in back. "Big ones," he says, spreading his hands as wide as a Christmas turkey. He nods to a worker, who slides a large, waxed-cardboard box from a stack behind the counter and strips off the lid. Inside is a squirming burlap bag, from which he dumps two 15-pound softshell turtles that hit the concrete with a clop, then flail helplessly on their backs.

Sitting in his sleek Melrose Avenue restaurant, Tommy Tang piles pieces of curried chicken, meekrob noodles and sprigs of fresh mint onto a bed of romaine lettuce, rolls it and dips it into a vinaigrette sauce. "If you eat Thai food every day, you automatically lose weight," says the chef and restaurateur in between bites. "I can eat like a pig and never gain weight."

What does an Israeli woman married to a Chinese man buy in a Japanese supermarket in Mar Vista? Would you believe, chocolate covered macadamia nuts from Hawaii? That, at least, was one item in Rachel Chung's basket as she headed toward the checkout stand recently at Yaohan market. Two Fuji apples and a chocolate-filled sponge cake from a Japanese bakery filled out her order. "We like to try new things," said Chung, who owns a shop called the "Flower Connection" in Gardena.

Ethnic food lovers have been bombarded with so much bad news lately, can a support group and 800 line be far behind? Chinese, Italian and now Mexican restaurant meals have all been skewered as unhealthy in recent surveys by researchers from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the same spoilsports who bad-mouthed movie-theater popcorn. In the latest study, released last week by the Washington, D.C.-based consumer organization, chiles rellenos took the heat.

Nearly every culture has found some irresistible way to fry dough: In Israel, there are the jelly-filled sufganiyot; in China, a twisted dough stick known as you tiao; and then there are the funnel cakes of Pennsylvania Dutch country. We can thank Spanish explorers for the skinny, crispy treats called churros--sold throughout South- ern California, from Disneyland to historic Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles.

For 25 years, the Lucky K.T. Noodle Factory in El Monte has been making fresh rice noodles for hundreds of Asian restaurants and supermarkets in Los Angeles and around the country. But a state law requiring manufacturers to refrigerate the pasta instead of allowing it to be stored at room temperature threatens to alter a long-held Asian tradition, said factory owner Tom Thong. "The health inspectors don't understand our culture," said Thong, 53. "We've been eating it this way for thousands of years and we've never had a problem.

In the early days when soul food restaurant Reign was red-hot, it almost seemed to Gerry Garvin that chickens could fly. "We'd get 75, 80 orders of fried chicken a night. A night," said Garvin, inaugural executive chef at the Beverly Hills supper club, who now owns G. Garvin's on West 3rd Street. Reign was launched by National Football League standout Keyshawn Johnson in 1999. The crisp, golden poultry parts virtually flew out the kitchen.

Growing up in a Native American community in Oregon, Jack Strong ate a lot of canned meat and processed cheese, handouts from the Department of Agriculture. Strong wasn't exposed to most traditional Native American foods until two years ago, when he began working as the chef de cuisine at Kai, the AAA five-diamond restaurant at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort in Chandler, Ariz. Now he cooks with as many native ingredients as possible, including plenty of beans, corn and cactus.

You hear it from a block away: an amplified, singsong call with an uncanny power to slice through the urban din. The tone is cheap and tinny -- as kitschy as a sound can be. And it's my favorite in Mexico City. Listen now, as it nears, the nasal-toned male voice stretching out syllables and pauses, again and again, into a verse so familiar it could be the unofficial anthem of this vast city, a kind of culinary call to prayer. "Ri-cos ta-ma-les oaxa-que-nos!"

THERE ARE two kinds of fusion cooking. The first kind is self-conscious about its fusion; it exists in order to cross boundaries. It loudly proclaims its own eclecticism with emblematic ingredients -- you know, like tuna sashimi tacos with pomegranate-tahini sauce. It's theatrical fusion. But in Southern California, there's another kind of fusion cooking. It's happening in homes when someone dips a tortilla chip into some hummus, and it's happening in small neighborhood restaurants and cafes.

When Dada Ngo opened a Cajun-style crayfish restaurant in the heart of Orange County's Vietnamese enclave, she worried whether it would survive. Crayfish was popular fare along the Gulf Coast where she had lived, but the red-clawed crustaceans were alien to most West Coast Vietnamese diners. Some thought crayfish were fish. They were intimidated when what looked like tiny lobsters were brought from the kitchen in steaming plastic bags and dumped on the table.

AS dragons run and dance down Bolsa Avenue in Westminster during this Saturday's Tet parade celebrating the lunar New Year, the restaurants of Little Saigon will be opening their doors to floods of revelers. Many of the thousands of Vietnamese Americans who throng to the district for the holiday carnivals, concerts and events will head for favorite places that cook the regional dishes they grew up eating.

Business couldn't have been better in the narrow shop where Hussain Ali Rasheed's three workers raced to keep up with the demand for Baghdad's most basic need. As lunchtime approached, a crowd of old men, women in black robes and children waving 1,000-dinar bills clamored for their daily khubz. Rasheed distributed the floppy disks of browned flatbread from a cloth-covered table and stuffed the bills he was given into a drawer.

Jollibee, the biggest fast-food chain in the Philippines, came to California four years ago with hopes that its pineapple-topped burgers and spaghetti-and-hot dog concoctions would fuel a rapid U.S. expansion. But with just eight stores in California, Jollibee has only half the restaurants it expected to have by now, and Jollibee Foods Corp. officials said per-store sales are 30% below projections.

Yuji Kawana watched as a conveyor belt carried row after row of bright pink-and-white fish cakes shaped like smooth, split logs into a massive steamer. Like his grandfather and father, Kawana makes kamaboko. For more than six decades, his family has satisfied what was once a craving unique to Japanese immigrants for the rubbery cakes made from a fish paste called surimi.

believed her. I do have photographic evidence. More important, I have the memory of a unique experience that reminded me how colorful, diverse and, yes, educational street market foods are. Eating scorpions, say, exposes the adventurous traveler to a new taste and demonstrates that all food aesthetics are relative; it also reflects the historic fact that billions of humans have had to consume whatever's available. I began this adventure as a boy in Mexico.

Inside the UCLA exhibit case, the family cookbooks offer generations of recipes and traditions that have persisted beyond place and time in America's Middle Eastern diaspora communities. There is "Assyrian Cookery: Exotic Foods that Outlasted a Civilization" and the "Iraqi Family Cookbook: From Mosul to America." There are Palestinian cookbooks from 1960s Detroit, and Armenian cookbooks from 1920s Boston.