Hot Sauce

The building that is likely to be the biggest commercial real estate development started in Los Angeles County this year is not part of a movie studio, aerospace venture or other type of business readily associated with the area. It's all about hot sauce. Huy Fong Foods, best known as the maker of Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce with a rooster depicted on the label, broke ground this week on a 655,000-square-foot, $40-million headquarters and factory in Irwindale. The project will nearly triple the space occupied by Huy Fong, which now operates out of two buildings in Rosemead that it will give up when the new facility is finished.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers, fittingly, are singing about the City of Angels on the jukebox when Dexter Holland walks into a Long Beach bar at lunchtime, pulls off his sunglasses and reaches for a menu. Like the members of the Chili Peppers, Holland is a signature star on the Southern California rock scene -- his Orange County punk-pop band, the Offspring, has sold 17 million albums in the U.S.

Like the best cocktails, the best bar food usually has a secret ingredient. The secret behind the Anchor Bar's Buffalo wings recipe came out a few years ago. What is it? Hot sauce, that bar staple hidden in plain sight, beside the taps, by the lemon wedges and napkins. But not just any hot sauce: Purists insist that it has to be Frank's RedHot sauce, which first appeared in 1920. The company has branched out since then, a success generated in no small part by the famous Buffalo wings.

David Tran is a Vietnamese refugee and a successful American entrepreneur, but the best evidence that his business is one more cog in the vast machinery of global commerce -- licit and illicit -- comes from what we might call the Great Hot Sauce Counterfeiting Caper. No one is ever surprised to hear about Chinese factories assiduously knocking off Rolex watches or Windows software.

You won't hear them much on the radio. You won't see them at any of Los Angeles' more mainstream jazz hubs, like Catalina's or the Jazz Bakery. You won't read much about them in the local press, aside from the odd review. So where can you glimpse the underground world of L.A.'s genre-fusing jazz improvisers? At a Salvadoran restaurant in Culver City, Carlos Rodriguez's Con Sabor Club Tropical.

Archeologists digging at the site of a black-owned saloon in a historic Old West mining town have unearthed a 130-year-old bottle of hot sauce. The oldest style of Tabasco bottle known to exist was reconstructed from 21 shards excavated from beneath the site of the Boston Saloon of Virginia City, Nev., about 20 miles southeast of Reno.

Surely it's no accident that i feel so at home in Southern California, even though I grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The spiky aloes and purple jacarandas, the periodic droughts and the acrid smell of brush fires are all familiar. And then, as now, I was not far from an international border. Just a passport stamp away were cheap wine, exotic music and bullfights in small, dusty arenas.

The American coot. By definition, Fulica americana is a black, ducklike migratory water fowl that ranges from British Columbia to South America, passing through Southern California each winter like an uninvited in-law. It's not particularly attractive, isn't all that graceful and, depending on whom you talk to, is either crafty as a fox or dumb as, well, an old coot.

Mo Hotta Mo Betta, the hot sauce mail-order outfit, kept getting complaints from habanero-guzzling parents whose children wanted to eat hot sauce like Mom and Dad but whose palates were too tender. The company tested dozens of sauces on 100 children aged 4 to 16 and came up with four that were widely liked, ranging from Cool Baby (a slightly spicy ketchup) through Wild Child (a barbecue sauce) and Crazy Kid (chipotle-based) to Screaming Teen (a jalapeno sauce).