@skinnylatte
I feel very fortunate to live in LA at the same time I want move out it.
If I do move, I will certainly miss the food.
People have no idea how much of a foodie city LA is. Even those that live here.
I would be interested what your favorite places were here.
I’m just as happy with the food scene in LA as I am with Singapore / Taipei / Bangkok. I don’t say that lightly. At some point it’s a quality of life thing for me. I don’t want to live somewhere where I’m not obsessed and really happy with the food (SF)
A LA foodie friend helped me put it in perspective. He was like, after demographic changes in SF due to cost, SF food is sort of like Santa Monica. Sure, you get a few nice gems here and there, but there is a lot of BS food. BS food made for someone who is very much not me.
Oakland / Fremont / San Jose are where I might go to get the foods made for immigrants by immigrants. And that’s what I do.
But that doesn’t take away from my sadness of ‘I really don’t like BS food where I live’
I know some SF friends are absolutely befuddled at how strongly i feel about the food scene there. But I really don’t like most of it. I have like, a few restaurants I love, and a deep dislike for all the rest of it. I just cook, or get in BART and go somewhere else these days instead of complaining about it now.
But after 3 days in LA, I’m so sad about it again. I think on many levels SF just isn’t for me, and I feel a little stuck and unhappy.
The main difference is, on every major food group I care about, I feel the ‘good enough’ places in LA are as good as (whatever Asian city you name). The best places in SF are worse than the meh places back home. I’ve become an extremely good cook, but having only lived in the world’s best food cities, living like that is somewhat depressing to me.
And I also feel very gaslit being told how it’s so great apparently
The really sad thing was, said LA foodie friend was like (while driving me around in East LA for tacos), you know back in the day SF was a bit like this (in terms of culture, food)
And I wish I experienced that version of the city.
My first visit was 2012, in the heat of Uber / Lyft / tech growth, I moved there in 2018. Mostly I’ve found a comfy little patch for my family but lately ive been feeling this deep desire to go elsewhere
@skinnylatte we lived in SF 2009-2010 and 2016-2019. Even in those six years, the city got very noticeably more and more -- artificial? I guess? It didn't feel like a real place. It felt like there were some real people but the vast majority of SF proper became geared towards a specific slice of person. It all beiged out.
@skinnylatte Oakland was way better in terms of feeling like a real place, we just couldn't find a decent sized apartment there that we could afford and would take cats. And public transportation felt harder in East Bay than SF proper, which already wasn't a high bar.
@skinnylatte when we first moved to LA (we lived in LA 2014-2015 and 2019-2022) I didn't expect to like it very much. The irony is that despite LA's reputation for being "plastic," that's actually a very small segment of the city, and there's a ton of the city that's great and real and interesting.
@skinnylatte transportation is not good in LA, but it's still my favorite city in North America. Having lived basically my entire adult life in the US but still missing Singapore and SEA food every day, LA's growing food scene really hit home for me. It has recent immigrants cooking food that's not for Americanized audiences. It has those 2nd- and 3rd-gen immigrants cooking real fusion in the best way and I love that.
@samantha yes, and that is such an interesting mix. Even more interesting than NYC (which has a separate set of other good things). But I truly feel at home in LA food culture.
@skinnylatte NYC's sheer volume of food and different stuff everywhere is impressive and you can find real gems there. But the percentage of amazing vs. overall is higher in LA (for me and my palate) than in NY.
@skinnylatte and I find that most people in LA are just less insular. They spend time around and with people with different backgrounds. There's of course a stratospheric layer of wealth that doesn't (and this is true in every city or geography around the world), but normal people's social circles are diverse in a way that's not contrived.
@samantha now having a delicious jujube tea at Ye Cafe and thinking of how my dad would make this for me, and how.. I wouldn’t know where to get that where I live :) and certainly not at 7:30pm
@skinnylatte the best thing about SF food-wise to me was the produce. But you can get produce JUST as good in LA. The Hollywood farmers market is a revelation, as is the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market.
@skinnylatte and the Japanese food scene in SF was just super disappointing. Really ridiculously expensive and the vast majority of the time mediocre in addition to being expensive. How and why, I just don't understand lol.
@skinnylatte I did have a super spendy kaiseki meal in LA that I considered worth every cent at Hayato Sushi. It rivaled upscale Japanese omakase I've had in Singapore and Japan. Would do again -- just have to save up for it.
@skinnylatte I do think that living in LA is very hard if you don't drive. Getting out to Alhambra for dim sum, going down to Westminster for a+ pho and banh mi, going to farmers markets, etc., all basically impossible without a car. LA's public transit is still very behind.
@skinnylatte I am sad to agree with you entirely wrt SF’s food scene but hope we can bring back a better food landscape after fixing our town’s affordability problem that has everything but one industry in a stranglehold for continued survival much less revival. IMO is has gotten worse over the last decade and so this is not a constant of SF but a part of the cycle. I tell myself SF goes in waves and so it can’t be like this forever. We may one day have a better food scene here.
@skinnylatte I saw you posting about the East Bay. Unless you're in rent control in SF, moving to East Bay might get you the things about the SF Bay Area that are superior to LA but also get you some of the things you like about LA.
I think LA has great things and SF people dog it way too much, but I also think the weather/landscape up north is better. Although being from a hotter clime, you'd probably like LA's weather better too.
How are you on West Side LA vs. San Gabriel Valley?
@skinnylatte When I moved to the Bay Area from Tokyo in the 90s everyone kept telling me how great the food was in SF. Well, hmmmm, after Tokyo it was a real let down in pretty much all cuisines. Now in NZ we cook for ourselves or travel but living here has many other benefits.
@sumisu3 there are a few gems but you have to really look, and I always say the best places to me in the Bay Area would be super hyped and ridiculously popular if they were in LA. But the Bay Area cares about a diff set of metrics
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