I wrote editorial restaurant listings for a new online directory the Los Angeles Times was building in 2007. I also wrote food news briefs for The Guide, a short-lived print section published Thursdays as a weekend entertainment preview.
I used this as a platform to visit countless cupcake bakeries throughout L.A. and Orange County. This clip typifies my early cupcakology.
This Southern California roundup includes news of Crumbs, SusieCakes and a charity cupcake competition. It was posted on LA.com, a former publication of the LA Daily News.
Writing about food in this time and place, I observed the birth of Korean tacos and food trucks, both of which produced seismic shifts in the food and culture spheres.
I blogged about food trucks here in 2010.
In 2017, I had occasion to reflect on the Korean taco phenomenon, which, like the cupcakery, was born in L.A. and now so globally ubiquitous that its origins have blurred into the melting pot. This is a disservice to an essentially California creation that Jonathan Gold so eloquently described in the LA Weekly, writing in 2009:
“Kogi’s taco is a new paradigm of a restaurant, an art-directed take on Korean street food previously unimaginable in both California and Seoul: cheap, unbelievably delicious and unmistakably from Los Angeles, food that makes you feel plugged into the rhythms of the city just by eating it.”
As designer accessories for celebrities and aspirational fashionistas, Sprinkles Cupcakes occupy an equally distinctive place in contemporary L.A. culture.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 