Excerpts

But change in Los Angeles is often easier to track by looking at its restaurants rather than its boardrooms, and from the business end of a pair of chopsticks, extreme diversity didn’t look so bad. Sometimes equality, democracy and tolerance are virtues you fight for on distant battlefields, and sometimes they are as close as the frozen-food aisle at Vons. The neighborhood wasn’t tidy, but until those few hours in late April, it worked.

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It was the idea of the grand mosaic, of L.A.’s multicultural exceptionalism that melted down as well. For months, it became uncomfortable to stroll into a cafe off of Central Avenue for a plate of pigtails and greens, or even for a chili dog at Florence and Normandie, without having to confront the unspoken questions of why you were there, what you were looking for, and when you were planning to leave. Apparently “eat lunch” was not the appropriate answer.

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In retrospect, the strength of Los Angeles as a restaurant city may owe less to the average Angeleno’s cosmopolitanism than it does to the desire of homesick expatriates to reproduce exactly the tastes, the smells of their hometown. Here you can find the cooking not only of China, or even of metro Shanghai, but of Wuxi. The best-regarded Thai restaurant specializes in fishy, pungent dishes from coastal Southern Thailand. South-side street vendors peddle fermented cactus drinks unknown outside a 10-mile radius of the proprietor’s coastal Mexican hometown. A thousand tiny worlds.

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After the riots, L.A.’s insularity somehow fostered restaurants with a strength of purpose, even stronger and more specific than they had previously been. Mainstream restaurants began to find their inspiration within L.A.’s communities rather than outside them. You began to see chefs congregating at places like Guelaguetza and Sapp on their days off, and the standard Los Angeles style of service grew to become more like the shared-plates meals at local Japanese izakaya, or Thai coffee shops, or Korean pubs, or Mexican botana bars — almost as a sign of L.A. cultural literacy, but perhaps something more.

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The difference between high cuisine and street cuisine, between “ethnic” cooking and American food, began to fade. Some of the best new “mainstream” restaurants of the last couple of years — Lukshon, Spice Table, LaOn, Post & Beam — were opened by classically trained chefs looking outward from their traditions rather than inward.