Lifestyle
Come for the comfort food, stay for the jungle oasis at this L.A. chef’s plant-filled cafes
Standing behind the counter of Yuko Curry in downtown Los Angeles, Yuko Watanabe inspired a hesitant buyer to take a stroll via her “secret plant tunnel” — a fascinating, moss- and plants-covered stairway shaft that connects the bottom ground of her restaurant to the second-story loft.
“Go forward and have a look,” Watanabe mentioned as she gestured on the set up, unbothered that the customer gravitated towards the vegetation and never the menu.
It’s nothing new. For practically 14 years, Watanabe has introduced her distinctive strategy to Japanese consolation meals and biophilic design to her three eating places: Yuko Kitchen within the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles, Yuko Curry in downtown L.A. and, a couple of doorways down on fifth Road, Yuko Kitchen: DTLA.
Overflowing with vegetation of each form and measurement — pothos, ferns, rubber vegetation, Dracaena fragrans ‘Lemon Lime,’ you identify it — and adorned with colourful hand-painted murals and chandeliers dripping with ferns (her favourite) and succulents, Watanabe’s eating places have grow to be standard on Instagram and TikTok, because of her capacity to create magic with on a regular basis objects like trash cans, moss, paper and paint.
A chandelier manufactured from vegetation inside Yuko Curry in DTLA.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
You by no means know what is going to occur while you plant a seed, however Watanabe’s uncanny capacity to fuse meals with flora has secured Yuko Kitchen’s status as a must-see Los Angeles vacation spot, very like the vegetation which have overtaken her eating rooms and outside patios.
Many individuals acknowledge Watanabe, even when she’s carrying a masks: Downtown canine walkers greet her on the sidewalk. Clients ask about her beloved 16-year-old German shepherd, Genki. Not too long ago, she was even noticed whereas procuring at Complete Meals. “A lady got here as much as me and requested me if I’m Yuko from Yuko Kitchen.” she mentioned. “She advised me she follows me on Instagram and is an enormous fan of my eating places.” Watanabe, who was touched to listen to that folks love what she is doing, can’t resist a contact of humility. “I used to be simply glad it occurred at Complete Meals and never at a fast-food joint whereas I’m pigging out on greasy meals,” she added with amusing.
The previous two years have been robust for eating places and Watanabe particularly. When Los Angeles eating places have been compelled to shut indoor eating throughout the stay-at-home order, she struggled to maintain her three eating places afloat. Depressed by the sight of her empty tables, she determined to fill them with a profusion of vegetation.
Crops grasp from the ceiling and relaxation in pots at Yuko Kitchen: DTLA.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
“No one might come inside,” she mentioned of the restaurant closures. “All of the tables have been empty with the chairs upside-down on them. So I began including tons of vegetation. Ultimately, folks requested me if I wished to promote them. I began including increasingly vegetation, and earlier than I knew it, it was like a humongous jungle indoors. Now folks need to see extra jungle!”
Inspired by the curiosity, she determined to present it a attempt. She added vegetation to the menu and started promoting greenery alongside her staples: Senecio with sushi, prayer vegetation with pumpkin mochi cookies, calathea together with her well-known mint lemonade. And it labored. “Individuals purchased vegetation like loopy throughout the pandemic,” she mentioned.
Then, simply days earlier than Los Angeles eating places have been cleared to renew indoor eating in 2020, rioters focused Yuko Kitchen in downtown Los Angeles as a part of the nationwide protests that erupted following the homicide of George Floyd.
Inside Yuko Kitchen’s eating room.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
After her constructing supervisor alerted her to the rioters exterior Yuko Kitchen, she drove downtown at 1 a.m. and defended her eating places armed with a brush.
Animated movies by Hayao Miyazaki display at Yuko Kitchen within the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles.
(Lisa Boone / Los Angeles Instances)
“I yelled at them, ‘Why are you attacking me?’” she recalled. “I advised them, ‘I’m a minority. I’ve constructed this small enterprise from scratch.’” Trying again, she doesn’t imagine she was focused due to her race. “It was a celebration,” she mentioned, earlier than including with a smile: “A good friend advised me that I ought to get a sponsorship from the broom firm.”
Requested if she was afraid, she recollects feeling fearless. “It was like in Japanese anime the place you get a superpower if you find yourself in peril,” she mentioned.
Watanabe, 44, is heat and open and has an exquisite humorousness. She will also be agency and outspoken, just like the time she advised the drug sellers who congregated exterior her restaurant to seek out one other nook. On Instagram, she tends to share her struggles truthfully, whether or not it’s coping with despair throughout the pandemic or confronting businessmen who mock her Japanese accent and presume she is unintelligent.
It’s this type of humanity that has impressed not simply her loyal prospects however her staff as nicely. Kathleen Deloso, who labored at Yuko Kitchen throughout 2019 and 2020, describes Watanabe as an “unimaginable powerhouse” who managed to thrive throughout the pandemic. “Issues have been so complicated, and there have been a variety of fast adjustments that have been essential to make the enterprise run,” she mentioned. “However Yuko owned it. She stored going. As a fellow Asian American, it was so inspiring for me to work with such a powerful Asian American girl.”
Yuko Watanabe contained in the plant tunnel she put in at Yuko Curry.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
Watanabe was born and raised in Japan, the place she grew up within the countryside and was surrounded by nature. “It was like Malibu — seashore and mountains — however with out the wealthy folks,” she mentioned.
Her mother and father liked to prepare dinner, and he or she grew up cooking and consuming with them in her household’s kitchen. Her upbringing would in the end affect the nostalgic passions that make her three eating places so particular: nature and cooking.
Crops on the market inside Yuko Curry in DTLA.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
“Something that I felt or touched or noticed once I was rising up has impressed my work,” she mentioned. “My installations and work signify how I really feel. I feel the fantastic thing about what I do comes from my childhood.”
In her teenagers, Watanabe labored as a pastry chef. When she moved to Los Angeles at 21, she struggled to discover a job as a pastry chef, so she labored as a sushi chef. She labored at a variety of completely different eating places however wished her personal place. She finally determined to open a restaurant that will mix her abilities as a pastry chef with the Japanese consolation meals she favored to eat every single day.
In 2008, she opened Yuko Kitchen in a tiny cafe positioned simply off of Wilshire Boulevard, not removed from the El Rey Theatre. “I painted the partitions and adorned the restaurant with stuff that I might afford,” she mentioned. “I didn’t have a lot cash, so I painted it on my own and acquired vegetation to brighten. I labored Monday to Saturday all day, every single day. As a substitute of visiting my mates, I stayed within the restaurant with Genki and painted the partitions one after the other. Earlier than I knew it, all the partitions had some type of a portray by me. I added colour and flowers, and that’s how I began. Then I began including extra vegetation, and it grew to become a jungle.”
Clients are surrounded by vegetation as they dine inside Yuko Kitchen: DTLA.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
“The place has a variety of persona,” Deloso mentioned. “Yuko is so inventive, and it exhibits in every little thing she does. Whenever you stroll into her eating places, it’s like a jungle oasis. Every thing from the vegetation to the meals has a Yuko contact. I’m actually excited and glad to see how a lot her eating places have grown because the starting of the pandemic.”
At the moment, most however not all the vegetation are on the market, along with plant equipment together with pebbles, planters and watering cans. Nonetheless, Watanabe can’t half with those which were rising in her eating places for years. “Everybody needs the large vegetation, however I don’t assume I can promote them as a result of they’re so glad right here,” she mentioned. “I don’t assume they are going to be comfy in another person’s home. In addition to, what’s the magnificence of shopping for an enormous plant? Purchase a small one and watch it develop; that’s the fantastic thing about nature.”
Though she values her neighborhood, Watanabe describes herself as an introvert and cherishes Sundays — her lone time off — when she will be able to spend time at residence, alone with Genki.
“After I’m portray and doing installations, it’s an enormous a part of my remedy,” she mentioned. “You’ll be able to’t keep away from folks working in a restaurant, so I discover my time alone to be valuable. That’s when so a lot of my concepts take flight.”
Yuko Watanabe’s plant tunnel at Misplaced Books in Montrose.
(Lisa Boone / Los Angeles Instances )
In the course of the peak of the pandemic, when it felt as if her life was a sequence of limitless pivots, she remodeled her eating places into plant outlets. Now, folks come from throughout L.A. to dine in her greenery-filled eating places, store for vegetation and expertise probably the most comforting eating experiences in Los Angeles. For a lot of, her plant installations have grow to be a joy-filled respite in a season stuffed with COVID fatigue.
“I would like folks to come back in and see the vegetation and revel in them,” Watanabe mentioned of the residing tunnel at Yuko Curry, certainly one of a number of installations she has created all through Los Angeles, together with a shocking tunnel composed of 365 vegetation at Misplaced Books in Montrose. “It’s so nice to be within the tunnel. I feel folks ought to expertise it. You don’t typically have an opportunity to be surrounded by that many vegetation.”
Yuko Watanabe inside her restaurant Yuko Kitchen, positioned in DTLA.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Instances)
Sooner or later, she’d like to purchase a farm and develop her personal greens for the restaurant.
She might additionally see herself making a film set with a “large dinner desk stuffed with unique meals I create in my fantasy backyard. It’s why all of us reside and chase goals in Hollywood, proper?”
Within the quick time period, although, she just lately accomplished a pair of life-size palm timber and a soccer discipline set up for the Tremendous Bowl Expertise on the Los Angeles Conference Heart this month.
As we enter the third yr of the pandemic, it’s laborious to think about what the longer term will carry. Will the seeds that she has planted take root? Watanabe is hopeful. “I really feel like I’ve much more concepts following the pandemic and much more goals about what I need to do,” she mentioned.
“No matter occurs in my life, to this point, I’m very grateful.”
That is the most recent in a sequence we name Plant PPL, the place we interview folks of colour within the plant world. When you’ve got any strategies for PPL to incorporate in our sequence, tag us on Instagram @latimesplants.
John Amos in 2007.
Nick Ut/AP
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Nick Ut/AP
John Amos taught me what it was like to grow up with a father in the house – and to be one.
That’s because Amos – who died in August at the age of 84, though his death wasn’t disclosed publicly until Tuesday – first came to my attention playing righteous dad James Evans, Sr. on the legendary 1970s sitcom Good Times.
As a young, Black boy growing up in a home without my father in Gary, Ind., the best window I had into what it might be like to have a concerned, powerful, ethical male in the house was seeing how James Sr. worked with Esther Rolle’s Florida Evans to keep their kids on track. It didn’t hurt that this new kind of TV family lived in what appeared to be Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, about 40 miles northwest of Gary.
Good Times presented the first network TV sitcom centered on a two-parent, Black family – in fact, Rolle herself had initially insisted that Good Times’ family have a father – and it meant a lot to a kid who sometimes longed for that in his own life.
James Sr., as Amos played him, was imposing and could get physical – he once gave a whipping to a friend of his youngest son Michael, when that friend dared to disrespect the family and refused to do homework during a sleepover. (Yup, stuff like that happened in my neighborhood all the time.) But he was also a loving, devoted, hard-working dad, who often balanced several jobs while trying to give his kids everything they needed to build lives outside of a deprived, occasionally dangerous neighborhood.
There was little doubt James Sr. could be tender in ways that fathers in my neighborhood rarely were in real life.
Resisting a racist TV industry
It wasn’t until I got older that I realized Amos also embodied another important reality: the Black actor had to use all his talents and wiles to make his way – constantly struggling to subvert and overcome the racist demands of a white-centered TV and film industry.
On Good Times, that meant fighting with producers of the show, including legendary executive producer Norman Lear, when the show’s scripts began focusing more on Jimmie Walker’s character, James Evans Jr., or “J.J.”
J.J.’s habit of shouting “dyn-o-MITE!” while bugging his eyes after dropping a cheeky rhyme recalled classic “coon”-style stereotypes for Black performers from the past. And Amos often recounted how much that irked him back then.
“I felt too much emphasis was being put on J.J. and his chicken hat and saying ‘dynomite’ every third page,” Amos told the Archive of American Television in a 2014 interview. “But I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days. And they got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes…That taught me a lesson. That I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show or to Norman Lear’s plans.”
Ralph Carter, Esther Rolle, John Amos, Jimmie Walker, and BernNadette Stanis gather in the kitchen during a scene from Good Times in 1975.
CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
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CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Lear admitted in his 2014 memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, that the attention showered on J.J. made Amos so “glum and dispirited,” that the producer wound up writing the actor out of the show at the start of the series’ fourth season.
Just like that, the two-parent Black family that had inspired me so much was undone – fractured by an offscreen car accident that claimed James Sr.’s life.
A TV pioneer who became the image of Black fatherhood
I didn’t know about the backstage struggles back then, but even as a young viewer I could see that something important had been lost. Turns out, Amos wasn’t just another actor spouting off about a supporting player outshining him; he had begun his show business career as a writer/performer – one of his early jobs in 1969 was as a writer on The Leslie Uggams Show. Amos knew how important quality words were for great acting.
His first big part came in 1970 as Gordy Howard, the weatherman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show – the series’ only Black character – which put Amos on the map and caught Lear’s attention when they were casting Good Times. And not long after he left Good Times, Amos landed another legendary job – playing the adult version of Kunta Kinte, the enslaved man at the heart of ABC’s surprise 1977 miniseries hit, Roots.
In fact, Roots was a bit of showbiz sleight of hand. Well aware that white audiences might grow uncomfortable with a miniseries centered on the family history of African American author Alex Haley and its early genesis in slavery, producers of Roots often cast Black actors as enslaved people who white audiences already knew and loved.
Amos, with his history on popular shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Good Times, fit perfectly as a grown up version of the character then-newcomer LeVar Burton played as a young man. (The moment when a slave catcher cuts off Kunta Kinte’s foot after an escape attempt remains seared in my brain, nearly 50 years after originally seeing it on TV.)
For me, the one-two punch of his parts on Good Times and Roots cemented Amos as a towering image of Black fatherhood in pop culture.
Back then, Black performers were working hard to take scripts crafted by white producers and make their characters as authentic as possible, balancing the expectations of Black audiences hungry for better representation with a white-dominated industry often stuck in old, demeaning patterns.
Amos could make his points forcefully. He told the Archive of American Television about blowing up at a white, British director on Roots who seemed unconcerned about a Black baby shivering during a night shoot.
Hearing the former pro football player tell stories about occasionally threatening white producers and directors to get his way, I saw a familiar dynamic. Sometimes, when the system is geared against you, intimidation is the only way to make your concerns truly heard.
An actor beloved by Black and white audiences
Over the years, Amos’ classic roles in TV and film piled up: Hunter, Coming to America, The West Wing (as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Let’s Do It Again, Die Hard 2, and much, much more. He’s even reportedly in the new spinoff series Suits: LA, as his last role.
(In a sad denouement, after conflicts between Amos’ children, his daughter Shannon Amos found out about her father’s death on Tuesday when media outlets reported it, according to her Instagram post.)
But for me, Amos’ greatest legacy remains as a TV pioneer who played proud, Black male characters with strong ethics and a devotion to family just when Black audiences needed to see them most – surviving a load of slights, fights and punishments in the process.
Word Central Kitchen has partnered with Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ to help provide meals for the Asheville, N.C., community.
World Central Kitchen/WCK.org
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World Central Kitchen/WCK.org
Jamie McDonald has provided hot meals in danger zones from Ukraine to Turkey as a volunteer with World Central Kitchen.
Now, the Connecticut restaurateur is partnering with the global charity led by chef José Andrés to provide free meals to residents in Asheville, N.C., where McDonald also has restaurant locations. Days after the remnants of Hurricane Helene devastated the area, Asheville residents have limited access to clean water and everyday necessities.
The western North Carolina city is one of several areas in the region facing catastrophic damage from the hurricane’s aftermath. More than 15 inches of rain fell in the area, which is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, adding to an already saturated terrain from recent storms. Roads have been closed because of downed trees, flooding and mudslides.
As of Tuesday, at least 370,000 customers were still without power across the region, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety said. More than 440 people had been rescued and nearly 4,700 had been evacuated, it said. At least 57 people have died in Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, because of the storm, officials said Wednesday afternoon.
McDonald, co-owner of Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ, which also has restaurants in Connecticut, arrived in Asheville on Monday to help with relief efforts. He has been a volunteer for two years with the World Central Kitchen, an organization founded by Andrés. McDonald has helped provide thousands of meals for those in need through the organization, including refugees who fled Ukraine and those impacted by earthquakes in Turkey and Morocco.
Now his restaurant is partnering with the World Central Kitchen to help in Asheville.
“The Asheville community has always been at the heart of our mission, and we are committed to helping it recover,” McDonald said in a statement. “With World Central Kitchen by our side, we aim to provide not just food, but hope and comfort during this difficult time.”
Free meals are being given out every day — first come, first serve — beginning at noon, the restaurant said on social media. There were 2,000 to 2,500 people who walked up for a free meal on Tuesday, Marine Baedor, a spokesperson for the restaurant told NPR. The restaurant is slowly getting electricity back but is running on generators and using wood to fuel the smokers to cook the meals, the Baedor said.
They have also partnered with other restaurants in the Asheville area. Community members from Lewisburg, W.Va., cooked and delivered 500 meals that included encouraging notes written by students from Greenbrier Community School.
People in Asheville, N.C., line up for a meal outside Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ on Monday.
World Central Kitchen/WCK.org
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World Central Kitchen/WCK.org
Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ is also providing free, potable water all day on Wednesday and residents are asked to bring their own containers, Baedor said.
While they are committed to ensuring the community is fed, staff members at the restaurant who live in the area are also dealing with Helene’s aftermath.
“The staff who were able to leave their homes didn’t hesitate to jump into action right away. But there are some who are still stuck in their homes because of trees and blocked roads. All staff are accounted for and are OK,” Baedor said.
The restaurant has raised more than $11,000 in donations through a fundraiser with the World Central Kitchen as of Wednesday afternoon.
“With the donations, the goal currently is to be able to provide 18,000 meals a day with restaurant partners,” Baedor said.
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