Introduction
Welcome to our citywide festival
Have you got your May all sorted out? I’m planning to spend most of mine at the second annual Food Bowl, the Times’ delicious monthlong celebration of food, farms, chefs and the arts, everything that conspires to make Los Angeles one of the greatest eating cities in the world. This May, there will be not just a Beast Feast but an animal-free No Beast Feast; not just exclusive dinners but a free-flowing Night Market in the glow of City Hall. I’m looking forward to a sustainable-seafood dinner at Manhattan Beach, a celebration of Sichuan cooking in the San Gabriel Valley and a food-film festival around the city. Some of the world’s best chefs will be flying in, including Virgilio Martínez from Lima, Ben Shewry from Melbourne, Gabriela Cámara from Mexico City, Yu Bo from Chengdu and Yoshihiro Narisawa from Tokyo. Copenhagen’s Nadine Redzepi will chat about home cooking in the shadow of Scandinavia’s most famous restaurant, and New Zealand’s Monique Fiso will plan a Maori feast. José Andrés will talk about feeding hundreds of thousands of meals in Puerto Rico to citizens displaced by Hurricane Maria. This year’s Food Bowl is the biggest food festival in the history of Los Angeles. And I can hardly wait.