By Laura Medina
After The New York Times and later founded and published the lifestyle magazine Simplycity and being the CEO of Vivienne Tam, a fashion company and, prior to that, the Managing Director of Assouline, a French creative advertising agency, Danielle Chang was brave and smart enough to collect her journalistic insight and commercial contacts to found the roving Asian-anything cuisine food festival, Lucky Rice.
Knowing the history of how prevalent Chinese-American cuisine is, from small-town America to the Big Apple, Lucky Rice Food Festival highlights the best Asian restaurants that the festival is in, whether it be Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas.
Well, Lucky Chow is the television form of Lucky Rice, on PBS's Create Channel.
Danielle Chang rejects the macho-snarkiness of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" and Andrew Zimmerman's stunt-eating and unfamiliar cuisine is "freak food" of his Travel Channel show, "Bizarre Food." She, of course, imparts a more feminine, humane, empathetic approach to the subject matters making the food. They're not freaks. They're people.
Being human, of course, she doesn't like everything that crosses her plate. In one Los Angeles-based episode, she was so taken by the hospitality and the generosity from a temple that it helps her overcame her distaste of their cooking.
This is what makes her "Lucky Chow" tv show differentiate from an increasingly-crowded travel/food/culture shows proliferating the airwaves.
Danielle dives deep, not in depth of a specific cuisine where culture, climate, and religion do impact dietary laws but in width, in how wide spread Asian has become, that it is becomes an cuisine unto itself, Asian-American.
This recent Lucky Rice Los Angele Food Festival represents the best of what California has to offer in Asian-American cuisine...and culture. The acceptance of Asian food and flavor represents the progress of multiple generation of a culture that morphs and being accepted into American society....
Sure, there is good ole reliable ramen noodle in pork, a college and twenty-something mainstay...
But really highlight of the food fete is something so normal that you can easily incorporate it into your life without any resistance, Asian-flavored popcorn, in sugar-glazed matcha tea powder, Mexican-American Fiesta Pop, and All-American Cinna-Pop, http://poppaspopcorn.com/.
The most revolutionary is sometimes the most simple.
Being human, of course, she doesn't like everything that crosses her plate. In one Los Angeles-based episode, she was so taken by the hospitality and the generosity from a temple that it helps her overcame her distaste of their cooking.
This is what makes her "Lucky Chow" tv show differentiate from an increasingly-crowded travel/food/culture shows proliferating the airwaves.
Danielle dives deep, not in depth of a specific cuisine where culture, climate, and religion do impact dietary laws but in width, in how wide spread Asian has become, that it is becomes an cuisine unto itself, Asian-American.
This recent Lucky Rice Los Angele Food Festival represents the best of what California has to offer in Asian-American cuisine...and culture. The acceptance of Asian food and flavor represents the progress of multiple generation of a culture that morphs and being accepted into American society....
Sure, there is good ole reliable ramen noodle in pork, a college and twenty-something mainstay...
But really highlight of the food fete is something so normal that you can easily incorporate it into your life without any resistance, Asian-flavored popcorn, in sugar-glazed matcha tea powder, Mexican-American Fiesta Pop, and All-American Cinna-Pop, http://poppaspopcorn.com/.
The most revolutionary is sometimes the most simple.
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