L.A. Sates Q&A: dineLA's Carrie Kommers

Carrie Kommers, director of dineLA, took time out of her busy schedule to meet up at the Original Farmers Market to discuss her thoughts on Los Angeles and food.

1. Briefly, what is culinary tourism?
   Culinary tourism is about reaching out to people who are looking to travel based on places that can give them an experience tied into the food and tastes of the region or city.  Whether it’s food tours, cooking classes, chef demos or simply the restaurants or street food scene themselves, each city has its own distinct culinary allure. What’s so amazing about LA is that this scene is so full, so rich and varied, that most people—including locals—don’t have any concept of what all is here.
2. What is most unique about the culinary landscape in Los Angeles
   By far its ethnic diversity. This has been talked about a lot lately in national media. Saveur covered it very adeptly in their March 2010 special Los Angeles Issue, as has Travel & Leisure in their May 2010 piece called “Food Lover’s Guide L.A. to Z.” For a city who once defined itself by the grandeur of its 80’s culinary temples like L’Orangerie and Ma Maison, LA has been peeling back its own layers for the last thirty years and has uncovered an authentic, visceral culinary identity that includes acknowledging the incredible ethnic diversity that’s here. And, ironically, I think we’re thankful that it’s not actually a “melting pot,” as many people refer to it. It’s more like a Cobb Salad (invented here in LA), because our ethnic communities and their food have retained their own clearly authentic personalities. Fusion does happen, but LA is proudly a landscape of very complete, independent neighborhoods that each tell its own story through the food.
3. Does dining still excite you? How do you manage to keep the experience fresh?
   Oh yes! It took me getting out of restaurant operations to really enjoy it again, but dining out in LA is incredibly exciting right now. I think the challenge is that there are so many restaurants, and so many more opening every week, that you feel like you can’t possibly get to them all. Or, worse yet, you feel like you can’t get back to that wonderful little place you discovered a few months ago that you’d love to frequent. It’s tough to be a regular in LA. And for the operators, that means it’s tough to build a steady clientele that they can depend on. That’s where our neighborhoods come in. An Angeleno’s burden: stay adventurous, try them all, but stay true to your favorites and let them know you love them.
4. What is dineLA and how does it benefit restaurants and Angelenos?
   dineLA was created by LA INC. The Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau in 2007. Our goal is two-fold: to create a program that tells the world what an amazing culinary city Los Angeles is; and to create programs that will actually drive awareness, traffic and, most importantly, revenue into the restaurants all over the LA area. When we started we put together an advisory committee with a dozen or so professionals—many of them trailblazers who made LA what it is, culinarily speaking—such as Joachim Splichal, Neal Fraser, Ben Ford, Suzanne Tracht, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, to name a few. Next we created the dineLA Restaurant Week event which now happens twice a year and pumps an estimated 4.9 million dollars into our local restaurant economy with each event. Thanks to American Express, our title sponsor, and our great media sponsors, we’ve been able to make this a very meaningful program for the participants. But the win goes two ways: Angeleno’s get the chance to really get out and try new places for a lot less money, and the restaurants get an influx of first time diners, a valuable commodity in this economy.
5. Is culinary exploration exclusively a foodie experience?
   Absolutely not. If you’re human you eat. If you’re visiting friends or family you flow along with their local experience and that inevitably includes local cuisine. Just the increase in the number of people who frequent their neighborhood farmers markets shows that there’s a happy intersection between necessity and what you call culinary exploration. Certainly there’s a local/sustainable angle to this, but the fact of the matter is that every day people are becoming more and more interested in food, where it comes from and who prepares it. You don’t have to have a food blog to be passionate about exploring what the city offers, but I do think it’s fascinating how many people have simply morphed into “foodies” out of sheer enthusiasm. I don’t think this is simply a trend. I think this is a new way of life for a generation of people who weren’t taught how to cook at home. It’s easy to be passionate when there are so many amazing people out there doing such great things.
6. In a city full of celebrity, do you feel the talented names in the kitchen are getting their due exposure?
   I think we’re getting better at it. I think that the more the consumers express an interest in the people behind the stoves, the more we’ll be hearing about them. That said, LA will always be known for its celebrity value. We’ll always have velvet-rope restaurants and celebrity owned places. But the wonderful thing is that we get to decide to who gets the accolades. We voice our opinion every time we make a reservation and, more importantly, when we tell our friends about the amazing meal we had.
7. What are some of your favorite local cuisines?
   I’m a huge fan of the old school diner/deli culture. There’s something so unapologetically frank about them that I love. (Even if the light fixtures haven’t been dusted since the 70’s.) I’m a sucker for a good potato pancake with sour cream and apple sauce at 2:00 a.m. I also really enjoy what I’d call neighborhood places. They may be working towards fine dining, but they’re still a small operation, maybe a husband-wife team, someplace that feels like a dinner party in a lovely home. The food tends to be very thoughtful and very personal. That’s a real pleasure.
8. Do you have any favorite dining events outside of dineLA? Are there any events in the near future our readers should note?
   I try to hit as many food festivals as possible and actually sponsor many of them. I’m especially fond of East LA Meets Napa which takes place in early July at Union Station. And I’m very excited to be working with the Los Angeles Times on a food festival scheduled to take place over Labor Day weekend at the Paramount Studios back lot. It’s an incredible opportunity to be able to collaborate on an event that could push the boundaries a bit. There are loads of food and wine events in LA—some really phenomenal. We’re hoping that we can create a unique experience that no one’s ever done before.
9. With a career in dining, does it ever feel like work?
   Sure, especially on the way to an evening event across town, stuck in traffic when I’ve already worked a 12 hour day. But then you get there and you meet the people and taste the food and you’re reminded of why you wanted to do this in the first place. The experience of food can be such a high.
10. 10. What has the public response been to the dineLA campaign?
    I feel like the public has really accepted dineLA as something that has some meaning to them locally. The first few years we were just trying to get people to remember the brand and understand what we were up to. Now they associate it with dineLA Restaurant Week and a chance to get out and experience their own city. We’re still working to let them know that we have a website with incredible content from some of LA’s best food writers, chef profiles, videos, really cool one-of-a-kind sweepstakes. That will come.
11. What are your thoughts on the future of dining in Los Angeles?
    Great question. I’m about to pose almost the exact question to a group of six chefs at the dineLA Chef Roundtable next Tuesday night. For me, I think chefs are getting back to cooking for themselves—it’s getting more personal. Concepts are simplifying, menus are getting tighter and the focus is back on the food, rather than, say, the designer or the other place they’re about to open in Vegas. Big and loud is still out there, but it feels like the overwhelming trend is distilling itself down to a very concise, thoughtfully crafted experience.
12. What's in store for dineLA in the near future?
    dineLA Restaurant Week will always be our tent-pole event because it has such an impact on the restaurants. But we are working on becoming more visible in between Restaurant Weeks—hence the chef’s panel, which I personally would like to see become a series. We’re working on some industry-specific projects that will try to offer more resources and opportunities year-round. We’re also liaising with the Mayor’s Office on a soon-to-launch Green Restaurant Certification program that will be very important for the city. We’re taking a baby-steps approach to this, but with the number of chefs and owners out there that are already doing so much in this vein, we feel that the timing is right.
13. Any final words to our readers?
    Support your local restaurants.

Carrie conceptualized and launched the city’s official Restaurant Week event which includes over 200 restaurants countywide; created and oversees the official dineLA.com Web site and e-newsletters; and continues to create strategic partnerships with LA restaurants, chefs and restaurateurs, high profile media partners such as the Los Angeles Times, KTLA, Los Angeles magazine and Clear Channel Radio, as well as community partners such as The March of Dimes Signature Chef Auction, Wally’s Central Coast Wine Classic, LA Wine Fest and more. She also conceptualized and created the first-ever LA Chef Family Tree.

For more on dineLA, please visit their website.