“That we are what we eat may be true across time, but Kitchens to Communities reveals the recency of the ways Southern Californians now dine out. With gender, immigration, and ethnicity added to the stew, Allison Varzally’s book brilliantly illuminates how we are where we eat and with whom we eat, as well as how we are shaped by who manages, cooks, serves, and cleans up when we go out to eat.”—Stephen Aron, author of The American West: A Very Short Introduction “The United States runs on immigrants. In From Kitchens to Communities, Varzally argues that this is clearer nowhere more than in the restaurants of Los Angeles. With scholarly rigor and an ethic of care for the people she writes about, Varzally traces how the hands that made the city’s most delicious meals also remade its food culture across the latter half of the twentieth century, turning restaurants from mere transactional spaces into vital sites of struggle, collectivity, and mutuality. The book is an insightful history of food, immigration, gender, race and ethnicity, and the U.S. West. Restaurants, Varzally shows, fuel immigrant belonging and efforts to democratize American society and culture, thus improving not only the way we eat and our sensory worlds—but our lives, our communities, and our futures.”—Mark Padoongpatt, author of Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America “With a simultaneously empathetic and entertaining tone, Varzally traverses the multiracial histories of food, restaurants, and immigrant communities in Southern California and offers us new insight and an homage to this region. Impressive and creative in its research, this book provides an essential counternarrative to vile discourses about the threats of multiculturalism and immigration. Both, as Varzally shows, have been essential to creating culinary third spaces and enabling us to dine out well.”—Lori Flores, author of Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 “Above and beyond the golden arches of McDonald’s and the arrow of In-N-Out, Varzally finds the true heart of working-class cuisine in Southern California. She finds it in the art and labor of ethnic gourmands who catered to the expanding immigrant neighborhoods that redefined the region in the post–World War II period. A trusted interpreter of multicultural greater Los Angeles, Varzally turns her attention to the connections made between people of diverse origins to produce a caring community that feeds one another, one dish at a time.”—Matt Garcia, coeditor of Food Across Borders
