Food Blogging in Los Angeles, the Life and Times of Javier Cabral: An Interview

INTRODUCTION

Javier Cabral is a reporter who specializes in food culture and punk rock. He was born in East Los Angeles, California, in 1989 and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. He is also an official restaurant scout for Jonathan Gold at the L.A. Times and a producer for KPFK’s “Pocho Hour of Power” with Lalo Alcaraz. He began writing professionally at the age of seventeen, and gained a following with his adolescent food blog, “Teenage Glutster.” At age eighteen, he served as a judge on an episode of “Hell’s Kitchen.” The next year, he was featured in a Los Angeles episode of the Travel Channel’s hit TV show, “Bizarre Foods,” for his knowledge of Mexican cuisine. He calls journalists Jonathan Gold and Gustavo Arellano of OC Weekly his mentors. In 2011, Cabral published his first cover issue for Saveur magazine, where he discussed Mexican (Zacatecas) cooking, which featured over a dozen of his own family’s recipes. He is the co-founder of Mexico Feeds Me, an ethnographic food tour service that visits Puerto Vallarta seasonally. Presently, he is a freelance writer for KCET, Saveur, Cooking Light, and Serious Eats. He is currently working on his first book.

Gabriel Chabrán (GC):

How did you get into the food scene?

Javier Cabral (JC):

It started when I was in high school, at Garfield High School in East L.A. Back then, it was a pretty bad school. I remember going there and I wasn’t learning much, you know? I wasn’t really into the cholo life, nor was I into the school life. I was into the punk rock life, which meant a lot of drinking and ditching and smoking weed. So I transferred to Alhambra High School because that’s where my family was originally from. I didn’t really have any friends in Alhambra. I would just start reading L.A. Weekly. At first, I read it for punk shows but then I started reading Jonathan Gold¹ and I started realizing, “Wow, he actually writes about places I can actually experience in my area.” What I liked the most about it was going to the restaurants with my brother. He would take me out to Venice and Culver City, on the West Side of L.A., and he had the money to take me out to expensive restaurants at first. I started realizing that this happened at the same time I was reading Jonathan Gold, and when I was older, my brother bought me my first MacBook, the old-school MacBook. I eventually started doing food blogs and I started posting things on Chow Hound. But Chow Hound can be pretty snarky and there can be some jerks on there. There would be some posts on like: “It’s my birthday, where should I go eat?”

GC:

I remember those!

JC:

I discovered blogs and started reading food blogs [after] I started reading online menus: I’d collect take-out menus and then I’d just look at and research restaurants, and then I found food blogs. Some of the first bloggers were old-school bloggers like Eddie Lin [from Deep End Dining],² and then there were others like Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.³ I began to read these blogs when I was in school. I would be in typing class and I’d be reading food blogs. Well, you could say I was looking at food porn [because] they called me out of class and gave me some detention. When I started blogging, I realized that food could be really cool. Food is also what I wanted to do in life. I just wasn’t into what my friends were interested in. I really wanted to get into food. If I’m going to do something, I might as well get paid to eat, and add a punk rock approach from my teenage years. He [Jonathan Gold] gets to go out to eat for a living, so why can’t I? So I wrote to Jonathan Gold about...