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Dim fung tai7/25/2023 I mean, it’s got one of those Vegas Bellagio-style fountains that fires off streams of choreographed dancing water. You know, I don’t really follow sports.” Also, the Americana is nothing like Cleveland. Was he saying the Galleria was like those cities? I reminded Mike that Lebron left Cleveland twice: first for Miami, then Los Angeles - two cities that are quite a bit flashier than Cleveland. This was months later we were talking on the phone. “This was like when Lebron left Cleveland,” he said, recalling the moment he saw his replies and learned the news. This man - let’s just call him Mike - checked his phone. Last August, moments after news of the Din Tai Fung move broke, the man who runs the Americana at Brand Memes Twitter account was out to breakfast with his mother-in-law when his phone began buzzing. The new, Galleria location for Din Tai Fung sits at a popular intersection with high foot traffic. It’s the sort of hyperlocal humor that, particularly in LA - which is not one city but many, and vast, and often lonely - helps bind the place together, reminding us of our common, shared experiences, like losing our car in a mall parking lot. The absolute horror and confusion brought about by the Galleria’s parking structure is also a running joke on the Americana at Brand Memes account, a popular parody Twitter account that goofs on not just the Americana, but the Galleria and other malls throughout Los Angeles, as well as countless other extremely specific details about living in LA. Specifically, its many-leveled, labyrinthine parking garage where - once, and never again - I forgot to take a photo of where I’d parked my car and ended up walking from floor to floor, pressing my keys and trying to hear it honk for - and I’m not even exaggerating one little bit here - two hours and 50-some-odd minutes. When I consider the aesthetics of lostness, Jerde’s Galleria immediately springs to mind. ![]() When it opened, in 1976, the Galleria’s principal designer, Jon Jerde, was heavily influenced by an essay by the novelist Ray Bradbury, published in The Los Angeles Times WEST Magazine and titled “Somewhere to Go.” For another Jerde mall, in San Diego, Bradbury even wrote a manifesto of sorts called “The Aesthetics of Lostness” - a phrase that, as the writer Andrew O’Hagan recently put it, “still provides the best definition of the ambience of shopping malls, a feeling of comforting distraction and exciting misplacedness akin to foreign travel.” Part of this image of the Galleria as somehow lower status than the Americana is simply that it’s an older mall, from an older era of mall design and philosophy. In the 1980s teen rom-com movie version of this, it was like the most attractive, high-achieving girl in high school - Din Tai Fung - suddenly dating someone - the Galleria - from a whole different social clique the Lloyd Dobler of malls. This was odd - definitely unexpected - and great gossip for a certain type of Angeleno who is aware of both the Americana and the Galleria and the garlic green bean situation at Din Tai Fung. To the much more indoor, much less “cool” mall: the Galleria. Din Tai Fung was moving across the street. Late last summer, as Caruso’s campaign was gearing up to spend more on local TV ads than any mayoral candidate in the city’s history, word got out that Din Tai Fung was leaving Caruso’s biggest mall (in square footage), the Americana. But Glendale: Glendale’s got more Armenians than almost anywhere but Armenia and also, malls.Ĭentral Avenue divides the two malls, the Galleria on the left, and the Americana on the right. These cities are - again, unfairly - given a kind of shorthand: Santa Monica’s got beaches West Hollywood’s got good nightlife and (relatedly) the gays Studio City’s got… a studio? So does Burbank. For example, my 101-year-old grandmother, a native Angeleno, still calls Glendale “Dingledale” and still complains about briefly living there about eight decades ago. Glendale, like other cities within the Greater LA region, is often unfairly provincialized. The remainder of our story begins and ends and pretty much exclusively takes place in Glendale, California - a city of close to 200,000 that sits just 10 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. An all-timer of a dumping.Īnd that, more or less, is the most you will hear about the food made at the wildly popular Taiwanese dumpling chain Din Tai Fung: It’s great, it’s a draw, it’s the reason for everything that follows. ![]() Particularly the soup dumplings, or xiao long bao, which are - you could argue, and I would - the platonic ideal of the form: silky, broth-filled little clouds that explode inside your mouth upon impact. Perhaps we should start with the dumplings themselves, which are, of course, delicious.
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