Author Archives: Andrew Froug

Hundreds of restaurants participate in dineLA Restaurant Week, offering three-course meals for a lower price for the next two weeks

With America’s obsession with good food, restaurants and chefs have become the edible equivalents of runways and fashion designers. You say Gianni Versace? I say Mario Batali. You say New York Fashion Week? I say Los Angeles Restaurant Week.

Sunday marked the beginning of dineLA Restaurant Week, a two-week event during which restaurants across the city offer three-course meals for a reduced price. Depending on the restaurant, a meal of appetizer, entrée and dessert will cost between $16 and $28 for lunch and $26 and $44 for dinner.

UCLA’s cupcake princess

Perhaps in conventional circumstances, when a princess goes to war against a general, we expect the one with the bow in her hair to lose.

And so it was easy to dismiss 2009 UCLA alumna Dorothy Tong, the self-proclaimed “Cupcake Princess,” when she competed on season two of Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars.” After all, the final competitor standing between her and victory was Bruce Zipes, a gruff New Yorker who wore camouflage and called himself “The General.”

Tong opened Cupcake and Cookie, an online bakery specializing in her trademark cookie-filled cupcakes and cupcake-filled cookies, only a month before appearing on the show.