A taste of California on two wheels

Gilded with buttery avocado, a savoury salsa seca of nuts and spices and a few artful sprigs of micro herbs, it’s deliciously chewy – but tangy, rather than aggressively sour. I’m not sure if it’s distinctively American, but it is very tasty.

Fortified, I head to Chinatown (the oldest in the country and the largest outside Asia) to find the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, which has been turning out 10,000 of these cookies a day, by hand, since 1962. I’ve always assumed that they’re as Chinese as chow mein, but it turns out that the city is locked in a decades-old dispute with Los Angeles to claim these crunchy, vanilla-scented wafers as its own. In 1982, a theatrical mock trial to determine their real origins ruled in San Francisco’s favour, though subsequent research suggests they have their roots in the Japanese-American, rather than Chinese-American, community. The latter can, however, take credit for such peculiarly American favourites as the egg roll – a sturdier version of the Chinese spring roll – and the sweet and spicy General Tso’s chicken.

Here at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, open to curious visitors seven days a week, I watch the biscuits being made, with a little help from a mesmerising Wallace-and-Gromit-style machine. Golden Gate has diversified into a range of different flavours, from strawberry to green tea to chocolate-dipped with sprinkles, as well as X-rated fortunes and personalised ones (popular for proposals).

Factory boss Kevin Chan is travelling in China at the moment, but when I ask one of the women – deftly folding fortunes into the cookies and chatting 19 to the dozen – where the cookies are from, she breaks only to say, simply but firmly, “America”, before resuming her stream of rapid Mandarin.

There’s a different America I want to try next, the hyper-local, seasonal “California cuisine” for which chef Alice Waters and her renowned restaurant Chez Panisse are renowned. Just across the bay in Berkeley, the farm-to-table trailblazer is a favourite of everyone from Bill Clinton to Meghan Markle.

There are no celebrities in evidence as I seat myself at the (cheaper) upstairs café, but I channel the body-as-temple Californian mindset and order a green salad to start. Not because – whisper it – I particularly like the stuff (for me, it’s merely a necessary evil) but because this salad, made from garden lettuce from Star Route Farms, the oldest continuously certified organic farm in the state, will surely be the best I’ve ever eaten. Who knows, it might even convert me.

I channel Gwyneth as I attempt to consume the entire bowl of leaves before me mindfully, like a proper Californian, though the poodle chewing crusts of sourdough near the stairs is setting a pretty low bar. There’s something up with the salad I think, then realise that what it needs is simply a pinch of salt. But I am too British to ask for any. A wood-fired goat’s cheese and prosciutto pizza follows – California can also take credit for elevating a cheap Italian snack into a gourmet event – which is, perhaps predictably, far more to my taste. As I munch away, I hear a woman across the room rhapsodising over a dessert of a single, perfect tangerine served in a golden bowl. Once I’ve paid my bill, I look it up on the menu on the wall outside: Churchill-Brenneis Orchard Pixie tangerine, $9. I wonder if you can take simplicity too far.

Having eaten my way around San Francisco, it’s time to head south, down the Pacific Coast Highway towards LA. There’s a pleasing straightforwardness about riding a coast road (keep the water on your right and you can’t go wrong), and this one’s a beauty – still quiet in late spring, all crashing waves and carpets of flowering succulents, though neatly stacked piles of charred redwoods tell their own sad story of the area’s constant threat of wildfires.

I slide into the palm-fringed surf town of Santa Cruz for the night. It’s too early in the year for the boardwalk amusements, with their corn dogs and French-fried artichoke stands – things I’ve never seen back home in Clacton, Essex. But on my way to the Seabright Social Brewpub for a cold, hoppy IPA, I’m satisfactorily tickled by the sea otter I spy floating on its back in the slate-grey ocean. My beer accompanies an enormous, and almost equally refreshing wedge salad with tomatoes, crumbled bacon and local blue cheese. America really does do good salad, I think the next morning, as I turn my pedals inland, through Castroville – self-proclaimed “artichoke centre of the world” – towards the city of Salinas, nicknamed America’s “salad bowl” for its agricultural industry. It’s also the hometown of John Steinbeck and, as I discover, some very good Mexican food. Almost all farmworkers in the Golden State identify as Hispanic, and as I bump along rutted farm tracks quite different from yesterday’s smooth coastal route, I’m passed by several taco trucks hurrying to fuel those bent double in the strawberry fields around me.

I shove my bike on a train to Santa Barbara, bypassing a road closure at Big Sur, to get back on the Pacific Coast Highway. I arrive so late that my first glimpse of Oprah Winfrey’s well-manicured hometown is the next day, when I spend a happy 20 minutes gawping at the abundance of the municipal farmers’ market. An elderly lady asks me when I intend to eat the avocado I order – “immediately please” – and she picks out a perfectly ripe one from the pile on her table. Warm, plump and pliant, this avocado bears little resemblance to those sold in British supermarkets. I pause just long enough to find a Mexican bakery to sell me a bread roll and a pinch of salt, then polish off my simple, delicious snack sprawled on the grass in the sunshine, washed down by fresh mandarin juice. A finer breakfast would be hard to find and I set off in good spirits.

The road, increasingly busy the farther south I travel, takes me through the celebrity-jammed town of Montecito (no sign of Meghan popping to the dry cleaners, though I do see a ginger-haired man on horseback at the polo club who may or may not be her prince) to the understated surfers’ paradise of Ventura. Do as I did and head straight for the pier for warm fish tacos with colourful, crunchy slaw. Though fish tacos are popular on both sides of the border, in California the white fish is often grilled, rather than fried, and accompanied by more salsas and salads. So much for my mum’s worry I’d be eating nothing but burgers, I think, polishing off the last sweet kernels of corn.

The surfers are already in the water as I round the tip of Point Mugu and into the Santa Monica mountains, perhaps the most beautiful stretch of road I’ve ridden so far, the sun rising over the ridge to my left, the ocean a calm flat blue to my right, and the tarmac black and smooth beneath my tyres. I’ve seen very few other cyclists so far, but this morning the Lycra-clad weekend warriors are out in force, paying little attention to me with my touring bike and bulging panniers. I don’t mind; it’s just nice to not be the lone madwoman on two wheels for once. Later in the trip someone will wind down their car window to ask which pizza delivery place I’m working for.

I follow the coast road through Malibu’s 27 miles of golden beaches and eye-wateringly expensive real estate, the grills in front of the RVs that line the hard shoulder are sparked into action, and I realise I’m hungry – enough to finish every mouthful of the raw sprout and quinoa omelette I order at the café on Malibu Pier, just to try and get with the Los Angeles vibe.

And then, finally, I’m rattling along the Santa Monica boardwalk in a crowd of bronzed joggers and fat-tyre bikes with boomboxes strapped to the back. Gazing at the white sand and palm trees, I can hardly believe I’ve made it in one piece. To be honest, I didn’t intend to bike in Los Angeles – the opening credits of La La Land don’t really sell it as a concept – but public transport proves so patchy it feels the quickest option. In fact, I find, it’s not so different to London, apart from the whole six-lane highway thing and the bit where I have to duck through police tape outside a cash depository. Most places have cycle routes if you’re brave (or perhaps foolish) enough to look for them.

Los Angeles is sometimes called the most exciting food city in America for the diverse selection of cuisines on offer, from Armenian barbecue to Mexican-inflected sushi. But perhaps the biggest feather in its cap is that even the New York Times now concedes the quality of its West Coast rival’s bagels. Californian examples tend to be lighter and crustier than the denser, chewier rings traditionally favoured in the Big Apple (across the Canadian border in Montreal, another hotbed of bagel action, they’re sweeter and smaller, boiled in honeyed water and baked in a wood-fired oven). And while in New York true aficionados will never toast their bagels, or insult them with any topping more exotic than cream cheese, cured fish or egg salad, out here, anything goes. That said, when I finally reach the end of the 45-minute queue outside Courage Bagels in Silverlake, I still choose to play it safe with a cream cheese, tomato and caper sourdough number, served open-faced, ready for its Instagram close-up. After all, we are in LA.

As I’m in Tinseltown I pay homage to Hollywood with Gwyneth Paltrow’s favourite Cobb salad from the Beverly Hills branch of her Goop Kitchen operation which, much as I want to hate it, is actually very good. But I’m not sure what to make of the $19 colostrum, offal and fruit smoothie at wellness-cult-status health-food store Erewhon. It tastes disconcertingly like a blueberry yoghurt with a hint of liver (and has no discernible effect on my cycling performance).

I eat wonderfully juicy Armenian kebabs with a Mumbai-born food writer who tells me sadly that there’s no good Indian food in LA and that these kebabs are the next best thing. After saying goodbye I pedal through a drive-thru shaped like a three-storey-high ring donut in La Puente, in eastern LA County; eat gravy-soaked roast beef sandwiches at Philippe the Original, which has been serving its signature “French dips” since 1918; and admire the giant, brightly tiled comale griddle in the cookery school at the Plaza de Cultura y Artes. Its director of programmes, Ximena Martin, tells me the school attracts a lot of young people to their lessons on traditional Latinx kitchen skills and recipes because, “as immigrants, a lot of us didn’t get the opportunity to learn from our grandmothers.”

Sorry Mum, but I do also eat a few burgers while I’m out west. In my defence, California is the birthplace of McDonald’s and In-N-Out, as well as Carl’s Jr, Bob’s Big Boy and Fatburger, among other questionably named patty pushers, so I couldn’t resist. Oddly enough, LA is the first place I’ve really noticed these chains. The businesses at the side of the relatively quiet Pacific Coast Highway have been, for the most part, independent or small local operations. The really big boys tend to hang out on the freeways and in the kind of car-focused malls difficult to access by bike. I suppose big cities are too lucrative a market for them to pass up.

Only a true golden arches obsessive would follow me to the suburb of Downey and the (weirdly fascinating) museum attached to the oldest McDonald’s still in operation, but casual gluttons could do worse than stop by the Apple Pan on West Pico, whose famous customers include Cary Grant and Barbra Streisand. Or, indeed, Marty’s Hamburger Stand further up the street, where you can enjoy a very decent $5 cheeseburger with a view of seven lanes of traffic. And though, as I’m already discovering just a couple of weeks into my trip, there certainly is a lot more to US cuisine than burger and fries, surely nothing could be more quintessentially American than that.

Felicity Cloake is the author of Peach Street to Lobster Lane: Coast to Coast in Search of Real American Cuisine, published by Mudlark at £16.99. 

The Adventure Cycling Association is an invaluable resource for anyone planning a US cycling adventure – you’ll find inspiration, downloadable route maps and practical tips on their website (adventurecycling.org).

Bike rental can be expensive in the States, but Golden Gate Rides believe that it shouldn’t cost a fortune (goldengaterides.com).

California’s impressive range of homegrown dried fruit makes excellent cycling fuel; I was very partial to the mission figs from the Santa Barbara farmers’ market (avilaandsonsfarmsllc.com).

If you want to do just part of a ride and then hop on a train, or retrace your steps to return your rental bike, Amtrak carries bikes free of charge, with advance reservation, on its Coast Starlight and Pacific Surfliner rail services (amtrak.com).

You’ll find accommodation aplenty at every price point, but for those on a budget I particularly rated the Green Tortoise in San Francisco (greentortoisesf.com), Santa Cruz Hostel (santacruzhostel.org), and ITH Santa Barbara Beach Hostel (ithhostels.com).

You won’t be short of eating options on the road, but detours particularly well worth taking are to Duarte’s Tavern in Pescadero, south of San Francisco, for fried fish sandwiches and homemade fruit pies (duartestavern.com); Beach House Tacos in Ventura for excellent fish tacos (beach-house-tacos.com); and the café on Malibu pier for brunch and salads (malibu-farm.com).

San Francisco photographs Mark Leong

Images Elizabeth Beard/Getty; Pascal Shirley/Gallery Stock; Julien Capmeil/Gallery Stock; Mark Leong; Jessica Sample/Gallery Stock