Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Kiriko (Los Angeles, Winter 2014/2015)

Posted on by

Kiriko
Kiriko, as I’ve said before, has one of the best lunch deals on the planet: miso soup, salad, 10 pieces of quality nigiri plus one handroll, served omakase-style for $46/head. It is true Shunji’s lunch special offers a couple more pieces but I’ll reiterate that I think Kiriko’s is a better deal anyway, as you get better fish. The only problem is that it’s not served to solo diners (but maybe you could just order two?).

We eat this lunch special at least once on every summer trip but I don’t write up every meal as the selection is seasonal and so doesn’t change so much from meal to meal. However, our most recent trip was at the end of December and so here’s an account of what we ate.

Continue reading →

Chang’s Garden for Christmas Lunch (Los Angeles, Winter 2014/2015)

Posted on by

Seaweed Flavoured Fish
It has been exactly a month since we got back from Los Angeles but I still have a number of restaurant meal writeups coming from the trip. We ate in the San Gabriel Valley quite a bit less than we usually do—partly on account of a couple of plans that fell through, partly because the holiday season meant very tight opportunities to see some friends and family in other parts of greater LA, partly because we went down to San Diego for a few days. We did, however, go out for Chinese food on Christmas, as we usually try to do and, despite heading to the SGV, shockingly decided against dim sum, Sichuan and Hunan. We went instead to Chang’s Garden in Arcadia for the the milder food of Hangzhou and Shanghai.

Continue reading →

Isaan Station, Twice (Los Angeles, Winter 2014/2015)

Posted on by

Chicken at Isaan Kitchen

Access to great Thai food is one of the culinary highlights of our trips to Los Angeles. And while Thai Town is not the longest hop from our base at my mother-in-law’s place in Koreatown, and while there are so many excellent options to choose from there, it was very good to hear that there was now a Thai restaurant in Koreatown as well that was receiving strong reviews: Isaan Station. I first heard of it from Sku and then saw a number of promising references on Chowhound and elsewhere.

Isaan Station’s menu is focussed, as you might expect from the name, on food from Isaan, the northeastern Thai region abutting Laos and Cambodia. The region’s cuisine is renowned for its heat, pungency and sourness and has more in common with Lao cuisine than with the central Thai cuisine most familiar from restaurants outside Thailand. Well, you could have found out as much for yourselves from a simple Wikipedia lookup—I don’t want to pretend to be an expert for I am not.

Continue reading →

Shunji, Dinner Omakase (Los Angeles, Winter 2014/2015)

Posted on by

tomatotofu

We were in Los Angeles for a little short of two weeks at the end of December and early January and, as usual, ate somewhat excessively. Reports on most of those meals will show up on the blog over the next month or so, though not in sequence. First up is the meal we were looking forward to the most: dinner at Shunji.

Shunji opened a little less than three years ago and in pretty short order rocketed to near the top of Los Angeles’s sushi scene (probably the best in the United States); most of the cognoscenti rank it in the tier below Urasawa (a restaurant I am unlikely to eat at in the foreseeable future). We ate their lunch special “omakase” this summer and while it was good we were not blown away (we both thought Kiriko’s lunch special, on this trip and previous, was far superior). When I said as much on Chowhound’s Los Angeles forum a lot of people insisted that the measure of Shunji cannot be taken without doing their full-on dinner omakase. Frankly, based on the nature of some of the conversation, I think there’s a bit of “Shunji’ism” at play on the Chowhound LA forum, but the point was well-taken and so we resolved to do the full omakase on this trip. And so we did. And it was a very good meal. But, again, it didn’t rise to the level of a transcendental experience—more on this below.

Continue reading →

Grand Central Market (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

Grand Central Market, Los AngelesGrand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles received a major (ongoing) facelift a little over a year ago, consonant with the ongoing gentrification of downtown in general. The entire area has been transformed utterly from what it was when I first arrived in Los Angeles in 1993, right after the riots. Then, the “fortress” of the financial district, as Mike Davis memorably describes it in City of Quartz, was largely deserted after the close of business, and the experience of the rest of downtown was in stark contrast to the gleaming skyscrapers and business hotels that had been constructed in the middle of it, a “self-referential hyperstructure”, to once again use Davis’s language. Continue reading →

Si Hai/Four Sea (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

Four Sea ExteriorThis is the penultimate food report from our recent Los Angeles trip. This meal slot was to have been occupied by a return to one of our old favourites, Chung King, but after the havoc wreaked on our system earlier in the week by lunches at two Thai restaurants, Chengdu Taste and Hunan Mao (not to mention leftovers at night) we decided to go for something milder. And so we washed up at the San Gabriel outpost of Four Sea/Si Hai for Taiwanese breakfast (the original is in Hacienda Heights).

(By the way, I’d noted in my review of Chung King last year that they didn’t seem to have a lot of business at weekday lunch and had speculated that they must be doing much better at dinner and on weekends, given the high rate of turnover in the SGV for places that aren’t popular. For what it’s worth as we drove by Chung King on the way to Si Hai at noon on a Saturday there didn’t appear to be any more action there (no one outside, not many cars in the adjoining parking). Can anyone who’s been recently comment?)

Continue reading →

Koreatown and Elsewhere (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

jongolI noted earlier that our recent trip to Los Angeles was unusual in that we ate a number of Thai meals and none of them was at Jitlada. It was also a bit unusual in that we didn’t eat out in Koreatown very much. My wife is Korean and most of her extended family lives in Koreatown and that’s where we’re based when in L.A. In general, we tend to eat other cuisines at lunch and do Korean restaurant meals at dinner, both because being close at hand they’re easier with the boys and because we’re usually accompanied by some extended family members or the other. My wife’s family are first generation immigrants—she was 10 when they arrived in the US—and many of her older relatives don’t speak any English and are generally not interested in eating anything other than Korean food. As such, it is usually a given that we will eat a bunch of Korean meals out and so I don’t plan them specifically. On this occasion, however, my wife and the kids had been in LA for a month previous and had already done most of the extended family meet and greets, and it turned out that we did the rest mostly at people’s homes. So there was almost no Koreatown eating out for us. Continue reading →

Hunan Mao (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

hunanmaoWhen we got to Los Angeles last summer Hunan Mao was all the rage. On account of my aforementioned hype-phobia we skipped it and on Sku‘s recommendation got our Hunan fix at Hunan Style instead. And that was a very good meal. This year we decided to give Hunan Mao a go—after all how often do you get to eat at a restaurant named for a dictator whose policies killed tens of millions of people by starvation?

It’s a large, bright restaurant—and while it didn’t fill up (we were there for lunch on a Friday) they seemed to be doing steady business a year after all the hype. We were joined again by the same set of food forum friends who ate with us at Hunan Style, and had a good time eating and reminiscing about the days when food forum politics took up too much space in our lives, and getting some scuttlebutt from one member of the party who works in the food industry in LA. Continue reading →

Three in Thai Town: Pa Ord 3, Sapp, Pailin (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

jadenoodlesThis was a highly unusual trip to Los Angeles for us in the sense that we did not eat at Jitlada. However, we did eat a number of Thai meals, three to be exact: at Pailin Thai, Sapp Coffee Shop and Pa Ord 3. As with almost all of the better Thai restaurants in Los Angeles these are just a few blocks away from each other on Hollywood Blvd. in Thai Town. We’d enjoyed our meal at Pailin Thai so much last year that we knew we were going to go back and try more of their Northern Thai specialties. Sapp Coffee Shop and Pa Ord 3 we picked mostly in order to diversify our Thai Town holdings.

Let’s take the meals in chronological order. Continue reading →

Kiyokawa (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

bigeyetuna1We’ve been going to Kiyokawa to celebrate our wedding anniversary for a few years now. It’s true that we already ate an excellent celebratory dinner this year at Piccolo (in Minneapolis) but tradition is not something to be messed with. Therefore after a pretty good but not particularly exciting lunch at Shunji earlier this trip we repaired to Kiyokawa last week for what turned out to be a pretty epic sushi omakase.

There are a number of things that distinguish Kiyokawa from their peers in the upper echelons of the Los Angeles sushi scene. There’s the whimsical approach to platings (seen most clearly in their kaiseki omakase meals); their live sea urchin; being open on Mondays; the ageless Satoshi Kiyokawa’s friendly and relaxed demeanour etc.. The one that I want to note here though is that their menu clearly lists the price of their omakase and what you are going to get for it. This summer the price for the sushi omakase at lunch is $120 and you are told that you will get 18 pieces of nigiri plus a handroll plus two desserts. This is in stark contrast to pretty much every other place where to opt for the “market price” omakase is to not really know how much you will get till the meal is done, or how much you will pay till the check arrives—which is fine for very wealthy people to whom money is no object, but a little intimidating for middle class people making the occasional splurge. So I appreciate it.

Continue reading →

Chengdu Taste (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

exterior
Chengdu Taste opened right before we got to Los Angeles last year and was immediately anointed the best Sichuan restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley (which is to say in the United States). We opted not to eat there last year on account of my general suspicion of hype. There were plenty of other places to eat excellent Sichuan at, we reasoned, and if it were still considered great a year later we’d eat there on our next trip. Well, the next trip is now and Chengdu Taste is still all the rage and so we decided to give it a go. Continue reading →

Dim Sum at Sea Harbour (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

deepfriedsmeltLast year I reviewed our outings to Elite and King Hua, two of the most celebrated dim sum houses in the San Gabriel Valley (just outside L.A) but unaccountably failed to write up our meal at Sea Harbour, which is perhaps the most celebrated of them all. Well, we were there again within a few days of my arrival in L.A and here is a report on what was an excellent meal.

Sea Harbour, like Elite and King Hua, does not have carts—instead, you order from a menu and your dim sum is fresher and better for it. There were four adults and two small boys eating. This is what we got: Continue reading →

Shunji (Los Angeles, July/August 2014)

Posted on by

kamatoroShunji has been making some waves in the Los Angeles sushi scene for the last couple of years. It has a highly unlikely location: in the refurbished Chili Bowl/Mr. Cecil’s on Pico/Wellesley in West L.a, in the shadow of the Santa Monica freeway, right next to a hardware store and across from an adult bookstore. It’s quite nice on the redone inside though, and the owner/head chef, Shunji Nakao has some serious cred: he was one of the original chefs at Matsuhisa in its heyday and previously helmed Asanebo. His eponymous Shunji is an altogether more modest affair: a two-chef counter with not much room to spare, some tables and a very distinctly non-Temple of Sushi vibe. Continue reading →

Chung King (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)

Posted on by

Chung King (1000 S. San Gabriel Blvd., San Gabriel)
As I noted in my review of our meal at Yunkun Garden a month and a half ago, Chung King was for a very long time our go-to place in the SGV for Sichuan food. This was until we inexplicably switched our loyalties to Yunkun Garden a couple of years ago, since which time we hadn’t been back to Chung King. As I try to trace the timeline of this switch this I think it might coincide with our first trip to LA with both our boys, not too long after the second was born. I suspect that at that point the 20 minutes of total driving time saved by going to Yunkun Garden might have trumped nostalgic loyalty–especially as Yunkun Garden is as good as Chung King. Well, on this trip, with our boys hanging out at my mother-in-law’s daycare till 1.30 each weekday we had more flexibility, and so decided to return to Chung King. Fascinating stuff, I know. Continue reading →

Noodle Soup and Dumplings (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)

Posted on by

Line outside outlet #1In the last decade or so, Shanghainese Xiao Long Bao, known in English as “soup dumplings” (though that’s not the translation), and usually found on menus as “juicy dumplings”, have become rather popular among American foodies. In Los Angeles the restaurant that was and is at the center of this cult is Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. This branch of a renowned Taiwanese dumpling house (which now has franchises all over Asia) opened in 2000 (or thereabouts) and came to mainstream attention via a LA Times article in 2002. Since then it has been showing up consistently on seemingly everyone’s “Best of LA” lists (including at #44 on Jonathan Gold’s recent list of the 101 best restaurants in LA). Continue reading →

Two in Thai Town: Pailin Thai and Red Corner Asia (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)

Posted on by

sausagesIn July we ate at our (and everyone else’s) favourite bastion of southern Thai cooking in the US, Jitlada, and also at the less ambitious (and expensive) Yai. This time around we decided to eat at a couple of places in Thai Town we hadn’t been to before and settled on Red Corner Asia and Pailin Thai. Red Corner Asia is officially within Thai Town (whose western boundary is Western Ave.) and Pailin Thai is a few blocks further west but I think we can all agree that it can only be a good thing if Thai Town grows and colonizes more of Hollywood. Let’s take the meals in chronological order: Continue reading →

Hunan Style (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)

Posted on by

steamedfishheadI’ve been in Los Angeles for a little more than a week now (after a two-week jaunt in late June/early July) and will be here for another week or so. As always, one of the highlights of this LA trip has been the food, and you can expect a few more posts reviewing some of our meals. If all you’re interested in reading here is whisky reviews now is the time to click on the “back” button on your browser.

Minnesota has zero Hunan restaurants; the San Gabriel Valley has many. Hunan Mao seems to be all the rage these days but Sku–of Sku’s Recent Eats–recommended Hunan Style in San Gabriel as his current favourite for Hunan food and so it was thither that we repaired for our fix of non-Sichuan but lethal Chinese food. We were accompanied by two friends from my old food forum days and so managed to do a fair amount of damage. Continue reading →