This report on a good but not great dim sum lunch at King Hua in Alhambra is the last of my meal reports from my recent two-week trip to Los Angeles. The family are still all there, and I will be going back for another two weeks in August, after which we will all return to Minnesota together. Doubtless, there will be more pictures of meals from that trip as well, but after this post it will be back to a steady diet of whisky reviews for a month. And a steady mostly vegetarian diet for me at home as I try to recover from a fortnight of reckless eating (I’ve been back a week and doing a pretty good job of sticking to it). Continue reading
Tag Archives: Los Angeles
Yunkun Garden (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
The Twin Cities area, as I noted in my first entry in this “Gluttony in Los Angeles” series, has acceptable Sichuan food. The first major restaurant was Little Szechuan in St. Paul. This was followed by Grand Szechuan in Bloomington–opened by the erstwhile chef of Little Szechuan who apparently decamped with the entire kitchen. After this defection, Little Szechuan fell into decline for a while, and then recovered with a new chef who installed a number of new dishes on the menu. I believe he left too–or at least this is my explanation for the decline that followed again, and from which they have not yet recovered. Grand Szechuan, however, continues to be quite good (there are a number of newer places too, but we have not visited them). Continue reading
Yai, Twice (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
With my carefully honed skill for the obvious, I noted in my review of our recent meal at Jitlada that there are other places to eat as well in Thai Town and that most of them are far less expensive. They’re not necessarily far less excellent though. Evidence for this claim: Yai. We ate two lunches here a week apart from each other; one was excellent and the other was just quite good.
Yai is a bit of a hole in the wall in a strip mall on Hollywood Blvd. (between Wilton and Van Ness) anchored by a 7-Eleven and is cash-only. The aesthetic of the small room is functional (you’re really not paying for ambience here), but the flavours of the food are baroque. At our first meal we arrived at noon and were only the second table seated, but by the time we left at 1.10 the place was hopping. We didn’t order much by our standards, but everything was excellent.
Jitlada (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
My greatest culinary regret from my years in Los Angeles is not exploring Thai Town more than I did. Los Angeles is home to a very large expatriate Thai population, reportedly the largest Thai population outside Thailand (you can probably repeat this statement for a number of ethnicities). And Thai Town (designated in 1999)–on the eastern end of Hollywood–is home to a large number of Thai restaurants. And then there are a number of acclaimed restaurants in places such as Norwalk and Garden Grove as well. We’ve eaten lunches at two of the Thai Town luminaries on this trip. Continue reading
Kiyokawa (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
We’ve had two excellent meals at Kiyokawa in the past–one the full chef’s omakase lunch, with kaiseki style cooked items along with sashimi and sushi, and the other an exquisite sushi omakase. And so, as good as our regular lunch omakase at Kiriko was, and as much as it suggested that their omakase of comparable cost could give Kiyokawa a run for his money, we chose to return to Kiyokawa for our 10th anniversary lunch (we’re travelling with our young boys and have neither the ability nor energy to go out to dinner). Continue reading
Kiriko (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
Sushi is not like whisky…. “Why, thank you, Captain Obvious,” you say, “one comes from a bottle and one comes from fish and other things wot live in the sea”. Well, first of all, whisky sometimes comes in a can, and secondly, imaginary interlocutor, if you’d let me finish, I was going to go on to say that unlike with whisky, the quality of sushi is very strongly correlated with price and once you’ve gone up the quality ladder it is very hard to level down; which makes good sushi a little harder on the wallet than good whisky. Continue reading
Shanghai #1 Seafood Village (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
After dim sum at Elite on Saturday we returned to the San Gabriel Valley for dinner on Sunday, this time to Shanghai #1 Seafood Village in Alhambra. This is a relatively recently opened place that has received very strong reviews and as we don’t have any Shanghainese restaurants in Minnesota (that I know of, at any rate) we wanted to try it. It sits in the same location as a previous Shanghainese restaurant, Green Village (though significantly expanded and refurbished) in the huge strip mall at 250 W. Valley Blvd.
The restaurant, which is divided into a number of dining rooms seems very elegant and luxurious as you enter, with lots of dark panelling and red and green satin. But as you sit down in a bright dining room it all begins to look somewhat tacky. This kind of decor in a fusion restaurant aimed at non-Chinese diners would doubtless be described as kitschy and attract derision, but in this context some of the reviewers have seen fit to describe it as an elegant throwback to the aesthetic of 1930s Shanghai restaurants and clubs. Well, whatever. Continue reading
Dim Sum at Elite (Los Angeles, Summer 2013)
I am currently in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks with the family, visiting in-laws and catching up with some old friends. As I have a backlog of tasting notes saved up, whisky reviews will continue to appear regularly, but I am going to also be posting discussions and photographs of some of the meals we will be eating. Here to start is a report on our dim sum lunch from yesterday. Please excuse the quality of the pictures. I have a 8 year old Canon Powershot with a scratched lens and have never been the best amateur food photographer, and my clean-up abilities in Photoshop are only marginally better. Continue reading