It’s a quintessential Southern California story: a Cambodian couple takes over a donut shop, learns the tamale trade from an employee and eventually works those neat, polenta-like packets of masa into a menu of crullers and coffee.
Garden Grove’s Sak Donuts, hidden in a Harbor Blvd. strip mall on the periphery of Little Saigon, is as exemplary of the American eating experience as any hamburger or rack of ribs.
Space Age Filipino cookies for the L.A. Times:
Crisp, impossibly airy cookies served straight from the freezer, their centers stuffed with slick buttercream, seem almost Space Age. They’re somehow both sturdy and weightless. They dissolve the second they touch your tongue. These otherworldly treats are silvanas, colorful and classic Filipino cookies that could easily be mistaken for oversized French macarons.
They’re the namesake of House of Silvanas, a months-old sweets shop at the confluence of Silver Lake and Little Armenia. You won’t find the place without some confusion — it’s but one of many stalls located inside Kusina, a surprisingly spacious cafeteria-style turo-turo joint where buffet trays are loaded with ruddy links of longganisa sausage and steaming cups of sinigang, a sour tamarind soup, serve as makeshift palate cleansers.
Never mind its humble surroundings — House of Silvanas has a long, multi-generational history. Its cream-filled tradition began a world away in the Philippines, where Trining Teves-Sagarbarria’s pastries were so popular that a business bloomed to satisfy demand. Those renowned recipes became heirlooms, passed down to daughter-in-law Mary Ann, who has now bestowed them upon her daughter Kathryn.
Read the rest here.
Artesia’s Mumbai street food for the L.A. Times:
PHOTO by CHRISTINA HOUSE / L.A. TIMES
Pomegranate seeds spill from the sandwich after each bite, brilliant and glistening like freshly polished rubies. Peanuts tumble out too, speckled with flecks of cumin, cinnamon and ground chiles. They land with a percussive patter that completes the sensory experience that is the Indian snack dabeli, a White Castle-sized, potato-based slider that’s a staple on the streets of Mumbai. At Artesia’s Mumbai Ki Galliyon Se, dabeli is just one of Sailesh and Shruti Shah’s edible odes to their former home.
The husband and wife brought the pulse of Mumbai’s cosmopolitan streets with them to the United States a decade ago. Sailesh spent most of his years here as a software engineer, all the while accumulating the knowledge and resources required to launch a restaurant. A year and a half ago, he put programming in the past and opened Mumbai Ki Galliyon Se with Shruti.
Much about the Little India restaurant is familiar: Its tableware is disposable (plates are Styrofoam, cutlery is plastic) and its ambience depends on whichever choreographed bit of Bollywood happens to be dancing across the TV. But Mumbai Ki Galliyon Se (literally “from the streets of Mumbai”) is unique to the neighborhood. While Gujarati chaat shops offer an increasingly familiar cast of snacks, Mumbai Ki Galliyon Se is the only eatery to focus on the flavors of India’s largest city.
Read the rest of my story in the L.A. Times.
December 1 marked the release of Eat: Los Angeles 2010, the second edition of the increasingly indispensable guide to all things edible. This year’s new-and-improved book has over 200+ new listings and some 50 additional pages, including contributions by yours truly. Visit eat-la.com or your local independent bookseller to grab a copy in time for your last-minute holiday needs.
PHOTO by KEN HIVELY / L.A. TIMES
KFI’s notorious open-mawed radio commentators John and Ken spent 15 minutes on Monday attacking everything about the recently opened Gold Line extension, a light rail line that runs from Little Tokyo to East LA. In the process, the pair slammed the L.A.Times for sending four writers (including me) to round up the best restaurants at each of the extension’s stops. (That story, including my contributions at the Soto St. and Indiana St. stops can be found here.) Predictably, John and Ken sink to race-baiting depths, calling East LA a “disgusting illegal alien slum” and wondering why they’ve never seen goat at the “authentic Mexican restaurants” they supposedly frequent.
Listen for yourself below:
Comforting Vietnamese classics for the L.A. Times:
PHOTO by ALLEN J. SCHABEN / L.A. TIMES
There’s an unquestionable comfort in Hoang Yen’s chao. The Vietnamese congee is a homey, hearty meal of rice boiled down until it takes on a consistency somewhere between that of oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. Even for those whose childhood memories revolve around grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, the porridge possesses an innate familiarity.
All of Hoang Yen’s dishes share that fundamental comfort. Simple pleasures define the year-old restaurant, which replaced a Mexican eatery that was awkwardly grafted onto the backside of late-night standby Luc Dinh Ky. Hoang Yen’s succinct menu of Vietnamese family classics better occupies the narrow space.
The Westminster restaurant is decidedly modern: deep blue tiles climb one wall as if to draw a high-water mark; a flat-screen TV recedes elegantly into the back of the dining room. It’s a clean style cultivated by the Chau family, which runs Hoang Yen with a welcoming air. The result is an open and inclusive space where uniformed electricians lunch alongside young mothers, and businessmen pop in for takeout as they pass through Little Saigon.
Read the rest here.
Finding halal highlights of Burmese and Malaysian cooking in Inglewood for the L.A. Times:
PHOTO by ANNE CUSACK / L.A. TIMES
The Koranic art at Mutiara Food & Market is rattling against the wall, its filigreed details shaken by the groans of a jet passing overhead. When the plane travels out of sight, Mutiara fills with a consuming quiet. The Inglewood restaurant and market is a subdued place, but its unassuming setting belies its rich and varied Burmese and Malaysian cooking.
Mutiara concentrates mostly on the halal highlights of Islamic Burmese cuisine, a hearty cast of curries and kebabs more closely resembling those of India and Pakistan than Myanmar. They’re the dishes of owner Myo Aung’s personal history. His recipes re-create his Myanmar, paeans to the Islamic traditions of both his family and home. (Outside the kitchen, Aung performs a similar service as an imam, leading prayers and instructing the teachings of the Koran.)
Mutiara isn’t his first restaurant venture. Aung used to own Jasmine Market in Culver City but sold it about two years ago and opened Mutiara. Similarities to the former restaurant remain, but Mutiara has a deeper, more complex menu.
Read the rest here.
PHOTO by SABRINA L.
To free the blog from stagnation, an update on a favorite lunch spot: Top Baguette. It’s possibly common knowledge by now for Little Saigon regulars, but the beloved banh mi shop made a recent move to a colorful spot on the corner of Bolsa and Magnolia. Earlier this month, Top Baguette was still offering a buy-one-get-one free banh mi deal to celebrate its grand reopening. It’s not the same value as, say, the three-for-two deal at Saigon Bakery, but still one to take advantage of while the eats are even cheaper.
Top Baguette
9016 Bolsa Ave
Westminster, CA
714.379.7726
Long Beach sprouted out of an agrarian dream, a pastoral fantasy of bean fields and beaches that sustained entire generations before the onset of the city’s industrial complex. But as happens with the immutable laws of progress, those plots all eventually disappeared, family farms and cultural traditions wiped out by time. With that came not just a divorce from the land, but a fundamental shift in thinking that has left many of our friends and neighbors without access to or understanding of good, fresh food. Long Beach, however, is blessed now with a whole community of food philanthropists: gardeners, cooks, activists and organizations all using their green thumbs for good. They’re reconnecting with the soil, and with Long Beach itself—feeding us, teaching us and reminding us of the simple pleasures (and power) of food. It’s not a new vision, but an eternal one, a return to the time when local, seasonal produce dictated diets and compassion compelled those more fortunate to extend a helping hand.
Read the stories of Jimmy Ng, Adriana Martinez, Cindy Goss and Paul Buchanan in the District.
The makings of Long Beach’s own Mayan Riviera for the District:
PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Fuego looks out onto the Long Beach of everyone’s oceanfront dream, a seaside theater where pelicans dive with hungry, graceful precision and pleasure-seekers boat by on the last winds of summer. It’s a scene so idyllic it’s nearly unbelievable, almost as if it were constructed and choreographed by a television crew trying again to approximate Miami. For Fuego, the newest tenant of the equally new Hotel Maya, it’s fitting, a perfect backdrop for the restaurant’s high-end exploration of coastal Mexican cooking.
But that sublime setting doesn’t diminish the difficulties of upscaling a cuisine so common in Southern California that even less-than-serious eaters possess a passable understanding of its regional distinctions. As a result, successful Mexican fine dining must undeniably out-cook our taquería favorites and also compete directly with modern masters like La Casita Mexicana in Bell and Moles La Tia in East LA. Chef Jesse Perez is, by and large, up to the task.
