The pleasures of a late-night taco are a defining L.A. experience, a few bites of food constructed seemingly to sate whatever urge drove you to some no-name truck in the first place. But if I could replace even a handful of the city’s countless taco trucks with carts or stalls or itinerate vehicles of some kind cooking up Japanese okonomiyaki, I wouldn’t hesitate. Thankfully, there’s Doya Doya in Torrance, which caught my eye for the L.A. Times last month.

Apropos of Orange Coast‘s previous look at the best Asian food in Orange County is my somewhat belated recognition of the magazine’s guide to the county’s best Mexican food. Many fantastic tacos, tamales, chilaquiles and pounds of carnitas were consumed for this, but I know I (and I trust fellow writer Gretchen Kurz) would surely do it again. Read more here.

The good eats for Orange Coast Magazine keep on coming. There’s ramen in the column’s future, but here are three recent looks at Orange County’s ever-fascinating international food scene.

First, grab a slice of pizza-like manakeesh in Anaheim’s Little Arabia. Then belly up to a bowl of bibimbap, the Korean rice classic. Finish up with the constellation of Indian small plates called a thali.

The October issue of Orange Coast marks the debut of my new column, Global Diner. Each month I’ll be examining an outstanding international dish among Orange County’s vast expanse of mom-and-pop and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. This time, it’s the spectacular chilaquiles at Anepalco’s Cafe in Orange:

Chef Danny Godinez’s dish is a marvel: The fried mass of tortillas is formed into a thin cake, topped with a fluffy omelet and dressed with avocado mousse, pico de gallo, crema, and sprinkles of cotija cheese. It’s surrounded by a pool of brilliant brick-red sauce that tastes of smoky, toasted chilies. The tiny Main Street cafe serves an equally good second version, chilaquiles verdes, made with a tomatillo-based sauce and sprinkled with a scattering of pumpkin seeds. Both iterations are precisely prepared, their contrasting flavors and textures balanced in every bite.

Read the rest here.

It would’ve taken a superhuman appetite to try everything at the third-annual L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade, which packed nearly 40 chefs and even more bartenders, brewers and vintners onto the lawn of historic Culver Studios. But that didn’t stop some 1,200 attendees from trying. Between ticket sales and some luxurious auction items, over $500,000 was raised for childhood cancer research—L.A. Loves Alex’s is by far the city’s best culinary event with a conscience.

PHOTO by JENNIFER BASTIAN

Donald Link (Herbsaint and Cochon) brought with him the flavors of Louisiana: a cool black-eyed pea salad, a knob of excellent Cajun sausage and a hunk of boudin turgid with rice and pork. Whereas many of the day’s plates seemed only like festival-sized bites, Link’s felt like a fully formed dish, a complete Cajun meal downsized only to accommodate the bacchanal. 

PHOTO by JENNIFER BASTIAN

Michael Voltaggio (ink.) went high-concept with his fried chicken oyster with buttermilk dressing and oyster leaf. Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo (Animal, Son of a Gun), meanwhile, delivered the fried chicken of your dreams: a massive, perfectly fried drumstick napped with heirloom carrot salsa, crema and strewn with marigolds.

Nancy Silverton and Matt Molina (Mozza) sliced up a never-ending stream of tiny, billowy pizzas, including a very good margherita and a somewhat messier fennel sausage, scallion and red onion. Chris Bianco (Pizzeria Bianco, Pane Bianco) kept to pizzas, too, turning out mini marinara pizzas dotted with strategic slices of roasted garlic.

Michael Cimarusti (Providence) presented a preview of the forthcoming Connie and Ted’s with a fried clam sandwich. Russell Moore (Camino) offered a juicy lamb kebab with a subtly spicy carrot salad, precisely the kind of dish you might want to pack for a picnic in Morocco.

PHOTO by JENNIFER BASTIAN

Zoe Nathan (Rustic Canyon, Huckleberry and others) brought a bevy of beautiful, tiny desserts, but many attendees simply couldn’t be pried from the day’s craft cocktails. Rye on the Road refreshed with a drink of Bluecoat gin, kiwi, cucumber and lemon. Bartenders from Lucques opted for a cocktail built with Bols genever that packed a gingery punch. The Varnish had what may have been the best drink of the day, a simple blend of scotch, lemon and honey that looked all the more enticing in an iridescent punch bowl. If that wasn’t enough, the Varnish team even brought an ice luge, convincing a number of attendees to assume the position and catch a shot of Brugal 1888 as it cascaded down the ice.

If your idea of a nice day in the sun is a star tour, L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade had that, too. There was Jimmy Kimmel serving as the day’s emcee. Allison Williams and Lena Dunham from HBO’s Girls. Parks and Recreation was in part represented by the lovable Jim O’Heir who plays Jerry Gergich (or is it Gerry? Or Gary? Not even Wikipedia knows). And if you looked carefully enough on your walk through the lot, you may even have seen the Bluth Company stair car.

L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade, the city’s finest food festival with a cause, is back September 29th from Noon to 4 p.m. at Culver Studios in Culver City. Hosted by Chef Suzanne Goin (Lucques, AOC, Tavern), business partner Caroline Styne and Chef David Lentz (The Hungry Cat), the third-annual event will once again benefit pediatric cancer research. This year’s roster of chefs, mixologists and vintners continues to impress, pulling big names not just from Los Angeles (Michael Cimarusti of Providence, Nancy Silverton of Mozza, Eric Alperin of The Varnish), but also New York (April Bloomfield of The Spotted Pig), Chicago (Paul Kahan of Blackbird, avec and others) and beyond. Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka will serve as honorary co-hosts and Jimmy Kimmel will serve as emcee. Noted Jitlada fan Aziz Ansari will be present, as will his Parks & Recreation co-stars Adam Scott and Jim O’Heir. Keep your eyes peeled for stars from The Office, Girls and Criminal Minds as well.

Tickets are $175 ($100 of which is tax deductible), inclusive of all food and drink. Find more info here.

There could be a dozen dissertations on the various Asian cuisines of Orange County, a topic so vast that it’s all but impossible to condense it into a single magazine feature. But for this month’s issue of Orange Coast, I (along with longtime Orange Coast writer Gretchen Kurz) embarked on just that task. What resulted is, I think, a pretty impressive accomplishment–a definitive guide to old-school pho joints, rare Okinawan izakayas, Taiwanese dessert parlors and so much more. Pick one up today.

In that fleeting moment when the ocean air still hangs thick over Venice before dissolving into a golden haze, the city slows to still life. Cars shudder to a stop, gulls flap fruitlessly against the wind and waves fall silently upon the shore. At Sunny Spot, the six-month-old restaurant from Kogi mastermind Roy Choi and Westside impresario David Reiss, that moment is meant to last forever, a picture both of California cool and Caribbean fantasy. This is where you come to imagine those wasted days on a white-sand beach, a slug of rum and a plate of jerk chicken your only itinerary.

Sunny Spot is Choi’s first restaurant that doesn’t directly deal with his cosmopolitan vision of the Angeleno appetite. Back in 2008 when Kogi’s bulgogi tacos and kimchi quesadillas sent legions groaning hungrily into the night, Choi created a cuisine that perhaps more accurately reflected Los Angeles than a census ever could. Choi didn’t simply capture the city’s zeitgeist; he became it.

It wouldn’t be wrong to attribute that success to a providential sense of good timing. But there’s also something to Choi’s fanciful cooking. His dishes at Kogi as well as Chego and A-Frame often feel as if they’re composed with a kind of surrealist automatism, flavors extracted from the culinary subconscious and assembled on the plate without any measure of restraint. What results is sometimes sloppy and not always successful, but it often is exactly what Angelenos want to eat.

At Sunny Spot, Choi sends us to the Caribbean to snack on gloriously fatty fried pigs feet and papaya-mango salads sluiced with lime juice and honey. There are of course dishes bestowed with the kind of goofy names you’d expect at one of Choi’s restaurants, like the “cash money” fried calamari ($10). Marinated in coconut milk, the rings of squid are fried in a barely-there tempura batter, tossed with shards of chilies and paired with a passion fruit-mint dipping sauce. It’s a bracing dish, one unworthy of anything even remotely resembling the Guy Fieri lexicon.

Your server—undoubtedly outfitted in a V-neck T-shirt—will attempt to spin the menu as a parade of small plates. But Sunny Spot operates instead in a kind of free-flowing, mid-sized family style. As such, food arrives mostly as it’s cooked, which can be maddening if you’re planning on enjoying the excellent yuca fries ($4) with, say, the reimagined Cuban sandwich ($11) bursting with rustic pork rillettes, prosciutto and pickled jalapeños. Still, the fries are great, potato-like lengths of tuberous yuca fried to a wonderful crisp and accompanied with Filipino-style banana ketchup laced with Thai basil.

The butter lettuce salad ($11) seeks a bitter balance: peppery arugula, biting radicchio, tiny bits of charred cauliflower, wedges of grapefruit and nubs of goat cheese all slicked with a mild chile vinaigrette. If you can manage to gather all the ingredients into a single bite, the salad yields a graceful medium. But a lot is lost in the oversized and disproportioned leaves of butter lettuce. The mofongo ($6), a starchy Puerto Rican staple, has no such problem. Here the plantain mash is transformed into a sort of loose stew fortified with bacon, garlic and black pepper—the mofongo’s porky quintessence and tropical sweetness exist in ideal equilibrium.

Eventually you’ll find yourself fixated on Sunny Spot’s interior. The place is deliriously colorful, a riot of mismatched shabby chic furnishings that looks as if it were assembled during a malarial fever dream. Amber pendant lamps cast an orange glow onto one wall; turquoise beams frame another. Tableware seems dredged up from the Caribbean’s colonial past with plates ringed in fine filigree and forks and knives burnished to a brassy sheen. There are three separate spaces: a sunny, high-walled patio, an airy, aqua-stained bar and a more reclusive back room. The latter is the only area for which Sunny Spot accepts reservations. All that unites the three are the subtle echoes of Desmond Dekker and Bob Marley.

Soon, entrees arrive. The Scotch Bonnet short ribs ($17) aren’t without charms (principally the sauce of Scotch Bonnet chilies, ginger, citrus and garlic that stays with you for days) but it takes a bit too much force to separate beef from bone. The Jamaican roasted lamb ($18), however, melts on contact. Wrap a piece each of stewed lamb and fresh mango inside a wedge of lettuce and revel in the lamb’s natural muskiness and the mango’s mediating sweetness.

Ample attention is also paid to seafood. The broiled hamachi collar enrobed in garlic-thyme butter ($14) is better than many of its izakaya equivalents. And groups daring enough to crack through a boatload of shellfish will inevitably eye the pound of langoustines scattered with lime, chopped herbs and mounted with clove butter ($50).

At Sunny Spot’s new weekend brunch, there’s no finer place to be than the breezy patio. And there’s no better way to start than with the festival bread ($8), savory beignets sprinkled with salt and paired with three dipping options. The best bite combines them all: a dab of creamy goat butter, a smear of guava jam and a drizzle of rum-infused honey—perfect. Still, the salt cod brandade benedict ($14) is what you really want. There’s just no replacement for the joy of when those poached eggs rush down the griddled fish-and-potato patties and flood the puddle of brilliantly subtle coconut hollandaise below.

But it’s only during dinner that you can try pastry chef Beth Kellerhals’ sweet potato tart with toasted marshmallow ice cream ($7). This is certainly one of Sunny Spot’s best dishes, warm and homey and just the right amount of refined. The tart is excellent; the ice cream is even better. It tastes as if it were churned over a campfire, rich with that distinct flavor of blackened marshmallow struggling to contain its oozing, molten center.

While Sunny Spot is often quite good, the restaurant is sometimes more concerned with cultivating a Caribbean state of mind than it is crafting a cohesive meal. But such an imagined vacation is not a bad place to be, especially given Sunny Spot’s fairly spectacular list of rums and cocktails created by Brian Butler. Sip a Dry Harbour ($12) or two—pot still rum, lime, absinthe and habanero-pineapple shrub—and before long you’ll feel that white sand between your toes.

Sunny Spot 822 Washington Blvd., Venice, (310) 448-8884, sunnyspotvenice.com. Dinner Sun.-Mon. 5 p.m.-10 p.m., Tues.-Wed. 5 p.m.-11 p.m. and Thurs.-Sat. 5 p.m.-Midnight. Brunch Sat.-Sun. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Credit cards accepted. Full bar. Street and valet parking.

In Los Angeles, where international cuisines are examined with the rigor of sociological study, dessert is often a dish born under a foreign flag. There are those who lust after the cinnamon-dusted ridges of freshly fried churros, others who long for the ephemeral sakura-wrapped mochi available only during cherry blossom season. But whether it’s by willful avoidance or total unfamiliarity, Southeast Asian sweets have yet to earn that same admiration.

Bhan Kanom Thai, meanwhile, is a rainbow rush of colors: Fresh mango glistening the brilliant orange of a late-summer sun, glutinous rice balls glowing a radiant pandan green, tender taro cakes blooming the same piercing purple as a field of lilacs. The Hollywood favorite is a den of overstimulation, its shelves stuffed with Thai desserts alive with vivid colors, focused flavors and foreign textures. To a particular set of Los Angeles diners, the sweet shop is an essential experience. Yet even as Southeast Asian flavors move from places like Thai Town and Little Saigon and into the mainstream, the region’s diverse desserts remain largely unknown, tropical curiosities far more complex than a simple batch of banana fritters. Across greater Los Angeles, however, are countless examples of these sweets, a vast dessert diaspora as varied and unique as the ingredients and cultures that comprise each confection.

Nearly every Southeast Asian nation is represented in Los Angeles’ own sprawling geography: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. These are the very same sweets found on the streets of Bangkok and Jakarta and Manila. Here, they’re imported by former culinary school instructors and avid cooks no longer confined to borrowed kitchens, by expatriates recreating tastes of home and younger generations now carrying on those traditions.

Southeast Asian sweets have even gone upscale. At restaurants like Lukshon, Red Medicine and the Spice Table, dessert draws inspiration from the region’s honeyed heritage: pearls of palm sugar boba, dollops of avocado and coconut creams, strata of thick kaffir lime custard. It’s an evolution in Los Angeles’ appetite, one finally primed to embrace Southeast Asia’s sweet side.

Read my Southeast Asian dessert picks at the L.A. Times.

Everyone waits in line at Franklin Barbecue: Austinites making their weekly pilgrimages, daytrippers traveling along the Texas barbecue trail, even Anthony Bourdain. It’s an inglorious task, a tortuous crawl in which you’re taunted by the scent of smoldering oak and the sight of those lucky few already sucking the meat from a set of pork spare ribs. Those at the front of the line likely arrived no later than 8 A.M.–a full three hours before Franklin opens its doors.

But there’s community in the chaos. Blankets are unfurled, lawn chairs are unfolded and stories are shared. The camaraderie of the line is overwhelming, a testament to the pacifying power of Franklin’s otherworldly barbecue.

Brisket is what you want here. At the counter, Aaron Franklin (or perhaps his barbecue partner John Louis) will offer slices of either lean or fatty brisket. There’s no wrong choice, but you’ve waited too long not to indulge in those glorious fatty cuts. This is brisket at the point of sublimation, beef so perfectly and thoroughly smoked that it barely exists in solid form. Franklin’s pork spare ribs may also be some of the best you’ve ever tasted, thick slabs of meat that peel from the bone with unimaginable ease.

Still, rigid traditionalists might point you away from Franklin, maybe to Louie Mueller in Taylor, TX or some combination of Smitty’s Market and Kreuz Market in Lockhart, TX. Smitty’s has the history–a charming old building so blackened by barbecue that you can practically scrape the smoke off the walls–but Franklin has the goods. The sausage at Smitty’s is indeed excellent, yet nothing there truly approaches the ethereal barbecue at Franklin, a place that shatters even the most outsized expectations of Texas barbecue.

Franklin Barbecue, 900 E. 11th St., Austin, TX, (512) 653-1187, franklinbarbecue.com
Smitty’s Market, 208 South Commerce, Lockhart, TX, (512) 398-9344, smittysmarket.com.