November 22, 2010

Leftovers: El Pollo Imperial

Drive-through Peruvian in North Long Beach for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by GARY FRIEDMAN / L.A. TIMES

A voice crackles from the tinny speaker in the kitchen, and the staff at El Pollo Imperial listens closely to someone in a minivan at the drive-through window placing an order — not for pallid hamburgers stacked two patties high or limp fish encased in sheaths of greasy batter, but for stunningly fresh ceviche and impeccable lomo saltado, the Peruvian dish of stir-fried beef and French fries.

El Pollo Imperial inherited its fast-food trappings. Six months ago, partners Oscar Ramirez and Carlos and Alicia Cortez repurposed a shuttered KFC in North Long Beach, adapting even the drive-through to the restaurant’s new Peruvian flavors. It’s a significant transformation for this stretch of Atlantic Avenue, a neighborhood where ship supply companies occupy former Chinese restaurants and a striking Art Deco theater awaits demolition.

There are playful nods to El Pollo Imperial’s Kentucky Fried past: its avian name, its feathered mascot outfitted like Incan royalty. But the restaurant isn’t a mere paean to poultry. Though you certainly will order pollo a la brasa on your initial visit — juicy, well-seasoned rotisserie chicken that demands to be eaten with your hands — the impressive breadth of the restaurant’s menu will compel you to try any of the dozens of other dishes.

Read the rest here.

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November 15, 2010

Leftovers: Tom Yum Koong

Crossing the border into Laos for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by LUIS SINCO / L.A. TIMES

Thatched baskets of sticky rice arrive alongside tart pork sausages still sputtering from the pan. Papaya salad follows, the strands of green, unripened fruit stained a murky brown from fermented blue crab paste. At Tom Yum Koong in Westminster, among the offal-laden boat noodles and coconut-rich curries of Thailand are the flavors of Laos.

Traffic flows past Tom Yum Koong in a stream of steel and rubber, pouring off the nearby freeway into the concrete delta of strip malls and suburban churches. The restaurant is looked at and looked over. To some, it may look like just another neighborhood Thai restaurant: salads sluiced with lime juice and chiles, broad rice noodles snaking through puddles of soy sauce. But the kitchen maintains a distinct duality, capable in Thai and Laotian cooking.

Tom Yum Koong’s Laotian influence belongs to chef and owner Manivanh Chansmouth. She and her family purchased the restaurant two years ago, restyling it with warm chocolate walls and a constellation of paper lanterns. Owing to her Laotian heritage, Chansmouth retrofitted the menu by adding a concise selection of Laotian specialties and Isaan-style Thai favorites. The latter are Laos-influenced dishes from Isaan, Thailand’s northeastern region that sits just across the Mekong River from Laos.

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October 28, 2010

Leftovers: Dat Thanh

A new nem nuong cuon contender for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by MARIAH TAUGER / L.A. TIMES

In the hyperspecialized kitchens of Little Saigon, where dining by dac biet (a restaurant’s prescribed list of house specialties) is almost a moral obligation, nem nuong cuon is a matter of contention. For every dozen batches of slack, sloppy spring rolls, there are a few that approach brilliance: ruddy pork patties branded by the grill, cucumber spears that snap with farmers-market freshness, dipping sauces derived from equal parts recipe and alchemy.

Consensus has long steered the spring roll-obsessed to Brodard. It’s the restaurant that transformed nem nuong cuon from craving to commodity, an immense place so popular that it staffs an entire assembly line to construct those sheer, swollen rolls. But a newcomer has all but unseated Brodard.

Dat Thanh operates on a much smaller scale. Its tiny, well-kept dining room is so compact it seems a mere outgrowth of the kitchen, as if each seat were arrayed around a chef’s table. The 4-month-old restaurant runs in the family: Hai Nguyen, affable and gracious, mans the front while his parents, who hail from a village near Vung Tau on Vietnam’s southern coast, stick to the stoves. The Nguyens previously owned a larger, otherwise identical restaurant in Little Saigon before selling it six years ago.

Read the rest here.

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September 25, 2010

Going local at the Food Rendezvous

Checking in on the newest platform for L.A.’s emerging food artisans for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by KATIE FALKENBERG / L.A. TIMES

Outside the old Venice jail, toddlers in tie-dyed shirts lick avocado-vanilla popsicles and graying couples aim their Leica cameras at a small-scale organic garden. Inside, wines are dispensed from behind the mahogany reception desk while curious cooks page through dog-eared recipes at a cookbook swap.

The inaugural Food Rendezvous brimmed with comestible energy, an assemblage of L.A.’s food artisans, gardeners, chefs and nonprofit organizations. The event sprang from the minds of Laurie Dill and Dominique Leveuf, two former San Franciscans who were inspired by the underground markets there. The pair had spent more than six months planning last month’s first Food Rendezvous, a populist platform designed to unite L.A.’s vast, sometimes fractured food community.

“The idea is not just to bring in new food producers and artisans that are making things from scratch, but it’s also to reconnect with the centrality of doing things from scratch,” Leveuf says. “It’s about sparking a conversation.”

Visit the Food Rendezvous tomorrow at the Abbot Kinney Festival. Read the rest of the story here.

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September 13, 2010

Leftovers: La Huasteca

Rocio Camacho’s pre-Columbian cuisine for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by GLENN KOENIG / L.A. TIMES

Cars cruise through the roundabout under the waning afternoon sun, leisurely circling a reconstruction of Mexico City’s Angel of Independence. First-timers marvel at the faux-colonial facade seemingly imported block by block from Guadalajara. Lynwood’s Plaza Mexico is Latin America the L.A. way, an elaborate set onto which visitors can graft memories and forge new ones.

La Huasteca is the shopping center’s grandest stage: sylvan murals that appear to recede into forested infinity, wrought-iron chandeliers that could light up a whole town. For six years, the restaurant has been a reliable outpost of high-end alta cocina, a study mostly of Mexico’s Huasteca region. Six months ago, however, the kitchen came under the command of chef Rocio Camacho.

Camacho earned the attention of an entire city at Moles La Tía in East Los Angeles. The César Chávez Avenue restaurant is where she transformed the very notion of mole, where vague ideas of chocolaty sauces exploded into a prismatic array of cheery yellows, herbaceous greens and brilliant magentas. Camacho’s move arrived by word of blogger Javier Cabral, who was also instrumental in raising the profile of Moles La Tía. Now at La Huasteca, Camacho has unveiled a refined new menu.

Read the rest here.

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September 2, 2010

Leftovers: Merry’s House of Chicken

Indonesian fried chicken and coal-black kluwak for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by MARIAH TAUGER / L.A. TIMES

There’s a glistening chicken somewhere under the blanket of crispy rice-flour crumbles. The crystalline snowflake-like particles are scattered over the entire bird, its skin sluiced with a squeeze of lime and spiced with a dab of sambal, shrimp paste and chiles ground into a pungent, penetrating blast of heat.

Time seems to stand still for that chicken: Phones quit chirping and fidgety kids suddenly snap to attention, transfixed by the fried delights of the ayam goreng kremesan at Merry’s House of Chicken, a months-old Indonesian restaurant in West Covina.

The eastern edges of the San Gabriel Valley might be L.A.’s epicenter of Indonesian cuisine. Sprawling across strip malls and city lines is an archipelago of food-court cafes and full-fledged restaurants, some serving offal-intensive curries and others sweetly lacquered barbecue. But there isn’t a single stick of satay at Merry’s; the restaurant instead purveys classic Javanese cooking.

Read the rest here.

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August 3, 2010

Leftovers: Uyen Thy

A French-inflected breakfast in Little Saigon for the L.A. Times:


PHOTO by LAWRENCE K. HO / L.A. TIMES

In Little Saigon, modest fortunes have been made on spring rolls alone. Entire legacies have been decided by the buttery crunch of a warm baguette. Diners anoint only the most exacting items: fresh-pressed sugarcane juice with muddled kumquats, whole baked catfish with skin caramelized into candy. Here, restaurants are immortalized in the details.

It’s with that diligence that Uyen Thy Bistro so often succeeds. This is a restaurant innately aware of its strengths even when the immensity of its menu sometimes indicates otherwise.

Uyen Thy is predictably secluded in a sliver of space at the bottom of a three-story strip mall behind a 7-Eleven. But the restaurant isn’t easily eclipsed — it’s the namesake of Uyen Thy, host of a well-known Vietnamese cooking show on the Garden Grove-based Saigon Broadcasting Television Network.

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