Food Blogging with Montezuma's Revenge

This scene happened time and time again during the week I was in Nicaragua:

“I know I need to eat, but I’m just not hungry.”

“Me neither. But we have to eat something.”

“But I’m not hungry. Maybe we can just eat trail mix?”

“Maybe.”

This never happens to me when I travel. Normally, I’m tapping the time away with my foot impatiently, allowing temples and mountains and museums to pass by unseen as I wait impatiently for my next meal.

Nicaragua was different.

First of all, it was hot in our first city, Leon. Ferociously, dustily, windlessly hot. Sweat poured from us at the slightest movement and we slurped down smoothies one after the other. Eating anything on top of the smoothies seemed like it’d be exhausting just by virtue of the fact that we’d have to move our jaws.

Second of all, though we barely ate anything that first day, our stomachs somehow intuited we were in a foreign country and revolted immediately. Mine especially. This was a shock, given that I’ve eaten in street stalls all over southeast Asia, and drank smoothies that were presumably made with local water without so much as a grumble of protest from my stomach. It’s always been too busy reveling in the joy of tropical fruit, and taking baths in fish sauce.

Third of all – and had this not been the case I probably could have ignored the first two – I didn’t like any of the food. Any of it.

Now, before I move on, let me make clear that there were so many (non food-related) moments in which I felt so lucky to have made the trip. The bottoms of my feet turned white with fine dust from the top of the Leon Cathedral as the wind blew me across the roof towards the dusty red view of distant volcanoes. Our pickup bounced aggressively past spiky purple dragonfruit-sprouting cactuses on its way up to a waterfall-adjacent, parakeet-filled natural reserve. Volcan Masaya, the “Mouth of Hell”, rose in the distance, shrouded with clouds, beautiful partially due to our not being able to smell the sulfur from all the way across the lake. And somehow, the last day was the first day that it rained, and friendly strangers crowded above us with umbrellas, giggling with us as we all got soaked and watched a parade that was supposed to celebrate horses but mainly seemed to celebrate energy drinks, medicine, and beer.

But almost every time we sat down at a table to eat, our plate had some kind of overcooked, gristly meat on it, paired with dry and sometimes mealy rice and beans, maybe a mushy, barely caramelized plantain or two, and if we were lucky, some sad strands of cabbage.

Of course there were exceptions, but they mainly stood out as ‘good’, or at least ‘interesting’, in contrast to the rest of the food we had in Nicaragua, not in contrast to the rest of the world. Granada’s vigorón and Masaya’s baho, two sides of the same yucca-chunked coin, looked like tidily wrapped presents in their bright green banana leaves. Chicharrones on one and beef on the other. Dry yucca on one and stewed yucca on the other. That cabbage-y salad on both, though with more onions on the latter. The first tasted like dried out vinegared potatoes with some wonderful crunchy oily pigskin goodness on it. The second had a little more homecooked charm, giving the depth and impression of someone stewing onions, vegetables, and spices in a cauldron (perhaps) for hours, stirring it with love and care. Unfortunately, they also stewed the meat for hours, leaving it totally unchewable.

Our first meal, in the car on the way from the airport, was at a gussied-up roadside stand famous for its quesillos. Quesillos are a kind of thick tortilla – like a pupusa without the filling – with a slab of fresh cheese on top, covered in pickled onions and even more vinegar than was required for the pickling, and then absolutely smothered in sour cream. Smothered. They take ice-cream-scoop-sized spoons and dip them 3+times. Enough is enough, but I have to admit that though the pickled onions look excessive, they aren’t. They’re great.

But probably the best meal we ate was from a plastic bag on a bench in Leon’s Central Park. There were some ladies outside the municipal market stirring pots and waving flies away from their pots with sheafs of paper, and we approached one and had her spear us some barbecued chicken, gallo pinto, and salad, then throw it in a bag. And though it looked indistinguishable from all the other overcooked, bean-encircled, salad-adjacent plates we’d had, just mixed up, the spice rub on the chicken was good and savory, the pickles packed some heat, and the rice held some residual flavor from whatever animal’s fat had enlivened it.

I’ll remember Nicaragua for the unrelenting friendliness of the locals and the way it felt to take buses from city to city that acted more like roaming hitchhiker-picker-uppers. And, yes, for the gallons and gallons of fresh, cheap tropical smoothies I drank, containing ingredients as widely varied as cinnamon, passion fruit, chamomile, guava, and spinach. But I won’t remember it for the food, and that feels foreign to me. I learned on this trip that I have no idea how to travel without being unreasonably excited for my next meal. I don’t know what to do. My movement from city to city, or neighborhood to neighborhood, or block to block, has always been driven by some local specialty or ingredient, some raved-about dish by some expat or tourist before me, or even merely the idea that some kind of fruit or sea creature might be found there. Maybe I should learn to be driven by whatever a particular country happens to offer, and that’s certainly what I’d do if I traveled solely by means of blindfolding myself and spinning a globe with my finger on it, but I think my next trip’s going to be to a country whose deliciousness is well established.

Suggestions?

Ốc Lá Lốt

Consider these two summer days in Sài Gòn, one year apart.

1.

I’m perched on a two-foot high plastic stool at a restaurant that’s half dining room, half sidewalk, festooned with plastic shell buckets, and just across a few streets from the narrow alleys of Sài Gòn’s touristy Phạm Ngữ Lão district. The shouts offering taxis, motorbikes, passport photos, buses to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, iPhone cases, and marijuana have faded into the background and have been replaced by the ever-present din of constant honking. Not even honking. So constant as to be one, droning, multi-tonal hum.

I’m new to Southeast Asia, so my ears still register this as alarming, rather than white noise. Also, I’m eatingplatefuls of snails, which just became my favorite food about 24 hours ago. Coconut snails. Blood cockles. Spotted, leopard-print snails.

Julian is ambling across the street, camera in hand, parting the sea of motorbikes by what looks like magnetic repulsion. He stops in the middle. The middle of the street! He raises his camera. Are you kidding me, Julian? The middle of the street?

Click.

2.

I’m way outside Phạm Ngữ Lão this time, miles out, in the very local Bình Tân district, walking aimlessly, deftly avoiding potholes, uneven sidewalk edges, and space-invading motorbikes. Since I’m white and I’m not hefting a giant backpack and I’m not at the bus station that serves points south and Cambodia, I don’t fit into this picture at all. I fit in even less because I’m angry, storming down the street after a fight with Julian, looking neither right nor left at the shops, parks, homes, or street stalls around me.

At some point, I arrive at a T-junction. Directly in front of me is a never-ending whirlwind of helmets, wheels, brushed plastic, and exhaust. Directly in front of THAT is a lady standing at a trio of grills, all covered with little cigar-looking blackish-green things. Surrounding her are buckets of vegetables, vermicelli, and what I gather are raw versions of the cigar things, looking a much brighter green and more like tamales in that state.

The smoke from her grills overpowers even the exhaust: caramelizing meat and some kind of pungent leaf. Suddenly drained of all anger and filled with the singular desire to try whatever is happening on the far side of the street, I find my way home, retrieve Julian, bring him back, and sit down on another two-foot high plastic stool. Then we await whatever happens to people when they sit there.

—

I’m in the U.S. now, albeit in perhaps the best place in the U.S. to approximate Vietnam – the greater Los Angeles area – and finding either snails or anything wrapped in betel leaves is not easy. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumble upon a restaurant that serves ốc lá lốt – snail sausage wrapped in betel leaves: a combination of the two most potent Vietnamese food-memories I possess.

When we walk in, the lady at the front takes one look at us and runs away, into the kitchen. The young waitress who follows her back out in a minute says cautiously, “How may I help you?”

“Well… we’d like to sit down and order food?” Suddenly, my social script interrupted. I don’t even know how to be at a restaurant.

She’s embarrassed because they don’t have an English menu. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, but she doesn’t really believe me. “We have pork and broken rice…” she says, trailing off, before I see what’s on the wall behind me and laughingly, stumblingly order the snail in betel leaves.

Without the frenetic, honking drone and the pouring sweat and the two-foot high plastic stools, it’s hard to approximate urban Vietnam. Chả Ốc Gia Huy is about as close as it gets. The kitchen is open and aromatic, divided from the eating area only by a tiny counter. The menu is an afterthought, jumbled onto one laminated page. Workers at the next table mix cha and load leaves with the mixture, rolling them up as deftly as any cigarette-rolling hipster. Their workspace takes up one out of three of the available tables in the restaurant, and puts the laborious process on display for all to see. It makes eating the result all the sweeter. Sometimes, you DO want to see how sausages are made. There’s something about looking at the raw sludge of filling and the bright green vegetation, separated and in bowls, while biting into a sweet, caramelized, crackling bundle of umami and marveling at the power of fire and spice.

What cements the mental teleportation, though, is their bún mắm, an anchovy-laden, muddy-looking broth filled with shrimp, pork, fish balls, and vegetation. On another visit, my dad took a spoonful and immediately said, “I’m back in Ha Noi.” From behind the counter, the waitress, a different one this time, peeked at him drinking the last dregs of the broth from the bowl and smiled. Not twenty minutes earlier she had been trying to convince us that bun mam was perhaps not the best choice for our American tastebuds. I’d heard it before from the guy at Ha Tien Quan and heeded the warning about as much this time.

A Hotbed of Poke

Over lunch at Poke Etc in Long Beach a couple weeks ago, my boyfriend looked at my lunch, a colorful two-toned splat of sauced ahi, all but eclipsing the rice scoop underneath, and asked, “So what’s the difference between a poke bowl and a chirashi bowl?”

Answering this was difficult for me, because what ISN’T the difference between a poke bowl and a chirashi bowl? There’s the rice (long-grain vs. short grain sticky) the fish (normally ahi vs. a large assortment), the sauce (none, or a light oil, or pretty much anything, if it’s fusion-y, vs. an austere soy-wasabi mix, if that) the accompaniment (mixed in, and might be anything from nuts to avocado to seaweed to onions, vs. always-on-the-side pickled ginger, sliced cucumber, and maybe gobo or something)…

By the time his eyes glazed over I was only halfway done with half of my half-and-half poke bowl (half wasabi poke, half ginger poke). They really do pile it on!

But is theirs the best poke?

I’ve been trying to answer that question since discovering (to my elation) that I am surrounded on all sides by poke. I live in a hotbed of it. Poke places dot the coast from Venice to Newport Beach as though Hawaii itself threw out experimental colonizing tendrils across the Pacific. (Hawaii, if your tendrils are listening, we love your poke. Please send more, and eventually stage a takeover.) Even my local crunchy granola market, Lazy Acres, has a poke bar with three different varieties of poke, priced by the pound – and even more impressively, all three are great.

Not all of the poke is. Bear Flag, in Newport Beach, swings wildly in quality, sometimes delivering containers of mold-smelling ridiculousness, and other times delivering divine, sweet, sesame-seeded morsels. Island Eats Hale Aina, in Torrance, puts all its culinary wizardry into crafting its superb lau-lau, and none of it into managing to make poke that doesn’t taste like someone upended a salt shaker over it in the kitchen. North Shore Poke, in Huntington Beach, must take its tips from IEHA; it soaks its poke liberally in soy sauce to the point where you may as well just drink a bottle of soy sauce. Fish King, in Glendale (not exactly on the coast, but I’ll allow it) has an extremely silky, extremely gingery version with unremarkable fish, which, smartly, is overpowered by the ginger. As a ginger lover, I’m not even mad. (Yes, I’m being inconsistent and unfair by not knocking the place which chooses ginger to overpower things with.)

Honestly, the contest is simple. It’s between Poke Etc. and a place called Jus’ Poke in Redondo Beach, which, if you’re familiar at all with dramatic setup, you’ll find is the one I’ve chosen for the Best Poke Trophy, hands down!

Jus’ Poke’s Original allows the superb quality of its fish to shine, along with the chefs’ carving ability. Not once have I found my teeth laced with connective tissue after a meal here. Not once. The fish is all brilliant red, cut in perfect cubes, sized for overly eager mouthfuls. Waiting in line here, watching scoop after scoop of glistening fish be plopped next to furikake-sprinkled rice and nestled between sweet and sour pickles or hot and spicy edamame or Hawaiian chips, your mouth gets overly eager for sure. It’s ready for those pillows of tuna, spiderwebbed with choke ogo, a purplish, veiny seaweed, and flecked with little pieces of green onion and sesame seeds. The whole thing is slicked with lightly scented oil, but nowhere does it overwhelm. The fish is the queen and ruler of this cardboard platter, and her flavors are her subjects.

Welcome To The Neighborhood

So, I moved to Long Beach.

That’s right, I voluntarily left the location where the fragrant embraces of Koreatown, Boyle Heights, Glendale, and Northeast L.A. converge. I gave up the ability to indulge in blue corn quesadillas on my way back from a jaunt to the Vietnamese market to pick up my weekly durian sticky rice. To take the bus to the caviar specialty store and stop for searingly hot crispy pork skins on the way home. To skirt downtown and drown happily in bowlfuls of Sichuan fish and intestine stew.

But Long Beach has its own secrets; while slow to show themselves, they are here.

For one thing, there is the farmers market.

Despite the fact that it’s literally on my block, it is well-hidden: aurally by skate-park shouts, and visually by a big ugly building whose purpose I have not yet discovered. You round a corner and there it is. You pick your way through mazes of beckoning shouts: wheatgrass! Natural dog cookies! Rustic soap! House-perfuming crystalline stones! These are the siren songs you must successfully resist to be allowed into the prepared food area.

At most farmers markets, this section is sparse. Much of it is usually dedicated to packaged pre-made food, not meals you might be able to eat on-site. At other markets, I’ve been sent home with stacked containers of green, red, black, and brown mole. I’ve staggered to my car with enough hummus to feed myself, exclusively on hummus, for 2 months. In Echo Park in particular, there was even organic banchan, which I only side-eyed after seeing the prices. But in terms of having dinner, I had only been to markets where you still have to go home and prepare it.

The Bixby Park Farmers Market, in comparison, is like a food truck festival without the hipness. Pupusa and tamale tents crowd each other and tout their competing horchatas, while, somehow, an Indian buffet manages to conform to the demands of the outdoors. A Korean sandwich tent sends smells out to mingle with the fish taco place across the way, while a wrap joint borrows from its surroundings by offering a chicken tikka masala wrap in the same breath as a salmon ‘n’ spinach rice plate. A bare-boned chicken wing tent elbows its pizza-selling neighbor’s wood-burning oven, and a lobster roll stand attempts to roll over the smoky aroma with the inviting smell of melted butter.

I have eaten at many, but not all, of these tents. The “problem” (read: not a problem) is, the tamale and pupusa tents reign so far supreme that I have trouble venturing anywhere else.

That pupusa tent, a cell of Wilmington’s Restaurante Estela, always has a group of salivating market-goers crowded around it, because the couple who run it take forever to make the pupusas (forever in market-time: at least 10 minutes). It isn’t consistent, as sometimes the cheese is sour or the bottoms are burnt, but when the pupusas are good, they’re as good as hot, melty, bubbling masa filled with savory meats, cheeses, and veggies are going to get. Their slaw topping is pink, vinegary, and begging for the bright red hot sauce that comes with it. My favorite is the revuelta, a gooey mess of pork, beans and cheese.

Sometimes, I’m not in the mood for pupusas, but I’ll still stop by to grab a mystery-fruit-filled ‘tropical punch’ – a passion-fruit heavy drink full of chopped fruit – or a Salvadorian horchata, which tastes like a cross between raw almond milk and the smell of brazil nuts. I’m there so often that the proprietor knows me by a name which he thinks is mine, but is not.

The tamale tent, perhaps too simply (but accurately) named ‘Me Gusta‘ (and headquartered in Pacoima), has the airiest, moistest masa I’ve ever tasted in my life, and the masa is flavored differently depending on its fillings. I know this sounds like a ‘duh’ statement, but to infuse the whole tamale, masa and all, with the flavor of the filling is quite unusual. Usually masa tastes like masa, and that’s that, but here, you know whether you’re biting into the rich, mole-like beef with red sauce or the seed-peppered kick of pork with green sauce before you even get to the meat. I should also mention that they tout their lardless preparation. When I first heard this, I scoffed, because everyone knows lard is what makes tamales tasty. I guess they’ve found another way, and I don’t expect them to let this secret out anytime soon.

If you can pull yourself away from these two tents (I can’t), there’s San Pedro’s fish tacos (straightforward execution, generous with the toppings, could stand to cook their fish less), pizza sticks (I am unqualified to comment due to my anti-pizza orientation) hot pineapple wings (tender, but marred by the use of canned pineapple), a vegan Mexican place (lost me as soon as they sold me a vegan cacao drink for $5 that tasted like watered down Snack Pack chocolate pudding), a creperie (does a pretty solid pine nut pesto spinach crepe), and a falafel stand (falafel so dry it that it instantly sucks all the moisture out of your mouth and throat).

Stands pop up and disappear weekly, but the two standouts are solid and dependable. Find them by the bandstand – as soon as the music is too loud to hear yourself think, you are in the right place.

—

Long Beach is home to Cambodia Town. Before I lived here, this is one of the only reasons I ever travelled down (or up) here. It’s a blurred-bordered area, centering on Anaheim between Alamitos and Junipero, but my favorite restaurant is on 10th Street, across from a near-criminally cheap laundromat, and there’s a noodle joint on 17th Street I regularly fill myself up on for $4, so you can’t discover Cambodia Town’s secrets by walking on the main drag. Much like Phnom Penh itself, you have to wind around its back streets, spending the whole day sauntering. And also like Phnom Penh, the streets are neatly numbered, making it impossible to get lost.

This 10th street restaurant, Crystal Thai-Cambodian Cuisine, has a menu way more confusing than the neighborhood in which it sits, mainly because it doesn’t really reflect what the restaurant is offering that day. In 2011, I was able to nibble around the edges of some delicious vertebrae-looking hunks of spiny eel, but in 2015, when I ask for the eel, my waiter simply laughs and says nobody ever ordered it, so it’s gone. The appetizer spring rolls – called ‘appetizers’ even though they’re tree-trunk sized – are similarly ephemeral, blinking into and out of existence based on the whims of the kitchen. Soups come out with whatever vegetables happen to be around, no matter what the menu descriptions say, and a lot of different curries get written down on the waitress’ pad as simply ‘panang’. There’s no brown rice, probably because who eats brown rice in Southeast Asia?

Of course, the only restaurants that can get away with putting up this many obstacles are restaurants whose food is good enough to be worth it, and here Crystal is no exception. Anything lemongrassy is dry-rubbed with a dusky sauce that, upon closer inspection, looks full of tiny, delicious little tree branches. My favorite is the chha kroeung, with either frog or fish. The frog – its whole body chopped roughly, not just its legs, can be a little overcooked, but I forgive it for the simple joy of popping its half-chicken, half-fish textured flesh off the smooth bones, and for the tiny-tree-branch-coated long beans everywhere. Eaten alone, it’s uncomfortably spicy, but with rice, you only cry a little.

One of the many things the waitress writes down as ‘panang’ is the special fish curry, which has meaty, thick-cut steaks of bony fish marinating in a deep yellow, creamy, unexpectedly fiery sauce. Fillet these fish with your chopsticks before beginning to eat, or you’ll spend the meal spitting out bones, and here, unlike in most of Southeast Asia, it is not polite to simply spit them into a pile on the floor next to you. There is also the tamarind leaves soup, which has hunks of floating fish fat, clouds of soft, silky leaves and stalks, and salty explosions of fermented shrimp, plus, of course, whatever vegetables the chefs feels like throwing in there. In fact, any soup you order will be epic, a veritable bucket of mystery leaves, hunks of bone-in, fat-attached meat, and three different kinds of eggplants.

Enjoy your dinner with their complementary tea, but a warning: it is much, MUCH more caffeinated than it looks or tastes. I’ve spent more than one night wide awake, thinking I’m having a panic attack, but really I’ve just eaten dinner at Crystal and drunk too many pots of tea.

While it’s never difficult to get a seat at Crystal, especially at night, Phnom Penh Noodle Shack at Cherry and 17th keeps the stubborn hours of 6AM to 3PM, and so gets absolutely swamped around lunchtime (I’ve never been there at opening time to see if anyone’s jonesing hard for noodle bowls at the crack of dawn). They have but one bench, and the rest of the sidewalk is a solid mass of salivating people.

Once you get in, you’ll want just one thing: the namesake #1: Phnom Penh Noodle. I won’t restrict you too much in my recommendation, though: you get to choose your noodle type (rice, egg, teardrop, ‘Mama’), and whether you want it ‘wet’ (broth-in) or ‘dry’ (broth-on-side). For my tastes, I like it dry and with teardrop noodles, though they’ll usually try and convince me that teardrop noodles need to soak in broth. Nonsense, I say (from my seat of cultural misunderstanding)! Their chewy texture when dry reminds me of those wheaty, robust Western Chinese noodles that usually show up accompanied by mutton. Here, in Phnom Penh style, they come with meat from all parts of the pig, including the liver and stomach, plus shrimp, plus a whole bunch of herbs. Despite the fact that the organ meat/herb combo leaves the soup tasting very strong already, the waiter might come around and pointedly remind you that, you know, there’s SAUCES on the table for you to use, hint hint.

This bowl of intense pleasure and the tenderest stomach you’ll ever taste runs $4 for a kids size, which is too large for me to finish. Also, they have no qualms serving a 30 year old a kids size bowl of noodles.

If you have time for only two restaurants when exploring Cambodia Town, I have no second thoughts in recommending these two; however, I have some honorable mentions to, well, mention:

– Amok Trey at Siem Reap: this fish-curry-served-in-a-coconut dish would be emblematic of the tropics if Cambodia was the sort of place we thought of when we thought of the tropics. It’s incredibly nuanced, with fish soft as butter and a cool greenish foam of spices bursting from the lip of the fresh coconut.

– Coconut shake at Cyclo Noodles: layers and layers of coconut and cream, as well as a guaranteed laxative, but totally worth it.

– Banh mi at Baguette Paris: OK, I’m not if this shop is technically Cambodian, because everything is written in Vietnamese, and the owner speaks a million languages, but it’s smack in the middle of Cambodia Town and its paté reeks of anchovies, in a good way.