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.

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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.