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photos, buses to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, iPhone cases, and marijuana have faded into the background and have been replaced by the ever-present din of constant honking.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.

Dessert That's Worth It

How come we – as humans, particularly as Americans – situate dessert at the end of our meals? Why do we subconsciously treat it as though it has a separate type of mass than the rest of our food, making statements like ‘there’s always room for ice cream!’ in utter seriousness?

Where, indeed, does the concept of ‘dessert’ even come from – the idea that we eat sweet things after savory things, and not before? It’s certainly not a reality, just a cultural rule, and one we unthinkingly break all the time with our nutella crepes, syrup-soaked French toast, tooth-achingly sweet toaster pastries, chocolate-filled ‘energy bars’, sweetened smoothies, and Froot Loops.

So, really, it’s not a rule at all. It’s an illusion.

Excessive deconstruction notwithstanding, I’m still going to treat dessert like it is a real thing, not a construct – a word we can mold vocabulary and examples around – just so I can say this: at restaurants, I’m rarely tempted by it.

When I see a piece of pie on a fancy restaurant menu that costs $6+, I scoff – even as I unthinkingly polish off my $15 bowl of udon or $28 plate of lamb chops. Should the pie be made with gold flakes, saffron, and blocks of pure, unadulterated Mexican chocolate, I will still scoff. “$6 for dessert?” I’ll mutter to myself. “You could get 3 bánh mì for that! In fact, I think I’ll go do that after this.”

I may simply not possess the sweet tooth that motivates many to lock their bowls of M&M’s in file cabinets for added self-control, or to sleepwalk to the fridge in the middle of the night to stick their face in cake. Or it may be that for two years I worked a job where all day, every day, my coworkers would come in and drop donuts, cupcakes, croissants, and slices of pie on my desk. I weighed a full 30 pounds more then, and I didn’t even like the sweets. It was just that, you know, they were there, so I ate them. Maybe I still conceive of dessert as something that should just fall in my lap, and paying for it seems ridiculous.

Who knows?

This is a very long preamble to say that the restaurants and stands I’m about to mention all serve dessert that makes me rescind every bad thing I’ve just said about dessert.

I: Los Angeles

Down the hill from me lives an overpriced, hipstery grocery store. It’s called Cookbook and it sells things like $11 bags of chips and $5 microscopic tins of hummus and all-natural popsicles that probably cost at least $3 but I’m scared to look. It also sells a $2 cookie called the Not Nutter Butter that will satisfy your nutritional requirements for an entire day and leave you with a big messy peanut buttery smile on your face for just as long. This cookie is better than energy bars. It’s better than most actual cookies. And it should go without saying that it’s as much better than the ‘real’ Nutter Butter as Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups are than Reese’s.

Mochi is another thing that’ll glue your mouth shut if you’re not careful, and I rarely find a specimen that makes this risk worth it. However, the 101-year-old Fugetsu-Do, a tiny shop right in the heart of Little Tokyo and thrown into shadow by the Miyako Hotel, makes such specimens. Their rice cakes appear crafted by visual artists, and the subtle shift in each layer, from the bean-based filling to the cake itself to the slightly more jello-ey accoutrements, keeps your teeth interested. They aren’t as heavy handed with the sugar as most mochi purveyors, and there’s something about the flavoring that makes me nostalgic for those gummy orange slicesthat used to be everywhere in the 80’s. This is a good thing.

Nearby, in a district quickly morphing from warehouses to dark artsy hangouts, there’s a place called the Pie Hole. It serves a slice called the Earl Grey, and the custard is precisely like drinking a perhaps over-sweetened cup. While it would be overly sweet for tea, though, it’s just right for pie. The crust is so tough it could be used to break glass, but I like the contrast; it’s like having pudding in a bowl, and then getting to eat the bowl.

Moving to the west a bit…

I’ve raved about Watdongmoonlek, in Los Feliz, enough here already, but let me just touch on it again to rave about their mango sticky rice. Mango sticky rice is a staple at every Thai restaurant in town, but it’s usually gooey and glazed, the rice shiny with a sugary coconut drizzle, and the mangoes on the verge of green. Here, they use black rice, lending the entire plate a nutty taste, and a use petal-cut slices – a full circle of them! – of champagne mango.

Black Hogg in Silver Lake isn’t exactly my cup of tea overall, but their panna cotta surprised me. While panna cotta can sometimes taste like nothing more than a bowlful of weak cream, or the underwhelming innards of creme brulee, their raspberries are boldly infused with a strong vinaigrette and sprinkled with wads – yes, wads, and I know it’s not an appetizing word – of dried honey. Honey so fresh and misshapen it’s as though they just pulled it from a beehive in the back. The honey gives it texture; the vinaigrette gives it tang.

I’m surprising no one, breaking no barriers, with this next one, but Scoops in East Hollywood deserves its accolades. The whiteboard in the corner upon which customers write their ice cream ideas appears to actually be utilized here, but smartly: flavors like red velvet oreo and vanilla tarragon brandy eventually make their way to the cold case, while flavors like ‘BBQ pulled pork” and “peanut lime bacon” live only a day until they get erased. While Scoops’ vernacular leaves something to be desired (that something is ‘sense’) – ‘single scoop’ means two scoops, and so on – it’s worth the confusion to try the off-the-wall combinations. Personally, I like it when they go tart and I like it when they go a little too crazy. Say, the mango lychee or blackberry jamaica on one end and the lavender goat cheese or avocado honey on the other.

Time to move away from well-known Hollywood shops and onto bakeries that specialize in something else. On the east side, La Mascota Bakery’s tamales rule the neighborhood (not an easy neighborhood for tamale-dominance, either). But their guava-cheese empanadas are just as good as their tamales. What is everyone in line at Porto’s for? Here, the filling bursts forth with the pride of a good New York bagel with all the toppings. I almost don’t want to mention it for fear their tiny parking lot will be overwhelmed.

II: Orange County

I will start this extremely belated second half of my Ode to Worth-It Desserts with a eulogy.

It is with a heavy heart that I report what was to be my #1 on my outer L.A. list, the chunky mango ice cream sandwiched between two gooey-crisp hot chocolate chip cookies at Honey Badger Cafe in Alhambra, is no longer with us. I stopped by today, and the dessert page had been diminished to include durian and taro ice cream only. (Bo-ring!… just kidding.) Rest in peace, mango ice cream sandwich. I grouched at the waiter in your honor (then apologized).

Our moment of silence will be brief, though, and we may as well spend it only one block to the west, at Perfectly Sweet, a bakery/confectioner whose modest display window is stuffed with cakes, truffles, puffs, macarons, cookies, and tarts. Its prices seem average upon first glance, but upon biting into something and realizing it may take you a couple hours for your stomach be able to process the level of richness in, for example, one single chocolate truffle, you suddenly realize just how good of a deal you’re getting. Everything here is excellent – no exceptions discovered yet – but the truffles are sublime, with bitterness just on the edge of fine wine. Plus, the cream puffs are filled with real custard – none of this whipped cream or frosting nonsense. The clouds, however, are filled with something rather more ethereal. When bitten, they festively explode their wispy filling all over the place like a second grade science project volcano. I clearly remember running my finger over the table to get all the foam, then licking it off my finger, with no regard at all for hygiene. That’s how good the clouds are.

Phoenix Dessert is in Alhambra, too, exactly where you’d expect it to be: Valley Blvd, a street practically paved with delicious Chinese food. I hear tell that Phoenix Dessert is attached to a not-so-great restaurant, but I have quite literally never noticed, as I head straight for the dessert display. One of its offerings is a sampler with four flavors of jiggly jello-esque pudding, separated by the kind of dividers you find in sock drawers. The flavors consist of things like hibiscus petals: reddish specks suspended in a clear gelatinous solution. Or black sesame and coconut – slightly gritty, volcanic-sand-sweet mouthfuls. Or simply mango – a delightfully bright sunny square, a dim sum dessert plate writ large.

Once your mouth is accustomed to the jiggle, you’re ready to try this one particular dessert at one of the many Thạch Chè Hiển Khánhs in Westminster and Garden Grove. My friends and I have dubbed it ‘Banana Snot’. Wait, don’t skip this one! Just because the bananas are oddly slimy and the coconut milk sauce is somehow viscous and watery at the same time, or just because the clear tapioca balls are invisible and thus surprise your tongue every time by being all squishy between your teeth all of a sudden (and sometimes they’re shaped like caterpillars) doesn’t mean it’s not delicious. It is. It’s worth the texture mishmash. I don’t know the Vietnamese name for this dish; I know how to say ‘banana’ and ‘coconut milk’, but putting these two words together never works as well as just pointing. Look for the tray of white goo with yellow banana chunks floating around like water-wings-wearing kids in a swimming pool. Make sure they put sesame seeds on top.

As long as you’re in Little Saigon, you might want to head over to Dong Phuong Tofu, which supplies all the nearby grocery stories with their hot tofu and hot soymilk trays. It’s better from the source, though. Soybeans make great appetizers at sushi bars; their milk makes a delicious drink; puffy and fried, they go better in drunken noodles than most meat; and apparently they also shape up well as pandan-green tofu custard with coconut milk and ginger syrup! One of their large (16oz) cups will last you a week of desserts in the fridge and costs under $5. Out of the tub, it looks like Nickelodeon Gak. In your mouth, it tastes like the achingly sweet tropics.

Also in Little Saigon (and in the San Gabriel Valley) is a dried-fruit-and-beef-jerky chain called Vua Khô Bò. Shopping there is an exercise in active restraint. Do you like being followed around at the elbow by two extremely friendly yet extremely pushy dried-foods-saleswomen? Do you like delicious free samples (tea, dried fruit, jerky, everything!) followed by a pointed snapping open of a purchase bag? I hope you do, because that’s what’s going to happen. However, if you’re going for dessert, do what I do: take the proffered sample of grass jelly (you won’t get away without it) and make a beeline for the ginger. Request a quarter pound of every variety of ginger. Watch them when they weigh it. They will try to make you buy a pound of each. Firmly insist that they dump it out and give you a quarter pound. They’ll laugh. Laugh with them! You both know the game you’re playing – no need to get frustrated or defensive. If you insist, you will get your quarter pound.

Now take it all home and binge on ginger. (I have been dubbed ‘The Ginger Binger’ for this very reason.)

Finally, a perhaps oddball suggestion (as though banana snot and green tofu weren’t): eat goat cheese for dessert. Soledad Goats has stands at farmers markets all over the Southland, and I have often stood in front of my fridge at night and spooned their pear-honey-walnut goat cheese straight into my mouth from the container.

California Chirashi Wars

I’m a chirashi fiend, but not for the normal reasons (and there are plenty of normal reasons to love chirashi, like, oh, I don’t know, that it’s fucking delicious*).  No, I’m a chirashi fiend because – this is embarrassing – but because my mouth is too small for nigiri.

It’s ridiculously awkward to be seated all primly and silently in front of some perfect-postured, kindly-eyed fish-slicing wizard who’s spent his whole career polishing his arrangement technique, to be handed an aquatic work of art, and then to spill the whole thing in a waterfall of shame down my chin and onto the front of my shirt when I try to either bite it or force the whole thing in.

I touched on this briefly here and I won’t comment further except to say that I’m being overdramatic for effect (although the description of the waterfall of shame is not an exaggeration): of course I still eat and greatly enjoy sushi.  But I am less inherently stressed by chirashi, where I can bite my fish in half in peace.  To me, a good chirashi place is like a neighborhood diner.  I go there to relax and enjoy the closest thing to a Cheers-style diner, only with the kind of food that refreshes and invigorates me.

I have an unequivocal favorite chirashi place in the Los Angeles area, and that’s the implausibly located and discouragingly named Toro’s Japanese Fusion Seafood.

It sounds like it could be a wacky-roll emporium, but despite the giant-screen TV set up behind the chefs that constantly plays deep sea or aquarium slideshows, it’s not.  It’s the purveyor of what are almost certainly the thickest, pillowiest, most flavorful and oceanic slices of tuna in Los Angeles. 

The restaurant is called ‘Toro’s’ for a reason – it’s owned, and likely kept afloat by, tuna.

It’s sliced thick, fatty, and looks absolutely nothing like the archetypal dark maroon maguro.  You know the kind: you see it, darkened and cloudy, stuffed next to cucumbers and browning avocado in supermarket sushi, and more often than not, it’s mixed with and camouflaged by ‘spicy sauce’.  Old, it’s smelly, but even fresh, in my opinion, it’s usually flavorless.

Not at Toro’s – the tuna here is a bright salmon pink, striped with fat, and snuggles into the rice’s nooks and crannies like a blanket.  They cut it huge and thick, at least the width of my finger.  It’s not only the tuna they cut thick – the hamachi is thick enough to see its shiny, cream tinged white sheen, and the salmon to count up to ten striations in its rich orange flesh.

Those three fish may be the predictable three ‘chirashi fish’, but they sure don’t taste the same here.

Toro’s will also put in, depending on the season, scallops, ikura, spicy albacore, squid, lotus roots, hirame, or masago… but there’s always ample seaweed, a beautiful triangle of sweet tamago, and perfectly vinegared sticky rice.

For dinner, the restaurant is outrageously expensive – although probably still worth it.  I wouldn’t know, because I would never pay $60 to fill myself up on even the best quality sushi when I can roll in at noon and pay $16.

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Toro’s takes the top spot in my heart, so it will take up the majority of the text space, but I have some honorable mentions to award, too, in case you don’t want to drive all the way out to Alhambra (but, just saying, you should drive out to Alhambra).

Murakami Sushi in West Hollywood has the casual ambiance that I crave – its breezy outdoor seating is paired with compact, ideally proportioned, and customizable bowls of fish that are impressively fresh for the price (though nothing compared to Toro’s and the fish is certainly not sliced as generously). Murakami specializes in build-your-own chirashi – you choose 4, 5, 6, or 7 types of fish and the price goes up in increments, starting at $12 for the 4 ingredient bowl. My favorite combination is mackerel, hamachi, scallops, and salmon. The scallops, tender and marinating in a masago-flecked white sauce, really are outstanding.

Tamon Sushi, in the Miyako Hotel downtown, is way too fancy for my taste, but if you’re a presentation junkie, you’ll love the ornate, double-layered chirashi (top dish, sorry for the blurriness). It also boasts the best ikura in town, with pops so dramatic you’ll swear you’re eating pop-rocks (or those weird fruit-burst things they’ve got in Yogurtland now).

The fish itself, in my opinion, is unexciting – fresh, clearly, but unexciting. The joy lies in the variety – taking turns surprising your tongue with the pops of ikura, the gum-like tako, the crunch of lotus, the tacky slips of sea bream, and the accompanying pickled salads and sticky mochi. If you bring a friend, force them (I mean, cajole them nicely) to order the Tamon Bento, whose shiso dust-topped rice, giant juicy mushroom, and greasy, charred, and flaky black cod make an excellent accompaniment. The shrimp hiding within the tempura is springy, but the time I went, the oil was a bit stale.

Though Tamon sounds like the weakest of the the three options I listed – and it is – there are a couple reasons to choose it. The first is if you are on a date and you want something darkened and formal. The second is that Fugetso-Do is across the street, and you can you stop by for some 101-year old mochi. I mean, the mochi isn’t 101 years old. The shop is. And the instant your teeth sink into one of their creations – silky, soft, fluffy clouds that envelope your tongue in joy and happiness – you’ll know why.

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*I have noticed that the only way I can be positive that Anthony Bourdain REALLY likes something is if he calls it ‘fucking delicious’. He might have written 4000 words on its preparation or the bumpy third world train ride he took to reach it or the artistry of the chef that dreamt it up, but if the words ‘fucking delicious’ are not present, all bets are off. So please take this phrase in the manner in which it’s intended: to convey that chirashi is something I love, crave, and aggressively seek out on a regular basis.

It's loquat season in L.A.!

I'm 6 years old and being held aloft by my rib cage, just under my arms.  Just beneath me is a black, slightly spiked metal fence, its points just grazing my knees as I stretch, stretch, str-e-e-e-e-tch towards a tantalizingly out-of-reach cluster of fruit on the neighbor's tree.

My parents and I are stealing loquats.  I am complicit in an act of fruit thievery.

Even though I grew up in Chicago, my family would spend its spring breaks here, in Echo Park, Los Angeles, and spring break was loquat season (late March to late May).  Chicago during that season was a wasteland of slush and icy dirt, occasionally punctured by prematurely hopeful crocuses.  To fly off to a different land and steal fresh, juicy, tangy fruit directly off trees while all my friends at home shivered and ate out-of-season red apples was a source of great joy.

My memory may fail me here, as my memory has a tendency to invent dramatic additions to childhood experiences, but it tells me I'd fill my sweatshirt pockets with handfuls of the strawberry-sized loquats before my mom or dad or I would hear some noise, some gate slamming, some dog barking, and they'd hastily hustle me back over, my clothes snagging on the fence, and we'd sprint back down the hill, loquats jiggling out of my pockets and leaving a telltale trail.

As an adult, living on the same street as the former site of my crime, the trees look eminently (and disappointingly) reachable. I barely have to stand on tiptoe.   The tree behind the spiky fence is gone.  The new nearest tree, only two houses away, is owned by an amiable man who relaxes in his deck chair and watches me gather them.  His dog presses herself against the fence for a scratch, and that's all they ask in return.  A few more trees, further down the hill, hang over the sidewalk as if to say, "Here I am.  Look how easy this is.  Your days of excitement and petty theft are over."

Strangely enough, even the loquats coat backyard trees all over the city, most people I meet don't know what loquats are, and if they do know what they are, they don't know that they're edible.  This is changing, slowly - I've occasionally seen bunches of loquats on sale in markets, and there have been a few blog posts about them in recent years.  But when I was a child, no one I knew was eating them.  They felt like a family secret.

We'd run into the house with our smuggled booty and empty it out onto the living room table.  The fruit would roll all over the table like soft marbles as we grabbed paper towels from the kitchen.  Then, whoever had the best thumbnails would pierce the skin at the steam and start peeling.

Loquats taste like a cross between an apricot, a grape, and a pear.  They range from tart to sticky-sweet, yellow to orange, and oblong to spherical.  They're one of those labor intensive fruits with a low flesh to skin/seed ratio (see also: pomegranate, coconut, mango, rambutan, pineapple, mangosteen...), but note that those types of fruits are usually insanely delicious, otherwise people wouldn't bother.  Loquats are no exception.

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So.  How can YOU find some loquats for yourself before the short loquat season is up?  There are two ways: the lazy way and the right way.

Lazy Way: Go to a market.  Try your local farmers market or any Middle Eastern, Eastern European, or West Asian grocery.  Wholesome Choice or Super King are probably good bets.  But I hope you're OK with paying out the nose for something you can probably pluck off a tree right on your block.

Right Way: Take a walk.  Keep your eyes peeled.

Look for this.

You will see them.  By blog-law I am probably required to advise you to ask your neighbors before gathering their fruit, so consider yourself advised.  Also consider the dubious source of this advisement.

Traveling through Thai Town

Thai Town and Little Armenia are squished right up close to one another in the grid of East Hollywood, sometimes overlapping, their mingling tendrils making for some very strange-looking blocks indeed.  There have been times when I've been devouring a soujouk sandwich or dissecting a new box of almond cookies on the curb in front of some Armenian grocery when the scent of basil, turmeric and chilies comes wafting out of the restaurant next door, making me hungry all over again in a wholly new way.

I haven't yet explored the Armenian corners as much as I would like, but I've thoroughly ravaged Thai Town.  This is not to say, of course, that it's been ravaged enough.  Nothing ever has.

I've never been to Thailand.  I've glimpsed it in the Thai corners of Ruili and Phnom Penh, eaten countless plates of pad kee mow in the basement of a food court in Boulder, and that's about it.  I welcome its influence in Burmese, Khmer, and Vietnamese cuisine, and bow down to its ability to make me cry from spiciness.  But, like other Southeast Asian cuisines, it always soothes the fire it wrought with coconut juice immediately afterwards.  So I forgive it.

Although it's not in Thai Town proper, I find myself most often at Watdongmoonlek Noodle.  This used to be a microscopic place with 12 seats, no bathroom, and these uncomfortable wobbly stool-like chairs that left my long legs dangling like a child's.  They'd always fall asleep by the end of the meal, since I'd linger so long sipping their bizarre smoothie concoctions.

Its food has always been magical, and recently they renovated, expanding into the space next door.  Now they have a bakery AND a bathroom.  That's awesome in and of itself, but why else does Watdongmoonlek get my vote?

1. It's right smack between Silver Lake and Los Feliz and is affordable and doesn't suck, which is a miracle in and of itself.  (Aw, come on, 'Eastsiders' [and that nomenclature is another can of worms, I know], I'm sorry, but I wish one of you would successfully prove me wrong about this generalization.)

2. It does 'street Thai' and 'fancy restaurant Thai' equally well.  Want a plateful of sweetly charred pad see ew, and also perhaps an artfully arranged rambutan salad with swirls of coconut milk and precisely placed clusters of peanuts?  You don't have to go to two different restaurants anymore!

3. When it renovated, it left its low prices alone.

4. It's the first restaurant that picky me and my equally, but polar oppositely, picky uncle have ever agreed is delicious (with the possible exception of Western Doma Noodle).

5. It has lychee mint slushies.  It has pickled plum slushies.  It has pineapple basil slushies.  It has watermelon ginger slushies.  Mountains of icy slush topped with chilly fresh fruit.

Here's a slushy story: my ex-boyfriend was (and is) a vegetarian.  I tried in vain for years to get him to fall in love with food, but his perpetually stuffy nose, refusal to compromise his morals regarding animal flesh, and inordinate love for food like cereal, mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli made this difficult, if not impossible.

However, he gamely tried his best, and we were a competitive pair, so whenever we'd go to places like Watdongmoonlek, or, say, Mil Jugos in Santa Ana - anywhere with an extensive and crazy drink menu - he'd quickly claim the craziest drink for himself, looking at me slyly as if to say 'who's the adventurous one now?'  At Mil Jugos, he ended up with something called a lulo, which tasted like someone took a lime and a jicama and spliced it with a cherry tomato.  At Watdongmoonlek, he ended up with the pineapple basil slushy.  (I had to take second place with my pickled plum slushy.)

And I've ordered just that slushy almost every time I've been back.  Even if I order basil-heavy dishes like the jungle fried rice.  You can't have too much basil!

Watdongmoonlek is delicious and reliable, and occasionally surprising, but when I want something that will force into existence whole new colonies of tastebuds on my tongue, I go to Jitlada.  I've written extensively on Jitlada before, so I won't reinvent the wheel by finding new ways to gush about it, but their dishes are so carefully and precisely balanced, with handfuls of perfectly complementary mystery herbs and spices, that each bite feels like a stop on a journey through a wildly exotic land.  Whenever I think I'm plateauing, that most of the tastes available to human beings have already touched my tongue, Jitlada disabuses me of that notion.

While fascinating and adventurous, Jitlada is also pricey, maddeningly crowded, glacially slow, and totally lacking in parking.  More often than not, I just want a quick bite, packed with flavor, for under $10, no pretensions.

For noodles - soup noodles and dry noodles, respectively - I have two go-to places.  For soup noodles, my pick is Rodded Restaurant for their excellent duck noodle soup.  It's dark-brothed, with duck textured as though it came right off a grill or out of a broiler.  It's tender, the fat is practically liquid, and very silky, and it still has its color.

For dry noodles, I go to Hoy-Ka Thai Noodles, which packs its namesake bowl with ground pork, pork liver, BBQ pork, pork meatballs, fish cake, and herbs and allows me to shoplift it from them for the ridiculously low price of $3.99.  Even though 90% of the bowl consists of different types of pork, each slice, ball, and chunk tastes unique.

For rice, Ruen Pair does a mean Cha-Po combination - its duck, pork belly, and BBQ pork are all cooked to their respective levels of perfection - and Pa Ord's crispy pork with holy basil is tooth-crackingly, greasily wonderful, with a spice chart so elevated that all but the most hardened diners should stop at 'medium'.  The deadly little pepper circles that look so innocuous blending into your basil are not innocuous at all, so treat them with respect.

In a category all its own is Spicy BBQ Restaurant, south of the meat of Thai Town, a place smaller than even the old Watdongmoonlek, with a sweet, friendly owner and a menu that starts out pedestrian but slowly morphs into mouthwatering at the Northern Thai end.  Its Northern special pork patties inspired me to go home and try to make a Thai fusion hamburger (this did not work, but the pork patties come close enough), and the spicy jackfruit has a back-of-the-throat kick that that distracts you from the oddly meat-like texture of the fruit.  The pork and the jackfruit are so indistinguishable that were I a terrible person, I could have easily fooled my vegetarian ex into eating this dish.

However, Spicy BBQ's Northern Thai Noodles did tempt a dining companion into taking her very first bite of blood cubes!  Usually, when someone points to the burgundy square and says 'what's that?' and I oh-so-casually say 'oh, you know, it's just blood cubes', they wince or reel back.  This dish looked so inviting that she merely shrugged and popped one in.