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.

A walking food tour of Echo Park, and a papalo postscript

At the beginning of this week, I moved to Los Angeles.

I have always loved L.A. unconditionally.  Though I was born and raised in Chicago, attended college in Colorado, and went to graduate school in Orange County, my family took trips here two or three times a year and I always knew in the back of my mind that this is where I'd end up.  Every cross-country move I made brought me closer.

I constantly find myself hotly defending L.A. against those who view it as an engorged, vapid, shallow extension of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, but I have only one firm rule.  That is: if you consider yourself both a food lover and an L.A. hater, you might need to readjust one of those attitudes.  You can't hold both.

L.A.'s dry sweeping winds, droughts, and brown desert cliffs only charm me and clear my skin; its sprawling vastness only makes for more expansive mountain views for me to enjoy, and its choked traffic and exorbitant valet parking just tempt me to walk or bus everywhere, discovering neighborhoods most people never see speeding (or crawling, as it were) by on the freeways.

One of those neighborhoods, Echo Park, is my home now.  Today, I took a walk.  And I was hungry.

Luckily, hungry is the best thing to be in L.A.!

There's apparently a cart where a lady makes terrific Oaxacan-style blue corn quesadillas on the corner of Sunset and Echo Park - but this cart remains the stuff of fables for me because I have never been able to find her.  Today was no exception.  The dusty and largely abandoned parking lot where she supposedly sets up was empty even of men selling chili-salted fruit bags, jangling and clattering ice cream/popsicle carts, and the heavy, greasy smoke of the bacon-wrapped hot dog lady's cooking.  Unusual.

So I kept walking.  I wandered into a Mexican grocery sandwiched in between two discount clothing stores.  The first thing I saw?  Papalo!  99 cents per bunch.  The second thing?  Manila mangoes: four for a dollar.

$1.50 poorer, baking in the sun, trying to peel a mango with one hand, and taking big juicy bites that dripped mango juice all over the concrete, I kept walking.

Sticky-faced, I passed an extraordinarily foofy-looking raw vegan café on the same block as a place that sells hot dogs, quesadillas, 'bibim noodle bowls' and licuados all for less than $8.  Pozole from Costa Alegre, trout from Taix, and a machaca burrito from my childhood burrito-serving giant, Burrito King, also failed to beckon me, and my stomach growled ominously.  It was too early for Tacos Arizas and its seductive lengua tacos, so I sadly bypassed the Walgreens parking lot.

But hark!  What gleamed rainbow-colored from the Vons parking lot?  Could it be... an earlier-rising taco truck?

Yes, it could!

The man inside the truck, friendly in an easygoing, chatty way, recommended the carnitas and the cabeza tacos, a recommendation I gladly took.  Within two minutes, I had a sturdy plate of meat piled high, fresh, moist tortillas, and liberal sprinklings of cilantro and onions.  The bar provided me with two types of green salsa, and I sampled one on each taco.

The darker, waterier tomatillo was deceptively spicy and heavily seeded, and filtered down through every pore of my carnitas, while the creamier cilantro-based sauce sat atop my cabeza like tzatziki.  I pulled my bag of papalo from my purse and padded each taco with a few leaves.  The taco truck proprietor tilted his head curiously: why is that girl adding secret purse ingredients to her taco?

Why are meals eaten perched on a curb so often the most satisfying meals?  Is it the constant redirecting of ants from one's feet, or the telltale dusting of dirt on the backside?  Is it the knowledge that there is nothing enhancing the quality of the meal, no wall paintings or ceiling hangings, no ingratiating service or padded back cushions, and yet it still makes you smile?

Sun-addled now, with remnants of mango juice, cow and pig parts, and grease likely speckling my face despite multiple wipes with a napkin, I stumbled towards home, but was arrested by the sight of a 300 square foot market featuring such attractions as $7 fig and olive crackers, artisanal olive oil in a giant jug, and prosciutto lined baguettes.  Spotting some enormous cookies with the moniker 'Not Nutter Butter', I shrugged.  Why not?

And thus did I stagger up the steep, winding incline towards home, letting the granola-like cookie flake away under my tongue as the fine, silky peanut butter melted on top of it.

This is the same hill where I, as a child, I stole loquats from the neighbor's laden trees in April, where I learned that nasturtiums were edible (and spicy), and where I looked out on the San Bernardino mountains while eating lox on bagels on Sunday mornings.

I finally feel, culinarily, very much at home, but it's almost time to be thrust into a completely foreign flavor environment: I leave for Japan in just under a week.