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.

Sunny with a chance of quesadillas

The Loch Ness Monster of Echo Park Lake does not have a long, scaly neck or a coiling, curlicued body.  She doesn't have green skin or big teeth.  Her feet are (probably) not webbed, and she certainly doesn't have claws.  She looks absolutely nothing like a dinosaur or a dragon.

And she's really damn good at making blue corn quesadillas.

I fondly dub the sweet, totally un-monster-like proprietress of the Oaxacan Quesadilla Cart 'Nessie' because she only appears when I'm not looking for her.

Want to brag to your friends that the best quesadillas on earth are made in your neighborhood, then take them down the street to prove it?  Too bad.  She's nowhere to be found.

But are you speeding down the street, late somewhere, with no quarters for meter parking?  Or did you just eat a huge lunch?  Perhaps you're on a jog or a bike ride and you didn't bring your wallet?  Then there she is, under her big rainbow umbrella, cheerfully patting her ovals of soft masa dough barehanded, like she doesn't have any nerve endings in her fingers.

I've had many permutations of the charred, oozing blue semicircles and can confidently say that the huitlacoche (corn fungus) is the best, its half-mushroom half-onion texture squishing satisfyingly within its cage.  I pry the edges of the quesadilla open, its flaps giving only slightly less than soft taco shells, and dump in onions, nopales, and cilantro, cotija, and, if I'm smart, I remember to put the sauce on the inside so as not to make everything soggy.

Usually, I am not smart.  The salsas on offer are so brain-scramblingly spicy that merely being in their presence must make me forget.  The green is an everyday lip burner, but the red, oh, the red.  You don't know whether you're choking or breathing.

The first time I dumped an ungodly amount of salsa over my quesadilla can perhaps be chalked up to a combination of adventurousness and ignorance, but every subsequent time can only be called stupidity.  Or maybe not.  I never regret doing it, for the flavor behind the pain is so worth it, and though I wince all the way home and every breath of air I puff climbing the hill burns, I still reliably over-salsa my plate every time I return.

Which is often, though accidentally every time.  I have never set out with the intention of eating a quesadilla.  But I have also never walked by her stand without stopping.

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.

Papalo

If some people can't help but taste soap when cilantro touches their tongues...

... might the papalo leaf be the answer for those poor souls who have never been able to experience the zingy shiver of a good sprig of cilantro?

In summer 2013, one particular papalo leaf ('Bolivian coriander' or 'summer coriander' despite not actually being genetically related to coriander) tucked itself coyly away in a sandwich I was about to devour.  I was expecting a torta: you know, meat, cheese, avocado, lettuce, some kind of spicy slathering, a bun, copious amounts of grease.

Instead, unbeknownst to me, I was actually holding a cemita.

...a MONSTER cemita.

The pounded, fried milanesa, monstrous as it was, amazingly faded into the background, providing only chicharrones-like crunch and a few pepper seeds as support for the teeth-squeakingly fresh cubes of queso fresco, the verdant fatty avocado, the zing of the papalo leaves, and the slow burn of the adobo sauce on top of it all.

But an unexpected guest at a party always earns an extra once-over, and I did a double take, peeking under the pillowy egg-bread to see what that surprise zing was.  Cilantro?  Fish-mint?  Saw-leaf herb?  My at-the-time-primarily-phở-based herb expertise was at a loss.  I poked and prodded the clover-shaped herb, ripping off bits to taste and holding it up to the light, examining its plant-veins.

Giving up, I asked the cashier after I was done: "Papalo!" she exclaimed, smiling brightly.  "It's seasonal!"

Seasonal?  In today's frantic global scramble, with cargo airborne everywhere and instant culinary gratification?

What a treat!  Something to look forward to every summer!

----

Where to get papalo in Orange/LA county:

The place that served it to me is called La Cemita Poblana and it's in Santa Ana.  A cute little cottage with outdoor-only seating, cheerful service, and aguas frescas served in small-bucket and large-bucket sizes only, dinner for two won't run more than $20 (and probably much less).

Otherwise, if you're more of a kitchen-adventurer than a restaurant-adventurer, I hear it's available in the produce section of Mexican markets.

Lengua and other 'secret' meats

I'd never been too fond of the idea of beef tongue before this past Saturday.  Or any kind of tongue, for that matter.

Maybe this sounds weird, but the thought of another tongue in my mouth next to my own tongue made me cringe a little.  I mean, what if I forgot which tongue I was supposed to be chewing?  What if my teeth couldn't tell the difference?  It's hard enough not to bite my tongue when it's numb from Novocaine - how would my jaw manage differentiating between multiple tongues?

So, there's been a taco truck that sets up shop next to the Echo Park Walgreens for as long as I can remember.  It's called Tacos Arizas.  Now, I've always been curious about it, but whenever I was in Echo Park it meant I was visiting my extended family, and that meant one thing: meat.  Grandmas and aunts and mothers and cousins all cooking ridiculous amounts of meat.  Chopped liver.  Borscht (yes, this has beef all over the place according to their recipe).  Enchiladas verdes con pollo.  Essic-fleish.  Spareribs - Korean or European style.

The last thing I ever wanted on top of all of that was a meaty meat-taco.

But Saturday, I had my chance.  I had fifteen minutes left on the parking meter from shopping and I was starving.  I ran over to the truck and ordered three tacos: buche, carnitas, and yes, lengua.

I didn't take a picture because: a) I was too busy spilling salsa all over my car as it was, and b) it was in my stomach before I knew it.

Tongue is like a cross between tender muscle meat and liver!  It's juicy, not chewy at all, and much, much more forgiving to chew on than, say, many steaks.  Why did no one inform me of its wonders earlier?

I feel like being raised in the States - for most of us, anyway - is like being raised in a parallel universe where animals just magically lack certain body parts.  They have flanks, they have breasts, they have ribs and muscles and bellies, but their heads have disappeared into the air.  And their hearts, and their organs, and their intestines, and their feet, and their spines too - when the animal is killed, these parts just shrivel up and disintegrate in little puffs of smoke.

And that makes me feel like for most of my life I have been complicit in a supreme conspiracy of waste, of toddler-like pickiness.  What is inherently wrong or gross about eating these invisible parts of the animal?  If you don't like the flavor or texture of a certain part after you've tried it, that's just fine.  But I doubt nearly an entire country would spit out a sashimi-like smooth chunk of tendon or a chewy, fatty intestine if its source were hidden, or sugar-coated.

It sounds like I'm frustrated, and admittedly there is a bit of that, but the overwhelming feeling is that the world of unexplored meat cuts is like an endless platter of potential favorites laid out before me.

What cut next?