Cuisines covered in previous posts: Mexican, Cajun, Nepalese, Lebanese, Thai, Basque, Argentinian, Cuban, Vietnamese, English, Belgian, Spanish, Jewish, Greek, Greek Diner, Hawaiian, Salvadoran, Iranian, Armenian, Afghani, Indonesian, Korean, Cambodian, American, California Cuisine, Soul Food, Japanese, Filipino, Barbecue, French, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Pizza, Mongolian Barcbecue, Pakistani, Indian, Peruvian, Malaysian, Burmese
We've covered 40 different ethnic cuisines, depending on how you slice it. The San Gabriel Valley has proven itself an food diversity powerhouse will all these different cuisines...
...yet we've been holding off on one til the very end.
While most visitors rarely venture east of downtown, and only to Pasadena on New Year's Day...if that...the valley is world renown for one type of cuisine. Yes, it's finally time to talk about the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
You would be hard-pressed to find a larger population of Chinese people anywhere in the world outside of the San Gabriel Valley unless you're talking about China or Taiwan. It stands to reason that the biggest slice of the ethnic food pie in the SGV is covered by the various varieties of Chinese Food.
While most of America has Chinese restaurants in their towns, it's mostly of the Americanized "with six you get eggroll" kind of food. We have a few of those here, notably Wang's Palace in Monrovia which is a very nice representation of that old-school type of restaurant, but it's quickly being supplanted by something more original, authentic, daring, and...most of all...very tasty.
Not to knock the sweet 'n sour pork and chop suey of the older establishments but they just don't compare with what we can get now.
The variety is staggering. You have your Hong Kong style coffee shops; Taiwanese dumpling houses; the steamy Szechuan dinner houses...even Islamic Halal Chinese food and vegetarian places. Starting in Monterey Park through Alhambra, San Gabriel, Rosemead...reaching up into Arcadia with tendrils running along the Puente Hills to Rowland Heights and Diamond Bar, there are hundreds of places to get great (and not so great) Chinese food.
As much as we've tried, we still have a long, long way to go before we get to it all.
A good place to start is the famous Taiwan dumpling chain, Din Tai Fung. The location on Baldwin Avenue in Arcadia is America's first outpost of this Taipei-based chain. With an extensive menu that is mostly ignored for the star of the show. You come here to get Xao Long Bao...steamed pork soup dumplings.
Very delicate, hot, juicy and tasty. Just how they get all that pork and broth goodness into those soft balls of thin dough is a mystery. Eating them is not. I like to mix a little rice vinegar in a bowl with a good dose of chili oil...both of which sit on each table. Poke a hole in the shell of the dumpling, put it into my mixture, roll it around for a few minutes so that the surface and the interior are throughouly mixed with the vinegar and oil.
Pop it into my mouth, whole, for an explosion of juicy, spicy, and incredible flavor. A serving of 10 dumplings...just enough for me...is around eight dollars. Come early to avoid the crowd.
Arcadia is also the home of Andy Cherng, who opened a small chain called Panda Inn starting in Pasadena. You might know of the take out version of the Panda Inn he also started that now has nation-wide outlets bringing their signature orange chicken to the masses, Panda Express.
For a more traditional feast, we'll head to the Golden Dragon...also in Arcadia...to get their incredible, crunchy Mandarin orange beef. It's flash cooked in a wok full of hot chilis and orange peels. It is similar to orange chicken but much crunchier and with a deeper, savory taste.
One of our best Chinese delights is hot and sour soup. This tasty broth with both a sour vinegar component mixed with hot chili is what we crave when we have a cold or sore throat. Nothing gets our sinuses clearer or soothes our throats faster. While many passable to very good renditions exist in the valley, it's the fiery broth of Happy Noodle in El Monte that fits the bill for us.
Some of the best Chinese cuisine exists with ingredients your mom told you to avoid. Intestines, feet, rotten eggs, stinky tofu...all can be great in the hands of a good cook.
These are the kinds of foods we make the trek over to Rowland Heights to eat at Remy's Noodle Palace, next to the Home Depot just south of the 60 freeway.
While I've tried a lot of those offal offerings, the best is the gelatinous bits of cow tendon floating in hot broth with soft noodles. Similar to the taste of ossu buco marrow, you will not think there's enough in the giant bowl they serve you.
My wife and I also like to get the half-foot long pot stickers they serve here on the side. Like most really good versions you have had only much, much bigger.
So there you have it. A celebration of diversity with over forty different ethnic cuisines in one, small valley. Next time you're in Southern California, you owe it to yourself to jump just a bit east of downtown L.A. (take the Gold Line if you don't want to drive) and try one of these deliciously different foods.
Chow!
Darryl
Copyright 2014 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved
If you're in Taiwan, you know about Din Tai Fung. It's a huge chain there. A few years ago they started to make inroads into America and, now if you live in L.A., you've at least heard of it (if you haven't, get out a little more).
One of Jonathan Gold's favorites and one of the consistently top-rated restaurants in the area, Din Tai Fung is known for it's delicious soup dumplings.
Before the dumplings, however, Letty likes their Shanghai rice cake even better. With slivers of pork, spinach, and shallots over slices of compressed rice cake, the flavors of this dish are just intense. Add with a little of their hot chili oil, and you've got a meal.
The dumpling, xao long bao, are filled with pork and broth. I like to poke a little hole in them with the chopsticks, let marinate in a little mixture of rice vinegar and that delicious chili oil, pop the whole thing in my mouth and bite down for a hot, spicy, flavor explosion.
The dumplings are legendary and deservedly so. They're also cheap, well under ten dollars for an order of ten.
To summarize, we get to have great food in one of the area's top restaurants, and get out for around twenty dollars in damage. Not bad at all.
The location we go to is at 1108 S. Baldwin Ave., in Arcadia. There are five locations in California and two in Washington.
DarrylCopyright 2016 - Darryl MusickAll Rights Reserved
Home of the world famous Santa Anita Racetrack and the Arboretum, Arcadia has morphed into an upscale Asian neighborhood. The San Gabriel Valley is famous for its Asian population and food stretching east from the epicenter of Monterey Park. Those with money have gravitated over to San Marino and Arcadia. Fortunately, they've brought their food with them.
Across the street from the world famous Din Tai Fung dumpling house is our favorite place for Chinese soup, the 88 Noodle House.
While there is an extensive menu here, I come for one thing...beef tendon noodle soup.
These little bits of jellied cow floating in a spicy and savory broth are just irresistible. Imagine the best ribeye steak literally melting in your mouth and you get a hint of the taste. Along with the noodles, spinach, and that tasty broth, it makes for a soup you'll remember to your grave.
Also, Letty likes to have the shrimp and pork dumplings that rival the famous ones people are lined up for across the street.
88 Noodle House is in a strip mall on Baldwin Avenue, just north of the corner of Baldwin and Duarte and about 4 blocks south of Santa Anita Mall.
DarrylCopyright 2016 - Darryl MusickAll Rights Reserved
We've counted almost 40 different kinds of ethnic foods in our home of the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles, and we're going to highlight a few here each week.
The grandaddy of them all has to be Mexican food. They say there's a Starbucks on every corner. Here, there seems to be a Mexican restaurant on every corner, plus a couple more in the middle of the block.
While you can find Mexican restaurants in every city in the county, here in the valley you can find them in the biggest numbers in the neighborhoods that have a high concentration of Mexican families like El Monte, Baldwin Park, La Puente, Bassett, and Azusa.
There are sit down restaurants that cater to more gringo tastes like El Torito and there are those who go for a more authentic palate like the goat stew called Birria at La Barca in El Monte.
You can get tacos made from almost any part of the animal...guts (a particular favorite of mine), brains, cheeks, tongues...and from nice places with waiters & margaritas, to hole-in-the-walls, to taco trucks on a late night corner. Most of it very reasonable in price, too.
Beware that there are many mediocre and lousy places but some of our favorites include Max's (in Azusa and Monrovia) and Rudy's in Monrovia for nice sit-down dinners (Rudy likes to break out the more exotic authentic fare on Friday nights) and drinks; La Barca and Guacamoles in El Monte and Mariscos Uruapan in Irwindale for a more boisterous, diner-like experience; Rincon Taurino in La Puente, El Picoso in Azusa, and Tacos del Chino in South El Monte for great taco stands. The King Taco chain also makes some pretty good tacos. For hard tacos, it's hard to beat Pepe's, with locations in Azusa, San Gabriel, and Alhambra.
One of our favorite restaurants was Cajun Way (AKA Frank and Joe's) in Monrovia. It was an extremely good example of Cajun cuisine. There is still some cajun left in the valley, mostly of the Chinese Cajun variety such as Boiling Crab, but nothing compares to Frank and Joe's. For really good Southern food with a smattering of Cajun, you need to leave the valley a bit and go to Spoonful in Studio City. Try to get there when they're having Cajun boil, pictured above.
One of the more obscure cuisines we have is Himalayan food or the cuisine of Nepal and Tibet. On a quiet street in Old Pasadena sits Tibet Nepal House, serving the very hearty food of the high-altitude Himalayas.
It's quite delicious and very filling with lots of protein like eggs, beef, and...of course...yak. Above you can see a bowl of thupka (a hearty stew), Tibetan bread, and fried rice.
Next time you're in Southern California, slip on over to the SGV and give some of these cuisines a try. You'll love it.
More to come next week!
Darryl
Copyright 2013 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved.
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