Archive for the ‘PLACES + PRODUCTS’ Category

The sign in Café Glacé’s all-glass storefront says “Persian pizza.” Now, if you were a canny Los Angeles food explorer, you’d probably suspect that this was an awkward translation of some traditional Persian dish. Maybe, you’d think, you will discover some exciting-flavored flatbread or a topped pita — some ancient Persian treasure hiding behind the Western name.

But you’d be wrong, because this is an honest-to-God, full-blooded, American-style pizza, with bell peppers and melted cheese and everything. But this is also pizza freed of any obligations of authenticity. It’s not authentically New York, nor authentically Neapolitan, nor is it trying to be. It’s made by Iranians for Iranians, guided by a distinctive, charmingly un-Italian aesthetic.

The crust is half-crisp, half-soft, a thickish, sort of spongy affair. Somebody searching for a more flash description might call it “focaccia-like,” but let’s be honest: If it’s like anything, it’s like a supermarket frozen pizza — a Celeste, maybe. But it’s also fantastic: fresh, abundant, texturally complicated, made lovingly and painstakingly. It feels like some brilliant Persian cook had a frozen supermarket pizza and liked the basic idea but was inspired to make it better, to remake it and remake it again, until it became this: a tiny, pita-sized, spongy-crusted, adorable jot of a pizza, piled high with carefully cubed toppings and soft melted cheese.

This is pizza like you’d find all over the streets of Tehran, explains owner Sam Alishahi. There’s no tomato sauce, just the slightest touch of ketchup — it’s the Persian style, says Alishahi. The cheese is fresh and white and just on the cusp between juicy and oily. The top is intensely brown with a baked cheese crust; little, intense streaks of oregano peer out from beneath the brown cheese-crackle.

Alishahi’s father, Eddie Alishahi, advances toward you with two cafeteria squeeze bottles, which turn out to contain ketchup and ranch dressing. Ranch? Yup, ranch. He seems to think that a squirt of each will vastly improve the pizza, and you know what? He’s right.

Café Glacé, explains Sam Alishahi, is a casual place, a real sandwich shop. Witness chips o panir: Lay’s potato chips topped with toasty melted mozzarella, a snack food popular in Tehran. “You could call it Persian nachos,” says Alishahi. “It’s a late-night snack food; college students come and eat it all night long,” an indication of Café Glacé’s proximity to the UCLA campus.

Then there are the sandwiches. It’s not some dashed-together affair but a carefully thought out sandwich, an orchestrated sandwich. They’re designed by Parvin Peykani — Alishahi’s mother-in-law and the mistress of the kitchen. “In Tehran, she was a homemaker,” says Alishahi. “She cooked food every day, and everybody would come over and eat it. She’s a feeder. She loves to feed the whole family; she loves taking care of people.”

The kotlet sandwich is centered on a few flattened patties of potatoes and ground beef. It’s starchy and herbaceous and soft, and the sandwich is carefully arranged around it. First comes the bread, toasted and crisp on the outside, soft on the inside. Then the lettuce — absolutely crisp. Then the tomatoes and kotlet — soft and soft. Then the Persian pickles — crisp again and zippy. Then the bread again, soft-crisp. It’s alternating layers of crisp-soft, crisp-soft, very consciously created.

If you get really lucky, Peykani will take a shine to you and steer you toward the olvieh sandwich.Olvieh is Persian potato salad, with a gently amped-up warmth and savor from shredded chicken breast. It’s an amazing sandwich — full of very fresh ingredients, cooked to preserve their distinctive textures, combined into a heart-warming gestalt. Peykani is obviously proud of her olvieh; she occasionally does a little dance of excitement when she brings you an olvieh sandwich.

There’s so much more. There’s the Iranian hot dog sandwiches, made with “real German hot dogs,” brags Peykani. There’s excellent fresh fruit juices and majoon, a shake made with bananas, dates, milk, ice cream and pistachios that satisfies and sticks to your ribs.

And now we have Persian pizza with ranch dressing and ketchup. Eat it up already.

Original Story

Written by:

C. Thi Nguyen

Photo:

Mariah Tauger, Los Angeles Times / August 4, 2011

Baseball, the great American pastime, is a sport of tradition.

For more than 100 years, people have sat in the sun on a summer’s day to catch a ballgame.

And over the years, grabbing a cold beer and a ballpark hot dog; bringing your glove to the stadium in the hopes of catching a fly ball or home run; standing and singing during the seventh-inning stretch about peanuts and Cracker Jacks have all become part of the experience of watching a game in person.

Now, T-Mobile and the Los Angeles Angels are in the middle of an experiment to see if they can add tablet computers to the culture of watching a live game.

T-Mobile is renting two tablets, the 7-inch-screen Samsung Galaxy Tab and the 8.9-inch-screen T-Mobile G-Slate (made by LG), at Angel Stadium for a reasonable $10 per game.

So why plunk down an Alexander Hamilton to get a tablet at a game, when your hands might already be full with the normal ballpark fare?

T-Mobile is hoping its the apps, and added entertainment value for kids, that will make this rental a compelling move.

Either tablet, both of which run Google’s Android mobile OS, come preloaded with apps that can make the game a bit more interesting.

Most notably, a game program is preloaded onto the tablets — so you can check out the rosters of each team on the field and read between (or during if the game is boring) innings about what players and the organization have been up to.

ESPN and Major League Baseball apps allow renters to checkout scores on other games and even watch video from other games — or the Angels’ game taking place at the time if it’s on ESPN. T-Mobile’s T-Mobile TV app can stream live TV shows as well.

Videogames are loaded onto the tablets too — Angry Birds, Need for Speed Shift and others — to keep kids and game-loving adults happy during a commercial break or during pitching changes.

And, of course, the Internet is readily available to settle any trivia questions one might have with friends during a game.

The tablets run on T-Mobile’s 3G and 4G networks, which are both speedy at Angel Stadium as T-Mobile installed cellular antennas in Angel Stadium itself during the off-season.

But despite all that, the tablet experience hasn’t yet reached its full potential.

Alongside all the other traditions of baseball mentioned, there have seemingly been fans in the stands with radios, listening to the play-by-play as long as portable radios have existed.

Tablets would be an ideal gadget to stream the play-by-play of the game and replace the AM/FM sets for many, but neither tablet comes preloaded with this ability — though an enterprising renter can hunt down the website for the radio feeds in a possible work-around. Regardless, headphones don’t come with the rental — that’d be a nice addition too.

And every game nowadays is available on TV (all too often cable TV) so streaming a game, would make sense to a tablet as well — another feature that is absent if the game isn’t on ESPN.

Of course, setting all that up would likely require new media contracts between radio and TV stations, the Angels and T-Mobile. But those additions, built-in and easy to use, could make tablets at a ballpark less of a novelty.

Another frustration is three radar-gun apps available in Google’s Android Market — none of which I could get working on the tablets. Maybe they weren’t designed for big-league ballparks, but it would be really cool to track just how fast a pitcher is throwing with a rented tablet.

As of now, T-Mobile and the Angels are simply testing the tablet-at-the-stadium idea out. If people rent the tablets and it’s a hit, T-Mobile says it’s something that could spread to other stadiums.

What do you think of the idea? Feel free to leave a comment.

Check out the video below to see the tablets at Angel Stadium in action.

<iframe width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/ykMhJUycN30″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

More Details

Written by:

Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Photo:

A Los Angeles Angels game program on a Samsung Galaxy Tab at Angel Stadium. Credit: Armand Emamdjomeh / Los Angeles Times

Korean pork again? Surely it’s too soon! Yet as the air grows still and hot, the days melt into languor and the Dodgers swoon toward the cellar, the pull of summer food becomes impossibly strong — yes, the grilled hot dogs, yes, the icy watermelon, but also the fried foods whose crunch, snap and salty, oily pleasure mark something finite amid the torpor of the afternoons. Late summer is the time for fried chicken, still bubbling from its bath in oil, and for communal fish fries, well-lubricated with cold beer.

It is also the time for tonkatsu, Japanese fried pork cutlet. With its crispness, relative lightness and inevitable accompaniments of dark fruit catsup and cool chopped cabbage,tonkatsu tastes like August. (Japanese have different ideas about hot weather — they celebrate the hottest day of the year by eating eel — but that’s another story.)

You find tonkatsu at many Japanese restaurants. Every izakaya and Japanese café features the dish, sometimes solo, sometimes bathed in thick curry sauce. The dish is a fairly recent addition to the cuisine, introduced by the Portuguese traders who were the first Westerners to trade with Japan: floured, dragged through an egg wash and rolled in jagged bread crumbs, creating a rugged surface with maximal crunch-enhancing surface area. Tonkatsu chefs fry specific cuts of the pig that showcase various qualities of the meat.

You can find one or two in the South Bay, and they are pretty good. But lately, I have been going quite a lot to Wako Donkasu in Koreatown instead — traditional Japanese tonkatsuwith an almost inexplicable Korean edge.

Is it the few grams of spicy radish kimchi that make it onto the table? Is it the chilled barley water? Is it the dark wood and wrought iron? Is it the generosity of the cutlets themselves, which bring to mind the pork tenderloin sandwiches you get at Main Street Iowa cafés? It’s hard to tell.

Wako Donkasu may have named itself for the most famous tonkatsu chain in Tokyo, and its food may be served in compartmentalized wooden boxes, but the vibe of the place, the brusque cheerfulness and big portions, are pretty much what you’d find at a Japanese restaurant in Seoul.

There are menus at Wako Donkasu, big, lavishly photographed documents, but it’s pretty much understood what you are going to order: fried pork cutlet, fried chicken cutlet, or fried, thin New York steak, with a bowl of udon noodles or cold soba if you’re in the mood. I’ve only seen the cheese cutlet in the menu picture, but it seems an odd and disconcerting beast, oozing its orange guts onto the plate, and I have often wondered if anybody has ever ordered the pork cutlet sandwiches, which look like the last hors d’oeuvres on the platter on bridge night. I have tried the orosi cutlet, fried pork onto which a 2-inch layer of grated daikon has been troweled, and I probably wouldn’t get it again.

The waiter brings out toasted sesame seeds in a ridged bowl of the sort Japanese use to grate taro, and she hands you a pestle. You grind the seeds into the ridges, either coarsely or into a powder. The fragrance is overpowering. Your first course, just as it might be at a palace of modernist cuisine like El Bulli, is a perfume, a promise of food that is almost filling if you think about it hard enough. You are almost disappointed when the waiter pourstonkatsu sauce into the bowls — you need to flavor your meat, but the fragrance fades away.

The food comes, fitted into compartments in a wooden container: cabbage salad lightly dressed with a squash-inflected dressing, a bowl of miso soup perhaps, and the pork cutlet, which is the size and shape of a deep-fried Zagat guide, perfectly crunchy, trimmed of most of its fat. The chicken cutlet is bigger, juicier — also presliced, although you wonder if it spurted like chicken Kiev at the first breach of the knife. The sauce is thick, dark, fruitier than its Japanese equivalent, also less pungent for some reason, and the memory of the sesame is stronger than its flavor in the final condiment. You are finished before you know it. You are happy. You look forward to the evening ahead.

WAKO DONKASU | 2904 W. Olympic Blvd., Koreatown | (213) 387-9256 | Open Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-9 p.m. | No alcohol | MC, V | Lot parking | A second branch, at 3377 Wilshire Blvd., Koreatown, offers lunchtime delivery; (213) 381-9256 | Cutlet meals $9.95-$11.95; combo meals $12.95-$16.95 | Recommended dishes: pork cutlet, chicken cutlet

Written by:

Jonathan Gold

Photo:

Anne Fishbein

Several restaurants later, Tim and Liza Goodell hit the mark at the Hollywood Roosevelt’s Public Kitchen

It’s all very public at Public Kitchen, Tim and Liza Goodell’s new restaurant at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. There’s a kind of highbrow country-store theme to the space: dark wood, tufted leather banquettes, and sculptural chandeliers coexisting with mason jar candles, chopping block tables, and containers of Dijon mustard and caper berries displayed on shelves. I’m not sure the look is totally achieved, but it certainly announces the accessibility of the place. In case you’re unsure, the menu reminds you with the tag line “Food for the people.” That’s a departure from the reputation for exclusivity the Roosevelt nurtured after its splashy remodel a half-decade ago. Back then mere mortals would be banned from the pool if a star was using it, and the Lamborghinis in the parking lot had a way of appearing mundane.

Of course, hitting the right tone at such a storied institution is no easy task. History drapes the art deco landmark, which stands catty-corner to Grauman’s Chinese. The first Academy Awards took place under the coffered ceiling of the Blossom Room, Shirley Temple supposedly danced on the sweeping staircase, and Montgomery Clift retreated to the palatial safety of the Roosevelt after his disfiguring crash. More porkpie hat than cloche, the present offers a variety of impressions, and all you have to do is walk into the hotel’s colonnaded central patio to feel buffeted by several of them at once. Pausing in the doorway of the Library Bar, you might find yourself longing for a gentler time after a customer in a Christian Audigier T-shirt pushes you aside, but take a few steps and suddenly you’re relishing the tales a record company veteran recalls for a foursome of fresh-faced musicians. You barely have time to wonder who they are before a little person wearing a lime green boa crosses your path, nonchalantly heading to work in the basement at David Arquette’s club, Beacher’s Madhouse.

What kind of restaurant does one slip into this mix? Apparently not Dakota, the steak house the Goodells operated here until last year. Unless you’re doing something exceptional like aging beef for six months, as Mario Batali does at Carnevino in Las Vegas, it’s hard to make an array of expensive meats seem hip. Self-doubt can set in when you’re ensconced in a booth: Others are having their plates spritzed with elixirs made by Umbrian monks during the summer solstice, while you’re the schlub who’s paying $50 for a porterhouse and $10 more for the privilege of having a baked potato on the side? The Roosevelt is too of-the-moment for that. Public Kitchen keeps with the meat theme but comes at it obliquely with scant talk of prime cuts. Hams nudge up against sweetbreads on the menu. Chicharrones, those segments of pork rind rendered to a crisp, are splashed with chile flakes and lime zest. The $19 butcher steak is capped with a cloud of butter whose folded-in marrow cubes melt in the mouth like marshmallow buttons in a scoop of Rocky Road.

*****

The Goodells have been on a rocky road themselves since 1994, when they founded Aubergine, their first restaurant, amid the yacht outfitters of Newport Beach. A petite stand-alone structure, it seemed modeled on the grand maisons that dot the French countryside. The Christofle, Riedel, and tasting menu made their source of inspiration even more explicit. Since its closure the couple has had less than stellar results with their company, Domaine Restaurants. Troquet, a clean-cut bistro at South Coast Plaza, recently shut its doors after eight years. Once they’d severed ties with Whist in Santa Monica, they replaced Meson G, their nouveau tapas place on Melrose, with the Southeast Asian Red Pearl Kitchen, which faltered, too. Dakota never found a groove, either. Other than Public Kitchen, their only surviving venture is 25 Degrees, a burger bar at the Roosevelt; in fact, the Goodells are growing the concept with several locations, including one in Chicago.

I’m glad their burgers are a hit. To me, though, Public Kitchen is the restaurant that was waiting for them. After so many reversals, the couple reached a point where they had to restate what they are about. This enterprise seeks to position itself with the nose-to-tail crowd but without the funhouse gambits of an Animal, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo’s Fairfax shopfront that serves as homeroom for the abattoir-driven school. The Goodells are and always have been more formal. Foie gras will not be joining Spam in any preparation here.

Glazed with a gelée that is tawny enough to be port and sweet enough to be Manische-witz, Tim Goodell’s chicken liver terrine is a silky mousse you can scoop from the jar with a spoon. The forcemeat of a sausage combines duck and foie gras. Austerely elegant, it is brought back down to earth by the silver dollar of potato rösti served alongside. A bouquet of frisée adds a hint of bitterness as a counterpoint. The sweetbreads (aka veal thymus) are spectacular. A labor-intensive mass that requires a cook to poach and press the meat before removing its membrane and tossing it into a pan, sweetbreads often receive a hard sear so that the crisped exterior provides a contrast to the pasty interior. At Public Kitchen Goodell pushes sweetbreads beyond the routine treatment. The lobes are lightly browned, with water chestnuts lending a crunch while the demi-glace sauce brings out the victual’s muskiness.

Prepared with patience and infinite coaxing—the sauce alone takes hours of skimming—the dish rides the undercurrent of tradition that defines the Goodells’ style. The two met at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and were tutored in the rigors of the grand fashion by Gary Danko, a chef who throughout his career has sought to give a California sheen to the haute repertoire. Liza focuses on management; Tim works the stove. He’s the kind of cook who knows how to sew a truffle mousse into a quail’s breast, glaze it in calf’s foot aspic, and serve it as a plump ballotine. He doesn’t go that far at Public Kitchen. Still, the craft pulsing through the menu is a reminder to every tatted chef who thinks he’s bravely making use of animal glands that the classical style was there first.

The traditional approach is evident even in the Parker House rolls, airy bundles of warm dough that come to the table in a cast-iron baking dish. The crust of melted cheddar gives them the right amount of sharpness and draws out the clean taste of the Vermont butter that accompanies it. This is intelligent cooking that isn’t showy or hidebound. Wonderful gnudi—little ricotta dumplings—are accented with thin bits of pancetta and sliced chanterelles. The ham hock in the split pea soup is minced finely so that the steam released when the hot, thick liquid is poured over it carries the note of a smokehouse. Goodell’s version of oxtail looks to the past and the present at the same time. When raw, these arm-length cones are all gristle, bone, and fat; braised slowly (usually tied to the side of a stock kettle so they can be pulled out before they fall apart), they repay attention with tender, flavor-packed strands. In Goodell’s hands this hard-won raw material—one tail doesn’t yield much—forms a mini tower amid a horseradish sauce; crowning it is a poached farmhouse egg that, when broken, gives back the richness that the cooking process has stripped away.

I wouldn’t go so far as to pile a yolk on the oily bone-in schnitzel, though the menu gives you the option, declaring, “Everything Tastes Better with an Egg on It.” Such cornhusker wisdom comes off like an attempt to keep up with all the other chefs who’ve embraced the fried egg as much for its ability to conjure the farm as for what it actually imparts. And I’m not sure anything but hydration therapy could help the pot roast, a desiccated slab of brisket sagging in a puddle of simmered cooking juices. Goodell can also lay on certain flavors too heavily, as if fearing that without the punch, his food might seem effete. He has a particular weakness for lemon. It overpowers the cured steelhead appetizer, on which it’s used in the finishing oil, as well as the pancetta-wrapped monkfish, which arrives beneath a heap of lemon segments. (I have found myself wishing that Goodell could do more with fish than wrap it in pancetta or serve it with capers in a butter sauce, too.) The thick wedges of cured lemon peel shoved into the buttery Shaker pie make it inedible.

With Steve Samson and Zach Pollack in the kitchen, Sotto embodies the elegant simplicity of southern Italian cooking

In L.A. we’re not accustomed to walking down steps to enter a restaurant. In other cities it’s so common, you hardly notice that’s how you pop into your favorite trattoria, except to make sure you don’t bump your head on the old doorway. You don’t have to gauge door height or duck to enter Sotto—the building’s too new for that—but Steve Samson and Zach Pollack’s spot on Pico does feel like a slice of the Old World. In the chiaroscuro of the windowless interior, you might see a cook tying a pork loin around a spit, the barkeep pouring deep red Puglian primitivo, or a waitress rushing through with a platter of grilled mackerel fillets under a jumble of cured lemon peel and minced capers. A table of friends passes around a plate of oven-roasted peppers, one guy dropping the last bite into his mouth in a gesture of pure delight. With a little effort (and a little more wine), you may be able to convince yourself that the nearest landmark is an outcropping of sun-bleached ruins rather than the billboard-bedecked entrance to the Fox lot.

The dining room has an everyday aspect. Vintage bulbs hang over rough-hewn wood tables; striped banquettes take a halfhearted stab at elegance; a communal table commands the oak-sided dining room, one end grazing the counter of the open kitchen where Samson and Pollack work. The two—Samson is 43; Pollack, 27—are a well-honed team. Samson mans the stove, a black sweatband around each wrist. The interest sparked by the pastas his Italian grandmother prepared when he was growing up in Tarzana didn’t truly ignite until, after receiving a B.A. in history from UC San Diego, he turned to cooking, eventually rising to head Piero Selvaggio’s Valentino. Pollack didn’t have the benefit of a bona fide nonna. As an architecture student at Brown, the West L.A. native was more drawn to Palladio than the bitter wild chicory puntarelle. But then passion took hold, and he found himself working a series of short stints at Sicily’s elegant Il Duomo and outlying farm restaurants before returning to Los Angeles to work at David Myers’s Sona and Neal Fraser’s Grace, where he met Samson. The pair went on to lead Myers’s Pizzeria Ortica in the O.C. Pollack is the pizzaiolo of the two, at ease wielding a long peel in the wood-burning oven, rotating the dishes beneath the refractory bricks, pivoting now and then to toss pizza dough.

Their partner in the venture is Bill Chait, the man who started Louise’s and has entered a second career bankrolling cutting-edge chefs like John Sedlar and Ricardo Zarate (who will soon open Picca, a nouveau-Peruvian restaurant upstairs). Sotto strives for the sort of modest craftsmanship you might come across at a neighborhood Italian joint—albeit one in Naples, not Hoboken. For the oven, everything down to the builder and the cement were imported from Italy. The wine list is chockablock with finds, like plumygaglioppo, a varietal that excels in Calabria, the drought-ridden toe of Italy. Sardines are from Portugal. They’re terrific, too: Charred and heaped with a crushed olive-pistachio vinaigrette, they have a resilience and a delicacy that California sardines just don’t (sorry, locavores). All is effortlessness and restraint here. For their version of the Puglian specialty pittule, the chefs flash-fry strands of dough—naturally leavened, the way it’s been done for centuries—and serve them with a dollop of fresh ricotta and a drizzle of tawnyvincotto, or cooked wine. Thick fava pesto brings out the concentrated power of the striated head cheese.

***

It’s pretty well established that you don’t have to be born and bred in Italy to get Italian cooking. In London, River Café forged the necessary link between cookbook writer Elizabeth David, who taught mid-century England about the pleasures of the Mediterranean kitchen, and Jamie Oliver, who trained in the Thames-side restaurant before becoming a star chef. Closer to home, Evan Kleiman captured something fundamental about the cuisine when she opened Angeli Caffe on Melrose Avenue in 1984, narrowing her sights on the most humble elements of the food with her austerely dressed pastas and her love of wild greens.

Of course the city has other sharp Italian restaurants run by non-natives (Cecconi’s, Scarpetta, Mozza, etcetera), but they don’t have the same frame of reference or communal memory as Italian-born chefs. When Gino Angelini of Beverly Boulevard’s Angelini Osteria shaves bottarga over a pasta, he is bringing a lifetime of nuance to the act. We’ve all experienced the opposite effect in restaurants that carry on about olive oil and tradition while faking the rustic (yes, there’s such a thing as too peasanty), fussing over what should be simple, and adding an extra element rather than trusting, as the best Italian food does, in the power of good ingredients.

Samson and Pollack have authentic chops. They display their credentials right off the bat in the menu’s small plates section with ciccioli, batons of pig parts (you name it, it’s there) that have been slowly simmered, allowed to set, and then pan seared. Musky and rich, gelatinous and crisp, it is a distinctly indigenous dish that’s likely to be unfamiliar to anyone who wasn’t raised in Italy. (The closest to it in America is the scrapple that the Pennsylvania Dutch grow up on.) In fact, Italian-born cooks might question offering the dish as finger food to an American audience. Yet the interplay of opposites that Samson and Pollack achieve brilliantly articulates Italian rustic cooking—its genius for maximizing flavor and for making use of every available scrap of flesh.

Though ciccioli is served in some northern reaches (I’ve enjoyed it in the alpine fog of Bergamo), if you look at the boot of Italy, the chefs stick almost exclusively below the knee. They rarely venture north of the region of Lazio on the Atlantic side or north of Abruzzo on the Adriatic; Autostrade A1 is their Mason-Dixon line. Such focus adds to the integrity of their food. You see finely calibrated technique all around the table rather than a culinary collage. Where so many restaurants automatically shower their plates withparmigiano, Samson and Pollack won’t use it; the region of Emilia-Romagna, where the cheese comes from, is outside their ken. So their cheese choices seem that much more thoughtful and meaningful. Fiore sardo, a sheep’s milk cheese, gives a shot of thyme to the tomato sauce bathing the maharrones, a Sardinian pasta that looks like tiny cross-hatched dumplings. Without the fiore sardo, the flavors could be bland; with it, they’re perfect. That same cheese would drown out the subtlety of the appetizer called Blistered Little Gems. Instead pecorino moliterno, a sheep’s milk from the high altitudes of the Basilicata region, accentuates the ancho-vies and bread crumbs that are spread over the charred lettuce leaves.

When dishes don’t succeed, it is because the straight lines of the chefs’ technique disappear and suddenly we’re in the domain of murky flavors and unnecessary ingredients. A schmear of lardo pestato, a fancy-pants kind of lard, can’t hide the fact that the bread dough, naturally leavened though it may be, is seriously undersalted. The chickpeas that lend earthiness to the stew of braised octopus with bottarga add a pasty texture when thrown into flakes of baccalà, or salt cod, and thick ribbons of tagliatelle. The whole grilled orata (prissily taken off the bone by the kitchen, diminishing the flavor and ruining the texture; if you’re going to cook it whole, you should serve it that way, too) winds up an oily mush. I suppose the scattering of almonds, wild fennel, and currants on the side is intended to pay homage to the Sicilian penchant for North African ingredients, but the entrée is drowning in grease. Samson and Pollack are far too skilled for that.

One of my favorite things to eat here is the seppia, tender cuttlefish grilled just enough to make the flesh translucent and then placed over Sicilian caponata, a vegetable stew dense with eggplants and zucchini whose broth is amped up by a spoonful of cuttlefish ink on the side of the plate. It’s stupendous. Pollack’s Neapolitan pizzas have the same exquisite complexity, revolving around the spectrum of tones the oven can impart. The margherita is as much singed as baked by the blazing heat, allowing the tart freshness of the tomato sauce to shine. More muscular is the guanciale version, in which thinly sliced pig cheek is layered over islands of ricotta. The dough acquires a darker coloration, almost like a deeply roasted coffee bean, so the big billowing crust becomes a match for—even a foil for—the gaminess of the house-cured meat.

Some food historians claim that ice cream and granita were invented in Sicily, and there’s a long history of Italian desserts that channel the natural surroundings. Fresh fruits, orange flower water, marzipan—you’ll find them flavoring the sweets in towns throughout southern Italy. Samson and Pollack nod to the tradition with their cannoli, crisp barrels stuffed with ricotta and studded with orange peel and pistachios. The salted rosemary caramel on the chocolate crostata, however, is a meek attempt to be both fashionable and authentic, while dried thyme in the panna cotta is a false note that’s too insistent about its country roots. You would think that given how disciplined the chefs are with their ingredients, they could continue their exploration with the final course. Or at least offer more than three options. But perhaps that’s not the point with them. As I sat back after dessert recently, sipping the delicious bittersweetness of my amaro, an herbal liqueur, Samson was ladling pasta water into a pan. Nearby, Pollack glanced toward the crowd waiting by the door, reached for another mound of pizza dough, and began stretching it with flour-dusted hands. For now the two seem to have plenty to do maintaining the integrity that marks every other aspect of Sotto.

Written by:

Patric Kuh

Photographs by:

Misha Gravenor

Creamy hummus, juicy hunks of grilled chicken, righteously tender spit-fired beef in a chewy pita—the joys of this patch of Middle Eastern cuisine can’t be overstated. And, lucky you, L.A. is one of the best cities to experience it

An Armenian meal in Los Angeles can make your head spin. At Araz in Studio City, lunch might begin with silky bowls of Middle East-conjuring hummus, progress to the yogurt cheese known as labneh, and  conclude with a buttery rendering of chicken Kiev so crisp and accomplished that it would have garnered a ribbon in Soviet times. But it’s not just the food that leads to confusion. The same garlic- and cumin-laden puree of roasted eggplant that is called baba ghanoujat Glendale’s Chicken Al-Wazir, a sparse white room with wood tables, is listed as mutabel down the street at Elena’s Greek Armenian Cuisine. Meat sliced off a rotating spit might be called shawarma or a gyro. Even flags, those unflinching symbols of national identity, get caught in the mix. The lady who tends the cash register at Falafel Arax, a Hollywood cubbyhole where falafel dough is scooped to order and dropped into baths of hot oil, is surrounded by three: Old Glory; the Lebanese tricolor, with its cedar at the center; and the red, blue, and russet emblem that represents the source of all this muddle, Armenia.

In a matter of decades L.A. has become one of the great cities to experience Armenian food. It’s a cuisine that is always vital, reliant on key contrasts, and, somewhat reassuringly, puzzling even to Armenians. Asked which kabob Armenians favor, the owner of Paros, a restaurant attached to Jons Marketplace in Hollywood, seems stumped. “It depends,” he answers, able to pause only momentarily because of the press of customers. “For Russian Armenians it’s pork, but for Lebanese Armenians it’s beef.” With a laugh he throws up his arms in a gesture of resignation that we can all understand.

A small landlocked country in a corner of the lower Caucasus, Armenia is among the world’s charter nations. To say it lies between Iran and Turkey is only to point to the far end of a long time line. You could as easily say that it lies between Persia and Byzantium. Its church predates Roman Catholicism. Resembling a jumble of plumbing, those scrawly letters you see on signs and awnings belong to a language so unalloyed, it occupies its own branch among the Indo-European tongues.

Because of Armenia’s desirable location as the hub that connects Europe, Asia Minor, and Russia, the country has seen more than its share of warfare over the centuries, though nothing parallels the genocide of 1915. And so its people have sought safety elsewhere, giving rise to a diaspora (spyurk in Armenian) that has reached places as diverse as Aleppo, Syria, and Geneva, Switzerland. Armenian exiles arrived in L.A. relatively late. “In the ’70s, Armenians came from Lebanon because of the civil war, in the ’80s, from Iran because of the fall of the shah, and in the ’90s, from the Soviet Union when it collapsed,” Glendale city councilman Ara Najarian tells me at Phoenicia Restaurant, where our lunch includes an intensemuhammara, hand-pounded walnuts brightened with pomegranate juice and olive oil. Some Armenians settled in one-room Hollywood apartments, others in mansions on the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains, but Glendale clearly experienced the largest influx. “For the Lebanese,” says Najarian, himself an Armenian American, “I think Glendale reminded them of Beirut.”

Each wave brought its version of Armenian food—the traditions they had maintained, the ingredients they had incorporated from adopted homelands, the dishes they had borrowed. Well, “borrowed” may be the wrong word. Rather, a kind of shading has occurred over many generations in which the Hellenic tang of lemon in a soup, the Persian custom of placing a shaker of sumac on the table, and the Mediterranean delight in fried fish have become markers along the route Armenian cuisine has followed. With its flatbreads, pickled vegetables, and skewered meats, Armenian cooking has never relinquished its nomadic heart. The bread was flat because it required little if any leavening and could be prepared quickly on a hot stone; the vegetables were pickled and the dairy products fermented to keep bad microbes from taking hold in the days before refrigeration; the meat was skewered so it could be roasted over embers.

More than an element, fire is the primary flavor of this cuisine, the maypole at the center of the dish. Unlike American grilling, kabob cooking shouldn’t add too much coloration. That’s why those skewers are so assiduously tended to, whether in tiny strip mall kitchens or in the open kitchens of big-ticket restaurants sheathed in river rock. Bite into something as simple as a lula kebab sandwich, and you see the logic of Armenian cooking. The grilling process imbues the ground beef with a flame-licked quality that stops short of char, allowing other flavors to lock in around it: Yogurt lends a rich tartness and baba ghanouj—or mutabel, if you are so inclined—a pert kick, each adding a layer of complexity.

When Zankou Chicken opened in a Hollywood strip mall in 1984, it established crisp chicken skin and creamy garlic sauce as an essential combination. This wasn’t a laborious French recipe involving 40 cloves but something you could eat on the run, or even better, in your car. Such gastronomy, delivered in a paper bag with plenty of napkins, always relies on one or two crucial steps. In the morning, when you ask for tahini bread at Sasoun Bakery, a neighborhood landmark across from an elementary school in the Hollywood flats, they toss the flaky pastry onto the oven’s stone deck for a few seconds to add crunch and to release the scent of sesame seeds. At Alcazar in Encino, sujuk, a spicy sausage, is exquisitely leveled out by the slow-cooked chickpeas of the hummus, with just a hint of olive oil peeking through. When the woman in a kitchen smock at Sahag’s Basturma Sandwich Shop on Sunset Boulevard spreads some labneh on the roll that she will transform into a basturma panini, the creamy fermented tinge amplifies the spice of the Armenian pastrami.

These are flavors from a borderless realm, a place that existed before the maps drawn up by empire makers. There is pan-Latin food and pan-Asian food served at restaurants that like to erase boundaries by mashing regional cuisines together; there’s no such thing as pan-Middle Eastern food because by its nature, it is already “pan” and has been for millennia. Which makes it an ideal food for a city like ours. Los Angeles allows any number of cultural rituals to be maintained even while happily incorporating them into the everyday. Would Zan-kou really be the same without the inevitable multi-culti queue of noshers at its various locations? (A Beck anthem doesn’t hurt, either.) Other times—say, lunch at Phoenicia when the tables are crowded with people squeezing lemon juice over the vermilion scales of mullet and drinkingarak, an aniseed liqueur that acquires a characteristic cloudy hue when mixed with water—a distant world is being evoked. We could be in the good days of Beirut, when the casino was full and the seafront corniche glistened like diamonds.

In Journey to Armenia, the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam writes about the “Armenians’ fullness with life, their rude tenderness, their noble inclination for hard work, their inexplicable aversion to anything metaphysical, and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things.” There is indeed a hard-won contentment, a sense of normalcy wrested from history, in the atmosphere of Armenian restaurants. But the communal story of uprooting, of departures, is ever present like a shadow. Virginia Petikyan and her husband, Onik, operate Elena’s Greek Armenian. Occasionally Virginia will linger over the oilcloth-covered tables of her busy establishment and peer into that past. “When we left Armenia in 1976, we had to catch the train to Moscow to then catch a train out. I was crying,” she says, fidgeting with the reading glasses that hang around her neck. “My father said, ‘Don’t—we are doing it for you.’??  ”

This is the pang that any immigrant community knows, and that need for a restaurant to create a toehold, to provide a foundation for a new life, is what prevents Armenian restaurants from breaking out of the “ethnic” genre. Part of this is due to the polarized roles that they play. With their tufted napkins and ornate glassware, some are pitched higher on the ceremonial scale than many of us feel comfortable eating at. Others, with their stacked Styrofoam containers, are doubling as a commissary. “We don’t order two kabobs,” jokes Glendale’s Najarian, “we order 40.” And eat them at home.

Despite the heartiness, Armenian food has a certain reticence. The pickled vegetables and little tub of garlic sauce tossed into a paper bag at the last moment are as far as restaurants go in asserting requirements. The glossy menus are functional more than enticing, content to shrink a swath of influences down to a few numbered dishes and time-tested combos. Though there are hearts and kidneys on the menu at Moon Mart Kabab, a shopfront in a quiet strip mall, the owner nudges non-Armenian customers to more familiar terrain with a curt “Have the chicken.” You can indeed have abdoug, a traditional summer soup of yogurt dotted with raisins and mint at Chicken Al-Wazir, but it’s not even on the kabob-packed menu; you have to know about it to ask. Maybe some traditions are more dear when left unspoken, or maybe the complexities seem too hard to explain. Sometimes it’s easier to just call yourself a Mediterranean grill and leave it at that.

10 Great Armenian Restaurants In L.A. 

Alcazar

17239 Ventura Blvd., Encino, 818-789-0991
Lebanese Armenian

Araz Restaurant
11717 Moorpark St., Studio City, 818-766-1336
Russian Armenian

Chicken Al-Wazir
1219 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale, 818-500-1578
Persian Armenian

Elena’s Greek Armenian Cuisine
1000 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale, 818-241-5730
Greek Armenian

Falafel Arax
5101 Santa Monica Blvd., Little Armenia, 323-663-9687
Lebanese Armenian

Moon Mart Kabab
400 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale, 818-241-2314
Persian Armenian

Phoenicia Restaurant
343 N. Central Ave., Glendale, 818-956-7800
Lebanese Armenian

Raffi’s Place
211 E. Broadway, Glendale, 818-240-7411
Persian Armenian

Sahag’s Basturma Sandwich Shop
5183 W. Sunset Blvd., Little Armenia, 323-661-5311
Lebanese Armenian

Sasoun Bakery
5144 Santa Monica Blvd., Little Armenia, 323-661-1868
Lebanese Armenian

Written by:

PATRIC KUH

Photograph by:

Dave Lauridsen

Our continuing series of Venn Food Diagrams has explored American regional and a smattering of international cuisines in no particular order or with any sense of geographic or cultural continuity. We’re taking another random trip from the land of tater tot hot dishto the land of kimchi hot dish to study how accurately Angelenos view Korean food.

Moral of the story: L.A. knows Korean bbq and kimchi. Trader Joe’s sells two kinds of Korean bbq: “Bool Kogi” and Korean style beef short ribs. Kimchi is available at national chains such as Whole Foods, Ralph’s, Costco and Walmart. Whole Foods carries snacked sized packets of roasted laver for kids’ lunches. Fashionistas who’ve never set foot in a Korean restaurant enjoy bimbimbap at spas. Dave’s Korean banchan does brisk business at Burbank farmers’ market with white kimchis catering to vegetarians and vegans. Finally, those Korean tacos: when soccer moms and the New York Times are talking to you (we provided backstory for this article) about them, California Pizza Kitchen’s Korean tacosand frozen Korean tacos at Costco seem inevitable. No, we’ve never tried North Korean tacos.

Methodology: A highly unscientific collection of armchair cultural anthropology, polls on social media sites, and anecdotes from years of being pegged a native informant about everything Korean including the virtues and horrors of Korean food (and women). Plus, we enjoyed a 100 or so trips to South Korea since 1975, including several culinary tours from Seoul to the port city of Pusan. And we remember when L.A. Didn’t even have a Koreatown.

Conclusion: Most Angelenos know at least a few Korean dishes. Beyond that, appreciation of the range and depth appreciation of Korean cuisine varies quite a bit. We’re never surprised about the wide swath of positive or negative things anyone has to say about Korean food. It really seems to depend on how someone was introduced to them and which aspects of the cuisine they chose to like or hate. Centrally located Koreatown is bustling with hundreds of restaurants. More adventurous eaters enjoy a number of specialty restaurants for dishes such as bibimbap, soon dubu, nengmyun, raw sea cucumber, blood sausage, clay pot duck, and even goat soup. Besides restaurants, on any given day we see a diverse cross-section of Angelenos shopping for ingredients at Korean supermarkets including entire Russian families buying ingredients for serious pickling and Armenian seniors trying to decipher packages of dried fish at HK market in Glendale. In aggregate terms, we’re pretty impressed with the range of Korean dishes Angelenos have tried.

Notes: Perhaps not everyone has a Korean friend, but there sure are a lot of us in Los Angeles represented in a broad cross-section of industries. So, if you live in Los Angeles, you’ve probably met a Korean in one context or another. Maybe you had a college roommate or co-worker who kept a stash of kimchi in a shared refrigerator. Susan Fenniger was introduced to kimchi by her dry cleaner (was that too obvious?). Chef Ludo Lefevre was introduced to Korean food by a Chinese friend who is married to, you guessed it, a Korean.

L.A.’s Koreatown may seem a bit like a “Third Korea”, however, an ethnic enclave in the diaspora, no matter how big and economically connected to the mother land, can’t possibly reflect the foods and eating habits of an entire country. Neither do Korean-Americans, who are afterall American, and tend to eat larger portions of proteins and bigger portions overall. Around 1998, there were probably more all-you-can-eat bbq joints in L.A.’s Koreatown than the entire country of South Korea. And yes, Korean-Americans are a wee bit heavier than Koreans who still live on the peninsula.

Eating at restaurants and shopping at Korean supermarkets are only two windows into Korean cuisine. If you’re invited to a Korean home for dinner, don’t expect bottomless pits of ten different banchans. Banchan are side dishes to be eaten with rice. The idea of banchan served as appetizers before bbq, with rice served last, is purely a restaurant convention. Sure, you”ve seen plenty of Koreans gorging at restaurants. But home meals tend to be much simpler and smaller. If there is one small plate of bbq and kimchi for five people, it’s shared by everyone. If there is rice in a Korean home, there is food. Even the leftover sauces will be spooned on rice and eaten. Eating at a Korean table is an inherently social affair, please pace your consumption and quantities of it with your fellow diners.

If you’re Korean or have a Korean friend who disagrees with this Korean, well, that’s expected. As much as many Koreans want to believe we are culturally and socially homegenous, we’re not. Currently, there are 7,000,000 Koreans in the diaspora and quite a few immigrated a second time to Los Angeles. Here, you’ll find Koreanexicans, Korean-Brazilians, Korean-Argentines and Korean-Russians. And depending on when a family immigrated to Los Angeles, their perception of the cuisine might be stalled in a certain place and time. Native informants, not surprisingly, speak from their own experiences and observations.

Susan Park is a food historian and the Program Director of Ecole de Cuisine, follow her on Twitter or join her on Facebook.

Written by:

Susan Ji Young Park

Image source

If you wanted to understand the precise state of L.A. cooking at the moment, you could take a look at the roasted marrowbones at Spice Table downtown, a dish that seems to express everything important about local cuisine. You’ve seen bone marrow before.Beverly Hills steak house Cut does a magnificent bone-marrow flan, and the roasted bones show up a lot at meaty places like Lazy Ox, Mozza and Animal. Roasted marrowbones are a signature of Fergus Henderson, whose offal-intensive Londonrestaurant is the lodestar of the Euro-American nose-to-tail movement.

The labor involved in serving them properly — sourcing the bones, sawing them in half, roasting them to just that point before the marrow collapses into grease — indicates a seriousness of intent; dedication to a dish that is usually one of the lowest-priced things on your menu, and which half of your customers would cross the street to avoid.

You don’t actually have to eat bone marrow to be glad that it’s on the menu. It means that somebody in the kitchen cares.

Bryant Ng, the chef at Spice Table, roasts his marrowbones in the wood fire that perfumes his downtown restaurant, and caps the semicylinders with a Southeast Asian paste of fermented shrimp and ground chiles that chars and crisps in the smoky heat. Henderson and his followers tend to flank their bones with tart parsley salads that tame the intense oiliness of the marrow. Ng serves his with a small stack of rau ram leaves, the pungent Vietnamese herb called laksa leaf in Ng’s native Singapore, as well as a tangle of scarlet onions that look like something plucked from a Yucatan taco. And when you spoon the trembling marrow onto a bit of sliced baguette, garnishing it with the rau ram and a sliver of the pickled onion, the taste of the leaf is sharp, almost metallic; the funk of the shrimp paste gives way to a low, throbbing chile heat; and the marrow melts on your tongue, meat yet beyond meat; the mellow, liquid bass line that makes the other flavors dance. You pull at a glass of cool rye beer, and you start in again. In a minute, the bones will look as if piranhas scraped them clean.

Spice Table, a high-ceilinged, candlelit restaurant in a patch of Little Tokyo better known for noodle shops and izakayas, seems to gather half the strands of contemporary cooking into a single, weathered-brick restaurant. You can smell the wood smoke a block or two away, and the roster of craft beers is as long as the wine list. The food comes out on small plates, meant to be shared. Ng haunts the farmers markets. You have to reserve online — nobody picks up the phone during business hours. You will find both a spicy marinated yellowtail dish — is there a new restaurant in town without one? — and a signature cheeseburger, which gives the impression of an In-N-Out burger made with chile sambalinstead of secret spread. Lunchtime sees Spice Table’s versions of bánh mì, sandwiches of curried eggplant, fried catfish or liver-rich homemade charcuterie served on baguettes baked each morning in-house.

You might expect a restaurant from Ng, the opening chef of Pizzeria Mozza, to be jammed from the moment it opened, and you wouldn’t be surprised to find quartinos of crisp Italian white wine. Diligent ingredient sourcing would practically be a given, as would be the complex, small-plate vegetable preparations.

What you wouldn’t expect is that Spice Table serves neither regional Italian dishes nor the food of the Mediterranean, but chiefly riffs on the multicultural street food of Singapore, including Hainan chicken rice; thin, bouncy kon lo mee noodles with chashu; crumbles of ground pork and braised choi sum; and crunchy fried chicken wings, crust laced with South Indian curry, that appear in no Singaporean hawker centers, but probably would be a hit if they did.

Crisply fried cauliflower with turmeric? Why not. The laksa, soft noodles in a thick, coconut-based broth, are jolted with strong, fermented shrimp paste belacan, more intense than you usually find in Singapore. And you can’t leave without tasting the curry-dusted fried peanuts and dried anchovies, or the perfect crossover dish of sambal potatoes, basically Mozza’s fried potatoes smeared with spicy chile paste.

If Ng has a specialty, it is his satay, the skewered, marinated meat, grilled over fire. The chile-soaked prawns can be dry, the chicken a little bland, but the lamb belly is magnificent, crusted black and spurting gamy juice. The otah, another Malay dish, is wonderful, bits of mackerel folded into banana-leaf packets with coconut cream, grilled until they collapse into spicy custard.

If Spice Table is running offal as a special — it often does — it is essential, especially the tripe, which becomes pure smoke and chew over the flames, and the soy-brushed sweetbreads skewered with scraps of bacon. The grilled rib-eye, marinated in garlic, palm sugar and a big handful of peppercorns, shares most of the satays’ virtues — it’s not on the menu, but you can usually talk somebody into serving it to you.

After dinner, there is soft-serve ice cream flavored with palm sugar or kumquat, and better yet, industrial-strength Vietnamese filter coffee, brewed at table, mixed with condensed milk and stirred into a glass of ice.

SPICE TABLE | 114 S. Central Ave., Little Tokyo | (213) 620-1840, thespicetable.com | Lunch Mon.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m., dinner Mon.-Wed., 5:30–11 p.m., Thurs.-Sat., 5:30–mid. | AE, MC, V | Beer & wine | Partially validated lot parking in lot on First Street at Central Ave. | Takeout | Snacks $6-$8, satays $8-$12, vegetables $7-$8, seafood and meats $12-$17, bánh mì at lunch $7.50-$9 | Recommended dishes: bone marrow with spicy sambal, tripe satay, curry fried chicken wings, otah, kon loh meenoodles

Written by:

Jonathan Gold

Photo by:

Anne Fishbein

To say that the menu at Noodle Boy is minimal is probably understating things. You can get noodle soup. You can get noodles without soup. You can get soup without noodles. That’s pretty much the end of the story, unless you include a perfunctory dish of Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce.

The soup, based on long-boiled pork bones as surely as the best tonkotsu ramen broth, is good, even potent. The rice noodles, I believe, are there only as a sop to the gluten-intolerant, the only people who have reason to avoid the egg noodles — wire-thin, chick-yellow, exquisitely tangled, with a snap and a springiness you never quite expect from dough in broth. Are there vegetables, a boiled egg, a handful of bean sprouts in the broth? There are not. Broth and noodles. The Noodle Boy has spoken.

Contemplating a beverage? You may choose between water and tea.

In the bowl with broth and noodles, unless you have ordered wrong, there will also be wonton, fat dumplings made with coarsely chopped shrimp and wrapped in gauzy noodles that contain their muscly bulk like a nightie around Ndamukong Suh.

These wonton are wondrous things, delicate and lightly crunchy, scented with toasted oil. If you wish, you may smear them with the Noodle Boy chile sauce, a dense, musky paste of dried chiles, seasonings and oil, a paste that the person sitting next to you may be spooning out of the container like ice cream.

If you happen to be the person spooning sauce out of the container like ice cream, you should know that you can buy jars of sauce to go. The smidge Noodle Boy gives you with takeout orders will be barely enough to get you through tomorrow morning’s eggs.

When you order just wonton in soup, you get six wonton. When you order wonton noodle soup, you get four wonton. When you order wonton with bouncy cuttlefish balls and noodles, you get three wonton. It is a matter of priorities.

If you spend much time in the area, you may recognize these wonton, which were the specialty of the late Alhambra restaurant Wonton Time. They were the go-to wonton in the San Gabriel Valley, probably — at least the best Hong Kong–style wonton, which considering the competition is saying a lot. When Wonton Time closed a few years ago, most of us ate less wonton, unless you count the scarlet wonton in chile sauce that most of the Sichuan restaurants serve. In this neighborhood, there is always another noodle.

Andrew Yu, the chef, resurfaced at Noodle Boy, tucked behind Tip Top Sandwiches in a half-empty Rosemead mall. The restaurant couldn’t be more hidden, and the bright dining room, although finished nicely, has the smack of fast food about it (you can be in and out in 10 minutes, if that’s your thing), yet on weekends there is often a wait. The wonton, trailing behind them fragile scraps of noodle as comets do their faint, sparkly tails, have that kind of gravitational pull.

With the wonton and the noodles — or instead of them, if you are perverse — you can have taut meatballs, bouncy enough to survive a game of golf, or an impressive pile of sliced, sauteed beef soft enough to pose as the model for a Bon Appetit tutorial on velveting. (What is velveting? A Chinese tenderizing technique that involves a marinade of rice wine, salt, cornstarch, egg white and sometimes a bit of baking soda, plus a quick pass through a bath of warm oil before the meat is stir-fried. Velveting renders even tough cuts marshmallow-soft — I’m sure Harold McGee could tell you exactly how the process relaxes meat proteins. You are not going to try this at home.)

But the important topping here, nearly as crucial as the wonton, is the house-made fish ball — less like the firm, rubbery things you usually find in this neighborhood and more like airy slabs of perfected Chinese gefilte fish: soft, white and juicy, coarsely ground but almost delicate, perfumed with white pepper and green onion. Is it kosher for Passover? Not with all those shrimp wonton around. But it should be.

NOODLE BOY | 8518 E. Valley Blvd., Rosemead | (626) 280-8963 | Thurs.-Tues., 10 a.m.-8 p.m. | Cash only | No alcohol | Lot parking | Takeout | Noodle soup $4.75, lo mein $5.50, extra toppings $0.75 apiece | Recommended dish: noodle soup with wonton and/or fish ball

Written by:

Jonathan Gold

Photo by:

Anne Fishbein