LA Restaurants

[Chris Amirault]

Hi Folks,

Thanks to the good suggestions of Pamela F, chezcherie, Carlsbad, saulbass, andiesenji, Chris Cognac, Carolyn Tillie, and (especially) Stupid_American, I just returned from a week-plus in LA to visit friends and attend a conference in Anaheim. Didn't have a bad meal the entire time, and I had many excellent meals.

I'm fitting this writing between work activities, so I'm going to break them up into little reviews. First to follow!

[Chris Amirault]

Pink's 709 N La Brea LA

As a major aficionado of NY system hot dogs, staple cheap lunch fare here in RI, I was eager to try the chili dogs at Pink's. There is only one Pink's in the world: the joint sits on La Brea in a boxy little shack, and having driven twice a day past the absolutely constant line outside (never shorter than twenty people), their resistance to franchising is remarkable. The wait when we arrived (midday weekend) was about 45 minutes, which gave me a good long while to figure out what exactly to order.

Celebrity dog recipes adorn the front of the shop (I looked in vain for the Martha Stewart dog, which has apparently been taken down in deference to the shamed home 'n' chow diva's downfall), but I decided to go two standard chili dogs of mustard, chili, and onions. This selection afforded me the opportunity to compare the Pink's dog to a NY system weiner, upon which sits onions, mustard, chili, and celery salt. Although I feel that celery salt is to weiners what caviar is to blinis and sour cream, I have worked very hard to look beyond this obvious mark of frank inferiority and compare the two based on their other, shared merits.

The damned things were fantastic. The dogs themselves were wonderful: good snap, bit of spice, actual flavor of meat. The chili was standard-issue red sauce, ground beef, and chili powder, but it had that sweet tartness required for a good counterpoint to the crunchy raw onions and the mustard. I'm grateful also for the bun, which has the softness and sinew both to nestle and secure the dog and its bling-bling on their way into your muzzle. It's a perfect combination -- well, less the celery salt, but who's quibbling?

I chomped two with a diet coke, the drink selection part of a futile attempt to restrict weight gain on this trip.

Edited for formatting -- CA

Edited November 17, 2004 by chrisamirault (log)

[Chris Amirault]

Mission 261 261 S Mission San Gabriel

Following a lead from the LA Weekly's on-line edition, my friend and I headed down to San Gabriel to try Mission 261. Jonathan Gold claims that it's "best dim sum in California," and I'd have to rate it in my personal top three. I will also state the obvious, which is that a blow-out dim sum meal costs about half of what most other blow-out meals cost, a fact that I still can't quite figure out.

We arrived on a Saturday at 11 am, after having hit a few stores in the titanic Chinese-American community in San Gabriel. We got there early enough to sit at a large table by ourselves and watch the place fill up -- or, had we chosen to do so, due to the expansive projection television screen half-way up the massive wall on the other side of one of the titanic dining rooms, to watch the USC football game. The place clearly runs like a well-oiled machine at this point; a steady stream of wait staff pour out of the central kitchen with tray after tray of delectables.

My dinner companion was less interested in adventurous fare, so we pretty much stuck to standards. Some were good but not thrilling, or didn't quite pull off the trick. For example, the steamed pork buns had an ethereal dough, but the filling was just ok. But other items were terrific. The pork and shrimp siu mai dumplings were meaty and luscious. The kitchen clearly likes good shrimp: the shrimp and spinach dumplings were made with nearly whole shrimp, and the simple shrimp dumplings consisted of two shrimp with a dab of sesame oil and salt -- perfect. The baby bok choi in garlic, lotus leaf rice, and pork ribs with black bean sauce were outstanding.

I have no idea how other dim sum palaces in the greater LA area are, but this was definitely worth the trip. Now I need to get back out to the left coast and try out those shisamo....

Edited, again, for formatting...! CA

Edited November 18, 2004 by chrisamirault (log)

[Ore]

Ciao,

Very nice!! I also have driven by Pinks many, many times - I even lived in LA for my first 18 years and never stopped there - I can't wait to have a damn hot dog! You made it sound so good!!!

Thanks!

Ore

[Chris Amirault]

El Coyote 7312 Beverly Blvd LA

I was taken here by a friend who, for some reason, had been told that El Coyote was a "great Mexican restaurant." It is a kitsch paradise, to be sure, and while we waited about seventy minutes for a table we perused each gewgaw in the display case a few times over. The other guests, dripping bling or their most recent liquid tan, were gawkable as well.

Once seated, the waitresses, each crammed into revealing, "festive" attire and hustling around under the watchful eye of the abusive floor manager, were very nice, and we got our food and margaritas right away (the better to hustle us out most speedily, of course). The food was, at best, merely passable California Mexican fare, not at all worth the bandwith to detail.

The joint is known primarily for two things: its margaritas and the fact that Sharon Tate ate her last meal here before heading home, going to sleep, and having the Manson family stop by unexpectedly. The margaritas were utterly mediocre, and you can insert your own ironic comment about Ms. Tate's final repast here.

[Chris Amirault]

Very nice!!  I also have driven by Pinks many, many times - I even lived in LA for my first 18 years and never stopped there - I can't wait to have a damn hot dog!  You made it sound so good!!!

←

Molte grazie! (Gotta love the internet for those translation aids!)

I really urge you to visit the place as soon as you can. Avoid basically everything that isn't forcemeat -- the fries, rings, chips, etc. are all food service standard, which is to say, not worth the astonishing calories and fat -- and, to bastardize Willie Mays, do what most people do and say, "It's a beautiful day. Let's eat two!"

[Carlsbad]

-- and, to bastardize Willie Mays, do what most people do and say, "It's a beautiful day. Let's eat two!"

←

I think that it might have been Ernie Banks you were bastardizing.

I used to go to El Coyote back in the 70's when I worked not too far from there. The food wasn't very good then either. It sounds about the same from the description. You can get much better Mexican food at the taco shops in San Diego, some of which are really pretty good.

Edit: I never can get the stupid quote thing right.

Edited November 20, 2004 by Carlsbad (log)

[jschyun]

thanks for the great mini-reports, chrisamirault! Pink's is great. I even tried their veggie dog once, and it was better than I thought it would be.

[tanabutler]

Whenever I have a hot dog, I want it to be pink. The other colors just weird me out.

<No emoticon. Steven Wright.>

[Chris Amirault]

Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant 685 N Spring St (Ord St.) LA

a meditation on why Zagat can suck so terribly and on the good fortunes of the author and his chums

This story starts out with an entry in the members's area of the on-line Zagat guide for Mon Kee's, 679 N. Spring St. (Ord St.) in LA. Zagat members who have clicked on this link know that the restaurant received a 23 for food, one of the three restaurants receiving the highest food rating in Zagat's LA Chinese category. Based on that number, I made reservations for four to eat at 9:00 pm, and while my chum parked the car, I eagerly bounded down the street...

...to be confronted by another number, 63, which was baldly displayed in the front window of Mon Kee's. Now, though 63 is numerically higher than 23, it communicates a rating that is in fact much lower than 23. LA denizens know that every restaurant in the city receives a rating from the LA County Health Inspector, which then must be displayed in the front window. Most eateries display As, Bs, or Cs -- and then the small fraction who didn't make letter grade cuts get a number.

Yes, the Zagat guide saves its top LA Chinese rating for the food at a restaurant deemed to plate literally unhealthy food.

I peered inside the windows just above the scarlet "63", and, not surprisingly, the place was empty. No, check that: the place was filled with about a dozen sullen waitstaff, cooks, and managers with, clearly, nothing to do. Since I had been delegated the responsible party for this evening's meal and had no desire to be served with a law suit by my friends for gross endangerment, I popped into Mon Kee's to tell them that we wouldn't be dining there, and ran out to find another nearby place. Turns out it was next door and filled with large, happy families sharing massive plates of seafood and vegetables and noodles. Surely, it couldn't be as bad as Mon Kee's looked. (Hell couldn't be as bad as Mon Kee's looked.)

The "place next door" turned out to be the fantastic Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant 685 N Spring St (Ord St.) LA. Everything we got was heavenly: Singapore noodles, beef with a spicy orange sauce, and pea pod leaves with garlic were all sharply flavored, not at all greasy, and just great. The crab fried rice was an ethereal combination of white crab meat, egg, scallion, and rice that was a subtle, wonderful mound half the size and shape of a volleyball.

Most notably, one of the dishes by which I measure Chinese restaurants, salt and pepper shrimp, was outstanding. The other three diners hadn't ever eaten this dish before, and were put off initially by the heads and shells still on the fried shrimp. But it arrived steaming hot, fresh from the kitchen, and I convinced each person to eat a head and then judge. One salty, head-fat-filled, crunchy bite of the sea and they were hooked: within three minutes the plate was bare.

So, Zagat's be damned! We ambled into a place none of us had heard of (and that isn't in the Zagat's guide) and had one of the best mid-range Chinese meals in my life. It was also astonishingly cheap: the four of us ate for fifty bucks plus tip, and we ordered eight different and massive dishes. It's BYOB, and the waitstaff look as if they want to hit you upside the head most of the time, but it's a palace to great food.

As for Mon Kee's, one can only wonder the basis for which Zagat reviewers established their recent ratings. I've always suspected that reviewers don't actually go back to places but instead review based on their last trip -- which could be five or ten years earlier. Of course, if anyone has a tale to tell about Mon Kee's, please do!

And or those headed to Mayflower, I give permission to plagiarize my story of good fortune to your own ends.

[Chris Amirault]

Soot Bull Jeep, 3136 W Eighth St LA

While Zagat.com steered me wrong on the previous restaurant, it steered me right on this Korean BBQ joint on the edge of Koreatown in LA. It also provided a great line to describe the olfactory effects of dining there, which is that you leave smelling like the three things in the restaurant's name. Well, the first one anyway....

Soot Bull Jeep is known for using actual Korean hard wood charcoal in their BBQ pits, which are built into the formica-topped tables in their dining room. "Dining room" overstates it: the entire place has the feel of a 1940s auto shop, complete with tin vents over the tables and ducts rising to the ceiling, dim light, astonishing noise, and a batch of busy, determined workers. (Just to be clear: I think that this is a good thing.)

The first time I ate there I dined alone at about 4 pm, and I was joined by a few small families and by a golf foursome dressed in their finest sportswear, polishing off a titanic mound of food along with plenty of Chivas and OB beer while slapping each other on the shoulder and laughing uproariously. The second time, mid-evening with a friend, it was packed, so we waited in line, chatting with four UCLA students who were finishing off their dinner. They gave us a couple of tips (short ribs not steak, you idiots; buy a bottle or two or soju to go with your OB) that proved very useful.

So, here's the basic ritual. When you sit down, the waitress comes over, lights the gas grill by reaching under the table, and dumps a scoop or two of hardwood charcoal from the bucket near the door on top. You order your meat and -- presto! -- it appears nearly instantly, along with about ten side dishes (sesame spinach, three kinds of kimchi, scallions, a nut and red bean paste concoction that I loved, raw garlic cloves...), rice, and lettuce leaves.

You also get a few glasses of ice, which seem very mysterious at first, and then the cooking begins, with the waitress laying out a few slabs of meat on the grill. Your job is now to cook them without burning them too badly, and to prevent flareups. This latter task seems impossible until the waitress suddenly bounds over to throw ice on the grill, dousing the grease-fueled fires and calming your embers down a bit.

When the meat reaches the doneness you desire, you try as quickly as possible to make little lettuce pockets to hold the burning hot beef, too much drippy kimchee, some scallions, and whatever else you can pack in the damned thing before cramming it into your mouth all at once. It's glorious -- messy, smoky, spicy, cool and hot -- and it's a perfect foil for astonishing amounts of booze. Which, from the looks of other customers there, may be the point.

It was all fantastic. Everything seems made on premises, so if you're used to crappy jarred kimchi that alone is a revelation. But the combination of great food, copious drink, and a one-of-a-kind atmosphere makes this place unique. A date destination it is not, unless you and yours have a complicated relationship to smoky grease, or to post-meal bathing. But if I lived in LA, I'd go here every damned week.

[Muffin210]

Soot Bull Jeep, 3136 W Eighth St LA

A date destination it is not, unless you and yours have a complicated relationship to smoky grease, or to post-meal bathing.

Personally, I wouldn't want to go out with anyone who WASN'T willing to eat at Soot Bull Jeep on a date!

But that's just me...luckily for me, Houseberg loves Korean food (he even lived in Korea for a few months teaching English), so he doesn't mind if we end up with smoky clothes and kimchee breath!

Glad to hear you liked Soot Bull Jeep, and that you managed to hit such a variety of good LA restaurants. Can't wait to read your next installment!

[jschyun]

A person I know hates Korean food but loves Soot Bull Jeep, go figure.

[Chris Amirault]

Soot Bull Jeep, 3136 W Eighth St LA

A date destination it is not, unless you and yours have a complicated relationship to smoky grease, or to post-meal bathing.

Personally, I wouldn't want to go out with anyone who WASN'T willing to eat at Soot Bull Jeep on a date!

But that's just me...luckily for me, Houseberg loves Korean food (he even lived in Korea for a few months teaching English), so he doesn't mind if we end up with smoky clothes and kimchee breath!

Glad to hear you liked Soot Bull Jeep, and that you managed to hit such a variety of good LA restaurants. Can't wait to read your next installment!

←

Thanks for the compliment! I should have written "first date" -- but you make a good point!

More after the holiday weekend!

[hollywood]

Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant 685 N Spring St (Ord St.) LA

a meditation on why Zagat can suck so terribly and on the good fortunes of the author and his chums

This story starts out with an entry in the members's area of the on-line Zagat guide for Mon Kee's, 679 N. Spring St. (Ord St.) in LA. Zagat members who have clicked on this link know that the restaurant received a 23 for food, one of the three restaurants receiving the highest food rating in Zagat's LA Chinese category. Based on that number, I made reservations for four to eat at 9:00 pm, and while my chum parked the car, I eagerly bounded down the street...

...to be confronted by another number, 63, which was baldly displayed in the front window of Mon Kee's. Now, though 63 is numerically higher than 23, it communicates a rating that is in fact much lower than 23. LA denizens know that every restaurant in the city receives a rating from the LA County Health Inspector, which then must be displayed in the front window. Most eateries display As, Bs, or Cs -- and then the small fraction who didn't make letter grade cuts get a number.

Yes, the Zagat guide saves its top LA Chinese rating for the food at a restaurant deemed to plate literally unhealthy food.

I peered inside the windows just above the scarlet "63", and, not surprisingly, the place was empty. No, check that: the place was filled with about a dozen sullen waitstaff, cooks, and managers with, clearly, nothing to do. Since I had been delegated the responsible party for this evening's meal and had no desire to be served with a law suit by my friends for gross endangerment, I popped into Mon Kee's to tell them that we wouldn't be dining there, and ran out to find another nearby place. Turns out it was next door and filled with large, happy families sharing massive plates of seafood and vegetables and noodles. Surely, it couldn't be as bad as Mon Kee's looked. (Hell couldn't be as bad as Mon Kee's looked.)

The "place next door" turned out to be the fantastic Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant 685 N Spring St (Ord St.) LA. Everything we got was heavenly: Singapore noodles, beef with a spicy orange sauce, and pea pod leaves with garlic were all sharply flavored, not at all greasy, and just great. The crab fried rice was an ethereal combination of white crab meat, egg, scallion, and rice that was a subtle, wonderful mound half the size and shape of a volleyball.

Most notably, one of the dishes by which I measure Chinese restaurants, salt and pepper shrimp, was outstanding. The other three diners hadn't ever eaten this dish before, and were put off initially by the heads and shells still on the fried shrimp. But it arrived steaming hot, fresh from the kitchen, and I convinced each person to eat a head and then judge. One salty, head-fat-filled, crunchy bite of the sea and they were hooked: within three minutes the plate was bare.

So, Zagat's be damned! We ambled into a place none of us had heard of (and that isn't in the Zagat's guide) and had one of the best mid-range Chinese meals in my life. It was also astonishingly cheap: the four of us ate for fifty bucks plus tip, and we ordered eight different and massive dishes. It's BYOB, and the waitstaff look as if they want to hit you upside the head most of the time, but it's a palace to great food.

As for Mon Kee's, one can only wonder the basis for which Zagat reviewers established their recent ratings. I've always suspected that reviewers don't actually go back to places but instead review based on their last trip -- which could be five or ten years earlier. Of course, if anyone has a tale to tell about Mon Kee's, please do!

And or those headed to Mayflower, I give permission to plagiarize my story of good fortune to your own ends.

←

A couple of points. First, Zagat is pretty generic in its ratings and totally misses out on Monterey Park when it comes to Chinese. Second, those Health Dept. ratings are to be viewed with extreme skepticism. Lots of the points taken off don't directly relate to the healthiness of the food, tho I would agree that at 63 you might have some problems. Third, the County of LA like the City is strapped for cash. I went into a pretty good take out/deli/wine store recently and got some excellent food. As I was leaving, I noticed that the place had a B rating (downgraded from the usual A). I asked the proprietor. He said there had been a problem with some leakage and its effect on some acoustical tiles (in a heavy rain, virtually every roof/ceiling in Southern California leaks). As a result, their A rating had been lowered to B. They immediately fixed the tiles and called the Health Dept. They were informed they could wait 3 or more months for another review of their place and maintain their B rating or they could pay $300 for an early re-visit which would presumably result in a new rating. They said, Screw it we ain't paying you the extortion. This was not an Asian establishment. I can't imagine but that many places with fairly low prices don't adopt the same attitude.

Edited November 27, 2004 by hollywood (log)

[mongo_jones]

i will say that mon kee's used to be quite good till about 5 years ago--since then they've gone downhill fast (in my opinion, of course). we stopped eating there finally after two indifferent meals in a row with not very many other patrons around us.

but hollywood's right: the zagat reviewer base (largely anglo) misses the boat completely not only on the san gabriel valley but also koreatown. i don't know what the story is now but the last time i bought the l.a zagat (2-3 years ago) there were probably less than 10 sgv places listed and less than 5 koreatown places (if that many).

[hollywood]

A quick glance thru the 2005 Z guide looks like 9 sgv Chinese listed and 5 Korean in K-town. But heck, they only list the Guelaguetza in Palms and not the 2 Koreatown/downtown branches.

[mongo_jones]

A quick glance thru the 2005 Z guide looks like 9 sgv Chinese listed and 5 Korean in K-town.  But heck, they only list the Guelaguetza in Palms and not the 2 Koreatown/downtown branches.

←

to put this in context that is like 9 and 5 out of many more than a hundred for each cuisine. (does anyone know what the exact numbers in sgv and k-town might be?)

that's outrageous about guelaguetza as well! i bet they get all the chin chin locations right though...

[hollywood]

If it weren't all about the Benjamins, Zagat would do a separate LA Asian Guide.

[Chris Amirault]

Thai Nakorn 12532 Garden Grove Blvd Anaheim CA

Thanks to the input of Stupid_American on the Cheap and Good CA restaurants thread and thread on which I requested meals in LA and Anaheim, I was able to hit two fantastic and wildly inexpensive restaurants while attending a conference at the soul-sucking, gargantuan, and generally horrid Anaheim Convention Center. One is the La Palma Chicken Pie Shop (more on that soon), and the other is Thai Nakorn, described here.

Having driven the 45-90 minutes from West Hollywood to Anaheim quite a few times, I don't expect I'll convince any Angelenos to make the trip to these two places. But given how much time you spend in your damned car as it is, you really should, you know?

To start, I must admit that I can't really say with confidence what "authentic Thai food" is or tastes like. I can cook a few things and have access to good ingredients, and I have eaten at many places that taste, well, good. But I've never been to Thailand and haven't had any meals that have made me feel I can make the leap to authenticity.

Well, that's until Thai Nakorn, any way. Walking into the place, I got the distinct and happy impression that everyone in the building could care less about the throngs of tourists eating at Applebee's just a quick drive away. The wait staff was hustling around the packed room yelling to each other and chatting with customers in Thai. Bubble tea posters hung on walls next to signs noting the days specials -- or so I assumed, able only to read the prices. I felt as if we were the only people there who weren't regulars.

I was eating with three chili-phobes who really only knew about pad thai and Thai egg rolls, and so as host I had to steer a bit clear of a few things that I was dying to try. But the old standards were remarkable: pad thai, mee grob, and tom kar gai leapt into my mouth as if I had never had them there before, filled with flavors that were, paradoxically, both far more intense and far more harmonious than I'd ever experienced.

That sense of harmonious intensity was particularly true later in the meal. While they finished those dishes off and crunched on egg rolls, I got a shrimp and chili curry dish whose name I don't remember (and which was probably a bastardization anyway), but whose flavor I do. David Thompson, in his remarkable cookbook Thai Food, writes extensively about the importance of fermentation in Thai cooking, and I have ever since been wondering how the process and flavor he describes translates into the food. Now I know: the fermented shrimp utterly transformed the shirmp curry I ate, binding the coconut milk with the other ingredients in a manner that justifies Thompson's claims that Thai sauces can be as complex as any in the French canon. I also got a fiery, perfect beef salad (yam nua), and we ended with a tropical fruit salad in coconut juice.

The place is astonishingly cheap, with well-portioned entrees in the $6-8 range. Four of us ate there like absolute royalty for about $60. I can't say what Thai in LA is like, of course, and thus can't offer comparisons, but I really do think that Thai Nakorn is worth a special trip.

And I can say with absolute certainty that, unless you've been, you have never eaten in a place even remotely like the La Palma Chicken Pie Shop -- the subject of my last report!

[hzrt8w]

Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant 685 N Spring St (Ord St.) LA

[...]

So, Zagat's be damned! We ambled into a place none of us had heard of (and that isn't in the Zagat's guide) and had one of the best mid-range Chinese meals in my life. It was also astonishingly cheap: the four of us ate for fifty bucks plus tip, and we ordered eight different and massive dishes. It's BYOB, and the waitstaff look as if they want to hit you upside the head most of the time, but it's a palace to great food.

[...]

←

Chris: By chance I just read your report on Mayflower in Los Angeles and saw your comment, now 17 months later. LOL!

I just want to say: Welcome to my world!

To a Chinese, service is secondary. The most important thing is "taste". If the food tastes good, you can tolerate the rest... lousy service, tiny dining room (rubbing elbows), long line or dirty bathroom. And... of course, the price needs to be right too.

Edited April 16, 2006 by hzrt8w (log)

[LarsTheo]

Mayflower Restaurant has changed its name to Jen Mei for some reason. I couldn't find any information doing a search for "Mayflower Chinese Seafood Restaurant" (except for one in San Francisco), but when I searched for the address, I found info about Jen Mei. Any explanations for this?

[rjwong]

Lars, It may have been called Jen Mai back three years ago.

Since Dec. 2004, the long-time restaurant Mon Kee closed its doors for remodeling & renovation. Right next door is the restaurant chrisamirault went to called:

Mayflower B.B.Q. Seafood Restaurant please note the exact wording

I think the Mayflower B.B.Q. took over the Jen Mai location a couple of years ago. Mayflower B.B.Q. used to be over in another part of Chinatown for many years, across the street from Hop Li and a community park. I've been keeping an eye on those two places for a while. "Mon Kee" has done a really nice remodeling job. It still hasn't open yet. That's Los Angeles bureaucracy. I've been looking inside from time to time, and believe me, the place really needed sprucing up. Mind you, the old "Mon Kee" location put up new signage, which reads:

Mayflower Seafood Restaurant please note the missing word "B.B.Q."

It's BYOB, and the waitstaff look as if they want to hit you upside the head most of the time, but it's a palace to great food.

Uhh, that's what happened to me when I started asking questions about the old "Mon Kee" location. I don't think the owner owns both places.

edited to add photo

Here's a photo to add to the confusion. To the left is the old "Mon Kee" restaurant location with the Mayflower signage without the word B.B.Q. Mon Kee had been around for twenty-five years and was a popular place for L.A. officials over the years. I'm figuring out why they didn't just keep the Mon Kee name. Mind you, more puzzling to me is why change the name to something technically different yet very similiar to your next door competitor.

Edited April 16, 2006 by rjwong (log)