All Flavor No Grease
Angelini Osteria
Animal
Apple Pan
Asanebo
Baco Mercat
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Beverly Soon Tofu
Black Market Liquor
Boiling Crab
Broken Spanish
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Chengdu Impression
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Colonia Publica
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Father’s Office
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Here’s Looking at You
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Jitlada
Karina’s Catering
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Lalibela
Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant
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n/naka
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al-Noor
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Removed from last year
Adana
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Pho 87
Raffi’s Place
San Pedro Fish Market
The Serving Spoon
Simply Wholesome
X’Tiosu Kitchen
You mean Sun Nong Dan, right? Still great, and yes swarmed by tourists (though food quality has not suffered). You’ll hear far more Mandarin spoken in that K-town plaza (at 6th & Alexandria) than Korean lol.
Nice for including Boiling Crab, which needs to be given more credit for its place in food history. I don’t think many people realize that Viet-Cajun may have started in Louisiana/Houston, but the current iteration of the crab boil broth that we know it as today arguably was invented by Boiling Crab in Little Saigon.
With all due respect, so what?
As you say, it was invented on the Gulf Coast…period. Should Evan Funke get credit for inventing pasta? That broth is the same as I’ve had at Cajun-Viet places in Louisiana…
Andrea Nguyen once argued this point at Southern Food Alliance, which did not go well in Dallas. But I’ll leave it at this:
Early versions of crawfish served at Vietnamese-owned restaurants resembled Louisiana boils but with more spices in the water; the crawfish came with squeeze bottles of condiments to create dipping sauces. When garlic butter entered the picture can’t be pinpointed. Walsh wrote that the trend started in Houston but noted a story in the Los Angeles Times that claims it began with the Boiling Crab restaurant in Orange County, Calif., in 2004. Food historian John T. Edge has placed the origin of boiled crawfish finished in a buttery blend of garlic, lemon pepper and Cajun spices with Boiling Crab in the early 2000s.
Sun Nong Dan has definitely gone downhill, not recently but prob around the time David Chang blew it up.
I remember when I use to live down the street it was never packed and the short ribs in it were thick cut. Nowadays its mostly thin cut so that it braises faster.
I never went before Chang but when we went this was our experience. We mostly got thin cut slices not attached to the bone. That is not galbi jjim. It’s brisket.
Aww that’s a shame if they are not using short ribs. I wonder if it’s the case for Sun Nong Dan’s Rowland and San Gabriel location. Not as busy as Ktown
Interestingly, in this article written by John T. Edge…
A similar, but more expansive, ethic applies at the Vietnamese-owned crayfish restaurants that began opening in Houston around 2000, and a few years later in Southern California.
carnitas/buche/chicharrón taco - My actual order…meat is quadrupled that of the free sample…all for 2 fidy…deeply savory and wonderful texture variations from the meat and organs.