You say Oaxacan, and I say @#$%^&….

It’s a special Friday edition of My Thursday Lunch, since yesterday was Thanksgiving. So today I had the pleasure of my wife joining me, since we both have the day off work. One of the interesting benefits of doing these Thursday lunches is seeing parts of LA that I normally don’t see, since my normal routes through LA are quite predictable. But LA is a big place, and even though my wife has lived in the LA area all her life, some of these neighborhoods are new to both of us.  My wife *loves* public transportation, and was very excited to see some bus routes in the neighborhood that she’d never seen before.  Whatever turns you on, I guess. 

Anyway, I selected Restaurante Guelaguetsza, which is an  Oaxacan restaurant.  You might ask yourself, “What in the heck is Oaxacan”?   And moreover, if you’re like me, how in the heck do you pronounce it?  Fortunately Wikipedia does provide a history and an audio pronunciation of Oaxaca.  Even with that, I still have a hard time saying it, but it took me months to be able to properly say Здравствуйте, so all things in good time.

Mangia a trois

I was joined by my friends Yasmin and Stefan for my Thursday lunch this week. Yasmin and I exchanged ideas about where to go, finally deciding on the Chung Dam, because I think it’s the best all-around Korean restaurant that I’ve been to.

There are so many specialty places in town: noodle shops, soup, BBQ, even a place that specializes in goat dishes. Yasmin and Stefan say they definately want to try the goat place next time!  Stefan hasn’t had a lot of exposure to Korean food and Yasmin has had plenty of bibimbop and bulgogi and wanted to be exposed to new stuff.   So that was our initial goal: “Always go for the new experience”, as Dame Marjorie Chardin advised. 

The curry is dead. Long live the curry!

For today’s adventure in eating, I chose a Thai restaurant, but one with a unique twist.  It’s one of the few Thai restaurants in town whose specialization is in Northern Thai cuisine.  Northern Thailand has been historically somewhat isolated from the rest of the country.  They have their own dialect called Kham Meaung (or Kham Muang; คำเมือง).  Some remote hill tribes have their own language.  However, standard Thai is widely understood.

The cuisine of Northern Thai has been influenced by it’s neighbors to the north, Myanmar (Burma) and Yunnan (China).  The coconut milk curry base we are so accustomed to in standard Thai cuisine is not part of Northern Thai vocabulary.

I went to “Spicy BBQ” at the corner of Santa Monica and Normandie, right on the border of “Little Armenia”.  Their menu says, “Thai & Chinese Cuisine by Nong and Family”.   It has the feel of a family-owned place.  It’s small.  There are 6 tables with seating for 18.   It’s cash only, but this seems like not much of a hassle with the ubiquity of ATM machines these days.  It’s tucked away in a corner strip-mall — easy to miss, but well worth looking for.

Chung Dam, that’s fine BBQ!

I had, after much study, selected a Korean restaurant from Yelp for my most recent My Thursday Lunch, but as luck (good or bad) would have it, they were closed.  So I decided to keep on traveling down that lonesome highway — well, Wilshire Boulevard, which is neither a highway nor lonesome — and I ended up going back to what is becoming my favorite Korean BBQ restaurant in LA, ChungDam Korean BBQ.

Never underestimate the power of sugar

My son Jeff is in town visiting, and we were trying to decide whether to go for Thai or Korean for our Thursday lunch. He decided that Korean would be much more of a new experience, so we went to one of my favorite Korean BBQ places, Si Gol Ssam Bob in K-town.

Most Korean BBQ places give you some lettuce in which to wrap the meat. One of the things I love about this place is the range of lettuces they give you. There is your basic romaine, parboiled cabbage, mizuna, even some seaweed!

I tend to always go for the spicy pork bulgogi at Si Gol Ssam Bob, so I wanted to try something different. I decided to go for the spicy squid bulgogi and Jeff got the beef bulgogi.

Yes, I’ll have lethal injection, please!

For my Thursday Lunch today, I decided to let fate (and my nose) direct me through Koreatown.  I was driving by Vermont and James M Wood Blvd, and a beautiful Korean BBQ smell pulled me in as if it was The Sirens and I was Odysseus.  Unfortunately for me, The Sirens don’t like eaters who fly solo.  They are an AYCE (All You Can Eat) place that has a minimum number of orders of 2.  So rather than pay for two meals, I decided to put that place on hold until I find some company for one of my lunches.  Instead, I walked a block over to Soowon Galbi.  I went to Soowon Galbi some months ago and was very pleased with it.  I find that often I can’t help myself but get the bulgogi, but that’s what I had last time, so I was bound and determined to resist.  The waitress saw my hesitation when looking at the menu and decided to tell me what to get.  She said I should either get the bulgogi or the bibimbop.  I told her that I was thinking about the Go Deung Oh Jorim (Mackeral and kimchi braised in a spicy sauce), also known as a jjigae.  Besides sounding interesting, it’s only $7.99 — well in the range of My Thursday Lunch requirements.  She said, “No, hot” and reiterated the two choices.  I asked again about the Mackeral and she said, “No, hot.  Spicy. “  I said, “Yes, I understand.”  She looked at me doubtfully and said, “You like spicy?” and I said, “Oh yes”, and she said, “Ok” and quickly left, as if I had just said, “Yes, I’ll have lethal injection, please!”.  I have to admit, there was a small voice inside my head saying, “Bruce, Bruce.  What are you thinking?”, but it was done.  I had ordered.

Food just like Mom used to make…if my mother had been Korean

I was looking through Yelp yesterday, preparing for my Thursday lunch, and came across “Jun Won Restaurant”.   The comments sounded intriguing.  Of course, there’s always one Yelper who writes, “I’m Korean, and I should know — this place rocks!” and then another Yelper who writes, “I’m Korean, and I should know — this place sucks!”.   But it’s usually pretty easy to sort out the reviews worth reading.  I asked Jonathan Gold, LA’s Pulitzer Prize winning food writer via twitter if he would recommend it and he replied, “ Jun Won is formidable; great panchan, jjigaes – come to think of it, I’ve never written about the place. Thanks for reminding me!”.  “Panchan” are the various little appetizers that accompany a Korean meal, and   “jjigaes” are a hot, spicy stew.

If it walks like a duck…

There’s a group of five or six Thai restaurants in the same little, well — I don’t know what to call it.  It’s not a strip mall.  It’s a small parking lot with shops (mostly restaurants) bordering it called “New Hollywood Plaza”.  These kinds of things aren’t uncommon in LA, but usually the percentage of restaurants to other little shops that make you wonder how they stay in business isn’t so high.  Anyway, I’ve tried 4 of the restaurants and they have all been amazing in their own way.  I’ll write about the others soon, but today I’m writing about the Ruen Pair at 5257 Hollywood Boulevard in Thai Town.

I’ll have what she’s having…

Faithful readers of this blog will note that I haven’t reported any lunches for a few weeks.  The problem is that I have been frustrated by my new camera.  The problem turned out to be the SD card, which lost the photos before I could get them off the camera.   But I will tell you about my lunch the other day and an idea as an adjunct project for this site.

I searched through Yelp and found an interesting place called So Kong Dong, at 2716 W Olympic Blvd, Suite 104, in LA.  So Kong Dong is basically a tofu joint, and first rate at that.  You can get bulgogi, but most of the dishes are tofu in hot soup with your choice of stuff.  I got the tofu with lots ‘o stuff, including beef, pork, clams, mussels, shrimp, and other  Mysterious Things.  When the banchan came, one of the items was what I thought to be a hard boiled egg.  Unusual, but ok, I’ve seen weirder stuff.  Turns out that it was a raw egg, and when the soup, heated no-doubt in the fires of hades, came out, I should have added the raw egg to it and mixed it around.  I didn’t observe others doing that until after it was too cool for the intended effect.  Next time…

Moo Dae Po

I had plans to go to Soowon Galbi Korean BBQ in K-Town, but as I was looking for parking, I happened to notice a teeny little place stuck in a non-descript strip-mall.   And free parking is a lot more fun than no parking, so after pulling a California spontaneous U-turn I found myself walking in to Moo Dae Po at 936 S. Vermont Ave.