Midtown Lunch

I try to be positive here on Midtown Lunch… and I love this city.  The food is amazing, and there’s no better place to be a “Midtown Lunch’er”.    But as much as I love most of the food in L.A. (and will defend it to the death against any outsiders, or natives with an inferiority complex) there are some things about lunching in this town that really annoy me.  Here are 7 of them, LAist style, for your enjoyment…

All salads should have this ratio of crunchy things to lettuce

1. So, in case using the words “toothsome” and “mouthfeel” didn’t clue you in, there isn’t actually a Salad Week 2014. It was just an April Fools Day joke. But if there was a Salad Week on this site it would probably be our biggest week of traffic of all time.  This is L.A. after all.  That makes me sad… but not as sad as eating a boring salad for lunch.

2. It is undeniable that Pa Ord’s expansion west to La Brea was a good thing for Thai food lovers who live west of Thai Town.  But we are quickly discovering that not all Pa Ord’s are created equal.  In other words, the ghost of Thai Foon still lives inside Pa Ord #2.  The good news is, you can get crispy pork and chinese broccoli as a lunch special!  The bad news?  That spring roll you get free with your lunch is as terrible as it ever was.  Unless you live in the hood and are ordering delivery, it’s probably worth just driving the extra 2 miles East to Pa Ord #1 or Pa Ord #3 (which, funny enough, might actually be an improvement on the original thanks to the ghost of Ganda!)

3.  The next politician who runs on the platform of transferring our industrial corn subsidies to fried pig’s head and trotter sandwiches will get my vote. USA! USA!

4. That being said, I love you Grand Central Market outpost of Belcampo Meat Co, but please don’t bother with the homemade ketchup. Your tallow fries are too damn good to be ruined by anything other than the sweet sweet sugar paste that is Heinz.  That goes for everybody.  When will restaurants realize that nobody likes homemade ketchup?  I’m all for quality, slow food… but I’ve got to draw the line at ketchup.

5. A message to all the shitty Chinese food restaurants in L.A… this is not a “New York Egg Roll”.  In fact, the resemblance this thick skinned monstrosity bears to a chimichanga makes me think it’s undeniably a “Los Angeles Egg Roll”.

6. Very excited that POT, Roy Choi’s new Korean restaurant in the LINE Hotel, has individual stews for $9-12, a spectacular $8 version of kimchi fried rice and one of the only versions of kalbijim for under $20 in Los Angeles. If only their uni dynamite rice bowl was cheap enough to eat every day for lunch. Then again, maybe it’s good that it’s not.

7. Can we put the fake doughnut thing to bed, and go back to eating regular doughnuts!? I’m talking about both the molding of non doughnuts into the shape of a doughnut, as well as molding doughnuts into unnatural non-doughnut shapes.  A doughnut muffin is an improvement on a muffin, for sure.  But it’s not good enough to be referred to as a doughnut.  Neither is bundt cake, no matter how you mold it.  That’s why it’s called bundt cake.  I get plenty excited over regular doughnuts. I don’t need your faux doughnuts.  Unless you’re talking about cronuts. The holes that come out of those are pretty spectacular…