Midtown Lunch

When a fat guy’s wishlist of places to eat is growing exponentially by the day, there is really only one thing said large man can do in the face of such adversity… start eating! Saveur’s homage to Los Angeles came out a week before Jonathan Gold’s 99 Things to Eat in L.A. Before You Die list, so I feel obligated to start there. And nothing stood out more to me in those 104 pages of pure bliss than Editor James Oseland’s love of the crispy catfish at Ganda, in Hollywood’s Thai Town.

I don’t know James Oseland, but there are two things I know about him. 1) He edits my absolute favorite food magazine there is. 2) The guy knows a little bit about Asian food. So if he claims to have eaten the crispy catfish at Ganda five days in a row, I think it’s safe to say it’s worth checking out.

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Anybody who has ever lived on the West coast will tell you that there is no good Mexican food in New York City, but I have to say… while I did find a decent taco or two during my 5 years in Midtown, I *never* found any good Peruvian food. I had an ok plate of lomo saltado in Brooklyn once, and a Peruvian owned Cuban chain in Midtown served aji (the Peruvian “green sauce”) with everything. But it was nothing like what you can get here, and I have to say I really missed it.

So a few days after I moved in I started getting the itch for some saltado de mariscos.

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I thought long and hard what my first lunch in L.A. would be. In Midtown it was this place called Hing Won, and it epitomized everything about what a perfect Midtown Lunch should be.  So I wanted my first lunch here to be just as special.  Street food?  An all you can eat buffet?  French dip?  So many options.  And then I saw this on Squid Ink. When asked by a reader where she could find the best khao soi in L.A., “The Guru” (aka Jonathan Gold) pointed her towards Spicy BBQ- a Northern Thai restaurant on Santa Monica and Normandie, on the outskirts of Thai Town.

I’ve been a big khao soi fan ever since trying it for the first time a few years ago in a Chiang Mai night market. You don’t see it too often in American Thai restaurants because it is exclusively a Northern Thai dish, and most restaurants here don’t serve dishes from the north. I had actually never tried (or even heard of) khao soi before seeing it being eaten by others in that night market, and my wife had to use the patented finger pointing ordering system to get us a bowl.

I found a decent version in Midtown, but it was a far cry from the original (isn’t it always?) and I was pretty excited to see if L.A. could do any better.  (Spoiler Alert: It can, and it does.)

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