Midtown Lunch

A little bit of quick news before we get to this week’s lunch links.  Midtown Lunch: LA has been nominated in the Best Food Blog Category of the L.A. Weekly’s 2013 Web Awards!  Our competitors are all awesome, and a few are hugely popular sites we link to on a weekly basis, so we don’t give ourselves much chance of a victory. But if you love us enough to vote (or hate one of the other blogs we’re up against so much you want to keep them from winning) you can do that here.  Thanks.  Now onto this week’s lunch links…

• CULVER CITY Honey’s Kettle makes some good fried chicken [Mattatouille]
• DTLA Horse Thief BBQ is now open in the Grand Central Market [Squid Ink]
• DTLA 3 new food spots are coming to Figat7th [Eater]
• PALMS New Vietnamese spot Phorage is now open [Eater]
• WEST LA Daikokuya is soft open but probably won’t open for lunch until Sept. [Eater]
• VENICE Pork Belly’s Sandwich Shop is now open [Squid Ink]
• EVENT Luckyrice returns next Saturday w/ food from Starry Kitchen, Spice Table, Night + Market, and more [Luckyrice]

It will probably surprise nobody to learn that there was a time, before my lunching was professionalized, when hot roast beef sandwiches served with fries from a beachside shack was one of my once a week go-to lunches. Kelly’s Roast Beef on Revere Beach was about a ten minute drive from the radio station I worked at, on the north shore of Boston.  And we made that drive often.  Not just for roast beef sandwiches of course. On the days you were feeling particularly rich there were also lobster rolls, whole fried clams, and pretty much everything else you’d expect to find at a New England seafood shack. Some days it was cold and windy, and keeping the pelicans away from your fries was a constant struggle.  But sitting out on the beach on a work day eating a roast beef sandwich is still probably one of my top 10 weekday work lunches of all time.

So imagine how excited I was to hear about Top Round Roast Beef, the new roast beef sandwich place on La Brea and Olympic.  In the month or two since they’ve opened I’ve heard a lot of talk of it being a “better version of Arby’s”.  But I have no love or nostalgia for the bologna of roast beef.  I was hoping it would return me to the beach.

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If you were getting bored of the super tasty but small’ish menu at Seoul Sausage in Little Osaka, you’ll be excited to hear that they’ve added two new weekly specials to their mix of Korean sausages and Asian rice balls.  On Mondays they’ve been serving a marinated galbi (short ribs) over bibimbap, with a soft boiled egg.  And on Wednesdays they have a pork belly special, also with a soft boiled egg, served atop a spicy mixture of rice cakes and ramen noodles (aka lakboki).

Check out the Monday one after the jump…

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Even though the myth of Momofuku has made its way from New York to the west coast, did you know that Ssam Bar, the second and arguably most popular restaurant in David Chang’s empire, was originally a burrito joint? In 2006, following the runaway success of Momofuku Noodle Bar, Chang went the fast casual route- opening Ssam Bar as a Chipotle style burrito cafeteria in the East Village.  There were flour tortillas and rice, but instead of carnitas there was pork belly. Roasted veggies were replaced by kimchi, and the “salsa” was Korean red bean paste.  Keep in mind this was a full 2 years before Roy Choi started stuffing tacos with short ribs and quesadillas with kimchi.   In other words, it was genius.  Sadly I might have been the only one who thought so, and Ssam Bar was quickly converted into the restaurant it is today.

But those Asian burritos left a mark on me, and I hoped one day that Chang would avenge his detractors by relaunching his only failed concept. A concept I believe in with all my fat encased heart.  Of course that is probably never going to happen, but when Chipotle first announced a few years ago that they’d be launching their own Asian concept called Shophouse, I found myself getting a little bit excited.

Midtown Lunch’s relationship with Chipotle has been quite the roller coaster ride.  Their burritos go against everything I believe a great burrito should be, and we won’t even talk about quesarito-gate.  But their work with Jamie Oliver and commitment to using sustainable and well sourced ingredients made me into a reluctant cheerleader.  But could Shophouse turn me into a true fan? Could this be the lunchtime, Asian burrito I had been hoping for?!

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Just a couple of things to let you know about this week…

First… Food is the New Rock, the podcast I do with Chuck P from KCRW where we talk to chefs about music and bands about food, turned one year old this week.  And to celebrate our 50th episode we had Chef Roy Choi on the show.  Midtown Lunchers will know Roy as the genius behind Kogi & Chego, but there’s also Sunny Spot, A-Frame, and the soon to open Line Hotel in Koreatown. But we didn’t really talk about all that.  We talked about hip hop, Alice Cooper, and Grateful Dead parking lot egg rolls.  You can download the episode for free on iTunes or stream it from the Food is the New Rock website.

And speaking of the Food is the New Rock website, the 2013 list of Eater Young Guns was released this week, and on Sunday they’re having a big party at LACMA featuring food, drinks, and a performance by the up and coming OC band Yellow Red Sparks (get your tix here.)  We ended up asking their lead singer for some food recs, and he mentioned El Caserio- an Ecuadorian spot on Virgil.  Definitely sounds like a lunch that will be happening in my near future.

But wait.  There’s more!

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As great a lunch street as Sawtelle has become over the past few years not everybody is doing gangbusters. A parking spot might be hard to come by, but so is a steady stream of customers for some of the restaurants on this bustling strip- both new and old. Valley success story Ramen Jinya, who arguably started the L.A. ramen craze back in 2010, is being replaced by Downtown favorite Daikokuya after just a year.  Miyata Menji didn’t even last that long, making way for the new Tsujita Annex a couple of months ago.  Sawtelle Kitchen’s inoffensive white table cloth Japanese has gone the way of the dinosaurs, and I can’t help but think that Soba Sojibo isn’t far behind.  Itself a replacement for Spaghetti House by Orris, Sojibo isn’t bad but it isn’t great either.  And when faced with noodle competition like Tsujita, or even Tatsu and Nong La, it doesn’t really stand a chance.  Thankfully if you love soba there’s another option just down Pico from Sawtelle.

Yabu!

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