Midtown Lunch

For lunch purposes I have a love hate relationship with sushi.  On one hand I don’t feel like anybody should ever have to spend more than $10 for lunch.  On the other hand, oftentimes (though not always) you get what you pay for- and that tenet is never more true than it is with sushi.  It is practically impossible to get a filling sushi lunch for under $10 (the keyword is filling), and when we do find one- it’s usually the kind of place that makes people cringe.  (Like New York City sushi from a drugstore.  Or a 99 Cent Store.)

So, naturally, when I moved to Los Angeles fans of the site (here and in NYC) wanted me to continue the Midtown Lunch tradition of sushi “bravery”.  And here that means eating sushi from a truck!

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I love street food and covered it with Rain Man like precision in NYC, but at this point I feel like there is little left that would surprises me in the new school food truck scene.  Grilled cheese?  Sure.  Peruvian food?  Why not.  Asian food in taco form from a truck whose name rhymes with “kogi”? Uh… yeah.  In other words, just when I thought I couldn’t get excited anymore, a new truck goes and gets me all super giddy. Dim sum… my all time favorite food…  from a truck? Here we go.

For a white guy I consider myself fairly well versed in the ways of dim sum.  I don’t know the Chinese name for anything (besides shu mai and har gow), and still resort to pointing… but I have a pretty general idea what most things are (based on experience, shape, color, etc.)  I like the giant places, where pandemonium rules and you might have to stalk items across long distances (like a hunter with a punch card in place of a spear.)   I like carts, and lots of them (dim sum that you have to order off a menu is not real dim sum imo.)  And to the delight of most dim sum cart pushers, this short fat Jewish guy loves chicken feet.  I also know that in New York, if you want good dim sum you go to Brooklyn (or maybe even Flushing… but never Manhattan.)  And in L.A. dim sum fans all head east to the (at this point incredibly well known) San Gabriel Valley.

In other words, if you want awesome “dim sum” you’re clearly not going to get it from a truck parked in Santa Monica!  And yet there I was yesterday, “punch card” in hand,  as excited as I possibly could be to try the brand new “Dim Sum Truck”.  And you know why?  Because we don’t work in Monterrey Park.

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Midtown Lunch: LA has been up and running for 2 weeks now, and not a single post about street food? Embarrassing… so on Friday I set to rectify the situation by heading to the new Downtown food truck food court on S Alameda and Traction run by the SoCal MFVA. I was excited to try India Jones, which had been recommended by Lunch’er Damara during my last week of lunching in NYC. I’m a huge fan of the kati roll (an Indian burrito/soft taco of sorts popular on the streets of Kolkata), and was worried that moving to L.A. would end my affair with the Indian street snack I had come to know and love.

Is there anything this city doesn’t have!?

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