Midtown Lunch

If you are one of those people who always felt like Eagle Rock was too far to drive for pastrami sandwiches, pulled pork and crazy burgers, you’ll be excited to discover that The Oinkster just opened a new Hollywood location on La Brea just north of Melrose.  The menu from the original has made it over mostly intact, complete with sandwiches, salads, fries and milkshakes. The rotisserie chicken is still Eagle Rock only, but to make up for it they’ve made some of the more popular specials from the the original location into permanent menu items at the new branch- like the Thanksgiving Burger (a turkey burger topped with celery sage relish and cranberry sauce) and the pork adobo burger (a burger topped with pork adobo.)

But is this is your very first visit to the Oinkster, you’ll probably end up going with their namesake sandwich.

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Growing up in Miami has made my love for Cuban food strong, a love that I will often blindly defend.  If you grew up here in Southern California on salsas and chiles and corn masa and mole, with as many regional variations as there are taco trucks in Boyle Heights, than Cuban food might seem boring to you.  But to me oxtails with rice and beans and maduros is as comforting as my Grandma’s matzoh bowl soup. Pollo Tropical?  My own personal Del Taco.

When I worked in Midtown Manhattan the Dominicans had me covered.  There may have been rice and peas instead of morros, and they put salami in their “cubano”, but there was grilled onions on top of grilled meats, and the fried plantains were plenty fried and plenty sweet.  And that was good enough for me.  Here in L.A., though, Cuban food is like tacos in NYC.  Even the half way decent stuff gets put up on a pedestal by the locals.  I guess what I’m saying is, I like Versailles’ garlic chicken just as much as the next guy but there’s something about that place that has never made me feel 100% right. Like an Angeleno eating a taco in Hell’s Kitchen.

So imagine how excited I was when I read about La Caridad on L.A. Magazine’s food blog.  Oxtails?  Pork shank? Morros?  I’m in.

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Back in May I posted a taco crawl for out of towners and locals alike; a perfect way to enjoy 5 of the best tacos L.A. has to offer, all in 2 hours. The journey starts in Los Feliz with a Baja style fish taco, and ends in Boyle Heights with a fried shrimp taco from Jalisco.  In the middle?  The best guisados, vampiro, and carnitas L.A. has to offer.  It wasn’t so much a recommendation as a glimpse into my demented eating habits.  The way I like to eat my tacos… because after eating at one, I find it hard not to crawl on to the next- each taco so cheap, and so close to the one that precedes it on the list.  The crawl is still the best way to enjoy these tacos, but two of the places have now opened 2nd locations- neither of which are too far from the original (much to the disappointment of westsiders.)

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I can’t remember when exactly I first heard about Park’s Finest, the neighborhood BBQ outfit turned professional caterer turned brick and mortar that’s been cooking up their brand of Filipino BBQ since the 80s.  But I do remember the disappointment I felt when I discovered that their brand new restaurant, on Temple just outside of Downtown L.A., was only open on Friday nights for dinner!  Thankfully this setback was purely temporary, because last week (after a brief flirtation with random Tuesday lunches) they started a new Thursday-Sunday lunch and dinner schedule.

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