Midtown Lunch

I’m going to give this place the benefit of the doubt and presume that their terrible name is completely unintentional.  After all Gangnam is a district in Korea, and there’s no use of the word “style” or any stupid music references in this otherwise modern but understated spot.

I’m also going to put aside the slightly higher-than-they-should-be prices, because it is on Melrose near La Brea and finding good Korean food outside of Koreatown is already an exercise in futility.  If paying a little extra is what it takes to get good soondubu west of Western, I’ll take it.  And make no mistake about it, this place serves up some good soondubu.

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If you are a coffee or preserves fanatic then you likely have heard of SQIRL. This tiny daytime only cafe on Virgil and Melrose has taken the L.A. food world by storm over the past few months, with their local and artisanal jam covered toasts, bowls of oatmeal, and sugar free G&B coffee. It’s kind of amazing to see some of the stuff that comes out of this tiny space, and the jam is almost good enough to make you forget how much you’re paying for a piece of bread with preserved fruit on it. It might not be something I can afford to eat every day for breakfast, but it’s a worthy splurge to say the least.

But the price isn’t going to be the thing that keeps me away from Sqirl. More often than not it will probably be Wah’s Golden Hen, the dirty old Chinese food spot that you may or may not have noticed across the street. With it’s sign that touts “chicken & shrimp” Wah’s fits into the neighborhood in ways that Sqirl never could (for now anyway.) And it happens to serve the greatest Chinese food lunch special I have ever found in L.A.

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Inspired by Nate Silver, I wondered this week if the same principles could be used to decide whether or not a restaurant is good before going.  Some combination, perhaps, of Yelp reviews and Foursquare check ins, with bonus points for pretty Instagram photos and deductions for Groupon offerings and the number of free meals the restaurant gave out to bloggers when they first opened (because, quite frankly, if you have to give out free food to a bunch of shameless white fatsos and cute Asian girls to drum up business, how good could your restaurant possibly be?)

My buddy Brandon thought he had cracked the code a few weeks back, proclaiming that if a restaurant got 4 1/2 stars or higher on Yelp, and had over 100 reviews it was guaranteed to be good.  The model is not exactly foolproof yet (we probably need to add a few more exceptions to the algorithm) but one place the method works unaided is Murakami.  4 1/2 stars on Yelp. 280+ reviews.  And it’s hands down my new favorite cheap lunch sushi place in Hollywood.

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If you’re looking for a one page eating guide to Thai Town, this post Josh Lurie did for DineLA is a pretty great resource.  He heaps praise on a bunch of great Midtown Lunch’ing spots, and most importantly tells you the best thing to order at each.  Anybody who reads this site on a regular basis will recognize Pa Ord, Sapp Coffee Shop, Ruen Pair, Spicy BBQ, Krua Siri, and Siam Sunset.   But the part of the post that really caught my eye was Rodded, a “40-year-old corner spot with pastel green walls and a cartoon-covered blackboard” that specializes in roast duck noodle soup.

But the noodle soup is not the only duck dish worth ordering at Rodded, and there are even a few ways to get your Donald on that aren’t on the menu.

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One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.

Defining the characteristics of the all you can eat buffet fanatic is not as easy as you might think. Girth is part of it, sure. And I will not deny the fact that part of the reason I love eating at buffets is because they are the only restaurants in Los Angeles where I find myself squarely in the bottom 10th percentile weight-wise. But more than being fat you have to prize variety, sometimes most of the time to the detriment of quality. To most buffet aficionados, getting to eat a lot of different things is way more important than getting to eat as much as you want. But winning the game is important too, and a true buffet fan will attack a newly opened buffet like an M.I.T. card counting team takes down a newly introduced casino game.

And last week the opening of Las Vegas Seafood Buffet on Hollywood Blvd gave me a chance to put my Rules to Beating the Chinese Food Buffet to the test once again…

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The very first post on Midtown Lunch: Los Angeles was khao soi (very fitting if you ask me) but do you know what the very first Midtown Lunch of all time was?  The one that kicked off this under $10 fat face stuffing nonsense almost 6 years ago in NYC?  It was Chinese food.  And not just any Chinese food, but possibly one of the most perfect Chinese lunch spots of all time.  The place was called Hing Won, and it featured a groundbreaking to me at the time two line system.  The left line was filled with mostly white people in suits, selecting Panda Express style orange chicken and egg rolls using the time tested method of menu ordering known as the finger point.  The second line was mostly Asian people, ordering from a bilingual menu of Chinatown style roasted meats, soups and noodle dishes featuring stuff like sichuan pickles and bitter melon.  Nothing over $7 (at the time), everything delicious.  And when they added Roast Pig over rice to the menu, it might have been the best day of my lunching life.  (And yes, there is a difference between char siu roast pork and roast pig.)

Head into Chinatown or the SGV and these places might be everywhere.  But for an eater trying to keep my lunches centralized, I would gladly cut off my Chinese food pointing finger for a Mid City equivalent to Hing Won.  Beef rolls from 101 Noodle are nice.  And I’ve had a few decent meals at Hop Woo.  But where’s the roast pig over rice?  Hell, I’d even settle for a decent roast pork over rice.  So when I saw Eater’s “Best Chinese Food Outside of the SGV” post last month I got super excited. Could the answer to my prayers be contained within?   I was a little concerned that Hu’s Szechuan made the list (the place is down the street from my house and kind of terrible), but the description of BBQ Unlimited #2 on Melrose in East Hollywood sealed the deal:

“A picture perfect hole-in-the-wall [with] steam baos for less than a $1, Cantonese style noodle soups, and cheap char siu pork that’s actually roasted.”

I’m there.

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Say what you want about Yamashiro, the crazy almost 100 year old Japanese palace turned restaurant perched on a “Mountain” just above Franklin Ave. in Hollywood, but their chef makes some freakin’ delicious tacos. Previously only available at the Yamashiro Farmers Market and various special events around town, it’s Japanese inspired finger food featuring fillings like miso cod and hoisin duck confit served alongside their now famous wasabi guacamole. Think Kogi, if Kogi tacos were Japanese, more refined, smaller and more expensive. Ok, so maybe not like Kogi at all.

I’ve always been a big fan. So when they announced that they were going to be spinning the tacos off into their own brick and mortar location called Komida I was pretty damn excited. Yamashiro tacos, available everyday for lunch? Awesome! As long as they don’t do something stupid like put it in some shitty mall in the most touristy part of the city, we’re golden.

What’s that you say?  Hollywood and Whaaaaa?  Fuck.

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