8 posts tagged “chicken”
A few years ago I bought a guide to Chinese food in LA. One of the places listed was Yunnan Garden on Garfield. It was my first introduction to Yunnan and Sichuan food in LA. I've been back lots of times -- it's now called Yun Chuang Garden (I think it's the third name change that I can remember).
I went there on Thanksgiving. Here's what I got:
There is a nice selection of cold appetizers/sides available. I guess the standard is to order three sides -- so here are mine. At the top is a pickled cabbage dish. At first glance it doesn't look like much -- but it was very tasty and flavored with chilies and Sichuan peppercorn. The second is a seaweed dish and the third is cucumbers drizzled with sesame oil.
I really love wonton (or chao shao as they're called here). These are dipped in a chilli oil that's heavily laced with Sichuan peppercorn. My lips went numb from eating this -- in a good way, I promise.
Dandan noodles brings together a really random set of ingredients: peanuts, sesame paste, green onions, pork, and preserved vegetables.
This is Chonqing chicken. It consists of small pices of chicken that are breaded and deep fried, tossed with lots and lots of chili peppers, Sichuan peppercorns, and green onions.
I didn't order any of the signature Yunnan dishes this time: "crossing the bridge" noodles and Yunnanese stewed chicken with broth. I also didn't order two mysterious dishes on the menu: "mother's chicken" and "mother's frog." Next time I have to get the frog.
My cousin recently had another baby girl, and according to Chinese tradition there was a party not long after she was born. The party was at Ocean Star, the venerable giant of the Monterey Park banquet restaurants.
I had kind of forgotten about my invitation and was reminded by my cousin that I hadn't RSVPed. She cautioned me, "There might be shark's fin." Oops...oh shit...that means she read my previous tirade about shark's fin. So, of course, I gave her Part II of my tirade about shark's fin. It was brilliant, if I do say so myself. After all, it's not anybody who could compare eating shark's fin with Mao's one-child policy.
In any case, there was shark's fin at the party. It looks very innocent -- at first glance it looks kind of like hot and sour soup. But it doesn't taste anything like hot and sour. It's delightfully deadly.
There were a lot of cool things offered that evening. Here's one:
It's a Chinese fried chicken. I really like fried chicken, and it seems to me that the Chinese version is one of the world's most perfect foods. This picture shows the chicken after it had gotten picked over, but the head is still there with its strategically placed cherry. All the food circulates on a giant lazy Susan. When it got to my cousin's boyfriend he selected a piece -- I had to tell him "You know that's the ass, right?" He didn't.
When this plate arrived, one of my cousins said, "Oh look, it's black fungus." No it's not.
It's definitely not black fungus. It's sea cucumber. The other wiggly thing is abalone (plus bok choy, but that's boring). At my table we ate all the abalone, but the dish was still full of sea cucumbers. My parents were at another table with my dad's siblings. They ate up their whole dish of the stuff.
A lot of the food is symbolic at these types of banquets. This fish is one example:
The little white ball in the front of the plate is an eyeball. For some reason there were two eyeballs on other side. There's nothing like a bonus eyeball!
So yesterday I tried to go to Yakitori Bincho down at the International Boardwalk in Redondo. We walked right by the place before doubling back to find a handwritten sign in the window that said the place was closed until further notice because they didn't have a fire permit.
Drat! We ended up at Jitlada instead and tried some of the Southern Thai specialities recommended by Jazz.
This dish has deep fried shrimp with some deep fried leaves (basil and something else):
This is some kind of chicken dish. It looks pleasantly serene, right? Not quite. The waiter explained that for the first few seconds it's nice and calm, but after that you get whacked by the chili stick. Whoa. He was right.
In the upper left hand corner of the picture is a little plastic clam shell full of ice, carrots, cabbage, and cucumbers. You're supposed to eat it if your mouth is on fire, apparently.
Gabby's Mediterranean in Marina del Rey looked really promising. It's in MDR, not too far from Venice. It's a nice location near the Venice canals with lots of beach traffic. We ended up there by accident, having left a Mediterranean place that turned out to be a Spanish tapas bar. I've looked at a lot of online reviews of this place...generally people like it but they seem to think it's Greek. I guess the Arabic pop music wasn't a giveaway.
In any case, we ordered a few different things here: a couple of mezze dishes (baba ganoush, hummos, sfeeha) and a chicken shwarma sandwich. The bab ganoush was really tasty, with a good smoky flavor. The hummos was a little chunky, a texture that I normally don't like, but it was very garlicky which I did like. The sfeeha, a meat "pie" with minced lamb and pine nuts was terrible. They obviously had made the sfeeha earlier in the day and reheated them in a microwave. The meat was dry but the crust was soft. It was totally inedible. The sandwich was bland -- Zankou Chicken would have been better.
http://szechwanbestrestaurantla.com/index.htm
For a while there were a lot of Sichuanese (or Yunnanese) restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. I think the trend has waned a little bit, but there are still a few around. Szechwan Best Restaurant was on the news recently because the owner donated a week's proceeds to the earthquake relief. We've been to Szechwan Best a few times, but each time it always seems to have different owners. Once we tried to get food in the middle of the day but all employees were sleeping in the booths.
Here's what we had this time:
Sichuanese restaurants usually have an array of different cold dishes you can choose from, like appetizers or side salads. There are four here: a dry beef with chillies, pickled vegetables, sea weed, and marinated cucumbers. All of them were good with the exception of the beef which was a little tasteless.
Wonton in hot chili oil. The wonton are served in the oil that's infused with Sichuan pepper corns (prickly ash) and green onions. The prickly ash makes your mouth go numb. It's one of my favorite things to order in a Sichuan restaurant. I don't want to be one of those people who judge restaurants by single dishes, but if I was one of those people this would be the thing that I would use to judge a Sichuan restaurant. This one was pretty good -- wait ... does that make me one of those people?
Fried chicken with chillies. This packs a punch -- it has prickly ash too. That's orange chicken in the background (not my choice).
This one wasn't so good. It's shrimp in garlic sauce. There wasn't much garlic in it, but it sure had a lot of canned button mushrooms.
I am awake now. I just heard the call to prayer outside and the cool morning air of the Persian Gulf is coming through the open window. Now I can hear the prayers and a rooster crowing someplace in the distance.
I've been resting for about five hours now. I flew from LAX to Dulles on my first leg of of my journey. I was starving when
I got on the plane, having refused to pay for Ruby's at LAX. On the United flight I bought a horrible wrap sandwich with turkey and ham. I've been trying to not eat pork, but somehow it always creeps back onto my plate. I got a whole soda, so that kept me happy. Ah the simple pleasures of life ... always better with Coca-Cola.
It was my first time in Washington, but all I did was pass through the airport. Shauna said, "Oh you'll love the building." Except I never saw it except through the corner of my eye. I was stuck in some remote terminal. I got a Starbucks americano and sat down. Who knew that you couldn't buy any food (at least any food worth eating) in Dulles after 9 PM. Tacos at Tequileria weren't going to cut it.
Anyway, my Qatar Airways to Doha flight boarded around 10:30 PM and I sat in for a long flight to Doha. It was a brand new 777 that had only entered service at the beginning of 2008. The in-flight map said "Time to destination 13 hours." Oh god... Then I discovered the magic of on-demand video. You don't have to wait for movies to start -- you pick what you want to watch and when you want to watch it. So during the flight I watched five episodes of Doctor Who, two episodes of Cities of the Underground, two episodes of Digging for the Truth, two episodes of The Simpsons, and onr episode of Two and a Half Men. I tried to watch an episode of Flight of the Conchords but I got too annoyed with it. I think that was more TV than I've watched at home in two months (really). The weird thing was that Qatar Airways only did its flight announcements in English and most of the flight staff was Asian (and I mean Asian Asian, not Indian). I didn't hear Arabic once.
I should mention the food. It was awful. The first meal was dinner -- an odd meal because I figure we were being served at midnight (or 9 PM Pacific time). I took the chicken option which sounded nice. It had a tomato sauce that was a bit heavy on the bell pepper, roasted potatoes, and some really rubbery carrots. There was a salad of apples (ick) and turkey ham, cake, and a lumpen roll. Later on after my restless napping and TV watching came a second meal, described as "brunch." I got the chicken option again, which turned out to be a really bad idea. It was typical rubber chicken, with some truly dreadful basmati rice and broccoli. Even my yogurt was nasty. I got another lumpen roll to boot. At least the coffee was decent. Try this out: Airline Meals . Search for Qatar Airways and see what I am talking about. That being said, I've had much worse food on airplanes, but this was no Cathay Pacific. CP gives you cup noodles on your flight -- that would have been preferable.
So the plane landed in Doha at 7:02 PM. I glanced at my ticket and noticed that my boarding time for my next flight was 7:15. Oh shit, I thought, I am doomed. I got into the terminal and cleared security. I should say one thing -- "security" in the Middle East is really lacking. You have some dude pointing you to a line, you pass the bags through a machine, and the people behind the machine don't pay attention. But I didn't have time to do any kind of geopolitical analysis because I had a plane to catch. I cleared security and found gate 6 -- the first one. I walked straight onto a waiting bus and in 5 minutes I was on a plane for Manama. It was a 25 minute flight. For the first time announcements were in Arabic. I got a dreadful mini tuna sandwich.
A half-hour later I was in Manama. I leaped off of the plane and got through immigration quickly -- that five-year multiple entry visa came in handy. I found out that those visas are supposedly hard to get, which is why the immigration guys look bewhildered when they see them.
I was hungry so we stopped in Adliya, an upscale neighborhood near central Manama. We went to Al-Abraaj, a restaurant that uses the Kuwait Towers as its logo. It bills itself as serving Iranian, Indian, and Chinese food. I ordered a pile of food -- grilled lamb, chicken, beef and chicken koobideh, filet mignon. Hummos came with fresh bread. I could live on the bread. I washed it all down with a lemonade mixed with pulverized mint. For the first time I could relax ...
Poulet du Jour
233 Pacific Coast Highway
Hermosa Beach, CA
Chickens don't stand a chance around me. It's truly the most perfect of fowl. I can, if the mood strikes, eat an entire chicken (plus sides) by myself. Luckily for me there's an overabundance of chicken restaurants in the South Bay. There are "French" ones, "Peruvian" ones, and even "Peruvian-Chinese" chicken places around here.
But there's a stand-out among the rest...Poulet du Jour, a self-described "Mediterranean" chicken place run by a Christian Palestinian family. The man is a real grump -- I call him the Chicken Nazi because he's constantly barking at people. He regularly and loudly swears in Arabic, refers to the cops that frequent the place as "kelb" (dogs -- I am sure they don't know that's what he's calling them), and takes swigs of booze from below the counter. But he makes a damn fine chicken. His sister-in-law is the kitchen making Caesar salads and never seems to leave her station.
He says that he goes through more than a hundred chickens a day. Unlike most of the other rotisserie chicken places around this one is very flavorful. You can see the spices sticking to the chicken skin.
His falafel is the best around. It's flavorful and spicy, with a tinge of hot pepper. His falafel plate is piled high, with hummos and salad included. I also like his kibbeh, a fried football of bulgar wheat, ground beef, and pine nuts. It's served with a fresh yogurt that adds a nice sour note to the kibbeh. There's also a raw version of kibbeh on weekends, but I've never tried it.
Some of his sides are all right. Tabouleh is good, but often he runs out. I can't say so much for his rice. It's one of the standard "pilafs" served at Mediterranean places. It's bland and based on parboiled rice -- something I can't stand. There are two places I hate to order rice -- Mediterranean places and fish restaurants. I invariably hate it.
But, the chicken is the star. You'll never go to Crazy Chicken ever again.
Oh-- I borrowed the chicken picture from Missy.
Flame
1422 Westwood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Leaving work is kind of traumatic when you're waiting to be picked up. There are buses to dodge, crazed parents who seem to think that SUVs don't need to wait in lines, and kids who think that they are somehow protected from cars by an invisible force field. But I persevered, managed to make my escape from campus, and went down Westwood Blvd to my favorite restaurant in Tehrangeles, Flame.
It's located on a stretch of Westwood that's full of Iranian ... excuse me, Persian ... businesses. There are carpet stores that always seem to be having "going out of business" sales, book stores stocking all the books on the shah that you'd ever want, bakeries with vaguely French names, and a random Bulgarian restaurant (which my friend David and I have both seen and secretly want to try). On weekends, Flame is BUSY. But at 3:40 on Tuesday afternoon it's deserted.
We got seated and immediately a basket of bread fresh from the tandoor appeared on the table. I really appreciate the touch of freshly baked bread in Persian restaurants. My other favorite Persian restaurant, Seaside Palace in Torrance, brings a plate of store-bought pita. Pitooey.
Flame is a pretty elegant place. It has plush chairs, and etched glass pictures of ancient reliefs from Persepolis. There are two big flatscreens in the room that usually blast Persian pop music. On this day, however, they were showing a Beyonce concert. Someone sure liked some Beyonce.
The tandoor has pride of place in the big dining room. It's a great idea -- the smell of fresh bread wafts throughout the dining room. I ordered chicken koobideh -- chicken loaf skewered on a stick. I opted for sabzi polo instead of regular basmati. In some places sabzi polo is called "green rice" which doesn't exactly sound appetizing, I'll admit. Here it's made with nice fresh herbs (mostly dill, which I generally dislike, and possibly some cilantro -- but I pretend that it's not there). I generally like the kabobs at Flame, and the sabzi polo is top notch. I still prefer the sabzi polo at Seaside Palace, but I like the koobideh at Flame. Too bad they can't marry and have a child.
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