Dining in San Gabriel

[Sundae in the Park]

We'll be out in the San Gabriel area of LA in a few weeks. Any recommendations out of the multitudes of ethnic places around there? We don't mind eating different asian foods all week, but could branch out...

[Sundae in the Park]

We'll be out in the San Gabriel area of LA in a few weeks. Any recommendations out of the multitudes of ethnic places around there? We don't mind eating different asian foods all week, but could branch out...

11/11/10 - "A Movable Beast: L.A. Weekly's 99 Essential Restaurants" by Jonathan Gold on laweekly.com

This was very useful, thanks!! We used it as a guide while in San Gabriel and it was a lifesaver in helping us choose among the literally hundreds of restaurants in the area.

If you're ever at the Hilton San Gabriel (Asian heaven, apparently - the background language on the street is Mandarin, not English), you might be interested in a rundown of our week:

Ajisen Ramen - looks like a chain (it is), but tastes like a good one. Big bowls of ramen noodles bathed in hearty (salty), porky broth. I had the premium pork and it was very good. No real vegetables or toppings, though, so read the descriptions to make sure you are getting what you want. Very fast, cheap, and the clientele looks like it skews young.

Hwa Ro Korean BBQ & Tofu [Closed in early 2015] - good, basic Korean BBQ, with some decent (6) panchan. Pretty good for not being in a Korean part of town! The all you can eat meat option is great for a group and you can try 7 different things, including beef tongue as well as all the usual suspects (our favorites were the marinated chicken and kalbi). They do NOT do the cooking for you. The tables are sticky and it is very busy. The tofu soup was only OK. Fill up on the meat!

Yung Hou Tou Jiang - authentic Taiwanese breakfast joint, very small, Chinese will definitely help here, and kind of dirty-looking. FANTASTIC yo tiao - light, greaseless, soft, perfectly fried, probably the best or very close to the best I've ever had. Excellent turnip cakes, soft and crumbly outside with almost gooey insides. The scallion pancakes were very heavy, flavorless and oily and we didn't eat much of our portion. The xiao long bao were very good, but most broke before we got to them (but the soup that was left was very nice!). Lots of folks were eating noodle soups and the "sandwich" bing (the dough pancake stuffed with meaty things). Very cheap and pretty quick.

Golden Deli - Vietnamese in a strip mall that apparently usually has a wait. It made sense, as everything we had was extremely fresh and good. We got mostly basics - pho (lots of star anise, not much msg, if any), grilled chicken bun, fried and fresh spring rolls (there is an extra skin layer on the fired rolls that makes them extra crispy special, surprisingly good cold the next day as well), and they were all great.

Babita - time for something different, it's a white tablecloth place in a converted house behind a nothing of a streetside facade. Inside is very small and charming, and the service is very personable and helpful. The chef goes a little crazy with the zig-zag drizzling of sauces, but the dishes are beautifully and thoughtfully presented. He really likes two-tone things, as evidenced by his fabulous half white corn and half blue corn (full halves, not a mix of the two, like a black and white cookie) that are thick and delicious and make for wonderful dipping chips, and the two-soups-in-one-bowl dish we had, where mushroom soup was side-by-side with a guava soup. It was a surprising combination, but worked fairly well, both separately and together. Both soups were thick enough that they didn't intermix themselves. We also had some very dense, chunky calimari (not rings), fried "soft" and not at all crispy with a flavorful not but-too-hot chile sauce. There are several appetizer ceviches, and all sound tempting. The red snapper-on-sopa ceviche was very bright and fresh and took me straight to the tropics. This fish, good as it was, was a little skimpy in comparison to the other ingredients. We also had the fillet and scallop, mole enchiladas, and the chiles en nogada special mentioned in the article above. The chiles will be out of season in a week or two and we were very glad to get them - it's a roasted poblano chile stuffed with shredded pork, pomegranate seeds, some cactus, and nuts, all swathed in a fruity cream sauce. It's a very strange (to my palate) and interesting dish that causes you to think about all the different the morsels hitting your tongue, a good thing in my book! The mole was very good with dark chocolate and chile flavor, and the bite of scallop I got (quivering, swiped through a green chile sauce of some kind) was the best bite of the night. This is a nice place, surprising for the surroundings, and a little bit of sticker shock (entrees ~$25 and apps ~$10) after eating cheap Asian meals all week, but it was a lovely change of pace and with some genuinely exciting food.

JTYH - the real deal of dao shao mian, the knife-cut rice noodles. Plump and chewy, especially in the excellent beef noodle soup. The leek dumplings are fat and flavorful, though the soup dumplings have thicker skins than I would have expected (pro: they stayed intact! Con: there wasn't that much soup. Tasty, though!). The lamb in the fried lamb noodles is shaved and doesn't add that much to the dish. There is a lot of garlic, but it needs a bit of soy sauce to really it up (an easy enough fix). They have a cold bar for cold appetizers, and we had some nice marinated celery, seaweed, and tofu noodles. We didn't have the room to eat the meat roll or the fried meat dumplings or pies, but they looked and smelled amazing! Bubble tea probably depends on the time of day, but our milk tea was very sweet and the bubbles were too soft (though not yet slimy).

And finally, I'm happy to confirm that the food at the Porto's in Downey tastes just like the other locations. Potato balls, tamales, chorizo pies (a little dry), the wee lemon poppy seed cakes...all delicious.

Time to hit the gym hard!