I actually first read about Cemitas y Clayudas Pal Cabron from the Teenage Gluster blog. At the time, I was actually more enthralled at the wall paintings than the food. I just found them so amusing, but then I finally re-grouped and read Teenage Gluster’s description of the food and it definitely sounded very appealing. Knowing that Pal Cabron, for short, was owned by sister and brother, Bricia and Fernando Lopez, whose family also owns Guelguetza, I wanted to check it out even more. About a month after that post, I got invited via Gluster to a Cemitas Party hosted by the restaurant. How could I say no to that?

Walking in, the first place I looked was up and there they were, 11 women painted on the wall. From modest to quite naughty, each of the women represents 1 of 11 cemitas, while a 12th cemita isn’t. By the way, if you’re not familiar with what a cemita is, it’s a Mexican sandwich that is different from a torta in that the bread is a sesame-seeded egg roll. Traditional ingredients include sliced avocado, white cheese, onions, a Chipotle sauce and some type of meat and that’s pretty much what you’d see on a Pal Cabron Cemita.

At this gathering, all the cemitas were out for sampling as well as a Clayuda. Thankfully, the cemitas were cut into smaller sections, which made easy to try quite a few of them, if not all. So I present to you the Cemitas Sandwich Menu presented with their female counterparts, starting with La Tetanic, a Breaded Chicken Cemita.

La Muy Muy: Breaded Beef or Pork Cemita

La Gordis: Pork Head Cheese Sandwich

La Mas Cabrona: Breaded Beef and Pork Head Cheese Cemita

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Watch out, Tomás, Ricardo and Enrique! Japanese taco scientists in Little Tokyo have recently developed a chicken taco with a taste so luxurious it could only be compared to one thing….

Industry analysts expect our hometown taco engineers to counter with a deluxe carne asada featuring factory-installed hydraulics and Virgin of Guadalupe paneling.

La Chicken
228 E. 1st St.
Los Angeles
www.lachicken.com

For the past year, food trucks serving fusion cuisine have been the talk of the town. After having had my share of food from some of these trucks, I decided to take a break from all this mixed culture food for awhile. That lasted until Robert, an Assistant Organizer from my dining group posted an outing to Red Hot Kitchen, which serves Asian-Mexican Cuisine. A fusion food experience at a brick and mortar restaurant was definitely a change of pace, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Upon our arrival, a few of us planned our lunch attack and ordered items from both their regular menu and their specials menu to share while others ordered on their own. To keep things separate, I’ll get into the specials first, starting with their Kalbi (Short Rib) Burger which came with a side of salad. The burger had a coarse as opposed to a fine grind, and the meat was juicy with a hint of sweetness to it. I’m not sure whether that sweetness came from the meat being marinated or because of some kind of glaze on top of the burger. Regardless, the flavor was pretty good.

Unfortunately, the Chicano Dog with Kimchi Slaw was disappointing. There was just too many toppings. I found the addition of lettuce, red cabbage and tomatoes a little too overwhelming. It was hard to find the hot dog and the kimchi under that barrage of salad. Taking a bite, all the ingredients were falling around your mouth and to the table and the bun was falling apart at the same time. All you got out of that effort was a too salty hot dog and little slivers of kimchi. This is one dog I’d pass on.

The Kimchi Quesadilla was my absolute favorite of the entire meal both from the Specials Menu and the Regular Menu. What I liked was that they weren’t shy when it came to the cheese. Looking at the side of a quesadilla slice, you could see the thick layer of cheese. Other ingredients also included kimchi and ground beef. Of the various kimchi quesadillas I’ve had in the past year, this one had the most kick to it and the most flavor. I should also mention that this is the only kimchi quesadilla that had meat added to it. Perhaps that’s one of the things that made a difference.

There were a couple of specials that were ordered that I didn’t sample, but I thought I’d show you the photos anyway. First, there was the Korean Taco Saam which was basically a lettuce cup with romaine lettuce, rice, ground beef and red pepper sauce. The second item was a Kalbi Bowl that I ordered to go for my Mom.

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Cafe Antigua Guatemala: Worth a U Turn in Hollywood

You know how you have one of those days when you rush to get to an appointment only to find out that you got the times mixed up and are actually early? So now you have time to kill and then you realize that you’re also hungry? What’s a girl to do, except look for some place to have lunch, so I decide to take a drive and tell myself to stop at the first place that looks interesting. I’m cruising down Santa Monica Boulevard and of course, a small Guatemalan restaurant with a red facade catches my eye and I proceed to drive right past it. Unfortunately, the street was pretty busy, so it took me awhile, but I managed to do a U Turn and was soon on my way back.

Part of the appeal of this restaurant laid in the fact that I’ve never had Guatemalan food before and feeling a little adventurous decided that day was the day to check it out. Walking in, I noticed that this was indeed a small hole in the wall restaurant with only about 6 tables in the space. The menu was also quite limited, so I just asked the Owner for a recommendation. One dish she mentioned was a stew, but the weather was just too warm for that, so I went for her other suggestion, the Chili Relleno Plate. While waiting for my food arrive, I tried one of their Guatemalan Soft Drinks. The company is Tiky and I went for the pina flavor. Two words. Super Sweet. Letting the ice melt actually helped a little bit.

The tortillas arrived first. and I loved how thick and pillowy they were. If I had some butter, I could have just eaten them on their own.

Finally, my Chili Relleno Plate arrived. Now with this dish, it comes with black beans, sour cream and rice and your choice of 1 of 2 different salads. I had asked if I could have a small portion of each salad and the Owner was fine with my request.

Since I’m not familiar with the Guatemalan cuisine, I was surprised at some of the foods that were served. One of the side salads was Pickled Cabbage, Beets and Carrots, which I absolutely enjoyed, but it’s a dish that seemed to me, more Eastern Enropean in nature.

The other salad option was a mayonnaise-based Beans, Carrots an Potato Salad. First, I’ve never had green beans as part of a potato salad before, let alone carrots, but in general, I wouldn’t think to associate mayonnaise with South American or Central American cooking. So if anyone has information on how these two particular salads would have made it in a Guatemalan restaurant, I’d love to know. As for the salad itself, it was tasty.

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Local culinary superman J. Gold recently checked out Eagle Rock’s Cacao and filed the following report:

Here is the topic for today’s discussion: Why isn’t duck carnitas on every Mexican menu in town? Because if you think about it, the dish is almost inevitable — duck meat simmered in fat until it nearly collapses, perfumed flesh arranged atop crisply fried sopes, a shotgun marriage of traditional and European cooking techniques of the sort that have been going on in Mexico since the conquest. If life were fair, you would be able to get duck carnitas from every respectable taco truck on the Eastside.

Carnitas, of course, is made from pork shoulder boiled slowly in its own lard until it is difficult to discern the medium from the product being cooked, and the magnetic pull of the giant copper kettles traditionally used to prepare the dish sometimes seems sufficient to pull the whole of the Earth toward Michoacan. Duck confit, its equivalent from Southwest France, involves salted duck legs cooked in their own fat for many hours until they, too, achieve concentrated flavor and extreme succulence.

Read the rest at the LA WEEKLY

Photo by Express Monorail

One of the things I enjoy about dining at Korean restaurants is that some of them offer tableside cooking where you either cook it yourself as in Korean BBQ or they’ll cook it for you as in Octopus Fried Rice or Spicy Crab Soup. So after reading an LA Times article about a Koreatown restaurant that specializes in a multi-course tableside prepared seafood meal, I knew that this was one place I had to visit and soon. The name of the restaurant is Bultaneun Cheongdamdong Jogae Gui, which translates to Flaming Clam Grill of Cheongdamdong and it’s in the Chapman Market Complex.

One key thing you should know right away about this restaurant is that there is no English signage. The name of the restaurant is in Korean and the street number is difficult to read at night. I actually ended up across the street and the valet there pointed me in the right direction. While there’s street parking, there’s also valet parking behind the restaurant for about $2 if you get your ticket validated.

Another thing to know is that the menu is only in Korean. Thankfully, I got that info from that LA Times article I read, so that wasn’t a surprise. After we picked the $59.99 option, the feasting began.

The first two things to arrive were beaten eggs in a covered pot and Dukboki, a dish that consists of rice cakes, enoki mushrooms, cabbage and some kind of chili paste or sauce. It didn’t take long for the eggs to cook with a soft steamed-like consistency, but the Dukboki wasn’t ready until much later.

Glen Bell, founder of Taco Bell (and Der Weinerschnitzel), has died at the age of 86 at his home in Rancho Sante Fe. The Southern Calfornian and former Marine is survived by his wife, three children, and four grand-children.

Many taco purists bemoan the rise of Taco Bell, which is many Americans’ first exposure to tacos or mexican food. The bastardization of the street taco into the crunchy, cheesy, lettuce-y fast-food taco induces revulsion and contempt in street gourmets the world over, and rightly so. However one cannot deny that to date, Glen Bell is the man most responsible for bringing the words “taco” and “burrito” to the farthest corners of the planet, setting the stage for the global taco revolution. As people discover authentic tacos, they realize that the transcendant flavors and aromas of a taco can reveal the lies behind corporate hegemony of all aspects of life. Or something like that.

Bell was a fast-food titan and originator, one of the original crew of Southern Californians who invented fast food. Like the others, he started out slinging hamburgers, but switched to tacos to both differentiate himself and introduce people to his favorite food, tacos. He is the direct or indirect inspiration for SoCal taco-preneurs from Southgate to San Diego. Originally sold for 19 cents out of a window in his taco shack in San Berdoo, the empire grew and grew and grew before it was sold to Pepsi in 1978 for $125m. Today there are more than 5,000 Taco Bells in 14 different countries including China and Dubai.

Well the truth is I can never love the regular Jack in the Box tacos. I only have love for the monster taco. And the monster taco is gone. Not the temporarily type of gone. The gone for good gone. And so a long love affair with yours truly and the monster taco has ended. A love affair that began some 25 years ago when I was a young lad whose knowledge of what a taco was reached about as far as the jack in the box monster taco(then called the super taco) would take me. And it took me far. From the picnic blankets at Douglass park in Santa Monica as a young boy to the kitchen table of a beer fueled twenty-something. The monster taco was my homeboy.

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El Paladar Oaxaqueno
Barry Ave and Santa Monica Blvd
Nightly after 8pm

El Paladar Oaxaqueno is the only taco truck on the Westside that has an al pastor spit so if it’s meat tacos your looking for stick to the pork. If a couple tacos isn’t enough do yourself a favor and order the Tlayuda, a crisp flour tortilla stuffed with your meat of choice, black beans, avocado and salsa. Read the rest of the review at DailyTaco.org.

We reviewed this truck back when it was still a wagon in 2006.