Laventina’s Big Cheese
A menu from Laventina’s Big Cheese hangs on just about every refrigerator on the Balboa Peninsula, a crucial take-out text for all those weekenders crawling from one bar to another. The restaurant has never put its clientele out of mind, either—the place knows full well that it’s the go-to spot for anyone with [...]

Grill Pressed Eggplant Wrap
Pre-packaged food is usually as appealing as a nice cool glass of Long Beach ocean water, but there are times when a home-cooked meal just isn’t a reality. Still, your stomach sure as hell doesn’t know that Jeeves is on vacation or that your oven broke—it’s hungry, needs to be fed and [...]

Frieda’s Fresh Marketplace
There’s a lot of history behind the fresh food at Frieda’s—decades of importing exotic produce and years of slowly pushing new tastes into the American diet—and that’s all summarized in some of the company’s early photos, black-and-white prints of founder Frieda Caplan receiving things like the first-ever American shipment of New Zealand kiwis. [...]

Kinokawa’s Spider Roll
The spider roll is one of those concoctions like fried ice cream, the California Roll or powdered wasabi, which you suspect (or hope) doesn’t exist outside Japanese restaurants in the United States. (And yes: like ginger, wasabi is a root best served freshly grated.) But it almost always tastes so good that you [...]

Veggie Grill
Veggie Grill’s finest fake meat comes from a proprietary blend. The chillin’ chickin’, says the menu, is the restaurant’s own unique veggie protein, something that the place dares you to taste and believe. And in the time that Veggie Grill has spent across from UC Irvine (nearing two years as we crawl towards the [...]

Fourth Street’s New Ralphs
Months I wandered Fourth Street between Temple and Redondo like a chicken without a head. The Ralphs grocery store that filled my belly and emptied my wallet had gone missing, leaving nothing but a fenced-in parking lot in its place. Then one day, like the Bat Signal, my phone rang. It was [...]

Park Bench Café
Everything about the Park Bench Café is friendly: a simple eatery in the middle of Huntington Central Park (the biggest one in town) that serves easy meals for breakfast, lunch and those hungry times in between. You’re not going to find anything unexpected at the café, but it’s hard to find something you [...]

Lola’s and Number Nine
Retro Row has always served the eyes more than anything else, but Fourth Street can now look beyond wallets and into some stomachs, thanks to Lola’s and Number Nine. Together, the two restaurants mark a new moment for the vintage drag, and one that expands the local palate beyond Portfolio and the [...]

A.R. Supermarket
Whether you’re hungry or not, shopping at A.R. Supermarket will chew up at least an hour of your time. But that’s part of the market’s strategy. If A.R. actually meant for its customers to make it out in less than an hour, it wouldn’t force them to pass by jewelry displays, a shoe store [...]

Belmont Grill
Belmont Grill is impossible to miss, a loud place that occupies the same space on Second Street where Los Alamitos import Paul’s once cooked its burgers. And unless you made a habit out of Paul’s, chances are you won’t be able to tell the two apart—the menu is practically identical, the tiny interior space [...]