Feed your Korean-Chinese curiosity with jajangmyeon, an overflowing bowl of wheat noodles topped with a black soybean paste called chunjang. The paste initially sits on top of the noodles in a sticky pile, a blackish ball nearly as dark as tar. But after you mix the dish together, its appeal isn’t so murky-—the paste is [...]

The buried treasures of Downey’s Peking Restaurant

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Peking Restaurant looks like it sprouted straight out of Downey’s past, an old space built right along with the rest of the city’s post-bean-field boom. And in those few modest midcentury blocks that make up downtown Downey, the restaurant is a fine fit, the kind of [...]

Like the Japanese-Peruvian cuisine at Lomita’s Kotosh, El Rocoto’s dishes pull from Peru’s immigrant past, drawing on the recipes and techniques that traveled with the Chan family from China to Peru and, later, to the kitchen of the first El Rocoto in Gardena. But you still get all the staples, like jalea, a fish fry [...]

Peru by way of China at El Rocoto

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
El Rocoto hits every equatorial trope: The walls glow a golden yellow, packs of tropical fish zip through a cool blue aquarium, the menus even come with a South American street scene sunken into their leather. And inside those bound books are all the Peruvian [...]

It’s not exactly culinary subterfuge, but nothing at Vegi Wokery is quite what it seems. That’s because Vegi Wokery specializes in vegetarian and vegan interpretations of classic Chinese dishes, with probably the most unique plate being the vegi-Peking duck. What’s usually a brutally fattening dish (duck skin literally bathed in oil) is completely transformed here, [...]

Falling for Vegi Wokery’s meatless meat

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
It’s not exactly culinary subterfuge, but nothing at Vegi Wokery is quite what it seems. That’s because nearly all of the restaurant’s dishes can be snuck inside a pair of quotation marks—the “chicken” isn’t chicken, the “fish” isn’t even from the sea. But it all makes sense [...]

Rohrabacher to Cambodians: Free Tibet! Peace out!
That green blur you saw Sunday morning wasn’t The Riddler. It was the surfing congressman–Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), in a grassy herringbone-patterned suit (hold the tie)–making a flying appearance at the fourth annual Cambodian New Year Parade on his way to Santa Monica. Thanks, brah!
But let’s hope you [...]

Ming’s comes from another era of suburban Chinese restaurants, when the cuisine was always Cantonese, when the kitschy décor was inevitably as thick, sweet and sour as the sauces, and when somebody at every table was obliged to joke that they’d all be hungry again in an hour. The choices are the familiar standards—chow meins [...]

Like its décor, Le Yen’s food sticks to what it has always done best: Cantonese-inspired dishes that, over the years, have taken as much from American cuisine as Chinese. A great mainstay is Le Yen’s excellent moo shu pork, a dish that has suffered a fading fate similar to that of egg foo young. It [...]

Most folks know Chen’s—if not for its food, then for its kitschy neon exterior, which, depending on what you’re in to, either screams Stay Away or Must Visit. And while that’s just the outside of the restaurant, the same can be said of the interior, and the service, and the food. A bite into the [...]