North by Northwest at Plums Café

PHOTO by RICK POON
There’s a sharpness in the air around Plums Café, a clean scent that makes for the kinds of brisk breaths that usually only occur when flowers and trees all exhale at once. It’s hard to notice at first, but that crispness is part of Plums’ patio, a [...]

Number Nine succumbs to style

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Number Nine echoes like an empty gallery, a long and lean place that bounces every sound back down to your table. Light doesn’t escape, either. It gets gathered up by walls painted the purest white and sent toward a ceiling that seems to rise up forever. It’s an [...]

Tiki Island
There’s nothing like the scent of the Alamitos Bay Farmers Market, the aromas of hummus and fresh fruit all combining in a sort of swirl that always seems to add on more to your appetite. But I wasn’t there for the produce alone, so after filling up on fruit samples, feta cheese and tomatoes, [...]

Fuji’s Famous Burger
Fuji’s Famous Burger, a Huntington Beach institution since 1973, specializes in offering fast food given the Fuji’s touch via teriyaki and/or avocado (avocado tacos, teriyaki beef sandwiches, you name it). There’s also Japanese-Hawaiian cuisine (Spam musubi, which is a block of salted rice with Spam on top and dried seaweed wrapped around it), [...]

Go rice-less at Lotus Chinese Eatery

PHOTO by RICK POON
Portion your order just right at Lotus Chinese Eatery and your meal won’t contain a single grain of rice. The restaurant does serve the stubby little staple (steamed as a side, fried as an entrée), but rice, a near necessity of so many Chinese meals, is left [...]

Mishi’s Strudel
Mishi’s Strudel is a place of intense thought, modeled after the kind of Old World cafés where philosophies were formed and great art admired. But there’s no pretense here—Mishi’s Strudel is as simple as it gets. As its name suggests, the café fills its ovens almost exclusively with strudels, flaky pockets stuffed with only [...]

Pinto beans on your pizza and more at Long Beach Pizza Company

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There are no walls lined with Little League team photos and no banged up Neo-Geo video arcade games, but Long Beach Pizza Company still recalls the familiar neighborhood pizza houses of my youth. You know the type: predictable, dependable and affordable, [...]

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 [...]

Pupusería San Sivar’s puffed-up pleasures

PHOTO by RICK POON
Even if you can’t see them, chances are the staff at Pupusería San Sivar can see you. That’s partly because of the two-way mirror that feeds into the kitchen, but it’s mostly just a simple fact of the lunch rush, the staff spread thin by eaters packed in [...]

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 [...]