Anger Burger

As an American, I didn’t understand until recently that ramen is an edible foodgroup.  That wretched dry brick was all I’d had, and even as a salt-hungry and largely tastebud-dead teen I knew that shit was evil.  After eating it I’d get a chemical flush all over my face and neck and would often lose sensation in my tongue for a short while.  It did not bode well for my desire to be a penniless college student.

Then, I found real ramen.  A paragon of noodles.  The king of bowl-meals, an ambassador of all things salty and soothing.  Hakata ramen, my current obsession, is made with a thick, oily, milky-looking bone-based pork broth.  It’s fucking insidious, I warn you now.  Traditionally, Hakata ramen should have very thin noodles lacking that trademark kinkiness of other ramens, and I think that’s a good deal of why I like it so much, but if I implied it wasn’t about the broth I’d be misleading you.

The Viking and Frego.

It doesn’t surprise me that Los Angeles is home to several great and totally authentic ramen joints, but what did surprise me is that we moved near one of them: Ramen Jinya.

He accepts your heathen noodles and will spare your village.  Today.

I think I’d still prefer a bowl of Shin-Sen-Gumi’s Hakata ramen if handed a bowl of each and asked to choose, but we’re starting to enter Sophie’s Choice territory.  Jinya’s pork is superior and the broth is almost a dead ringer – only the noodles break in favor of Shin-Sen-Gumi, and then only because I feel less of an ass ordering them soft (the option is right on the ticket you fill out and hand to the server).  But here’s the real issue: Shin-Sen-Gumi is a 45-minute drive away now.  Jinya, you have the lead.

There isn’t much to say about sushi.

We went to Katsuya Studio City with good friends last night.  Each Katsuya location is known for being a celebrity hotspot, but for some reason I can’t really pin down.  The sushi is solidly good, with some just good and some clocking in at awesome.  But the prices are pretty normal and the restaurant itself isn’t particularly fancy or anything.  The Studio City location is in a strip mall next to a Domino’s Pizza and a pet grooming store.

So, there is the economy of Los Angeles: for no particular reason, things get famous.

Don’t get me wrong, Katsuya is good.  The above curried oyster on a rice cracker with salmon roe was like being slapped across the mouth with a flavor glove.  I like to imagine the flavor glove as being studded with rhinestones, too, if that helps.

Most of the time I’m the only one that wants monkfish liver.  More for me, of course.  I love it.  I’ve described terrible monkfish liver as “catfood” before, but this stuff was more like cheese.  Fish cheese.  I’m totally making this worse the more I type.  Stopping now.

We lost count of how much nigiri we ordered.

You know who loves Japanese food?

The babies.  Sure they eat soggy Cheerios and lint, but this kid knows when to cry at the vegetable sushi and hold out for bites of yellowtail cheeks.  Wait, that was me.

Who knew I was going to have more time to write during my move than after? Did any of you know this? I didn’t know this.

So, lemme tell you about how I’m in love with an old Mexican woman.

As you might imagine, the only thing that makes me sad about moving is that we’re moving away from our established eateries, including the trucks.  Sure, the food trucks visit other parts of town, and they even come up to the Valley, but nothing like the Street of Trucks (which, if you’re a Google map addict like me is at 5900 Wilshire).  Things at Guacamole House are bucolic, but I still have dreams of being walking distance from cheeseburger sushi and overpriced banh mi.

Enter: Antojitos mi Abuelita.  In Caucasian, that translates¹ to “Raddest Mexican Food Ever.”

That’s my friend Nathan on the right.  He’s even more blurry in person.

Oh, mi Abuelita.  Oh, my heart.  Is three times in a week too many?  I hope not, because my stomach shows no sign of stopping.  Each day we don’t eat at the Abuelita truck, I wonder when the next time we can eat at the Abuelita truck will be. Unfortunately each time we go it’s after dark and the little folding tables are lit only by a single fluorescent bulb, so the photos look like this:

But I think you get a reasonable idea of what we’re dealing with here.  Also I’m shaking with hunger rage.  Anyway, the above is Mike the Viking’s burrito mojado, which Google warns me might mean “wetback burrito” but something tells me that’s not what Abuelita means by it.  The sauce over the top of the giant burrito isn’t the typical enchilada sauce of most wet burritos, but a shockingly flavorous oregano-laced tomato soup loaded with stewed peppers and vegetables.  It’s not overly spicy or tomatoey, but somehow transformative in a way that I would never have predicted.  Easily the best wet burrito of my life.

But I’m here to talk about the huaraches.  The photograph is uniquely terrible even by my standards, so I’ll have to walk you through it with word pictures: it’s a fried corn masa bottom, like a thick tortilla, that ends up chewy and a little crispy just around the edges.  It’s too soft and chewy to pick up and eat like a tostada, so it’s a knife and fork kind of thing.  It’s topped at Abuelita with green chili sauce, lettuce, cheese, crema, meat (pork, here) and the crowning, mind-blower: carmelized onions.  I cannot express how much the huarache is more than the sum of its parts.  It’s an unexplainable phenomenon.

Truly, I could not be happier.  I had believed only the mentally impaired could experience a blissfulness such as this, but for a few brief minutes I figured out a work-around.

¹ It might be closer to “Grandmother’s Street Food” but I learned German in high school because no one warned me that learning German was a complete and total waste of time. Scheiße!

Los Angeles’ Koreatown is currently experiencing a crime wave, something I really didn’t think about when I set out to explore it yesterday.  I guess I’m of the belief system that bad things happen to good people no matter what, so what’s the difference now?  Nothin’.  That, and most of the crimes are of the home-invasion type, not the weak-ankled-white-girl-gets-attacked type.

I didn’t mean to go exploring.  Mike the Norge had a surprise¹ massage for a screwed-up shoulder and since I didn’t want one² I thought I’d tag along and head over to some obscure Korean bakery instead.  We parted ways in deep Koreatown and I walked a few blocks before entering a place and picking something out and chatting with the lady at the counter, all before realizing that I’d left my wallet back at home.  Miserably disappointed, I wondered out onto the street, suddenly faced with something that hadn’t happened to me since I lived in Washington State: penniless, lonely and cold, I had an hour to kill.   So I walked.  And walked.  And when I’d walked for 30 minutes, I headed back.

Koreatown is a strange place, and hitting it on foot doesn’t make it any less so.  It’s dense, for starters.  There’s far more to take in than can be mentally consumed.  What makes it worse for me is that over half of the shops are restaurants.  Koreans love to eat out, and I lost track of the restaurants with absolutely no English anywhere on their exteriors, which made me want to go into them even more.

But as I mentioned: penniless and cold, and now tired as well.  While I waited for Mike to come out of the massage salon, a 30-something Korean man approached me.  I’d been trying to avoid eye contact with him since he’d been playing pool in a rather rough-looking parlor in the same strip mall as the massage parlor, but when he approached me I had absolutely no idea what he was going to say.  When he neared me, he looked me up and down and then says “I’ll give you twenty dollars if you give me a back massage?”

I probably don’t have to tell you that his tone implied that “back” meant penis and “massage” meant massage.

I burst out laughing and said, “No thank you!”

To my surprise he looked chagrined and said “Well, I thought I’d ask.”

“Sure,” I said, watching as he went back to playing pool.

I need a fucking hamburger.

Luckily we were walking distance from Kalbi Burger, which we’d heard good things about.  I ordered the “Saigon Burger” (above), a regular beef patty with a banh mi treatment of pickled radish and carrot, cilantro, cucumber, jalapeno and mayonnaise.  It was pretty excellent, though the patty was underwhelming for me.  It was mostly just overly processed (there was virtually no texture) though juicy and otherwise benign.    I find this is a weird phenomenon of high-end burgers — it almost seems like they’re laden with fillers, when in fact they are 100% organic, humane or otherwise coddled beef.  It seems almost like they are beef paste instead of ground beef formed into patties.  Still, it was a decent enough burger, and inspiring enough to want to try and do something similar at home.

Mike got the eponymous “Kalbi Burger” which fared much better.  The beef is a blend of short rib and chuck and seasoned heavily with teriyaki-like kalbi marinade.  The toppings were standard American burger fare made interesting with a light vinaigrette on the romaine lettuce.  Vinaigrette!  That’s clever, yo.

Mike ordered his burger with salt and vinegar fries, which were a delight.  They’d tossed the fries with what tasted like plain white vinegar straight out of the fryer, which for some bizarre reason didn’t make them soggy, just nicely perfumed.  My sweet potato fries were more pedestrian, though good enough.

No longer cold but still stinky and tired and now full, I returned to my pit of boxes I call home and passed out while watching Space Cowboys, which made Mike later say with grave disappointment “Just when you think you know someone…”  So I told him: I was watching it for the second time.  Just when you think you think you know someone.

¹This is how Mike’s friend works: he calls and says, “I’m on my way to the cheap Thai massage parlor and they can fit you in, wanna come?  You have to be there in 20 minutes.”

²I do want a massage, but there were  two discouraging factors:  The first is that I hadn’t showered in two days and had been packing dirty old belongings into dirty old boxes in the hours previous to the appointment.  The second is that I’m a fragile little butterfly – alright, moth – and the Thai ladies’ Ultimate Fighting style of massage terrifies me.

I sense a seething jealously from ya’lls when I mention the food truck blessing that has rained down upon Los Angeles over the last year, and for good reason.  It’s incredible.  I rarely have emotions that vary from WORRY (of which there are 17 complicated stages, I’ll tell you about it sometime), but I have some pretty strong ones for the food trucks.

There’s some semi-minor drama going down about the trucks, too.  Some Los Angeles council members are being leaned on heavily by brick and mortar restaurants that don’t understand we’d rather eat from roach coaches than their overpriced, underwhelming mega-plates of slop.  Tom LaBonge is the worst of these council members, vocally encouraging absurd limitations on the trucks whenever he’s given the platform to do so.  My favorite was to limit the number of trucks that can operate in Los Angeles at any given time.  I’m not sure how this guy figures out how to put his pants on in the morning.  In fact, I wrote him this letter, and I’ll accept your praise for not using a single swear word:

Dear Mr. LaBonge

I love Los Angeles.  I do!  My father moved to Los Angeles as a young teen and made the city his own — his stories are the stories of most Angelenos, filled with craziness, fame, adventure, and hardship.  Years after he’d left and raised a family, I’d also move to Los Angeles and make the city my own.  One of the things I list when describing the wonderful and bizarre L.A.  are the food trucks.

I would be spending at least $100 less a month on food if I weren’t eating at lunch trucks a few times a week.  I work from home and the trucks are my splurge.  Shaved ice, Brazilian hamburgers, hum bao, banh mi, Philly cheesesteaks, crepes, hot dogs and dosa — I love them all!  These foods are Los Angeles to me, and while I eat at brick-and-mortar restaurants with regularity as well, I am not exaggerating when I say that much of my motivation behind living in the La Brea area is walking distance to food trucks.  While there are a long list of cons to living where I live (expensive! no parking!) the list of pros is short, but contains one notable point: FOOD TRUCKS.  I’m not kidding.  Food trucks!

You see, when I call home, I tell my mom and dad what I ate that day.  It sounds bizarre, but it’s true: my parents are lovers of food strange and delightful, and a large part of my life here in California are the gastronomical delights. For better or for worse, my entire feeling for the soul of my adopted city includes – among many other things – the ability to walk to a busy street and see a vista of possible edible treats spread before me like a feast table in some Medieval movie.  It fills my heart with hope and my tummy with a rumbly.

Please do not limit the ability of these trucks to make people like me happy.  There should be no villains here — what a wonderful time to be a lover of food in our city!

Sincerely,

Sunday Williams

Some brick-and-mortar shops like Sprinkles – arguably the most famous cupcakery in Los Angeles – wasted no time recognizing the power of the truck and launched one tout de suite.  They aren’t shedding a single drip of sweat over lost business – they’re pulling up at street corners and selling out dozens of $4 cupcakes in the time it takes to drive from one end of town to the other.  Bitches is smart, yo.

This is all a very long introduction to say: I walked by the Sprinkles cupcakemobile entirely on accident – THOUGH ONE MIGHT ARGUE THERE ARE NO CUPCAKE ACCIDENTS – and had my first taste.   First: $4?  Too much for a cupcake.  Sorry, charlies.  Still: what beautiful packaging, yes?  Makes a nice little gift.  To your own face.

Unless you walk like the hunchback of Notre Dame with a sprained ankle, in which case this happens:

Whoops.  Oh well.  That’s what the frosting is for.  Slap that thing back into shape.

This is an orange cupcake.  And how’d it taste?   Well… boring.  I know!  But so entirely one-note.  Just: orange.  I couldn’t even detect any salt in either the cake or the frosting, and if there was vanilla in there I missed it too.  Admittedly I just got over the flu, but I kept taking bites expecting to be wooed and getting just somewhat buttery orange instead.  Even that sounds too interesting.  The frosting was a more straightforward disappointment: gritty.  It takes several minutes of whipping butter and confectioners sugar together before they become smooth and creamy – it takes a while, but the sugar will eventually break down.  But it takes patience.

Lets try this beauty: the marshmallow chocolate cupcake.

Very attractive, first of all.  Though, I admit a childish and petty irritation that the gumpaste dot on top was inedible.  It was technically edible, but in the same way that Hot Pockets are technically edible.

Here the chocolate flavor was very good, rich and fudgy, but would it fucking kill someone to use some salt at Sprinkles?  I thought America had unanimously agreed that salt was great all the time.

Sprinkles has a pretty solid cupcake, at least of the two I tried, but no way I’ll ever pay $4 for them again.  Until someone smuggles some sodium chloride into their kitchen, I’m out.

Like most problems, this one begins with my mother.   She makes the perfect apple bread.  It’s almost more apple than bread, and the apples themselves are cut into pretty large chunks, making for this final product that is cotton-candy soft, so moist it’ll drip if you squeeze it and smells like I wish a cider mill did¹.  Years ago when I went to make it myself, I wasn’t entirely surprised when it came out all wrong.  Mine was leaden, greasy and attracting fruit flies almost before it cooled off.  I told my mom, we trouble-shot it a little, and the next time I made it the same thing: nearly inedible.

We did what we always do in times of baking need: we made two together, side by side.  I mimicked her perfectly.  Our breads were identical.  Until we baked them, and mine came out of the oven looking like an oily paper weight and hers was its usual angelic self.

“Wow.”  She said.  “You’re right.  Only I can make it.”

And that was that.  Suffice to say, about once a year I try a new apple bread recipe and each time they’re just not right.  They’ll never be right.  I’ll still be on the lookout for that eye of newt I know she slips into hers.

I’m not going to give you the recipe, but I got it from Kita at Pass the Sushi if you’re interested.  There’s nothing wrong with the bread — it merely tasted like bread.  It was not especially apple-y, or anything else really.  The four eggs made the texture a little too rubbery for my taste, too.

This recipe-neutrality has been happening a lot with me lately, and it’s taken the wind out of my sails.  Also: being so sick I hallucinated my aunt speaking to me on the phone.  Boy was that solicitor confused!  I think my somewhat insane cackle toward the end of the conversation helped clear things up.

¹I suspect an actual cider mill smells like gasoline, dirt, rotten fruit and sweaty immigrants.

I vaguely remembered that my friend Yuko was a big Korean food fan, and her husband, Sol, confirmed this.  The deal was sealed.  We were going to venture somewhere the Viking had expressed a distinct disinclination¹ to go, and for good reasons: they specialize in soup made of tofu.

But not before we both separately told them that Los Angeles’ Koreatown had the largest population of Koreans outside of Korea.  And then we told them again.  And again.  Because it is the only fact we know about Koreatown.

But first, even Vikings love pickled spicy things.  Good for everyone’s digestion.

Ahhh, there she is.  Soondufu, the sizzling, homemade fresh silken tofu soup riddled with seafood and meat bits and rich, spicy sauce.  You crack an egg in her and she looks into your soul like the baleful eye of Smaug.

The boys ordered a meat pile to preserve their vital male fluids.

And then the baby stole everyone’s rice when they weren’t looking and carefully applied it to her face and shirt.  We discussed making her a shirt with a pattern that mimics rice so this isn’t such an issue in the future.  Clothing makers, please get on this.

In the cab to the restaurant, the elder brother declared (after the rest of his family had napped) that he hadn’t napped because, of course, he was not tired.  Less than 10 seconds later his head fell forward and he remained that way while his dad extracted him from the cab, carried him into the restaurant, nestled him into a chair and then ordered a feasting-table’s worth of food.  After two hours of eating and traveling, back at the apartment he declared “I’M HUNGRY!”

The aftermath is gruesome.  The ladies working at So Kong Dong were so enamored with the baby that they kept bringing extra little things for her, including packets of seaweed snacks.  They loved her.  Each time she dropped a stainless steel chopstick they’d run over with another one, laughing at the joy of it.  I swear, it was like we brought the baby Dalai Lama into a Buddhist restaurant.  Ah, the holy baby has dumped her tea all over a pile of napkins!  We are blessed.

Wait a minute.  I think they’re onto something.

Mike said the truest thing of the night, which was “Be careful, or those kids are going to be child stars.”   Whereas all I could think was, “How hard would it be for me to make that outfit for myself?”

¹ “Odin sier nei eller dø!”

We have friends in town, which is a nice change.  A few years ago I went to Houston for two weeks to visit my friends Leesa and Aaron and I was unexpectedly smitten with the city.  Part of my mental preparation had been years of Leesa’s stories on what a hot, hopeless place Houston was, but when I was there it was the only two weeks of the year that were sunny, mild and bursting with tropical greenery.  There was a point at one of the million of the city’s parks/museums that I ran shrieking, barefoot, through grassy rose gardens festooned with gazebos, surrounded on each side by skyscrapers, shouting that this was some kind of perfect Logan’s Run utopia made real.  In that moment, Leesa forgot what a damp hellhole Houston is for the other 99% of the year and agreed: the city is capable of true beauty.  I went home and she stayed, immediately returning to humidity, giant cockroaches and hurricanes.

Los Angeles isn’t quite the jungle-planet nightmare of Houston, but it’s always good to have visitors, and to see the city through their eyes.  Our visitors from Seattle went from low-60′s temps and drizzle to perfect, breezy 73° L.A. in under three hours, and their glazed expressions reflected that.

For them, it’s already hotpot season.  Here it is and shall ever be corn-on-the-cob season.

And strawberry season.

Note the half-lidded eyes.

The baby was not as easily impressed.

Until she noticed the hummus.

And little girls with ice cream.

I swear I’m not going to be the blogger that tells you that she’s got some secret shenanigans going on in her life and how she can’t tell you about it but she can tell you that it is very stressful and important.  If I were that kind of blogger I’d assure you that I’d tell you all about it just as soon as I could (like the time a ventriloquism museum tried to sue me and I had to hire a lawyer¹) and afterwards you’d be all, pfft, was that all she was freaking out about? But, like I said: not that blogger.  I’m the kind of blogger that stuffs her face with $15 worth of waffles and yells at her boyfriend “YOU’RE THE SHITTIEST PHOTOGRAPHER!” on a street corner while spraying powdered sugar out of her mouth.  I wish I were kidding.

It’s like this: what would make a waffle better?  They’re already at the upper end of the awesomeness scale, but there’s room for improvement.  Perhaps if they were made from a denser yeasted dough rather than a batter, and were then just rolled in balls of pearl sugar so that when they were in the iron they turned chewy and caramelized.  At this point I’d say yes sir, you have achieved over-awesomenating.  Huzzah.

A restaurant in my neighborhood recently opened that serves Liege waffles, called Shaky Alibi.  I have to get this out of the way now so I can focus on the waffles but: for such a cheeky name, the place was naptime serious.   I wasn’t feeling it.  But also: who cares?  Waffles.  In the above photo you can see where the unmelted chunks of sugar remain, and I assure you this is a lovely thing: they are crunchy and sweet, and most of them have caramelized.  The texture of the waffle itself is fascinating, somewhere between a good, soft British scone and an American sticky bun.  The exterior is crispy and breadlike, but the interior has heft and grain.  In fact, the whole thing has heft.  It’s like a good-sized puppy.

Mike the Viking did actually take some good photos of me, but this is the one I identify with.

Now, the interesting thing is that they’ll make you a savory sandwich from these waffles.  So, the same sugared waffle, but sliced open and filled with turkey or ham (we chose ham) and a variety of cheeses (we chose swiss).  The Viking was reluctant to declare like-at-first-bite, but as a card carrying Monte Cristo addict, I was preemptively on board.  If I’d had some blackberry jam on the side I’d be dipping that fucker.  <– I can say that about a lot of things, now that I think about it.

Eventually he said he’d like it if it were saltier, to balance the sugar, which I can’t argue against.  I mean, saltier, sure.

But still we are not to where the problem lies.  FIFTEEN DOLLARS FOR THAT.  Well, $9 for the sandwich, and $6 for the plain waffle.  It’s a shame, too, because they are delicious.  But … I don’t know.  We kept discussing it like I imagine kind-hearted people discuss whether or not to stop eating meat.  Which is to say, with feeling.   On one hand, we kept rationalizing that we were eating an artisan product made fresh.  It’s no supermarket croissant we’re talking about here, we’re talking about a hot-from-the-iron yeasted pastry.  On the other hand, FIFTEEN DOLLARS.  No.  It’s like, I just paid $6 for what amounts to a really, really awesome donut.  Well, okay.  Wait, is that okay?  I don’t know!  If it were $4 I’ d be all over that shit.  I’d be back there right this second.

But $6?  I don’t know!  I still can’t decide.  Rather, I can say for certain: the sandwich is out.  The waffle itself is the star, and the ham and cheese present themselves as merely a $3 distraction.

Now, if it had a big piece of breakfast sausage and an egg in the middle…

¹ 100% true story. Ask me about it in person; for all I know they’re still standing by with their coterie of lawyers, seething.

Friend and semi-erstwhile Anger Burger contributor Aaron specifically requested that I eat a piece of cheeseburger sushi from the Yatta-! Truck here in Los Angeles.  He would have done it himself, but the truck doesn’t often make an appearance in Houston, Texas.

I should tell you: this was the day after my birthday dinner, which meant that I was still grossly full on meat fat.  But the truck hasn’t been near my house in a long time, and I feared I’d miss out on this quest entirely if I didn’t act.

I got a half-order each of the “All-American” (aka, the cheeseburger sushi) and a vegetable roll, partly because my arteries were begging me to stop, and partly to see if the Yatta-! boys could actually make sushi.

Short version: they can!  And the cheeseburger sushi was pretty delicious, all things considered.  The thing is, it doesn’t taste like sushi at all, but like a cheeseburger-flavored tater tot.  I’m not sure what made it such a strong tater tot flavor (maybe even just the ketchup), but there was nothing offensive about it. Crispy, fried, with a snap of pickle in the middle and the faintest whiff of cheese, I fear the presence of something like this next time I’m drunk.

The vegetable sushi was lovely, the rice was slightly warm and sticky but with good individual rice grain definition, not too tightly packed and small enough to pop the whole thing in your mouth.  I was sad I hadn’t gotten a full order.  Which, you know, is a very sad sentence to type.