The L.A. Chinese Food Destination You Probably Don't Know About

The L.A. Chinese Food Destination You Probably Don't Know About - Menuism Dining Blog, January 14, 2019


 

In the Los Angeles area, both the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles Chinatown provide many choices for finding authentic Chinese food. But few are aware that there is also a nice collection of authentic Chinese restaurants tucked away in the South Bay.  This concentration is centered in the unlikely location of Lomita, mostly along Pacific Coast Highway.  With a negligible Chinese population, Lomita boasts no Chinese grocery, dry goods, or other kinds of Chinese stores or businesses anywhere in the vicinity.  But decades ago, in a roundabout manner, Lomita started to become a center of Chinese dining.

 

The story begins several miles to the north in the early 1960s in communities like El Segundo, Hawthorne, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach.  That region rapidly built up as the home to many aerospace companies busily involved in the cold war and the race for outer space.   All of those companies employed many Chinese-American aerospace engineers and technical workers, and as the industry and their workers thrived, those workers settled into the upscale residential  neighborhoods of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.


For the initial Chinese residents gaining the toehold in Palos Verdes wasn’t without difficulty.  As the civil rights movement changed America in the 1960s, certain communities were particularly resistant to housing integration and in the Los Angeles area Palos Verdes was a major holdout .  Indeed, I remember when my uncle wanted to buy a house in Palos Verdes, he was told by his real estate broker that before making an offer on a house, he should knock on neighboring doors to ask the homeowners if they would object to having a Chinese family living next to them. (He did succeed in buying the house.)

 

Eventually these barriers eventually fell, and the Palos Verdes Chinese community grew, enhanced and surpassed by Chinese from other walks of life, and creating a large demand for authentic Chinese cuisine. But with Palos Verdes being an exclusive residential community with very little in the way of retail activity, those restaurants did not appear locally, but rather five miles down the hill in the city of Lomita.

 

One of the first of these restaurants servicing the Chinese population up the hill in Palos Verdes opened over 30 years ago on Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita.  Still in operation today, A-1 BBQ is clearly the Godfather of authentic Chinese food in Lomita and the South Bay.  To call A-1 BBQ’s premises a shack is no insult, because it holds probably only eight tables, is dark and almost windowless.   Due to A-1’s success, and the growing Chinese population in Palos Verdes, it wasn’t long before a good number of other authentic Chinese restaurants appeared on the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Hawthorne Blvd. and Western Ave.   While A-1 remained an institution for more than a quarter of a century, with its Cantonese bbq meats and beef chow fun headlining its menu, it did lose much of its luster as a number of restaurants serving more modern Hong Kong style seafood and dim sum made their appearance in Lomita.  Consequently, A-1 BBQ has added Taiwanese and Sichuan style dishes to their menu, such as fried pork chops, cumin lamb, and minced pork rice, which has reinvigorated the restaurant.

As A-1 demonstrates, the same changing demographics throughout America where non-Cantonese Chinese food has been supplanting Cantonese food has also been at work in Lomita.    Meanwhile, all of Lomita’s Hong Kong style Cantonese restaurants that flourished during the 1990s are gone, though authentic Cantonese food can be found just over the border in neighboring Torrance at Sea Shore, Seafood Port and Seafood Town.  And you can still get dim sum in Lomita at Szechwan Chinese Restaurant, which has shown amazing resiliency in its almost 40 years of operation.  Starting off as an Americanized Chinese restaurant, it added dim sum and Hong Kong style seafood dishes to its menu during Lomita’s Cantonese heyday, even rechristening itself as Szechwan Seafood, but now reverted to the Szechwan Chinese Restaurant name and adding Taiwanese and Sichuan style dishes to its menu to reflect the changing demographics.

Ruiji Sichuan Cuisine, which only opened up a little more than two years ago, is Lomita's premier restaurant.  Crowd pleasing dishes such as toothpick lamb, spicy fried pork ribs and beef tendon dry pot mean locals  no longer have to drive 25 miles to the San Gabriel Valley to get quality Sichuan style food.  

Lomita offers much in the way of Shanghai cuisine as well.  Tasty Noodle House, another recent addition to Lomita's Chinese restaurant scene has also opened two branches on Los Angeles' Westside.  Newcomer Muodu Shanghai Cuisine, opened up in late 2018 and is already becoming known for the xialongbao, shen jen bao (tiny fried Shanghai pork buns), dumplings and other specialties.   And if you don’t mind traveling Pacific Coast Highway a block to the west of the Lomita border, there’s a branch of the Little Sheep hotpot chain out of China. While you won't be able to do your Chinese grocery shopping or find any other Chinese goods anywhere near Lomita, a fantastic Chinese meal is reason enough to visit.

 


 

 

 

 

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