Chandavkl's Menuism Blog

  The South Bay’s Hidden Chinese Dining District Monday, February 27, 2017 at 6:13 a.m.   While everybody knows that the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles' Chinatown have many choices for authentic Chinese food, fewer 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, and the immediately adjacent portions of Torrance, along Pacific Coast Highway. To say this is an unlikely locale becomes more evident when you consider that Lomita has a negligible Chinese population, and that there are essentially no Chinese groceries or other kinds of Chinese stores or businesses in the vicinity. How 30 years ago Lomita started to become a center of Chinese dining arose in a roundabout manner having very little to do with Lomita itself, and makes for an interesting tale.   The story begins several miles to the north in the...

  As Chinatown Changes, the Neighborhood's Chinese Restaurants Move Away from Cantonese Food Wednesday, January 11, 2017 at 6:33 a.m. By David R. Chan   From the 19th century to the late 1960s, Chinese food in America in general and in Los Angeles' Chinatown in particular was exclusively Cantonese in origin. Not only was it Cantonese, but specifically a rural version brought to America by immigrants largely from the Toishanese countryside, nearly 100 miles from the city formerly known as Canton. Consequently, what was known to most 20th-century Americans as Chinese food was hardly representative of what people ate in China, rather reflecting one narrow branch of the Chinese food spectrum, both geographically and temporally. It would be as if all American food in China was rooted in the culture of 19th...

  Good Chinese Food Finally Comes to the Westside, Thanks to UCLA Students David R. Chan | December 15, 2016 | 6:44am   Those who have lived in Los Angeles for any length of time are aware that the Westside has historically been a wasteland when it comes to good and "authentic" Chinese food. Fortunately things are rapidly changing, thanks in large part to the presence of the UCLA student community. Until the mid-1960s, housing discrimination kept most Westside neighborhoods almost entirely white, resulting in only the most Americanized form of Chinese food being served in area restaurants. Rare is the good and authentic Chinese restaurant that doesn’t have a local base of Chinese diners to serve. Even after housing barriers fell, there was no critical mass of either Westside-based Chinese diners or sophisticated non-Asian diners to justify authentic Chinese restaurants in the area for another two decades. Even if a g...

 - L.A.’s Secret Chinatown Has Only One Restaurant Left — but New Neighbors Are Arriving Friday, August 11, 2017 at 6:19 a.m. By David R. Chan A wedding at New Moon, 1990 Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library On the surface, Los Angeles' Chinatown seems to be just like other historical Chinatown, such as those in San Francisco, New York and others that were founded in the 19th century and have survived to this day. But Los Angeles is unique in one major respect: Its current Chinatown dates only from the 1930s and effectively began as a movie set–esque ethnic theme park for tourists, with very few Chinese people actually living in the area. Yes, Los Angeles did have a vibrant late–19th century/early–20th century downtown Chinatown, but it was leveled in 1933 to make way for Union Station. While civic do-gooders thought they were providing two nearby replacement...

Several years ago I wrote an  article for the now defunct Menuism website on how Irvine, California had arrived as a major Chinese restaurant dining destination with which few Los Angeles area residents in the San Gabriel Valley (40 miles away) or the Westside of Los Angeles (55 miles away) were particularly familiar.  So why now has Irvine likely become the most expensive locale for authentic Chinese food in the United States?  Chinese restaurants having branches in both Irvine and the San Gabriel Valley often charge $5 or more for the same regular entrees at their Irvine branches than in the San Gabriel Valley.  Portion sizes are said to be smaller in Irvine, and while Irvine Chinese food on balance is very good, it is as a whole an obvious cut below the San Gabriel Valley.  There are few, if any lunch specials in the local Chinese restaurants. And to top it off, the most expensive Chinese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at in the United States, Chang’an, ...

So everybody has heard about "A" list and "B" list celebrities.  Then  years ago Kathy Griffin made light of this by proclaiming herself as a "D" list celebrity.  But now the attention paid to "celebrities" has gotten so out of hand that people like myself have become borderline celebrities, which I'll refer as being on the celebrity "Z" list. I'm not sure what makes a celebrity in today's world, but there are celebrity doctors, celebrity dentists, and celebrity real estate brokers.  We know about the celebrity houseguest from decades ago.  A former co-worker has been described as a celebrity real estate developer.   I wouldn't be surprised if there were celebrity plumbers and celebrity gardeners. Perhaps having been referred to as a "celebrity diner" might put me in a similar category, and having a next door neighbor who has won multiple Emmy awards and a backside neighbor who has been an Oscar nomin...

As far as the younger generation and more recent immigrants are concerned, the gigantic Chinatown that is the San Gabriel Valley is something that has always existed.   I remember a comment on one of my interviews about the San Gabriel Valley was along the lines of "I always thought that my family used to live in East Los Angeles because they couldn't afford to live in Monterey Park at the time."  But indeed, I remember a time when there were very few Chinese or other Asians living in the San Gabriel Valley, and in fact at one time that the San Gabriel Valley was the most racist, lily white areas in Los Angeles County. So naturally, the subject which intrigued me over the years is how such a gigantic Chinese dining mecca and Chinese community in terms of both population and geographic area could have developed in the San Gabriel Valley, and not anywhere else in the Los Angeles area or somewhere else in the United States.   Now it’s not that I didn’t have a clue, as some o...