Top 10 Visits to the Plate

This year may have been a pretty slow one for the kind of restaurants I like. The Chinese restaurant boom in the San Gabriel Valley finally started to taper off, and not many new Central American communities attained critical mass. Slow times in the urban core meant that more people ate at home, and fewer lunch counters opened than at any time I can remember. Long Beach’s concentration of Cambodian restaurants all but disappeared.

Still, there are almost 20,000 places to eat in the Los Angeles metropolitan area--I’m not complaining or anything--and these were the 10 best dishes to hit my plate this year.

OYSTER LOAF

If you hang around New Orleans long enough, you may hear about po’ boy joints like 5 C’s, attached to ancient taverns in obscure wards, with sandwiches good enough to make you weep. 5 C’s is a swell place, an ancient bastion of New Orleans-style fried seafood in a neighborhood so densely populated with Southern-style fish mongers that it might as well be called the You Buy, We Fry District. The oyster loaf, as served here and at the New Orleans oyster loaf godhead Casamento’s, is essentially a loaf of bread neatly split in half, buttered and toasted, layered with chips of sour pickle and filled with fried oysters. There are about a dozen oysters to a sandwich here, sandy-crusted, dense and gnarled, and when you bite into it, the sandwich’s snappy, buttery crunch gives way to fragrant mollusk chewiness and an explosion of exotic marine essence.

5 C’s Restaurant, 2329 W. 54th St., Los Angeles, (213) 298-9313.

ROAST DUCK

When you peek into back doors in Chinatown, you see racks and racks of freshly salted poultry hung to dry in breezeways, pale as ghost ducks. Certain alleys are alive with the glorious high aroma of garlic, star-anise and charring, sugary poultry drippings that usually signify ducks in the oven, and when the breeze is right, you can smell ducks on the wind as far away as City Hall. Cantonese roast duck--not Peking duck, not pi-pa duck, not salty simmered duck--may be the most popular dish in Chinatown. And the best roast duck in Chinatown comes from Lucky Deli: a sweet, garlicky bird, tinged with char, as smoke-ruddy as great barbecue and somehow both chewy and filled with juice. Lucky Deli, which encompasses both the actual delicatessen and the extremely basic cafe next door, has been in Chinatown so long that the place tends to be taken for granted, but in duck roasting, as in so many things, perhaps the old-fashioned ways are still best.

Lucky Deli, 706 N. Broadway, Chinatown, (213) 625-7847.

MACHACA

Machaca, a sort of fried beef jerky, can be one of the great dishes of the Americas, an intense distillation of the flavors of the dry Mexican West, all salt and smoke and heat. It is easy to imagine something like machaca being eaten in Mexico long before Cortez. Still, in Los Angeles, what generally goes by the name machaca is stringy, watery stewed beef with maybe a bell pepper thrown in, a burrito filling scrambled hard with eggs. Machaca is usually not a good thing to order on your first visit to a Mexican restaurant. But El Sitio serves what is by far the best machaca I’ve ever eaten, a red-brown heap of spicy dried beef, grilled, pounded into shreds with a stone, fried to a frizzle with bits of onion and sweet peppers, a dense, chewy animal essence. An order of machaca here doesn’t look like a lot, but it is hard to imagine a richer food. You can get the machaca straight up, ready to roll into little tacos with beans and hot red chile; you can get it scrambled with eggs; you can get it simmered with water as soup (caldillo de machaca). Mexican food authority Diana Kennedy calls this a poor man’s soup, but it is hard to imagine a rich man eating any better.

El Sitio, 3466 E. Florence Ave., Huntington Park, (213) 584-8491.

BEEF TONGUE SALAD

It would be possible to eat at Sang Dao 20 times without suspecting there was anything more to the restaurant than ginger beef and chicken panang, but Sang Dao, an inconspicuous restaurant masquerading as a neighborhood Thai-Chinese place, may be the first serious Lao restaurant in the Southland. Much of the Lao food at Sang Dao falls into the category of stuff to nibble with a cold Heineken or two: pungent, chile-hot finger food. A lot of the Lao specials here are fiery-hot salads dressed with chile and lime, tossed with a fragrant powder of coarsely ground toasted rice, pungent with the aromas of garlic, pounded eggplant and herbs--some Laotians eat these salads with their fingers, rolling the salad into little balls with sticky rice, then popping the little marbles into their mouths. The chef at Sang Dao seems to love cooking with beef tongue--sometimes to the extent that you wonder what he does with the rest of the cow--and the warm beef tongue salad is terrific; animal richness cut by the bite of raw garlic.

Sang Dao Lao Thai Cuisine, 1739 W. La Palma Ave., Anaheim, (714) 956-8105.

CARNE ASADA EN SU JUGO

Valenzuela’s is almost synonymous with this Jalisco-style dish of beef roasted in its own juices--thin, massively heaped confetti of browned beef flavored with bits of smoky bacon, filled out with soupy beans, garnished with chopped onion and a handful of cilantro, sopping in a spicy puddle of juice. On the side, a plate holds sugary roasted onions, grilled scallions, hot chiles that have been charred to an elusive sweetness, radishes and lime. It’s a classically compelling dish, each spoonful subtly different--smoky, meaty, spicy, tart--with the promise of carnivorous nirvana in every bite, and hungry people can demolish giant piles of this stuff in just a couple of minutes.

Valenzuela’s Mexican Restaurant, 11721 E. Valley Blvd., El Monte, (818) 579-5384.

UGALI

Kenya is the most cosmopolitan country in Africa, veteran of a thousand years of trade routes, and the restaurant cooking of the capital city Nairobi reflects this: Indian-influenced curries commingle with Muslim-inspired kebabs, British puddings with native African vegetable dishes and Swiss hotel-school buffets. Bamboo Place, though, is a homey restaurant, with a small menu of half a dozen African starches and as many stews to go along with them, everything simple, fresh and light. Ugali, the basic staple food of Kenya, is a dense loaf-shaped pone of white cornmeal, slightly coarse-textured, bland on its own but practically exploding with flavor when you twist off a bit with your fingers and drag it through a sauce. Ugali sukuma wiki--it translates “push the week stew,” for the lean stretch before payday--is the classic Kenyan down-home dish, the East African equivalent of red beans and rice, and is served here with a sharp-tasting mound of chopped, cooked collard greens, slightly crunchy, and a bit of beef stewed with onions and tomatoes. Delicious, plus you get to say the word ugali in public.

Bamboo Place, 5778 Rodeo Road, Los Angeles, (213) 296-4294.

APPES

Owned by a guy who used to cook at Siri Lanka Curry House, Chamika Sri Lankan Restaurant is wedged into a Hollywood building once occupied by a hot dog stand called Big Weenies Are Better, three or four tables wedged into a room nearly as vast as the back seat of a Camry. A Sri Lankan meal here usually revolves around a starch thing, a pastry or a rice concoction that you can use as an edible utensil to scoop up sauced dishes, flavor with a violent bit of chile sauce or use as sort of a bowl. Chamika makes appes only on weekends, but you should try them if you get a chance. The coffee-filter-shaped crepes are crisp at the edges, sweetened with coconut and taper down to a thick, sour pancake-like base on the bottom that may or may not have an egg fried into it, and which you can daub with pungent, cardomom-scented red chicken curry, a greenish lamb curry gritty with spice or the legendary well-toasted black beef curry for which Sri Lankan chefs--especially this one--should be famous.

Chamika Catering (Sri Lankan Restaurant), 1717 N. Wilcox Ave., Hollywood, (213) 466-8960.

BANH CUON

Of the world’s great street-food specialties, banh cuon, might on the surface seem to be among the less compelling. Sort of like the ghost-white noodles that come under the oval metal hoods in dim sum restaurants, but thinner and more often wrapped around stuff, this Vietnamese steamed rice pasta can be chewy, unsubtle, no fun. But Tay Ho serves the Stradivarius of banh cuon: transparent, almost membranous noodles, with the slight, stretchy resilience of caul and a faint fine-cloth nubbiness that catches bits of the thin sauce you ladle from the Goofy-stenciled carafes of Vietnamese fish sauce. You can get the banh cuon here wrapped around ground dried shrimp or around a filling of crumbled pork sauteed with black pepper and tree ear mushrooms. Order banh cuon with thit nuong and you’ll get the best noodle burrito in town, stuffed with sweet Vietnamese barbecued pork.

Tay Ho Restaurant, in Gold World Plaza, 1039 E. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, (818) 280-5207.

FLYING FISH

Flying fish look so cute in those Jacques Cousteau specials, whizzing above the surface of the Caribbean, leaping in and out of the dive boats, popping out of the ocean, like finned pastries popping out of toasters, when they’re trying to escape the sharks. In Barbados, you’ll see flying fish everywhere, on T-shirts, on the covers of books but mostly stuffed into sandwiches, where they serve as something like the country’s national fish: A nation’s got to have its priorities. Caribbean Mouth-watering Cuisine, a little “Bajan” (Barbadian) restaurant a couple of minutes north of LAX, may serve the only flying fish in town, imported from Barbados, flying fish filets brushed with spices and fried crisp, two or three to an order. Flying fish has something of the richness and firmness of great mackerel, without the overwhelmingly strong taste. When the restaurant runs out of flying fish, the chef fries snapper or croaker in the manner of flying fish, but the comparatively blander flesh just isn’t the same.

Caribbean Mouth-watering Cuisine, 6511 1/2 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 417-9798.

CHICHARRONES DE CONEJO

The classic meat dish of the high Andes is guinea pig (cuy) cooked to a sizzling turn. In the northern part of the altiplano, they roast cuy with garlic and wild mountain herbs; as you get farther south, toward Bolivia, people tend to deep-fry the marinated cuy instead, until the skin is crisp and oily, the meat texture that of thoroughly roasted pork, the whole saturated with the Andean herb huacatay, which is a flavor powerful enough to tame the richness of even this strong flesh. The capital of deep-fried cuy might be the mountain city of Arequipa, a stronghold of spicy stews and traditional ways, in the shadow of the enormous volcano El Misti. While El Rincon Arequipeno, a new Arequipa-style Peruvian restaurant in a Lawndale mini-mall, actually serves no Arequipa-style cuy, there is the closest imaginable equivalent: half a rabbit marinated with garlic and huacatay, fried until the meat is tender, the skin glossy and crisp, the juices clear, with a powerful herbal flavor that will stay with you for the rest of the day. I like fried cuy just fine, but El Rincon’s chicharrones de conejo may be one of the few dishes where a substitute works better than the original.

El Rincon Arequipeno, 15651 Hawthorne Blvd., Lawndale, (310) 644-7720.