Mapping a way around the world through 10 Orange County restaurants
In a few weeks, we will mark a year since the pandemic hit the U.S. This means that even for those with wanderlust, it’s likely been at least that long since they’ve gone abroad.
Despite declines in reported COVID-19 cases, flying to another country still harbors a lot of uncertainty and risk. However, if you’re like me and your primary reason for travelling is the food, you’re in luck: The Orange County dining scene is surprisingly international. It’s well-represented by small businesses that offer tastes from far-flung cultures — cuisines that are perhaps less familiar to you than your weeknight sushi or Mexican takeout meal.
In fact, there are so many restaurants from so many nationalities in O.C. that cataloging them all could itself fill a “Lonely Planet” guidebook.
What follows is a selection of 10 restaurants representing 10 countries from four continents, where you can eat your way through an international journey.
AFRICA
DESTINATION: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Abyssinia, 2801 W. Ball Road, Anaheim, (714) 826-8859
Though a huge part of an Ethiopian restaurant experience is bearing witness to the arrival of the gigantic platters at the table, it can be argued that Abyssinia’s dishes are actually best consumed in the privacy of your home. This is, after all, food designed to be eaten with your hands.
The potential of drips, licking of fingers and public embarrassment is real if you’re new to the cuisine. It all depends on how deft you are at handling a flat bread called injera that functions both as plate and utensil. You use the injera to dip into stews, pick up meat and sop up sauces by employing only the fingers of your right hand. Made from fermenting teff flour, injera is as delicate as a crepe and has the tanginess of sourdough.
It’s eaten with everything — the literal basis of the cuisine, especially the Traditional Combo, which is a greatest-hits sampler served atop a platter covered with injera. Use a piece from the injera provided on the side to tear chicken meat from the yedoro wot, a drumstick and hard-boiled egg simmered in a ruddy stew made from sweet red peppers. Use another swatch of injera to pick up the awaze tibs, beef strips sautéed in butter with onions, tomatoes and green peppers.
The dish is seasoned with berbere, Ethiopia’s indigenous spice blend. The rest of the combo consists of side dishes, such as sweet and savory lentils, a simple iceberg salad in Italian dressing and, best of all, a cabbage-and-carrot stir fry that also needs to be delivered to your mouth with injera.
DESTINATION: Cairo, Egypt
El Mahroosa Restaurant & Hookah Café, 930 S. Brookhurst St., Anaheim, (714) 991-9200; elmahroosa.com
Before COVID-19, when you came to El Mahroosa Restaurant & Hookah Café for Egyptian food, you’d eat while sheltered under a steel-covered patio. Your fellow customers would be smoking fruit-flavored tobacco from gurgling hookah pipes.
You’d start with the fried kebbeh appetizer that looks like Christmas ornaments. Then you’d drag a torn piece of warm pita through the hummus, onto which charred bits of beef have been added. You’d take spoonfuls of the kabsa, scrumptious basmati rice cooked with saffron, cinnamon and cardamom. Next you’d tear a piece of lamb that’s falling off the bone. And when the om ali, a baked-to-order dessert somewhere between bread pudding and baklava arrives billowing, you’d ooh-and-aah.
But these days, even if you just do takeout, you can still enjoy these spectacular Egyptian specialties at home — and without the secondhand smoke.
ASIA
DESTINATION: Jakarta, Indonesia
Indo Ranch , 22722 Lambert St. #1701, Lake Forest, (949) 458-1108; indoranchoc.com
For a long time, Indonesians were better represented at the Rose Parade than they were in Orange County’s food scene. It’s gotten better over the years, but as of this writing there are still only two restaurants that serve Indonesian food within our borders. If you ask actual Indonesians, though, they’ll say there’s really only one true Indonesian restaurant in O.C.: Indo Ranch.
The place started out as a grocery store a few years ago but has since slowly transformed itself into a full-service eatery by setting up a few tables and pushing back the shelves of imported Indonesian goods to the corner. The national staples of gado gado (a salad of boiled vegetables doused in peanut dressing), nasi goreng (Indonesian-style fried rice) and satay (barbecued skewers of chicken, lamb or beef) are mainstays.
But you can also slurp mie ayam jamur, Jakarta-style noodles slicked with flavorful oil, topped with chicken and mushroom and served next to a side bowl of broth. Then there’s the nasi bungkus, a dish whose name comes from how it’s packaged — inside a banana-leaf tetrahedron. Unwrap it to discover a mess of rice paired with beef rendang, egg balado (fried hard-boiled egg in chili sauce), fried chicken, jackfruit curry and a piercing green sambal guaranteed to have you sweating more than actually being in Jakarta during summer.
DESTINATION: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Seasons Kitchen USA, 641 N. Euclid St., Anaheim, (714) 829-4213, seasonskitchenusa.com
For Seasons Kitchen USA owners Khim and Soon Teoh, operating one of the few Malaysian restaurants in O.C., a county with very few actual Malaysian residents, means never staying complacent.
Even before the pandemic hit, they branched out far and wide. They teamed up with a restaurant pop-up service to introduce their flavors to thousands of worker bees in office parks all over the county. And when the shutdown happened, they didn’t just rely on the usual online delivery apps to distribute their food; they set out on their own runs, fulfilling orders as far down as San Diego.
Through it all, they continued to produce some of the best Malaysian food in O.C.: candy-like char siu pork, crispy-skinned pork belly, silky char kway teow (stir fried rice noodles), bold curry laksa, and best of all, nasi lemak, arguably Malaysia’s most iconic dish. It has it all: fragrant rice cooked with coconut cream and pandan; ikan bilis (fried anchovies with peanuts), cucumber, tomato, hard-boiled eggs, homemade sambal and your choice of beef rendang or chicken curry. If you only order one thing, let it be this gateway drug to a lifetime of a Malaysian food addiction.
DESTINATION: Yangon, Myanmar
Irrawaddy Taste of Burma, 7076 Katella Ave., Stanton, (714) 252-8565; irrawaddytaste.com
If there was a Venn diagram of Thai, Indian and Chinese cuisine, the intersection would look, taste and smell like Burmese food. At Irrawaddy Taste of Burma in Stanton, there’s samosas, parathas and biryanis like in India, but also a pad Thai lookalike called shan kauk, and taut taut pork, which is Chinese sweet-and-sour by another name.
As good as these dishes are, what you want is the stuff unique to Myanmar, such as lahpet thoke. This salad — presented as separate components of lettuce, tomato, cabbage, crunchy fried lentils — features lahpet, the national delicacy of fermented tea leaves whose flavor equivalent is pesto, except with much more tannins and tang.
Finish with par lu dar, a Technicolor demo reel in a bowl. The dessert contains a rose-syrup-sweetened milk soup, various jellies, tapioca pearls, chunks of flan and ice cream on top.
EUROPE
DESTINATION: Bucharest, Romania
Goodies in the Pantry, 1108 E Katella Ave., Orange, (714) 602-7524; goodiesinthepantry.com
Goodies in the Pantry isn’t just a butcher shop from another country, it’s a butcher shop from another era. It offers the kind of service your grandparents might reminisce about, where the guy behind the counter knows your name and how you like your steaks cut.
That guy is Claudiu Giorgioni, who, in a former life, was a sturgeon farmer in his native Romania and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion. Now his passion is sausages, including the Romanian kind, which he stuffs into coils after he seasons the meat with allspice and lots of garlic. He offers it raw, but if you’re lucky, the Romanian sausage will be that day’s chef’s choice for the grilled in-store lunch, served with your choice of side. The rest of his meat-forward breakfasts, lunches and dinners are a carnivore’s dream, with all manner of fauna roasted and barbecued to make up sandwiches and steak-house-level plates.
Giorgioni is now starting to offer weekend-only specials of papanasi, a Romanian version of a donut smothered with sour cream and jam, and langos, a deep-fried bread with the circumference of a pizza, topped with cheese and dill sauce.
DESTINATION: Munich, Germany
Continental Deli, 1510 W. Imperial Hwy. # C, La Habra, (562) 697-0333; continentaldeli.us
For nearly 30 years, local fans of FC Bayern Munich have converged upon Continental Deli in La Habra to watch and root for their hometown soccer team with German beer and food. But you don’t have to be a “fussball” fanatic or even German to appreciate the culture and the house-made sausages here.
You should, of course, start with the bratwurst. It’s got a snappy natural casing outside, a marvelous coarse texture inside, and peppery overtones throughout. Next, try a plump knackwurst as smooth as mousse. It eats like a giant garlicky hot dog. Or perhaps you’ve always wondered what a currywurst tastes like. The latter comes with fried potatoes to sop up the excess curry ketchup.
When you opt for the bratwurst and knackwurst, you get sauerkraut and a choice of two homemade potato salads. The house special potato salad, which is like mashed potato since it’s pushed through a ricer, is a customer favorite. The German potato salad follows a traditional recipe where sliced potato is tossed in vinegar, bacon and onion, then served warm.
Either way, you’re not leaving hungry or without a few German pastries such as a decadent homemade cheesecake to take home.
DESTINATION: St. Malo, France
Delice Breton, 31451 Rancho Viejo Road Suite 103, San Juan Capistrano, (949) 503-1577; delicebreton.com
If you’ve ever eaten an omelet in the Brittany region of France, you’d notice they’re unlike their slender, all-yellow Parisian cousins. These instead have a pronounced brown outer crust and a puffy crescent shape. They’re also fluffier than a Parisian omelet since they’re whipped in a copper bowl to incorporate millions of air bubbles, cooked over a steady flame, and flipped only when they go on the plate.
These kinds of omelets are an attraction of nearby Mont Saint-Michel, where a hotel called La Mère Poulard has been serving them for the past 130 years to everyone from Monet to Jacques Chirac. San Juan Capistrano’s Delice Breton replicates the experience with an omelet that possesses an ethereal texture somewhere between shampoo foam and cheese fondue. Served next to a salad, it’s a luxurious lunch that needs to be followed by one of the best crepes in the County for dessert.
SOUTH AMERICA
DESTINATION: Buenos Aires, Argentina
La Farola Empanadas, 2790 Harbor Blvd. #118, Costa Mesa, (714) 714-0588; lafarolaempanadas.com
Empanadas are to Argentina what pizza is to Italy. It is so ingrained in the food culture that encountering an empanada in O.C. that’s not Argentinian is almost as rare as an Argentinian restaurant that doesn’t serve them.
La Farola Empanadas in Costa Mesa revels in empanadas. Each of the 15 kinds it offers possesses a crust thick enough to securely cocoon the filling, but not so thick that it’s doughy. The basic beef empanada weeps so much juice, it’s advisable to eat it over a bowl.
The Arab empanada has a lemon juice tang, and the sweet beef has raisins mixed in. The tuna empanada is so good, Subway needs to take note. Yet, La Farola owner Eva Galvan isn’t content on resting her laurels on just the empanadas.
Her Milanesas are not to be ignored. In particular, there’s the La Farola Milanesa where she pounds a steak to the thinness of an iPad mini. Then it starts. She breads and deep-fries it, brushes on some tomato sauce and layers on a slice of ham, melted mozzarella and two fried eggs. It’s served with a side of hot fries and a tacit guarantee that you won’t be hungry for a good long while.
DESTINATION: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
TASTE, Brazilian Style Gourmet, 19933 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach, (714) 460-8606; tastelikebrazil.com
There is more to Brazilian cuisine than all-you-can-eat churrascarias and acai bowls. TASTE, Brazilian Style Gourmet in Huntington Beach is proof of that. And if you know any Brazilians, they can attest that this humble shop is the county’s preeminent salgado specialist.
Salgados is the term that describes all the pastry-based delicacies usually sold by street vendors and corner shops back in the old country. Among the salgados offered here, there’s the addictive, crispy-chewy cheese-bread balls called pão de queijo; the tear drop-shaped chicken-and-cream-cheese croquettes called coxinha; quibes, deep-fried footballs of bulgur wheat, ground beef, and mint; and the enroladinho de carne moida, which are stuffed with spicy beef. You can make a meal out of two or three salgados, but if you’re lucky, there will be feijoada, the national dish of beans, sausage and pork.
Edwin Goei is a contributor to TimesOC.
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