Loco Moco and Other Delights

Fried lobster. If you have been to enough barbecue places, you could probably navigate your way through Zest blindfolded, past the counter up front, around the hostess station, ahead to any of the big round tables that bear crisp tablecloths at night and are bare for the bargain lunches. If you have been to enough barbecue places, you probably also know this menu by heart: sizzling pork chops fried with spicy salt, seafood chow mein, anise-scented Cantonese beef stew with turnips over rice . . . speed bumps on the way to the barbecued duck. But something is clearly going on in the kitchen here. The "Zest-style" lobster is just wonderful, hacked into pieces and fried with Vietnamese-tinged spices, chiles, ginger and minty Thai basil, crusted with garlic and utterly juicy. 2505 Valley Blvd., Alhambra; (626) 281-9968.

Salpicon. Though its food is hard to find in Los Angeles, Veracruz is the capital of Mexican seafood cooking, home to elaborate crab soups, exotic jungly stews, fish flavored with a dozen strange, licoricey herbs found almost nowhere else in the world. And oddly, although its dense pozole is first rate, the Westside Veracruz-style restaurant Mi Ranchito falls short on some of the crucial Veracruz seafood classics. But one bite of Mi Ranchito's minty Veracruz-style salpicon is enough to make you forgive the restaurant almost anything: warm, coarsely chopped beef mixed with minced radishes, onions and fresh herbs, tossed with lime juice, served with thick flour tortillas and great mounds of oily rice. A seafood restaurant with salpicon this good could probably get away with serving Mrs. Paul's. 12223 Washington Blvd., Culver City; (310) 398-6106.

Location Info

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Bruddah's Hawaiian Foods

1033 W. Gardena Blvd.
Gardena, CA 90247

Category: Restaurant > Hawaiian

Region: South Bay

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Magic Carpet

8566 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035

Category: Restaurant >

Region: West L.A.

Rincon Hondureno

1654 W. Adams St.
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Category: Restaurant > Central American

Region: USC to South L.A.

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Mi Ranchito Family Mexican

12223 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90066-5507

Category: Restaurant > Mexican

Region: Venice/ Marina del Rey

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More About

• Veracruz
• Noodle Rolls
• Congee King
• Eating Out
• Thai Food and Cooking

Smoked pomfret. Hunanese cooking is at least as much about smokiness as it is about zinging chile heat, and Charming Garden's smoked pomfret, a glistening, golden, slightly dry fish that the restaurant imports from Taiwan, is so smoky that it makes Texas barbecue seem like a side dish for sissies; this salty fish holds the essence of smoke more powerfully than anything you are likely to experience outside a forest fire. And the pomfret, with its garnish of tropical flowers, may be the most beautiful dish in town. 111 N. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park; (626) 458-4508.

X.O. Sauce Fried Rice Noodle Rolls. The late, lamented Congee King, the Chinese breakfast specialist in a Rosemead shopping center, was the undisputed monarch of rice porridge. But even better than the congee were the rolls, made by steaming rice batter on muslin sheets, rolling the noodles into tight cylinders, slicing them into thumb-size nuggets and pan-frying them with X.O. sauce, the pricey Hong Kong condiment made from soy sauce, chiles and dried shellfish. The noodle rolls were crisp at the edges, heavily garlicked and pungently spicy; the soft, bland, molten interior seemed closer to hot custard than to anything you might ordinarily consider pasta. Just spectacular. If anyone figures out where the chef has decamped to, please let us know.