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LU GI

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Electric Lotus

4656 Franklin Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Category: Restaurant > Indian

Region: Los Feliz

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Fu Shing

2960 E. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91107

Category: Restaurant > Chinese

Region: Pasadena and vicinity

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More About

• Fu Shing
• Rincon Hondureno
• Alhambra
• Eating Out
• Meat

539 W. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel

(626) 457-5111

Behold the Szechuan hot pot, a pint or so of scarlet liquid frothing in a chafing dish, spitting up bloody geysers, roiling and bubbling around bits of meat and tofu like a sulfurous brimstone pool. You have tasted hot Asian food, but this is a heat of a different order, truly corrosive stuff, a pure tincture of chile and spice, thick as cream, overlaid with a garlic pungence that may ooze from your pores for a week. Like Pink’s, Roscoe’s and Chili John’s, Lu Gi is essentially a one-dish restaurant, and every table in the place hosts an induction burner, a bubbling pot and a garlicky cloud of steam. With the hot pot, tofu and vegetables, you order foods to cook yourself in the boiling brew: gamy shavings of mutton, gelatinous chunks of beef tendon, delicate little fish balls. By the end of the meal, when you have finished simmering a tableful of meat and greens in the broth, the espresso-thimble of red goo that is left is as caustic as pure lye. Open daily from 11 a.m. until midnight.(JG)

RINCON HONDUREÑO

1654 W. Adams Blvd., L.A.

(323) 734-9530

Near the edge of the West Adams district, Rincon Hondureño is a serene restaurant, washed in sea blue, with high ceilings, a cheerful mural of sailboats, and sleepy natural light. Bottles of ultrahot habañero sauce dot each table. The most popular Honduran snack is the baleada, a thick flour tortilla as big around as a phonograph record and griddle-baked to order, then painted with puréed black beans, Honduran sour cream and cheese and folded into something like an oversize taco. And nowhere else will you find sopa de caracol as good, or curry-tinged arroz con pollo, or coconut-enhanced fish soup that revolves around a whole, fresh red snapper as highly peppered as pastrami. Green plantains microtomed lengthwise into thin slices, then fried until they resemble phallic potato chips with a subtly sweet aftertaste — tajadas, they’re called — are served with nearly everything. This is the sort of place you’d be glad to find in a Honduran beach village. Open daily 7:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. (JG)

ZEST

2505 Valley Blvd., Alhambra

(626) 281-9968

The basic unit of Cantonese dining in L.A. is probably the barbecue joint: a takeout counter with lacquered ducks, simmered pig’s intestines, salted chicken, barbecued pork, annexed to a restaurant with a long menu of basic stir-fries, noodle dishes, hot pots and possibly exotic seafood. At a Chinese barbecue, it is perfectly all right to show up at odd hours, by yourself, and eat only a bowl of won ton soup or a plate of roast duck over rice. Of the hundred-odd Hong Kong–style barbecue places in the San Gabriel Valley, perhaps the newest is Zest, a bright, sprawling restaurant near the eastern edge of Alhambra. 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. But something is clearly going on in the kitchen here. The tables are stocked with a couple of different kinds of chile sauce and jars of marinated Thai peppers, and there are far more spicy dishes than you might expect at a Cantonese restaurant. The barbecue is fine, especially the honeyed roast pork, and the "Zest-style" lobster is just wonderful, hacked into pieces and fried with chiles, ginger and minty Thai basil, crusted with sweet Asian spice. Open Sun.–Thurs. 8 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri.–Sat. until 11 p.m.(JG)