Straight to the Duck Heart

Beef Roll

101 Noodle Express, a bleak mini-mall storefront next to a bowling alley, may not scream with promise. But the café is home to the Shandong-style beef roll, a massive, bronzed construction that commands its platter like two El Tepeyac burritos laid side by side — brawny Chinese pancakes rolled around slivers of stewed beef and seasoned with a sprinkling of chopped scallion tops and fresh cilantro. The inside of the beef roll is smeared with a sweet, house-made bean paste with an ethereal, almost transparent top note, a bean paste that bears the same relationship to ordinary hoisin sauce that Joachim Splichal’s demi-glace might to a slug of canned brown gravy. It is a simple composition, and yet not; ordinary street food raised to a transcendent level. 1408 E. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, (626) 300-8654.

Macau Street’s fried crab

Beef as art

Location Info

Map

Bistro K

1000 Fremont Ave.
South Pasadena, CA 91030-3225

Category: Restaurant > Bistro

Region: Pasadena and vicinity

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O-Dae San

2889 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90006

Category: Restaurant > Korean

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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More About

• Laurent Quenioux
• L. Ron Hubbard
• Al Bap
• Eating Out
• Meat

Khandvi

What the owners of Rajdhani like to call Gujarati dim sum might more properly be called a bottomless thali, the cooking of the Indian province overwhelming you with labyrinths of flavor and a profusion of perfumes, a 10-course combination platter constantly refilled in all of its components. After 45 minutes, your plate will probably look exactly the way it did before you started eating, save the odd drip of lentil dal. But when the waitress bearing khandvi — tart, fermented-batter crepes smeared thickly with puréed lentils and coiled into jelly rolls —comes around again, you will probably beg for another portion no matter how full you may be. The concept of too much khandvi simply does not exist. 18525 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia, (562) 402-9102.

Bacon

It is hard to go wrong with bacon, but Square One, a cheerful, brightly painted breakfast place in the L. Ron Hubbard district of East Hollywood, may have the city’s best: Nueske’s bacon, the well-regarded artisanal product from northern Wisconsin, sliced thick, laid on a rack, and slow-roasted until it becomes crisp but pliable, sweet and deeply smoky, exploding under your teeth into gushers of fragrant juice. Even if your American Express card has long-standing relationships with smokehouses in three or four mid-Southern states, you may never have tasted bacon cooked with the obsessive care that Square One brings to its slabs. Everything goes better with hickory-smoked hog belly. This morning’s horoscope probably told you that. 4854 Fountain Ave., Hlywd., (323) 661-1109.?