Where to Eat Now: New to the List

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Wednesday, Feb 6 2008

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Monterey Park/San Gabriel and Vicinity

BattambangKhmer cooking is among the most exotic on the planet, sharing some ingredients with nearby Vietnam, Thailand and Laos, but with a flavor unmistakably its own: clear, clean and bitter, inflected with coconut milk, the fermented fish sauce called prahok and any number of minty herbs. Amok ("steamed curry fish filet" on the menu) is probably the most famous dish of Khmer cuisine, a filet steamed with coconut milk and aromatics until it almost collapses under its own weight, garnished with a plop of coconut cream and sliced fresh chiles. As at most Cambodian-Chinese restaurants in town, the smattering of Khmer dishes is not specifically identified on the menu, and if you manage to order a selection of them, the waitress will probably raise her eyebrow and ask you if you like Cambodian food: loc lac, sautéed cubes of saucy marinated beef served with a watercress salad; sweet grilled "beef stick" marinated in a deep-red paste that tastes like but isn't Hawaiian Punch concentrate; spicy-sour soup with slices of catfish and battleship-gray slivers of banana blossom that taste like bottled artichoke hearts. Tell her you've come for the karaoke. 1806 S. San Gabriel Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 307-3938. Mon.-Sat. 9:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m., Sun. 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Beer, wine. Lot parking. MC, V. Cambodian-Chinese.

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Orochon Ramen

123 S. Onizuka St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Restaurant > Japanese

Region: Downtown

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Pitfire Pizza Company

108 W. Second St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Category: Restaurant > Pizza

Region: Downtown

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Boiling Crab The Los Angeles restaurant world has long been a place of improbable carom shots, but even here the Boiling Crab, a Cajun seafood restaurant opened by a Vietnamese family from southeast Texas and serving a young Chinese clientele, is unprecedented in the complexity of its resonances: Southeast Asian seafood culture colliding head-on with Franco-Acadian cuisine, Tabasco running into the bird pepper, spicy Vietnamese-Chinese crabstyles bleeding into the swamp cooking of the American South. At Boiling Crab, you choose seafood, boiled with a choice of three flavors — supersaturated garlic butter, lemon pepper, or a fiery Cajunesque seasoning that will stain your fingers and seep out of your pores — or, more likely, what the restaurant calls the Whole Sha-Bang, a mixture of all three. (It is good to remember that what the restaurant calls spicy is extremely spicy, of an intensity that more or less blots out the flavor of the seafood. Medium-spicy is fine.) It may take four or five attempts to get a glass of iced water, but a second beer appears on the table almost before you have a chance to open your mouth. Recommended dishes: shrimp, crab, crawfish. 742 W. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, (626) 576-9368. Mon.-Fri. 3-10 p.m., Sat.-Sun. noon-10 p.m. Beer. Severely limited lot parking. MC, V. Cajun-Chinese.

Bollini's Pizzeria At the bottom tip of Monterey Park, in a neighborhood better known for its tacos than for anything Chinese, Bollini's is an unlikely bastion of real Neapolitan pizza, a narrow storefront serving as a rudimentary support mechanism for the magnificent Italian oven that turns cords of cherrywood into intense, pizza-blistering heat. Chef Christiano Bollini, who grew up in the neighborhood and put in time at one of the best pizzerias in Naples, turns out brawny, load-bearing crusts, blackened and crisp at the rim; raised and a bit doughy at the center. There are classic margherita pies, unconventional pizza with pesto and shrimp, pizza with three kinds of sausage, with spinach and ricotta, and (shudder) with pineapple and bacon. The enterprise is still on shaky legs, although it is already scheduled to expand into the space next door, and the few tables seem superfluous to the booming to-go operation. The pastas are not going to cause Gino Angelini any sleepless nights. There is as yet no alcohol license. But the heart of any pizzeria is the crust that its pizzaiolo manages to coax out of its fires, and in that, Bollini's is pretty much there. How dedicated is Bollini to the cause? He has the Italian flag tattooed on his arm. 2315 S. Garfield Ave., Monterey Park, (323) 722-7600.Mon. 5-9 p.m., Tues. 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. & 5-10 p.m., Wed.-Sat. 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. & 5-10 p.m. BYOB. Lot and street parking. Major CC. Italian, pizza.

Din Tai Fung If you are of a certain bent, you have probably spent many mornings milling around the parking lot outside the original Din Tai Fung, checking off too many items on the clipboard menu issued with your queue number, waiting for your shot at a steamerful or three of the renowned soup dumplings. Using irrefutable logic, the owner just opened a brand-new branch of his restaurant ... right around the corner. This means that you get to fight for space in the same parking lot and fill up on boba beforehand in the same Chinese kitsch emporium, but you can spend your waiting time pressing up against a handsomely curved wall of glass, behind which squadrons of busy dumpling technicians frolic like porpoises at Sea World. It's the greatest dumpling show on earth. Once you are finally seated in the shining gallery, your order sheets whisked from the table by the hostess, you will find the Din Tai Fung experience to be pretty much the same as it is next door, although the efficiency seems to have been perfected — the food appears as quickly as it would in a Jack in the Box drive-through — and the ambiance is closer to a chic Taipei department store than to a vast food hall. 1088 S. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia, (626) 446-8588. Open daily 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. & 5-9:30 p.m. No alcohol. Lot parking. MC, V. Chinese.