To Live and Eat in Highland Park
NELA yorkblvd points out that 5 NELA resturaunts made jonathan gold‘s/LA weekly’s 99 Things to Eat in LA Before You Die list. not to be a hater, but the list gets smaller if you remove that highland park adjacent tourist trap for the westsiders and the our own hipster vietnamese restaurant with incredibly poor service and a $9 veggie pho (i’m not bitter). so i will leave you with three selections that both mr gold and i can agree.
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Huarache de Cabeza
A huarache, the definitive unit of Mexico City street food, is a flattish, concave trough of masa shaped like a size-12 sandal, pan-fried or deep-fried, then smeared with beans, sprinkled with meat and layered with lettuce, grated cheese and cream. Part of the fun is eating the thing — a huarache is too brawny to attack with a flimsy plastic fork, and you will either burn your fingers or wait for your lunch to cool into corn-flavored cement. Emily Post provides no guidelines for eating a huarache. You can have a huarache topped with almost anything, from the black corn fungus called huitlacoche to standard-issue steak, but I like it best with cabeza — rich, gelatinous meat pulled from a cow’s head and cooked down into an ultraconcentrated essence of beef. El Huarache Azteca #1, 5225 York Blvd., Highland Park. (323) 478-9572.
El Atacor #11’s Potato Tacos
You will encounter many schools of thought when it comes to these tacos, some of which call for coarsely mashed spuds, others for herbs, and still others for a wallop of chorizo. But all pale before El Atacor #11’s tacos de papa: thin corn tortillas folded around gooey spoonfuls of puree and fried to an indelicate, shattering crunch. The barely seasoned potatoes ooze out of the tacos with the deliberate grace of molten lava. The glorious stink of hot grease and toasted corn subsumes any subtle, earthy hint of potato, and guacamole-drenched tacos de papasevaporate so quickly from the table that you understand why they come 10 to an order. El Atacor #11, 2622 N. Figueroa St., L.A. (323) 441-8477.
Eibis Restaurant’s Arabes: (via york blvd)
I wrote a pretty sophomoric post a few months ago about hunting down an Arabes truck in East LA, comparing it to Ahab’s White Whale from Moby Dick. The irony of course is that I drive within two blocks of Eibis Restaurant , which specializes in Poblano food, every day. As a prerequisite for writing a food post I have to sprinkle a little knowledge on the dish at hand: Allegedly, Arabes trace their origins to Lebanese immigrants to central Mexico who brought spices from their homelands and applied them to pork, instead of the beef and lamb that was more common in Lebanon. (For two other examples of successful Lebanese-Mexican fusion, see Salma Hayek, and Carlos Slim.) At Eibis, the pork is roasted on a veritcal spit on the street (so as to maximize the exposure to exhaust emissions), filled with some salsa, and rolled into pan arabe, essentially a slightly thick flour tortilla, that has been warmed in corn oil. One word of warning: I don’t think anyone at this restaurant speaks English beyond “hello”. If you don’t speak Spanish, bring a friend, or prepare a script in advance.
Eibis Restaurant 231 North Avenue 50 (323) 999-0109
Bookmarks for July 1st through July 3rd [del.icio.us]
![Bookmarks for July 1st through July 3rd [del.icio.us]](http://www.paulbailey.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/family_easter_20021-150x150.jpg)
Bookmarks from July 1st through July 3rd:[del.icio.us]
- Jazz: The Music of Unemployment: Twitter killed the video star – christopher weingarten makes the point that crowd sourcing killed great music. because there is lots of “who” you should listen to, but not much “why” (via andrew durkin)
- AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com -a good cure for the summertime blahs
- Los Angeles Eat+Drink – Snook Attack: La Chente – johnathan gold again tempts me with his food porn. “Have you ever encountered pescado Zarandeado? Because it is as intimidating as an entrée can get, a vast, smoking creature split open at the backbone and flopped open into a sort of skeleton-punctuated mirror image of itself, wisps of steam rising around the onions and lemon slices with which it is strewn, served on the kind of plastic tray you may remember from your high school cafeteria, which is probably the only vessel broad enough to handle the fish. As served at Mariscos La Chente, a Westside restaurant specializing in the seafood dishes of Sinaloa and Nayarit, it is so menacing that you scarcely know whether to eat it or beat it to death with a stick.”
- Industrial Jazz Group – ReverbNation -now that i’m on break i’m looking forward to listening to the IJG’s latest album LEEF. “Frustrated by the limitations of “Jazz, the Institution,” but equally resistant to the confines of modern pop, the Industrial Jazz Group has slowly pioneered a middle way. Its music is an idiosyncratic blend of rock, bebop, cartoon soundtracks, blues, funk, Balkan music, doo wop, and, well, a lot of other stuff. (In the end, it’s neither “industrial” nor “jazz,” so don’t let the name fool you.)”
