Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles

by Jonathan Gold

Overview

Jonathan Gold has eaten it all. Counter Intelligence collects over 200 of Gold's best restaurant discoveries--from inexpensive lunch counters you won't find on your own to the perfect undiscovered dish at a beaten-path establishment. He reveals the hidden kitchens where Los Angeles' ethnic communities feed their own, including the best of cuisine from Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Burma, Canton, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Middle East, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam and more. Not to mention the perfectly prepared hamburger and Los Angeles' quintessential hot dog.

Counter Intelligence is the richest and most complete guide to eating in Los Angeles. The listings include where to find it and how much you'll pay (in many cases, not very much) with appendices that cover food types and feeding by neighborhood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312276348
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/01/2000
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	539 KB

About the Author

The first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize, Jonathan Gold (1960-2018) wrote restaurant reviews for Los Angeles magazine, California magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet magazine. His book Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles collects critiques originally published in his long-running column for the L.A. Weekly.

Gold was also the subject of the documentary, City of Gold.

Read an Excerpt

Counter Intelligence

Where to cat in the real Los Angeles

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By Jonathan Gold

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2000 Jonathan Gold
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-27634-8

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CHAPTER 1

A

AGUNG

3909 BEVERLY BLVD., LOS ANGELES; [phone]. MON.—SAT., NOON9P. M.

The overeducated misfits who frequent East Hollywood's ethnic restaurants have their well-known favorites: Zankou for chicken; Sanamluang for Thai noodles; Marouch for hummus, grilled quail, and fattouch. For café con leche, there's Tropical; for weissbeer and wurst, the Red Lion. And Agung near downtown has become the one place to go when you want avocado in your coffee.

Agung is a tidy, cinder-block Indonesian restaurant in an untidy neighborhood, a soothing world of spicy curries and continuous soft hits squeezed between a medical building and a lube pit a block or two south of the Hollywood Freeway. It's a tiny, family-run place, decorated with travel posters and batik. The customers seem to be mostly Indonesian students from USC and Indonesian-speaking Dutch guys involved in international trade. They always have avocado in their coffee.

Iced coffee and the creamy fruit go pretty well together, especially when blended with milk and ice into the fluffy consistency of a malted—coffee brings out a sweet richness in the avocado that isn't apparent in guacamole. If Tuscan peasants had stumbled across this combination, es alpukat, people would be lining up outside Melrose coffeehouses to drink the stuff from little cups. Agung is famous for its other beverages too, a Bordeaux-colored drink called es cincau that tastes a little like jellied Robitussin and a rosewater-scented drink called es kelapa mundi that's spiked with gelatinous shreds of baby coconut. Everybody seems to like a sweet, cool drink that's made with coconut, jackfruit, and avocado, which tastes a little like a malted from Mars.

Agung is probably the best place in California to try Padang-style cooking, the fiery, complex cooking of central Sumatra, but you'll find pretty good versions of the dishes that would be standard eating if Indonesian food were as common as Thai—clumpy fried rice with scallions and ham; delicious fried bakmi noodles with dark soy, shrimp, and plenty of cabbage; the chicken soup soto ayam, thick with fresh vegetables and fragrant with spice. The crisp lettuce salad called gado-gado is dressed with chile-spiked peanut butter and sprinkled with crushed shrimp chips. There's decent satay, sweeter than the Thai kind, skewers of grilled chicken, pork or lamb, and an unusual, Sumatra-style tongue satay served with a pasty Indonesian velouté. The turmeric-stained lamb stew is fine, if a little ordinary.

And the Sumatran dishes shine. Empek-empek may sound like a noise made by a small Sumatran lizard, but is essentially a crusty turnover of house-pounded fish cake stuffed with egg, steamed, and fried. It comes cut into peppery, rubbery chunks, served in a bowl with glass noodles and diced cucumber floating in a soy broth. It's the sort of thing Japanese kaiseki restaurants are always trying to do but never quite get right. Or try lontong, loosely packed rice cakes cooked with mixed meats in a coconut broth, or telur belado, a big tofu patty that's been battered, fried, and doused with sweet, dark soy.

The best way to eat at Agung may be to order several items from the section of the menu called "rice table combination," tapas-size portions of crispy fried chicken in a vivid fresh chile sauce, curried beef, chilied hard-boiled egg, or Sumatra-style curry-roasted beef—served with a big plate of rice—that cost about a buck and a half apiece.

Don't miss the smoky dendeng belado, slices of beef fried until they attain the size, shape and crunchiness of Pringles.

ALADDIN FALAFEL

2180 S. WESTWOOD BLVD., LOS ANGELES; [phone]. MON.—SAT., 11A.M.-11P.M.; SUN., NOON-10P.M.

Consider the falafel, the Middle East's favorite grease bomb, a drippy, screaming-orange postcard from culinary cultures that would really rather be remembered for kebabs, seasoned rice, and sheep's brains garnished with sauteed pine nuts. Most food from Arabic-speaking countries is healthy, sparkling fresh, breathing the vitality of the earth. But a falafel sandwich is an oozing, stinking mess of fried chickpea batter and garlicky sesame goo that may have more calories per ounce than pure hog lard.

Still, as with cheeseburgers and sex, even bad falafel can be pretty good. I grew up craving the industrial-grade falafel from the cafeteria next to the molecular biology building at UCLA, and I still sneak down there once or twice a year for a hit of the sloppy, odiferous stuff. I am no stranger to the oil-soaked pleasures of Falafel King, whose vat of boiling orange grease has been bubbling in its Westwood window for generations, or to the reasonably austere sandwiches served at Fairfax-area stands like Eat-a-Pita. Falafel usually finds its way onto the table at the Armenian-Lebanese restaurants Marouch, Caroussel, and Carnival. I even have a certain fondness for the hard, Sahara-dry falafel reluctantly served at Zankou Chicken, a dish that I have never seen anybody else actually buy. The best falafel place in Los Angeles County is Golden Dome, a Palestinian-owned restaurant in Bellflower, but lately, I have been going to Aladdin Falafel so often that my truck practically guides itself into the restaurant's tiny parking lot. In contrast to the other falafel stands in town, which are mostly Israeli owned, Aladdin Falafel is run by Palestinian-Americans, and the flavor is subtly different, smokier, tinged with cool. A sign posted in the window announces halal (Islamic kosher) meat, and a framed prayer is mounted high on a wall. The air is perfumed with cumin, garlic, clean oil. Classic Arabic riffage wails from the restaurant's stereo—a small, Tom Schnabel—ish selection of Middle Eastern CDs rests in a spinning case near the cash register—and even the Formica of the main counter is inlaid with blocky Islamic designs.

If you have been to a Middle Eastern restaurant lately, you can probably recite Aladdin's menu by heart: lamb kebab plates, rotisserie chicken, sour grape leaves stuffed with rice and vegetables. The shwarma is fine, thin, garlicky shavings of extremely well-done meat, flavored with cinnamon and cloves and sliced off a rotating spit; three plump, little grilled lamb chops, slightly grainy, are not precisely what you'd find at a grand restaurant like Campanile, but are a good value for eight bucks. The tabbouleh salad is fresh and tart, with parsley enough to deodorize a dozen people were the dish not so laden with garlic; the baba ghanoush is smooth, fresh, and cool. With every dinner comes a bowl of terrific cumin-laced lentil soup, yellow as a school bus, mellowed with a squirt of citrus.

But you've come for the falafel. It is a small miracle, an oblate Ping-Pong ball of ground chickpeas whose thick, tawny crust gives way to a dense interior, mildly spiced, barely greasy, tinted green with pureed herbs. Without the benefit of tahini, most falafel collapses into dry powder under the teeth; this one is moister, a little more resilient, almost chewy, and you may go through an entire plate of the stuff (it is also available dressed as a sandwich) before realizing you have forgotten to dampen the patties with sauce. On a plate with hummus, peppers, salad, and tart pickled turnips, Aladdin's falafel is a satisfying lunch whether you roll it into a pita or not.

ALAMADA SWAP MEET

ALAMEDA AVE. AT 45TH ST. MON., WED.—FRI., 10A.M.—7P.M., SAT. AND SUN., 8A.M.—7P.M. MANY OF THE FOOD STALLS ARE OPEN WEEKENDS ONLY.

The Alameda Swap Meet may be the most overwhelming place you can visit on a Sunday afternoon, an immense converted factory complex south of downtown swarming with people, stuffed with hundreds of stalls selling everything from seaturtle extract to straw ranchero hats, fluffy white first-communion dresses to the latest in pinstriped gangsta wear, and alive with the racket of two dozen pumped CD players blasting trumpet-bright norteño hits. You are reminded that the Mexican population of Los Angeles is second only to that of Mexico City itself.

The crush to get into the parking lot can sometimes back up Alameda for as much as a mile, and the streets teem with trucks selling tacos, or fresh mackerel, or bootleg rap cassettes, or a queer, sweet cactus drink called lechugilla that is sold in plastic packets that resemble silicon implants.

Outside at the swap meet, in a vast sort of asphalt plaza that separates the two main buildings, the fences are decorated with Mexican flags and portraits of Mexican revolutionaries. Small children totter about clutching cotton candy and ears of roasted corn. Sometimes a DJ presides over hundreds of couples executing complicated two-steps. It's a vast fiesta every weekend of the year. Around the perimeter of the plaza and stretching back along an arcade to the southernmost parking lot is a bewildering succession of food stalls that perfume the air with grilled meat and sputtering oil, and a certain high note of stickiness—every kind of Mexican food you could possibly walk around with, and a few that are destined to land straight on your shoes.

The big food stall under the awning closest to the main building is a full-on Mexican restaurant without the walls, featuring grilled chicken, carne asada and pretty good steam-table dishes: chile verde, chicken mole, and a really good, spicy goat-meat stew the color of fresh blood. The big awning at the other end shades a Salvadoran stall where a woman pats pupusas one after the other, frying them hard and stacking them up in front of her. The pupusas are fantastic, if not the subtlest version of the cheese-stuffed corn patties, ready to be mounded with the spicy cabbage slaw called curtido and moistened with a fiery, brick-red smoked-chile sauce. Around toward the south parking lot, marinated flank steak sizzles on steel-drum grills until it's tough enough to go into tacos. Across a walkway, at a stall named Tejuno, there are tostadas smeared with beans, garnished with lettuce and ripe tomato, and topped with slices of tart pickled pigskin or tasty roast pork. Outside the El Texanito ice cream shop, a stand specializes in huaraches, which are tasty sandal-shaped patties of masa mounded with diced nopales (cactus), sour cream, and peppery, crisp bits of extremely well-done meat.

The Alameda Swap Meet is the land of chile and lime, which are dribbled on freshly fried potato chips, sprinkled on popcorn, daubed on sliced mangos, squirted on the delicious ceviche, and splashed onto marinated-shrimp tostadas served at El Bucanero seafood, a concession hard by the main building's entrance. (As far as I know, there is no chile in any of the sweet, hospital-green limeade the vendors ladle out from iced glass demijohns, nor in the orangeade, nor in the canteloupe drink.)

One popular dish here, served in several different places, involves chile, lime, mayonnaise, kernels of fresh corn, and a generous squirt of Liquid Parkay, all mixed up in a cardboard bowl. It's obliquely delicious in its way, although not the sort of thing you'd smear on a slab of La Brea Bakery bread. You can also get corn that has been barbecued in steel drums until it becomes corn-on-the-cob jerky, chewy enough to chomp on for the duration of a really long drive.

And you can always perform a scientific assessment of the state of flautas, those deep-fried rolled-tortilla things that Jack-in-the-Box calls "taquitos," by rigorously testing each of the dozen or so varieties available: fat or thin; topped with sour cream or drenched in guacamole; brittle throughout or kind of bendy in the middle; but especially the meaty ones in the far southeast corner. That's my idea of pure empirical research.

ALEGRIA

3510 SUNSET BLVD., SILVER LAKE; [phone]. MON.-THURS., 10A.M.-10P. M., FRI. AND SAT., 10A.M.-11P.M.

Alegria is everything you could want in a neighborhood Mexican restaurant, with cool Day of the Dead stuff on the walls, fish tacos on the menu, and a motherly chef-owner, Nadine Trujillo, who may scold you for filling up on chips before dinner. There's no beer, but a waitress will whip up a strawberry-papaya shake for you if somebody's remembered to buy the fruit; if not, the homemade lemon agua fresca may be the best lemonade in town. The secret house salsa, made with pureed chipotle chiles and enough garlic to knock an owl out of its tree, is pretty great too.

The restaurant's clientele is the essence of groovy, post-boho Silver Lake—Latino families, spooning gay and lesbian couples, Spaceland regulars, a scattering of coffeehouse guys—searching for satori in pocketbook-size veggie burritos. On Saturday mornings the crowd includes most of the people you used to see in Silver Lake half a dozen years ago, only with one-year-olds instead of Guatemalan friendship bracelets wrapped around their arms. Like the Farmers Market, the bleachers at Dodger Stadium, and the Aztec playground outside Plaza de la Raza, Alegria feels like L.A.

The original Alegria was a grimy taqueria in the parking lot behind the Burrito King in Echo Park, known for its excellent carne asada but sparse in its amenities. The newer place, stuffed into a Silver Lake mini-mall space formerly occupied by the great Yucatecan joint Don Luis, is a sweet, family place in an area dominated by squalid taco dives and sterile margarita mills. Trujillo's food is sometimes regional, sometimes not, sometimes chefly, and always intensely personal. The cooking here is both blessed and marred with quirks, the lovable eccentricities you'd expect of food in a Mexican home.

Carne asada, which here means slabs of lime-marinated, grilled skirt steak instead of the usual forty-five grams of grayish beef byproduct, is stuffed into tacos or folded with beans, salsa, and herbs into one of the rare burritos in this world that might actually be worth five clams. When the carne asada is crusted with melted cheese, garnished with grilled poblano chiles, and flanked with rolled enchiladas in a sharply delicious roasted tomatillo sauce, it becomes part of a classic Tampiqueña plate.

Soft, salty carnitas may lack the garlicky presence and the crackly crunch you look for in lard-braised pork, but the flesh has the sweet, subtle presence of suckling pig. Tortitas, egg pancakes studded with aromatic vegetables and flakes of fresh crab, are misshapen, heavy masses, a little oversalted with an elaborate, almost Creole-like seasoning that makes them somehow compelling, even on the odd nights when they are made with artificial crab. Tacos a la crema, like deep-fried, potato-stuffed taguitos daubed with chunky guacamole and chipotle sauce, are almost up there with the legendary flautas at Ciro's.

But sometimes the cooking at Alegria is a little too close to the food at Mom's house. Chilaquiles, soggy things not up to the strict standard set by Toribrio Prado at Cha Cha Cha, are overwhelmed by the sharp, green flavor of unripe tomatoes. Something called budin Moctezuma, a casserole of tortillas, cheese, and vegetables, tastes a little like something your culinarily challenged aunt Armida might bring to a potluck family picnic.

The best food at Alegria may revolve around Trujillo's extraordinary mole sauce: sharp, thick, sweetly complex, with topnotes of smoke, clove, and citrus, lashed with dried-chile heat, black enough to darken the brightest Pepsodent smile. Enmoladas are corn tortillas folded around melted cheese and moistened with mole; chilapitas are sort of chicken sopes doused with the stuff. There is chicken mole, and sometimes a Oaxacan-style special of chicken, pork, and plantains cooked in mole. You can get a side of mole sauce to put on your burrito.

But sometimes you can't get mole at all. "The mole isn't ready yet," the waitress confessed one time. "It takes three days to make, a million steps, and has something like twenty ingredients. And if you'd been cooking as much as Nadine has been lately, you'd be in a bad mood too."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Counter Intelligence by Jonathan Gold. Copyright © 2000 Jonathan Gold. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Editorial Reviews

Gold’s “curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself….He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer.”—Pete Wells, The New York Times

“Gold redefined the genre.”—Los Angeles Times

“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV….and (before) people really being into ethnic food in a serious way…Jonathan…got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community.”—Ruth Reichl, former editor-in-chief of Gourmet and author of TENDER AT THE BONE

From the Publisher