![]() Totally memorable.Īnd then we meandered through Little Tokyo past sushi restaurants, ramen bars, and Japanese street food stalls to our last stop, one of LA’s most well-known tourist attractions - Grand Central Market. I’ve never been a fan of mochi until I tasted these soft, almost creamy little cakes. There was strawberry, white bean paste, chocolate, orange, lemon, and other flavors. All the colors of the mochi looked like artistic jeweled cakes. You could hear the pounding in the back of the shop as we looked into the glass and wood display cases. Mochi is a small round cake made from glutinous rice, pounded with a large wooden mallet. A variety of mochi at Fugetsu-Do (Kathy Gunst/Here & Now) Next stop, Little Tokyo! There, our guide Ulysses introduced us to one of the city’s oldest shops - Fugetsu Do Bakery Shop where the same family has been making mochi since 1903. Olvera Street is lined with papel picado. We walked onto Olvera Street, the historic commercial hub for LA’s Mexican community where you can still buy a tortilla press, eat homemade taquitos and listen to live Mexican music. We walked across an overpass above the 101, one of the city’s major freeways that runs north to south, and saw the murals that were painted for the 1984 Olympics and looked down into the ever-present traffic. We walked on and it started to get noisy. It was nearly impossible to believe there weren’t layers of butter inside.Īcross the street at Katsu Sando, we ate a remarkably moist egg salad sandwich on homemade milk bread. It was so incredibly flaky like a really good French croissant. Her flaky, buttery furikake croissant - a plain croissant sprinkled with sesame seeds, seaweed and soy sauce - really won us over. Our best seller is black sesame cookies, chocolate croissants and plain croissants.” A furikake croissant and black sesame cookie from Baker's Bench. Yes, a vegan Chinese bakery.Īccording to owner and baker, Jennifer Yee, “Many Asians are lactose intolerant. We walked on to Markey’s Plaza just off North Broadway to Baker’s Bench, a vegan bakery. The thing about this walking tour is that it’s focused on food, but it’s also a way to experience so many aspects of this city. Los Angeles has some of the most glamorous neighborhoods filled with hillside mansions, but it’s also a place with a crippling unhoused population. What Ulysses is speaking to here is that LA is a city with huge economic divisions. As Ulysses pointed out, “The community here relies on each other.” The community tends to shop for vegetables and basic homewares at small local shops rather than Whole Foods. You’re walking through Chinatown, but within five minutes, you’re walking past a Vietnamese sandwich shop specializing in bahn mi, a Filipino wine bar, California burger joint, French cafes, and a Southern hot chicken restaurant.ĭespite the number of restaurants and dim sum parlors in Chinatown, we noticed something else: There are no supermarkets in Chinatown. The thing about LA is the way cultures collide. Next door at a tiny shop called Steep, we had a traditional Taiwanese tea ceremony, sipping black tea that had been aged in dried tangerine peels for 8 to 10 years and sampled savory BBQ pork bao and sweet Taiwanese egg tarts. (Kathy Gunst/Here & Now)Īnd then we headed to Mandarin Plaza, where we found the James Beard Award finalist restaurant the Angry Egrette, which does not serve Chinese food at all but some of the best fish tacos I’ve ever tasted. ![]() Fish tacos from Angry Egrette in Chinatown. We walked past the Bruce Lee statue where so many movies were filmed. Ulysses pointed out the dumpling shops and small mom-and-pop shops that sell basic home goods. We met our guide, Ulysses Salcito from Culinary Backstreet’s Culinary Walking Tours of LA, on foot under the arch at the entrance to LA’s New Chinatown. But walking is a unique way to see parts of the city you can't see behind the wheel. Most people in LA drive and drive and drive … and sit in lots of traffic. Walking is not exactly what comes to mind when you think of LA. A few months ago, I took a five-hour walking food tour of several LA neighborhoods. There are more than 4,000 taco trucks and close to 25,000 restaurants in LA County that represent cultures and cuisine from all over the world. ![]() Los Angeles is one of the most exciting, diverse food cities in the country. Mochi in many flavors from Fugetsu-Do (Kathy Gunst/Here & Now) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |