Dreaming about ‘normal’ restaurant dining in the Long Beach area - Long Beach Press Telegram
The coronavirus pandemic forced the closure of Los Angeles area restaurants back on March 15. Like most of us, I haven’t had an in-restaurant dining experience ever since. Oh, I’ve gotten takeout — lots and lots of takeout. And I’m grateful for that. But honestly, I miss the joy of sitting in a restaurant, observing the rituals of the kitchen and the dining room, spying on my fellow diners and … enjoying a meal.
I’ve spent my life eating for a living. There are weeks when I dine out for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. It’s part of who I am. Eating in restaurants has been built into my DNA since I lived in New York, then in San Francisco and finally here in Southern California. I am because I dine out. It defines me. And it pains me, sad as it may sound, to eat at home. No matter how good the takeout, it just ain’t the same.
I’ve also spent weekday evenings, and weekend afternoons, driving through the streets of our normally very tasty city, a culinary voyeur, staring mournfully at much loved dining destinations, dreaming of the day when they’ll reopen, and I’ll be able to dine out, once more, even if it’s in a half-occupied room, with the staff wearing face masks and the smell of Purell wafting through the air, rather than braising beef and sizzling salmon.
In recent days, openings have sort of, kind of, partly happened. But then, with the latest surge, that may well turn out to be just a hopeful glimmer. One step forward, two steps (or even three) back.
In the meantime, I can dream — we all can. And what I dream about is returning to my favorites. To the restaurants that, over year years, have made me fat and happy. The warm bread! The crispy salad! The properly plated proteins, starches and veggies!
I’ve got my list — but please don’t call it “Shindler’s list,” for that brings up other, even more unfortunate memories. But let me share it with you — restaurants in the hood where I long to feed when (and if) the world returns.
I’d be happy to hear what’s on your list. Feel free to send it to me at mreats@aol.com. Let’s get nostalgic for noshing together.
Beachwood BBQ & Brewing
210 E. 3rd St., Long Beach; 562-436-4020, www.beachwoodbbq.com
At Beachwood BBQ & Brewing they do have a fine hand with smoking, which you’ll find in the smoked brisket, a meat so tender and sweet, our local New York delis can only dream of anything as good. And when you get to the smoked chicken — jackpot! This is chicken that’s the apotheosis of smoky goodness, with the smoked flavor permeating every fiber of the bird, leaving it cooked all the way through, but neither dry nor chewy. It was even delicious, pulled from the fridge, for lunch the next day — heck, it might have been even better!
And since all the meats come with a choice of two sides, from a list of 16 (along with the requisite cornbread muffin, decent but not great), you can trick your chicken (or ribs, or brisket, or pulled pork, or andouille sausage) up with everything from smoked asparagus (seriously) through garlic-ginger roasted carrots, vanilla-scented pecan yams, blue cheese grits, collard greens, and a kale, barley and walnut salad. Creamed corn too. Happy time.
Worth noting as well are the burnt ends chili, which takes the crispy, culinary objects of desire that are the crusty ends of the smoked brisket, and tossing them with ground veal, cannellini beans, smoked chilies, beer, scallions, smoked cheddar and sour cream. Served with saltines. Honestly, I’m surprised they don’t bake their own in-house.
Humblebrags Eatery
3225 Carson St., Lakewood; 562-429-3161, https://ift.tt/2ObFufa
They serve three meals a day at Humblebrags — I guess for those hitting the links in the morning, and then for those in the neighborhood the rest of the day. It’s an admirably easy menu to negotiate. If you’re of the salad persuasion — and here in SoCal, aren’t we all? — lunch is a time of many good options.
Large, well-assembled plates of a proper Cobb (chopped, but not too chopped), an heirloom tomato and burrata creation (with lines of both pesto and balsamic, very colorful), a chunky old school iceberg wedge, and if you need to mix protein with your greens, both a steak salad and a grilled chicken salad. The grilled chicken comes with shredded mozzarella; the steak with blue cheese crumbles. Humbly, details are well respected here.
There are sandwiches (of course), and burgers (of course, including a bison burger with blue cheese and a chipotle aioli) and then, some dinner dishes begin to creep in — for those duffers in need of a serious feed, I suppose, after a trying 18 holes. They’re as soul-satisfying as could be.
If you’re hungry, give the Godfather Skillet a try — which is essentially a meal of linguine and meatballs, served with lots of pecorino. Ditto the chicken pesto pasta, and the very substantial, seriously dense meatloaf — just like mom would have made, had mom been a better cook.
The aforementioned soup deserves some kudos. It changes from day to day, served by the cup or the bowl, a substantial chicken noodle on Wednesdays, a chunky chicken tortilla on Thursdays, and a really wonderful chicken posole on Saturdays and Sundays — as good a reason as any to head for Humblebrags.
Jongewaard’s Bake ‘n Broil
3697 Atlantic Ave., Long Beach; 562-595-0396, thebakenbroil.com
I’ve been to Jongewaard’s Bake ‘n Broil so many times over the years for breakfast, that it comes as something of a surprise to notice that Jongewaard’s is not just a pancake and egg dish joint. Though based on the morning crowds, which spill out onto the patio, it’s easy to perceive Jongewaard’s as one of those many Long Beach eateries that closes in early afternoon, after the egg supply finally runs out.
Rather, Jongewaard’s finally closes at 9 p.m. most nights (8:30 on Sundays). And there’s much to eat there that’s not breakfast. Though I must admit, those banana nut pancakes call out for me to choose them instead.
The sine qua non of lunch or dinner at Jongewaard’s has to be the chicken pot pie — a dish so good, it deserves a descriptive — perhaps the iconic chicken pot pie, or the legendary chicken pot pie, or even the fabled chicken pot pie. It fits perfectly into the Bake ‘n Broil pledge of, “Simply Good Food.”
For so many of us, it’s a quintessential taste of our childhoods — only better than the Swanson frozen pies we ate back in the day. So much better. Rather than shards of what hopefully was chicken, in a soggy pastry, the Jongewaard’s version is flaky and fresh, with sizable chunks of chicken, along with recognizable carrots and peas.
The sauce isn’t a somewhat scary glop; it’s a gravy, as gravy was intended to be. And yes, the pies travel very well, though they’re so good, I prefer not to freeze them; I don’t want to do anything that undermines the essential goodness of this quintessentially American dish. (And yes, I know it’s British. But it’s also Pennsylvania Dutch. So we have a fair claim on the pie.)
The food at Jongewaard’s both warms the body, and the soul — and fills the stomach very nicely too, at prices that seem to be out of an earlier time. There’s a pot roast on the menu — pot roast, cooked long and slow, tender and sweet, just like mom made on Sunday nights, only better.
There’s a chicken fried steak, worthy of a middle American diner — which is a compliment, and a big one. And though they’ve upgraded the name from Salisbury steak, the ground burger steak is a glorious throwback to a dish I used to get at the old Horn & Hardart chain in New York City, where it always seemed so exotic. Here, it comes with grilled onions, and with the options of add-ons like Swiss, cheddar, jack, chili, and sautéed mushrooms. And be sure to check out the menu card of pies and cakes, freshly baked every day — 10 pies, four cream pies, six cakes — and two more listed under the heading, “Lush & Cream Cheese.”
The cinnamon rolls and coffee cake are both pretty great as well. Which means, at Jongewaard’s, even if you can’t have your cake, and eat it too, you can have your chicken pot pie and eat your cake. Or your pie. The lemon meringue is a particular favorite. It makes me a kid again, wondering how the heck meringue could taste so good, no matter how many times I ordered it.
Joe Jost
2803 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach; 562-439-5446, www.joejosts.com
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Joe Jost — in fact, both Joe Senior and Joe Junior. And the first Joe Jost, founder of the venerable and much love saloon on Anaheim Street, is immortalized in a long, and heartfelt essay on the joint’s website, where we learn that “Joe was born in a small Hungarian town called Istranfold, now in Yugoslavia. At the young age of 12 he was given a choice of either becoming a priest or getting a job. Off he went to live with an uncle in a nearby village to serve a four-year apprenticeship as a barber.
“You see, Joe had a dream of his own. Fascinated by the books he had read about the United States, he romanticized about journeying to America. In those days, I’m told that you had to have a skill or trade before coming to the U.S. This being a part of his plan at the age of 16, he sailed a steamer that landed in New York Harbor. He never forgot the moment he first gazed upon the Statue of Liberty, a memory he kept close to his heart for his entire lifetime…”
The story goes on for quite a distance, with Joe journeying from job to job and coast to coast (and to Down Under, for awhile, as well). Eventually he wound up in Southern California, where he opened a shop first on Balboa Island in Newport Beach — and then, in 1924, in Long Beach, where he ran what his teetotaler wife Edith referred to as “the store.” It’s a classic American story, about a classic Long Beach destination — loved for its beer, its sandwiches, its peanuts — and most of all, for its pickled eggs. Which are sold to eat in-house with pretzels, and in large jars to take home. I doubt there’s a restaurant in America that makes better pickled eggs — or sells more of them.
Lacquered
3632 E. Broadway, Long Beach; 562-881-8105
The chicken at Lacquered — a storefront cafe at the edge of Bluff Heights and Belmont Heights, that’s an exercise in purest serendipity — isn’t so much lacquered, as it is marinated, flavored, herbed, sauced, basted, cared for, and served with much love.
The result is a remarkable bird, one of the best in Long Beach. No, heck! One of the best in Southern California, land of much tasty poultry.
There are three chicken options at Lacquered — the original lemon & pepper with garlic butter; the house blend blackened with barbecue sauce; and the Peking-style soy lacquered, simmered in Vietnamese soy broth and Asian spices and herbs. The chickens are all organic. And you have three further choices, making the process one you might want to consider before committing yourself to having some fun with chicken parts.
The opening gambit is a quarter chicken (either breast, or thigh and drumstick) comes with legumes & grains or garlic noodles; with remarkable grilled scallion bread (which is not to be given short shrift); with house pickled vegetables, and a choice of spicy peanut sauce or mustard vinaigrette, along with garlic sauce. It’s a wonderful chicken, moist on the inside, crispy on the outside, with a crust so good, it’s hard not to gobble it down, despite your pledge to watch your cholesterol and all that.
And the sides are nigh-on perfect — did I mention the crispy scallion bread. I’ll mention it again — it’s that good!
Phnom Penh Noodle Shack
1644 Cherry Ave., Long Beach; 562-433-0032, www.thenoodleshack.com
The name to the contrary, there’s more than noodles on the menu at Phnom Penh Noodle Shack. There are also half a dozen or so rice soups, and a trio of breads that the restaurant runs out of early on. By lunchtime, the breads may well be gone. But the noodles and the soups abide — Phnom Penh Noodle Shack isn’t just a place to go for a taste of Cambodia, it’s a journey to Cambodia, on the edge of a residential neighborhood in mid-city Long Beach.
The Shack opens at seven in the morning, serving a Cambodian breakfast of noodles, rice and bread to locals, heading off to work. The crowd grows logarithmically during the day, with plenty of non-locals flocking to the Shack for lunch — at three in the afternoon, when the restaurant closes, it’s still pretty much jammed. I’m guessing that “student noodles” are called “student noodles,” because they’re inexpensive, and filling.
Interestingly, no matter what you opt to eat here, you’ll wind up with soup as well. The noodles come with a cup of pork bones soup on the side. And the noodle soups themselves, somewhat perversely, allow you the option of “dry” (soupless) noodles, or “wet” (with soup). Though when you get them dry, you still get soup on the side.
Indeed, it’s soup that dominates the menu. At the top, it reads “Noodles Soup,” offering five types of noodles to choose from (I like the “big egg noodles”). After which, there’s a choice of 10 dishes, including the House Special Phnom Penh Noodles, made with pork four ways (sliced, ground, stomach and liver) and with shrimp.
Mo’s Special Noodles add on beef balls. The Chluy Bowl turns to beef intestines, pork rinds and quail eggs. And if pork bone soup isn’t your thing, the beef stew soup comes in a tomato broth. The soups all come kid-sized and large. Go large — they travel very well.
Saint & Second
4828 E. 2nd St., Long Beach, 562-433-4828, www.saintandsecond.com
It’s a bit hard to cubbyhole the food here, for it stands somewhere between gastropub and New American, between eclectic and eccentric. It’s a menu that should make a proper West Coast foodie feel right at home.
The menu is divided into Smalls, Bigs, Burgers, Flat Breads, Soups & Salads and Sides — with a box for oysters. And though the Bigs are tempting, there are so many Smalls that cry out for a taste, you may never get to the 22 ounce rib chop for two (with roasted root veggies and shiitake butter), or the roasted organic chicken with cauliflower puree (with broccolini and fennel).
Instead, if you’re a committed grazer (and aren’t we all?), this is the land of familiar dishes, made with unfamiliar twists — a very creative menu. Consider the hummus, for instance. It’s made with fava beans, rather than garbanzos, flavored with smoked paprika and caperberries. It’s both hummus, and not hummus at the same time. It’s hummus on steroids.
Or how about the grilled prawns, served salted, with the heads still on, with a spicy green chimichurri sauce and a sort of creamed guacamole. It’s a very messy dish; be sure to ask for extra napkins. Ditto the hickory smoked lamb ribs with fried basil, which is so messy to eat, no way that ancho chili glaze was coming off with a napkin.
The options are so many — how to choose between an appetizer of southern-fried quail and pozole clams, between duck meatballs with shishito peppers and marrow bones with mushroom and olive tapenade, between lobster & Dungeness crab cakes and a crab, corn and coconut soup.
There’s a fondness for pork here — in the double-cut heritage pork chop, the pork banh mi sandwich with Sriracha mayo, the pork belly flat bread with kimchi and mozzarella. It’s a combination you don’t run into every day. But then, Saint & Second is filled with dishes and tastes and swigs not found every day. Or any day, for that matter — except here.
Uncle Fung Borneo Eatery
5716 E. 7th St., Long Beach; 562-494-3888, https://ift.tt/3fecKyi
Peter Then — aka Uncle Fung — has done more to bring the flavors of Borneo, Malaysia, Indonesia and the South Pacific to Southern California than just about anyone else, for which he certainly deserves our thanks, and probably a Beard Award, and frankly, if it existed, a Nobel Prize for Global Cuisine. For this is a world of tastes so amazingly intense, so mouth-pleasing, so tummy-happy-making, that it’s a surprise there aren’t restaurants offering the chow of region in every spare mini-mall space.
There are colors to this cooking; it fairly well glows on the plate. Consider the many merits of gado gado. Which is often described as a salad, though it stretches the meaning of the word as we known and revere it here in SoCal. I suppose it’s a “salad” more because it’s made of vegetables, than because of its greens, which seem on the plate as a bit of an afterthought — though lettuce, cabbage, cucumber and bean sprouts all appear. But what you mostly come away with from your big (very big!) plate of gado gado is the joys of fried tofu, and the pleasure of the house peanut sauce — which would probably make my Nikes taste pretty good.
There are hard-cooked eggs too — which add much to the fun. Hard-boilers on a salad are always a good thing. There’s chicken satay too — spelled “sate ayam” in Malay — which is a reassuring dish to find, for it comes with more of that good peanut sauce and some sliced cucumber, coated with fried garlic chips. It’s easy to say that chicken satay is chicken satay, and what’s the big deal? But this is satay on steroids and stilts — a head above the usual.
For the true Borneo experience, these are dishes that must be had. Along, of course, with the fried roti prata flour pancake, which feels like a dish mamas made around the world for their sprouts. It’s a pancake with levels of flavor, a depth of taste. And it doesn’t hurt that the curry sauce that comes with it is a curry sauce to dream about.
And then, there’s the housemade hot chili sauce (or to be more precise, very hot chili sauce), served with Indonesian fried chicken which, as the menu, observes, “isn’t the fine shattering crisp of Southern fried chicken; it’s a heart, chewy fry, halfway to crunchy jerky…” It’s how I like my chicken — so crackly it tastes like a giant chicken shaped potato chip.
Rounding out the menu, there’s a trio of Singapore style noodle curry soups, which seem to be more noodle and curry than soup. And to wash it all down, there’s tropical fruit tea, chrysanthemum tea, Borneo style milk tea with grass jelly, Borneo style chocolate drink, honey green tea, iced milk, and Borneo style coffee — which like Thai and Vietnamese coffee, makes our American joe taste like a very weak sister.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
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