The Best Chinese Restaurants in Los Angeles includes FTCer Chandavkl’s discussion of FTCer Johnny Lee’s Pearl River Deli.
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Love Kim Luu-Ng’s shout out to Dolan’s - which is a fabulous place.
the places listed are worthy of some sort of endorsement for the most part, but personally, if i didn’t care for the place before, any review in this list wasn’t going to change my mind.
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i would have included JYTH aka heavy noodling ii, whose lineage includes dow shaw from the 90’s, as the forerunner of northern chinese cuisine. of course you probably wouldn’t know that between not being old enough to have patronized dow shaw (the original HN) in the 90’s - and the unfortunate assimilation by the JYTH plaza name.
the site has posted a number of articles about chinatown - from all over the US - you can find if you go to their main page. i think they’re worth reading.
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I probably had it as a kid and didn’t know it.
My Mom loves knife cut noodles. I do remember eating it in SGV as well as take out. It might have been the OG JYTH.
I definitely had knife cut noodles at China Islamic because my Mom would get this sour lamb soup in a big pot. I thought it was absolutely gross but I loved the knife cut noodles and sesame bread. We called this style of food, “Ma Family Restaurant”.
How is JYTH now? I think you said the main chef is no longer with them?
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Ma Jia ( 馬家 ) is a Chineseism that can refer to any halal or Central Asian-themed restaurant…
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given that it’s been almost 30 years i’d be surprised if the original chef was still there but i can neither deny nor confirm. IIRC they tried expanding to ESGV once but it didn’t pan out. now that we’ve got a place like lao xi noodle house for shanxi, not to mention shaanxi restaurants now also producing great noodles, HN2’s offerings seem more mundane to me now. the lack of finesse that seemed so charming decades ago - the dumplings were seemingly wrapped in the same dough used for noodles - now just seems unrefined. i can recall when the number of places serving in-house noodles with great “Q” could be counted on the fingers of one hand. kam hong, omar, dow shaw was just about it (the MSG used at china islamic disqualified them from my list). now i can think at least ten off the top of my head: (slashes indicate part of the same chain) omar, dolan’s HN2 & lao xi noodle house/noodle palace xian tasty, liang’s kitchen/cindy’s noodle house/shang jie, northern cafe (MP),bang bang in highland park, qin west, shaanxi garden, lan noodle, etc. and i’m sure i’ve left out a few ESGV venues. the point is that the bar is SO much higher now, reflecting the change in demographics of the more recent immigrants from china.
i feel much the same way about 101 noodle express and their beef roll & their dumplings. they jacked up their prices when they expanded the alhambra location, IMO you can get better and cheaper beef rolls at zui xiang yuan (the old flavor garden) across the street and dumplings from you kitchen in the same mall.
before DTF, the best XLB probably came from the three places in prospect plaza. at least one of them is gone (i forget which), and seemingly everyone is now offering them, with varied levels of proficiency. my choice for QPR remains shanghai dumpling house, and i wish it would reopen soon.
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Fabulous list!
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