so you also hold out when you don’t like a place?
Seriously, dude. Move on.
Bopomofo Cafe, about a year old I think
Taiwanese fusion place featuring Mapo Tofu tots, Lu Rou Nachos with Cong You Chips, a chicken sandwich, and all white meat popcorn chicken.
The most Taiwanese thing on the menu might be the Mofo Club Sandwich, their take on Taiwanese breakfast sandwiches (white bread, triple layer, crusts off). I’ll give that a try. The rest of the menu…
Taiwanese Fusion has arrived in this corner of SGV. Golden Deli, Tasty Noodle House, Southern Town are pretty traditional. Nearby across is also OG Luscious, and Hui Tou Xiang. The other place across you got Golden Leaf and Kingburg are both Taiwanese as f. Labobatory of course, still a hard pass for me when you can’t even make a traditional milk tea right.
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for some reason i keep thinking of that place as being mainly about boba, which isn’t a high priority for me. i had a friend who managed to develop kidney stones because he was guzzling boba all day.
and you neglected to mention the korean chicken place at that intersection and benten ramen next to golden deli; and there’s family related vietnam house on the SE corner. it’s as pan-asian an intersection as i can think of in LA when it comes to food: vietnamese, shanghai/taiwanese/dalian, korean & japanese. and IIRC there’s actually another korean place at that intersection as well that serves bo ssam.
I haven’t tried those places.
Feels weird to eat Korean and Japanese in SGV. That’s me though.
both japanese and korean places are starting to chase (the new) chinese $ in the SGV. more obvious with japanese places after major japanese car companies left town; there’s a magazine (in chinese) with someone like 30,000 circulation (in LA) that’s about nothing but local japanese restaurants. you’ve got road to seoul in alhambra that does pretty well. the branch of sun nong dan in san gabriel hired mandarin speaking wait staff. i still partake of their breakfast special from time to time, at and first it threw me to hear them speaking amongst themselves in mandarin instead of korean. and IIRC there’s been a significant number of openings in the ESGV as well.
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You shouldn’t, at least for Japanese, as many had settled into the southern section of Monterey Park in the early 1950s. That’s why you’d find a few restaurants in that southern section such as Shinano on Atlantic and Tai Hei on Garfield.
And in the East SGV, there’s been a growing Korean community from Rowland Heights to Walnut over the last 10+ years.
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Bopomofo took over the space that was once Fine Garden Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant. The only place that serves a large variety of vegetarian dim sum items.
+1 on the Japanese in Monterey Park comment. Indeed as I explained in the LA Times Off Menu video on Chinese food in the SGV, the Japanese move into that area in the 1950s was the triggering event for the San Gabriel Valley becoming the gigantic Chinatown it is today.
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there’s still a fairly small concentration of japanese left in MP, but most of the restaurants that were a result of that emigration have since bitten the dust. taihei might be the only one left in MP that’s worth mentioning. ducks has been in san gabriel since 1995 or so.
when i moved here from the midwest in the late 80’s i thought tokyo lobby was the greatest. truly, ignorance is bliss (i think the place was run by chinese). but i still have fond memories of the place. order a $6 special, take home leftovers you could take to work the next day. they had those rolls underneath plastic wrap to show what they looked like. once i was there when i noticed that one of the pieces of california roll was missing and the cashier was hoping no one had eaten it since it was about five days old. yeek! the ESGV location is still going strong, but i haven’t frequented that location in over 30 years.
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xiang la hui also received a favorable review from the times back on the 13th of this month.
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the times posted another WSGV article, this time mentioning 3 places that have recently opened in the SGV. two of them were already on my to do list: guilin rice noodle and 1919 lanzhou, but the 3rd was completely off my radar. happy table at 2nd & valley in alhambra has been replaced by new qing dao chinese. and @chandavkl has already been there and posted a yelp review last december.
i note that the new place still has a number of happy table items on the menu including the lamb ribs with four different sauces (which i recommend)
but they’re supposed have qing dao style fish dumplings, among other specialities.
One strange sidelight was that I must have been one of their first customers since there were zero Yelp reviews. So why were the menus that had the restaurant name on it all so dog eared?
the laminated ones or the paper ones? there’s pictures of what looks like a laminated menu on yelp, probably submitted by the owner.
those glass noodles you had are definitely a dongbei style dish, which doesn’t surprise me since dongbei lies directly to the north regionally but the inclusion of the lamb ribs from the former menu prompts me to imagine that someone from the former restaurant is on the current staff in some way.
Drove by Chef Tony tonight (4/18). Closed. No answer on the phone line. Looks like he went from soft opening to shutdown.
Dim sum lovers are taking it in the shorts. Dim sum restaurants seem to be closing disproportionately and those remaining open have cut back on variety.
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I used eat there all the time as a teen. Was one of my favorite restaurants. Loved the fried pork chop, the chinese hamburger (not sure what it’s really called, and it’s not the “mo” at Qin West), and the beef noodle soup. ::sigh::
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I’ve been told Garden Cafe in Alhambra and Arcadia is good.
if there was any doubt before, chibiscus ramen in the alhambra ranch 99 is completely empty. they’re gone. boba express is still up and running, but qi wei is closed, but all the equipment is still there.
for those looking for deal, a lot of ranch 99’s cold stuff goes two for one after 4pm or so. this week i picked up two orders of cold sesame chicken noodle for $5.49.
speaking of QPR, i celebrated cinco de mayo by ordering $.99 fish tacos from tacos ensenada in altadena. INSANE; a friend went around 5:45 saw that 4-5 ladies had each ordered about 30+ EACH ahead of him, turned around and left. i stopped by around 8:30 after feeding the homeless and my order of eight took about 35 minutes. i can’t begin to guess how many fish tacos they sold that day.
i am really looking forward to the end of the quarantine.
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