Ethnic L.A.

Don't miss the following ethnic neighborhoods: Chinatown, Koreatown, and Little Tokyo. LA is like many cities in one; 50 percent of the population speaks Spanish as their first language, and many Asian languages flourish as well. If you want to see booming ethnic neighborhoods, with interesting stores and delicious food, you've come to the right place. It's OK to walk around Hollywood Blvd and look at the stars on the sidewalk for a while, but don't get stuck there for whole time here.

Often, people are disappointed when they visit -- LA is a town people love to criticize. Anyway -- this place is awesome if you know what to do. It's one of the biggest immigrant destinations in the world. What does this mean for you? GREAT, CHEAP ethnic cuisine! Keep reading!

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

Get a car if you can. It's very hard to be flexible here on public transportation. Even with the new subway stops, it's limited what you can do without a car. Cabs are expensive and you have to call them.

This Pho (pronounced "Fa") restaurant is not just OK as its name may lead you to believe -- this place is absolutely GREAT! Hidden in a little commercial strip on the edges of Koreatown, this small unpretentious (hole in the wall, yes) restaurant serves great PHO, and excellent Thai iced tead and Vietnamese iced coffee (BEWARE! Either of those concoctions will keep you up for hours!). In case you're new to PHO: huge bowls of Vietamese noodle soups with lots of stuff added depending on what flavor you get -- among the choices: seafood, brisket, and other beef choices (stomach, instestines, and so on -- you don't have to get the intestines or the stomach, so don't get freaked out). The broth (beef broth even with the seafood) is absolutely delicious. When the steaming bowls of pho come, you will also get a tray of fresh basil, quarters of lime, and soy sprouts to add to the soup (request chopped cilantro and add that as well) -- you break the branches of basil into pieces, add it together with the sprouts, squeeze some lime juice, and pour some hot sauce from the generous-sized bottles on the table, and stir with your chopsticks. What a treat! Also incredibly cheap (about five bucks or so for the PHO)! My favorite is the seafood pho, and I get an iced coffee too. The place is run by a really friendly Korean chiropractor (I can't remember his name right now) -- he has lived in Vietnam, so he knows about pho. Oh! I forgot to tell you that this is Korean-style pho (it's in Koreatown after all), which means the meat is a little less fatty and the broth a bit more mellow than in the Vietnamese pho places. I've been going to this restaurant since it opened, about two years ago, and plan to keep going! When people come to visit me from out of town, I always take them here with the warning "It's not fancy -- but it's SOOO good!"

An Armenian mini-chain serving the juiciest and most tender roasted chicken ever, as well as kebabs and many delicious side dishes. Tucked in a corner strip mall in Hollywood, this place looks like nothing from the outside, but it's truly a find: super cheap and amazingly good! Although the food is done very quickly, this is REAL, not fast food.

The place is tiny, too bright, and there's always a line. You could eat there in one of the five or six tables or, as I prefer to do, take it to go. The whole chicken costs about six bucks and comes with pita bread and delicious garlic sauce on the side. I always splurge and get the tabouli salad as well. YUMMM!!

This is a great restaurant in Little Tokyo. They only serve one thing (Shabu Shabu) and you sit at the counter and eat there. Shabu Shabu consists of a platter of thinly sliced raw beef and vegetables that you cook yourself in boiling broth that sits by you in a bowl. Each party gets their own bowl and meat. It's lots of fun! Really delicious too! The coffee with liquid sugar and cream is yummy as well.

This is a great place to get dim sum in Chinatown. The lines are amazing on weekends at brunch time, so come prepared. The restaurant is in a little mall that houses several other Chinese businesses. While you wait for your number to be called, browse around, it's fun. The restaurant is very large, Hong-Kong-style, with lots and lots of tables. The waitresses walk around pushing carts of delicacies, and they stop at your table and open the lids off the bowls and you can point to explain what you want. The food is delicious; try lots of things! When your teapot is empty, turn the top upside down so it gets refilled. Bon appetit!

The dim sum here rocks! My favorite dim sum place in Los Angeles, and I don't mind the drive if I get to have the sticky rice wrapped in tea leaves! OK, this fabulous restaurant is not in Chinatown, it's in Monterey Park, aka "the first suburban Chinatown." Quite an experience to come to this neighborhood off the 10 freeway (exit Atlantic Blvd) not only for the fine dim sum fare (and it's so good that coming for the food would be enough for most) but to experience the vibrancy of an evolving ethnic neighborhood. A bit about the neighborhood before I tell you more about the food at Ocean Star: this ethnic enclave is quite different from a traditional Chinatown because it's based on a suburban model (read: you need a car). Drive on Atlantic Blvd to get a glipmse at the number of Chinese businesses on strip malls, offering all kinds of products and services: restaurants, tea and Chinese medicine stores, book stores, banks, supermarkets. It's worth stopping at any of the supermarkets to buy great cheap fruits and vegetables, as well as tea and other products you may want. Monterey Park is a rather recent phenomenon -- it has become a Chinese enclave in the last 20 years (mainly Taiwanese, and thus Mandarin-speaking, as opposed to Chinatown which is more than a 100 years old and has traditionally been a Cantonese-speaking area).
More about the restaurant: there are generally long waits here on the weekends, and you can sit on the couches of the waiting area and look around at the fish tanks and the paintings, as well as the almost-all-Chinese clientele: quite a cultural experience without leaving the LA area. You'll get seated in a large dining area with hundreds of tables and dozens of servers pushing tin carts full of the most delicious food: shrimp dumplings, sticky rice, pork buns, and lots more. The staff often does not speak English, but you'll make yourself understood by pointing at the dish you want. An amazing cultural as well as culinary experience.

Tucked in a large outdoor mall in The San Gabriel Valley near Monterey Park, this Islamic restaurant offers delicious dishes at a very good price. Many of the offerings you'll be familiar with, such as a variety of noodle dishes, sauteed chicken and beef, and shrimp with scallions and ginger (all excellent here). Some tasty surprises are in the menu as well: get the sesame bread with scallions to share; it's a delicious warm round bread that comes cut into large slices, covered in sesame seeds and stuffed with scallions (the full order is huge; it's enough to get half an order for 3-4 people).

Try a variety of great soups (try the sizzling rice soup or the melon soup) -- soups come in big serving bowls designed to be shared by at least 3 people. It's good to get a few things here and share; the times I've eaten here with a Chinese friend of mine, she orders for the whole table: soup and an appetizer, and then a couple of dishes (this is MORE than enough for 4 people). Unlimited amounts of rice and tea are served here, and the service is very friendly.

Walk around the mall after you eat (you'll be over-stuffed and need to stretch your legs anyhow) and check out the tea store, the ginseng and herb store, and the large bakery that's a few feet from the restaurant. The bakery has great egg custard.

This Cal-Mexican restaurant has been around LA since the 1920s and has become a local institution. Located on the south edges of Koreatown (where Koreatown gives way to several Latino neighborhood -- observe that the Korean signs on the stores as you drive south on Western Ave become less frequent, and the Spanish signs start to appear), this restaurant is huge, tremendously popular, and full of delicious offerings. The margarita pitchers are a must, particularly if you couldn't get a reservation and have to wait at the bar anyway -- very strong, but not too strong to be enjoyable. A great night to come here is Monday nights (packed as if it were a weekend) to watch and listen to the female mariachi band -- they are quite good, and their outfits are really cool, especially the silver belts with shell motifs. They also sing happy birthday to you in Spanish if it's your special day. My favorite thing on the menu is the green corn tamales, which are only available in the spring and summer -- what a wonderful dish, well-flavored, moist and with a tasty tomatillo sauce. All dishes are served with great rice and beans. Not to be missed when you're in town! There are El Cholo branches in Santa Monica and Pasadena, but they are not quite the same as the original Western Ave location.