Chinese Food Hits Close To Home

Having lived my entire life within 10 miles of downtown Los Angeles (and predominantly in a 7 to 9 mile range to the south or west), I have never been convenient to really good Chinese food.  This has especially the case for the last 30 years living in the Hollywood Hills, as Hollywood has always been one of the biggest wastelands for Chinese food, in a Los Angeles metro that has historically no lack of Chinese food wastelands.  Fortunately, there recently have been a few authentic Chinese restaurants that have opened up in Hollywood maybe within 2 to 3 miles, specifically iXLB, Northern Cafe and  Hui Tou Xiang, which led me to write HURRAY FOR HOLLYWOOD Chinese Food on this blog, which I'm pretty sure is the only article in existence on Chinese food in Hollywood.  But these new restaurants are in the heart of Hollywood with no parking in sight.  

But then in the middle of March, I saw this incredible signage come up in the shopping center on the northeast corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Western Ave.  KINGDOM DIM SUM.

At first I thought it was a joke.  Or perhaps a movie or TV show shooting location.  A quick Google search did show a Kingdom Dim Sum in the UK.  Was a British dim sum parlor opening up in Hollywood?   It didn't look that the space would be built out for a while, yet by the end of March, Kingdom Dim Sum actually opened up.  No, it wasn't British, but it did have a full menu of dim sum items.  Of course, the big question was whether Kingdom Dim Sum would be any good.  Would it sell dim sum provided by a food supplier like Sysco or HF Foods, would they prepare their own dim sum, or what?  This question was quickly answered when I saw these fish shu mai, a dim sum variety so rare that I can only remember eating this variety less than a handful of times.

The fish shu mai were excellent.  I also ordered another uncommon dim sum item, chicken shu mai, and their baked bbq pork buns.  Both were quite good.

 

 

 

But the most eye catching item of this first visit was something called deep fried fish chop.  I've never seen anything like this on any dim sum menu.  And frankly, it's not dim sum.  But it is a clever insertion, as many Chinese fast food restaurants in inner Los Angeles serve deep fried fish fillets, and this item is really consistent with this local tradition.   And it's quite good.

 

So after my first visit to Kingdom Dim Sum, it was clear to me that this was a legit dim sum restaurant that because of its convenience a little over a mile from my house, it would be someplace that I would clearly be patronizing.  But while obviously it wouldn't be a substitute for my favorite sit down dim sum restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, would it be comparable to the next tier of San Gabriel Valley dim sum eateries?   So I went by a few more times in the ensuing two months to figure out where on an absolute scale Kingdom Dim Sum would land.  

As it turns out, Kingdom Dim Sum is better than I had imagined.  I mean, who would know that their egg tarts are as good as anything in the San Gabriel Valley, including the sitdown restaurants?

 

Their har gow would rank with the best of the San Gabriel Valley.

San Gabriel Valley dim sum restaurants seldom have two different types of baked bbq pork buns.  This is the puff pastry version at Kingdom Dim Sum.

And few, if any of the San Gabriel Valley dim sum places have chicken cheung fun.

Nor is it easy to find pan fried chicken buns there.

And I don't recall seeing anything like their shrimp and celery patties.

Personally I really like their crispy version of turnip cakes, though I know they're not for everyone.

They've even added a few rice plates.  The lemon chicken rice is excellent.

And the desserts are varied and top notch, like this mango sago coconut.

 

 

Kingdom Dim Sum far exceeds anything I could have hoped for in Hollywood, with ample parking to boot.  Indeed, if Hollywood is closer to you than the San Gabriel Valley, I would consider this to be a destination restaurant.  And even if it isn't, if you're a fan of their distinctive dishes or their awesome egg tarts, it could be a destination restaurant for you.

Everything We Ate In San Francisco - 2023

 

Though it was just a three day trip, we managed to cover a lot of ground in last month's visit to San Francisco.  Due to traffic conditions, we didn't get to the Royal Pacific Motor Inn until 8:30pm, at which point I was only looking for a light snack, and not knowing what restaurants were still open.  I had been keeping track of Chinese restaurant openings in Chinatown since last year, and there were two on Jackson St., Fusion Dumplings and Taishan Restaurant, both of which were still open, so I chose Fusion Dumplings which was the first.  This was their sidewalk spotlight.

The Peking duck dumplings were quite good.

The intriguing sounding Shanghai bean curd leaf rolls was just a fancy name for vegetarian chicken.

With an early Tuesday lunch scheduled, Tuesday morning was limited to a visit to the newly opened Stockton Bakery for an excellent BBQ pork bun and this unusual and delicious durian bun.

For lunch it was on to the newish Grand Dynasty in San Jose.  Interestingly I recently received an inquiry to be an expert witness in defending an unnamed Chinese restaurant in this area from claims of appropriation of trade secrets leveled by the owner of another restaurant against his former associates who opened a similar restaurant.  The premise was that the design and menus of the two restaurants were similar.  I declined the offer, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Grand Dynasty being sued by the owner of the shuttered Dynasty, a mile away in Cupertino.   If the plaintiff were arguing there was something proprietary about the look and feel of Grand Dynasty, I would say sorry, Charlie, this is what all the new large Cantonese restaurants in the Bay Area look like.

 

I'm a sucker for piggy buns, so here are the Grand Dynasty lava buns.

These green fried mochi dumplings were great.

 Fish dumplings with roe was another interesting and different dish.

 

At sit down dim sum restaurants, the cheung fun always have filling.  This is the first time I've seen plain cheung fun with dipping sauce at a large restaurant like Grand Dynasty.

Apparent, a combination of crunchy tofu, eggplant and shrimp paste is a common dish in Hong Kong, but I only ate it for the first time as an entree, six months ago in Monterey Park.  So it was interesting to see this dish again, as a dim sum item.

The crispy skin pork belly was top notch.

We almost never order BBQ pork pastries, because we normally order baked or steamed BBQ pork buns, and these would be duplicative.  This version was quite good too.

There was one other Chinese restaurant in the same shopping center on Bollinger Road, Shang Cafe.  This is their mung bean noodle salad.

Afterwards we checked out a couple of shopping centers in nearby Cupertino.  We immediately saw evidence that all the big new Cantonese restaurants look alike, such as these views inside Koi Palace Contempo in the Cupertino Main Street shopping center.  

 

The cheapest thing on the menu at Koi Palace Contempo was this $7 steamed bbq pork bun.  I don't think I've ever paid that much for an order of these.  The guava cheese pastry at the nearby 85° Bakery and Cafe was better and much cheaper.

It was back to Chinatown for dinner, at the newly opened Taishan Restaurant on Jackson St.  We had eaten at their first location on Broadway two years ago, Taishan Cuisine.  Anyway, as we walk into the restaurant and look at the menu, we see a combination of familiar dishes and dishes we never heard of, which presumably represent modern day dishes of Taishan.  The real puzzle to me was the fact that the prices of just about everything was quite high, something not to be expected  given the peasant background of people from Taishan.  We ordered the beef chow fun and the grass carp jook, each apparently pricey at $18 each.

To our surprise, both dishes were unlike any version of these we ever had before.  The chow fun noodles were not the flat noodles we’re familiar with, but rather sort of crinkly, reminiscent of the new style crinkly cheung fun some of the restaurants serve these days.  When I asked the waitress whether the noodles were made in house, she said they were.  Since the crinkly cheung fun is the new style that has become popular in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the last few years, I presume the same trend has affected Taishan.   And then there was the fish jook.  When I bit into the fish, I thought it was squid–hard and crunchy, but it looked like fish.  So we asked the waitress, and she said it was a special kind of imported fish, grass carp, which is used traditionally to create a crunchy fish jook in southern China.  I must say that the portions were also quite large, so the prices which seemed unreasonable actually reflected the portion size, the utilization of rare ingredients, and based on other Yelp reviews from people in-the-know, high quality authentic Taishan cuisine. 

Wednesday was spent entirely in the City.   Crispy baked BBQ pork buns from AA Bakery on Stockton St. provided a nice start to the day.

At lunchtime we headed over to the newly opened second branch of Hon’s Wun Tun House, a branch of the Vancouver restaurant of the same name but nowhere as good.  The San Francisco branch opened up maybe 30 years ago and I’ve only eaten there once as it was unremarkable.  However they just set up this new location on Washington St., taking the space of the iconic Washington Bakery and Café.  This new branch is much larger, with a much bigger menu.  The fish ball soup with dumplings was pretty good.  The pickled green bean soup was surprising as we were expecting regular Cantonese egg noodles, but instead getting lai fun rice noodles.

We headed downtown to say goodbye to three of our favorite stores that were closing.  Everything they say about downtown San Francisco is true.  When I walked into Off Saks 5th Avenue on Market Street,  the security guard was wrestling a shoplifter to the ground, so I quickly fled downstairs into the basement.  Dinner was in Chinatown was at G & Y Bakery and Café, where we ate last year, and which doesn’t have any bakery goods for sale.  I guess that’s why this year they added a secondary sign which said G & Y Hong Kong style café.  We had the fish with corn sauce, which was actually more of a corn soup, and bitter melon with beef. 

Getaway day before lunch on the way home via Milpitas was this tuna bread from Little Swan on Stockton St. in Chinatown, one of a small number of non-chain enterprises ever to have locations in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

At HL Peninsula in Milpitas we have further proof that all new Hong Kong style seafood and dim sum palaces look alike. 

What an exciting array of new and attractive dim sum items.  My favorite was the purple wild rice shrimp paste cruller cheung fun--quite a mouthful in two ways.

Something I've never seen is the ginger sweet rice cakes, which apparently is typically a seasonal new year's dish.

Continuing purple treats, the unique baked taro bun.

The lava bun, however, was a disappointment, since it was pictured and described on the menu as a tangerine bun, not a squid ink bun.  Taste was fine, though.

 

Bean curd skin dumpling is broth was fine.

The crispy baked bbq pork bun wasn't very crispy.  

Last stop was OK Noodle in Milpitas for tomato/egg/beef stew hand pulled noodles.

All in all, not too bad for a little over 60 hours on the ground in the Bay Area.

Video Shoot Is Hard Work, Part 2

As I previously wrote after doing my Goldthread 2 video interview with Clarissa Wei four years ago, doing a video interview can be a tiring, day long proposition.  In that video, which has since garnered over 1.25 million views, we started off with dim sum at the now defunct Ocean Star Seafood restaurant in Monterey Park, where we examined my collection of Chinese restaurant menus, headed over to San Gabriel Square where the camera crew followed me as I walked in and around that and neighboring shopping centers passing a number of Chinese restaurants, followed by a drive over to Bistro Na's in Temple City for an Imperial Chinese meal.

It was deja vu all over ago less than a year later as I did a video interview with Gabrielle Chang of the now defunct Hong Kong Apple Daily News.  We started with dim sum at Lunasia in Alhambra, where we examined my collection of Chinese restaurant menus, and then headed over to the Atlantic Times Square shoping center in Monterey Park, where the camera crew followed me as I walked down Atlantic Blvd. passing a number of Chinese restaurants.  

So a couple of weeks ago, it was deja vu all over, all over, again, as I did a similar San Gabriel Valley video interview with Tzu-i Chuang Mulligan, Taiwanese-American celebrity chef and Chinese social media star.  This video was for a Chinese magazine and website called WHYNOT/Wainao, with their US group headquartered out of Washington DC.  I had met with the production team headed by Rachel Chen late last summer, and at that time they said they would be back to shoot in November.  However that got postponed until April, then May, then they pivoted back to April.    

Unlike Clarissa Wei and Gabrielle Chang who were both quite familiar with Los Angeles, this group started with little knowledge of Los Angeles or the San Gabriel Valley, so it was a longer process to develop an agenda and specific shooting locations.    In the end, it turned out quite well.  Initially they were going to start with a walking tour of San Gabriel Square too, except when they got there a lot of the storefronts were boarded up due to renovation.   Actually a lot of those storefronts were not restaurants, and the majority of the restaurants were still operating.  But visually, that would not have looked good.  So I pointed out the three other centers within a stone's throw of San Gabriel Square, so they settled on the one across the street next to the San Gabriel Hilton at 227 W. Valley Blvd.

Like many interviews I've done over the years, all advance contact was with the video's producer, and there's little or no contact with the interviewer until showtime.  That was pretty much the case here, with the interviewer Tzu-i.  We pretty much arrived at the mall at the same time and quickly began shooting.  There were two camera operators and two producers.  

 

However, they quickly stopped when the producer Rachel said that what we started to talk about was best covered in the interview portion at the restaurant, and we should walk around the mall and limit the discussion to the mall and the other centers in the immediate vicinity.  So we walked around that mall, having to do several takes because pedestrians got in our way as we were walking.   We also stepped in the line of mall auto traffic a number of times, indicative of the more casual nature of this shoot.  All this activity at the mall took over an hour.

Initially they wanted to eat at a restaurant in one of the four centers clustered there, at a favorite restaurant that had a special significance to me.  Well, d'oh, even if there were such a restaurant (and there wasn't), it probably would have closed down years ago and been replaced.  After throwing around the names of other restaurants, Bistro Na's resonated with them.  They sent an email to Bistro Na's asking if they could have lunch there and film an interview with me, but they didn't get a reply.  I told them to call them on the phone.  I don't know if they did that, or whether they just went in person, but they ended up getting a private room and made contact with the head chef, who was very accommodating and even gave us a tour of the kitchen at the end of the day.  Right before I left from home the producer asked if I could bring a copy of my Chinese restaurant listing and my menu collection.  I told them the restaurant list no longer existed in hard copy, but I did bring the menus.

When we got to Bistro Na, we shot a segment of Tzu-i going through and asking about some of the menus.  

 

The restaurant then brought out Bistro Na's famous Emperor's Jar, a multi-ingredient broth with multiple additional ingredients.  The protocol was to start off with the soup.

 

 

Then add additional ingredients such as purple rice and some kind of pear extract.

 

After filming us partaking this dish, they decided that they wanted a tableful of dishes to be on the table during the entirety of the main interview, which meant that (1) the interviewer and I were given 15 minutes to eat some food so we wouldn't have to go hungry during the interview, and (2) the rest of the crew couldn't eat any food until after the interview.   

 

 

I thought the interview was open ended, so I leisurely answered the questions that Tzu-I put forth.  But then the assistant producer Vivian said we needed to wrap up quickly.  Tzu-I said that was fine since she was almost done and we only needed to conclude.  But I'm thinking, wait a minute.  An important part of the story is how the San Gabriel Valley came to be with the background of housing segregation both in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley itself, and we hadn't even broached the subject.  So when Tzu-i asked me to make a conclusory statement about my journey from being a kid who didn't eat Chinese food and was exposed to very little Chinese culture, into a current day Chinese food "expert", I pivoted my response to say how I have seized my opportunity to inform people about the history of Chinese Americans,.  I then segued into how the era of segregated housing in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley being a onetime hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity flipped into the San Gabriel becoming the well known giant Chinatown that it has become.  

After the interview ended, everybody got to partake of the spread that had been ordered.  Naturally the visual and culinary star of the show was the signature crispy shrimp.

 

 

Having eaten at Bistro Na's numerous times, I was a little surprised that they would serve a dish as spicy as this angus beef with peppers.  The entire production crew were China natives, and one of them bolted out of the private dining room after digging into this dish, because of the spiciness.

In contrast, the spicy cold chicken was only mildly spicy, despite appearing to be very spicy.

The Beijing style Zhajian noodle is brought out first in its component parts.

 

Then mixed up to be served.

Their tofu skin salad is one of their best dishes that we always order.

Chef Su's fabulous pork feet jelly.

Snow pea leaves.

Fantastic tofu sticks.

 

Capped by the dessert sampler box.

 

After the shooting we got the kitchen tour.  They showed us how the crispy shrimp was made.

 

This being the final product.

 2:30pm so it's relatively quiet.

And spotting a tub of pork belly on the way out.

This video shoot basically was two thirds of the one with Clarissa Wei for Goldthread back in 2019, reprising the Valley Blvd/San Gabriel Blvd. and Bistro Na's venues, without the initial morning dim sum scenes.  But with travel time, it was nearly six hours, which for me these days, is a good day's work.