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LA Restaurants

I remember seeing an NYTimes.com article before, but this is the best I could find w/o having to pay to see the archive. Will have to look into it more later. Next LA trip, hafta go check out some of those "cheap but good" restaurants.

Found a copy of the article. Thank goodness for little papers that subscribe to other papers' services. Copied the contents onto this site just in case they make their archive available only via subscription.

In Los Angeles, strip mall food is way cool

By JANELLE BROWN

c.2003 New York Times News Service

In the back of a dingy strip mall in Hollywood, between a discount cigarette store, a coin-op laundry and a 7-11, sits one of Los Angeles’ most revered restaurants: Zankou Chicken. Its walls are plywood, its tables are orange Formica, the floors are sticky, and the fluorescent lights are unflattering. The menu consists of a plastic-laminated poster with faded photographs of some suspiciously pink-hued meat on a rotating spit.

Essentially, Zankou, an Armenian restaurant, could not be farther culturally or aesthetically from the trendy eating places just down Sunset Boulevard. Yet it is a legend in Hollywood, packed at any hour by Armenian families and industry up-and-comers willing to drive a half-hour to eat its $4.29 signature dish, chicken made with roasted garlic.

"Zankou is the greatest chicken ever," declared Andrew Miano, 29, a film company executive. "I’d probably eat it out of the garbage can."

Zankou, memorialized in the Beck song "Debra," is Exhibit A in a curious dining phenomenon found mainly in Los Angeles: strip-mall cuisine. Little-known hole in the walls, lurking on just about every major intersection in town, are the antidote to everything flashy and velvet-roped, which is why they remain so popular with Hollywood’s next wave, even as trendy boites come and go.

"It’s fun to eat without pretensions in a city that has so many," Jeffrey Lieber, 34, a screenwriter said. "It’s a relief: no valet parking, no dress code," adding, ... "and a Slurpee 15 steps away."

Strip malls are a dominant architectural feature of the greater Los Angeles landscape, drab buildings in an L-shape where dentists and dry cleaners sit cheek by jowl with generic-looking establishments serving food from far-flung locales.

Although high-concept restaurants do, on occasion, plant themselves in strip malls (like Michael Ovitz’s high-priced Japanese endeavor, HamaSaku), most of these restaurants operate on the cheap: immigrant-owned, low-budget and minimally decorated (plastic signs, faded travel posters, fake flowers in jelly jars).

Not that this makes a difference: on a typical night, Mario’s Peruvian on Melrose draws a dozen patient customers loitering between the cars in the parking lot, gazing plaintively through greasy windows at diners lucky enough to have secured a table and a plate of fried seafood. Aficionados of restaurants in strip malls tap into a pipeline of inside information about which of them is worth a special trip and which is just a dive.

Since half the appeal of this variety of dining is being in the know, newcomers can catch on quickly as almost everyone — starving artist and million-dollar director alike — is eager to share information about favorites.

Although bulletin boards on Web sites like Chowhound and Citysearch offer mind-boggling numbers of recommendations, the best inside sources generally come by word of mouth. (Miano was introduced to the joys of Zankou chicken by his employer, Paul Weitz, director of the 2002 film "About a Boy." )

"You move out here, and people are immediately like, have you tried that place in the mall? That little place between the doughnut shop and the 7-11? said Lieber, whose favorite strip-mall spot is an Italian place in Marina del Rey called Alejo’s, which is famous for its shrimp pasta. "You feel like you have a neighborhood secret. Then you give it to the people you like, and keep it from those you don’t."

The result of this cult of underground cool is that the dingiest, most unassuming restaurants often have long lines to get in, and the person at the next plastic-topped table is just as likely to be Christina Applegate as a struggling student or actor drawn by the rock-bottom prices.

True food fans will seek out those little-known places frequented by locals, whose presence both attests to the authenticity of the cuisine and provides a fashionably anti-hip atmosphere. Such is the scene at Palms Thai in Hollywood, for example, where an Asian Elvis impersonator, with jeweled belts and mutton-chop sideburns, sings karaoke while Thai families shovel down tom kha gai at long banquet tables. The smattering of 20-somethings are willing to wait an hour for a table so that they can revel in the ironic obscurity of it all.

"There’s the complete cool quotient of going to those places," said Alex Tse, 26, a screenwriter. (Favored place: Mario’s Peruvian.) "When you go to a place that’s kind of ghetto, it’s like you’re part of a secret club — you’re really down, you know where the joints are."

Strip mall pilgrimages, however, are, as much about the food as the atmosphere, or lack thereof. Occasionally, meals can even be of high quality. The wildly popular Mexican restaurant Alegria in Silverlake, for example, is not popular because of its colorfully funky decor. Instead, it is the menu of inventive and delicate dishes like Budin Moctezuma, a savory tortilla-based lasagna, and perfectly grilled tiger shrimp sopes that lures diners like the actress Patricia Clarkson, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of Aunt Sarah on an episode of "Six Feet Under."

Most strip mall meccas have perfected one hearty ethnic dish, which inspires fanatically devoted followers. There’s Zankou’s chicken; at Mario’s Peruvian it is saltado de mariscos, a curiously addictive concoction of shrimp and squid sauteed with tomatoes and French fries. At Versailles, a Cuban chain, it is crispy garlic chicken with onions and plantains.

"That’s what a makes a hole in the wall worth going to — it has something you can’t get anywhere else," Miano said. "Chicken at Falcon" — a current It spot — "can taste just like chicken at Spago, dress it up any way you want. But what you get at a strip mall is something unique."

Unheralded sushi restaurants inspire particular fanaticism. Many locals argue that the best sushi in Los Angeles is not at the renowned restaurants with celebrity chefs and designer lighting but at bare-bones strip-mall places like Sushi Ike or Hirozen. Cast members of the television show "24," for example, regularly stand patiently in line for a table. Devotion to these restaurants may be a matter of thrifty economics: with strip-mall sushi your money is going mainly for fresh fish.

Occasionally, a popular strip-mall restaurant misinterprets its success and upgrades to a more stylish address. That was the case with Ita-Cho, a restaurant that served Japanese appetizers like sweet eggplant and lotus root for years before it outgrew its dingy and diminutive space.

Now, Ita-Cho offers both interior decor and valet parking: which, in turn, deters former regulars like Nicole Barnette, 30, a director, who frequented the restaurant because of everything it was not.

"I loved Ita-Cho for years," Barnette said.

"When it moved, it lost the charm of being ‘that great place in the minimall on Highland.’ It was way too hip."

Posted by kstroke at February 12, 2004 01:58 PM