Neighborhood Restaurants Strike Gold

By Eddie North-Hager on September 21, 2009 7:54 AM

Every year Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold releases his list of 99 “Essential L.A. Restaurants” in LA Weekly.

In this year’s list, Gold praised three restaurants near the University Park neighborhood: El Parian, near Pico Boulevard and Union Street, and Mo-Chica and Chichén Itzá, both inside Mercado La Paloma, near Grand Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard.

What does it take to make the list of Gold, who once attempted to eat his way through every restaurant on Pico from downtown to the ocean?

“An essential restaurant is one that reflects Los Angeles in a startling and unusual way, that uses fresh local ingredients in a fashion that respects the land in which they were grown, that showcases cooking echoing both foreign-trained chefs’ region of origin and the hypercharged mosaic of the L.A. dining scene,” Gold wrote.

On his list of 99, Gold looks for spectacular food with or without the extravagant atmosphere. Not only does he love the Culver City hot spot Akasha, helmed by Barbra Streisand’s former chef, but Let’s be Frank, a hot dog truck.

“An essential restaurant moves people, inspires them to think about food in a different way, inspires them to think about Southern California as a great agricultural region, a great port, a builder of the shiny symbolism that is a large factor in how the rest of the world thinks of itself,” Gold said. “And it’s also a damned good place to eat.”

El Parian, at 1528 W. Pico Blvd., always looks closed from the street even when it’s open. There are two front doors and the one under thelarge sign is, inexplicably, always gated.

But inside the restaurant serves superb birria (“Guadalajara-style roasted goat in a consommé made from its amplified drippings,” Gold drools), carne asada (that got raves from The New York Times) and thick corn tortillas made by hand on the premises.

Chichén Itzá, according to Gold, “is the most formidable Yucatecan restaurant in town, its menu a living, chile-intensive thesaurus of the citrusy, fragrant, sometimes searingly hot cuisine of the Mayas.”

The restaurant is in the food court of Mercado La Paloma at 3655 S. Grand Ave., a small business incubator once supported by USC. Chichén Itzá now has a second location in the Westlake District.

Mo-Chica’s presentation, cuisine displayed with an artist’s touch, is the first surprise at this Peruvian lunch counter in Mercado La Paloma. And the food itself “is as about good as it gets: cubes of sushi-quality tuna in a vinegar emulsion, soft and tart and brutally spicy all at once,” Gold writes. “Nobu’s version is good, but this is earthier, more sensual, more Peruvian, speaking as much of the mountains as of the sea.”

And don’t forget about an old Gold favorite, La Taquiza No. 2 at 3009 S. Figueroa St.

Taquiza did not make the list this year, but Gold gushed that it has perhaps the best Mexican antojito in Los Angeles, “a sort of quesadilla on steroids, good enough to make a grown man yelp with joy — two thick corn tortillas, made seconds earlier, are slapped down on a griddle, glazed with jack cheese and fresh guacamole, sprinkled with a few grams of meat snatched off the fire, then welded together into kind of a sandwich.”

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