LP Hastings

Eat this now, in queso: it's gone next week!

Lola Gaspar's Queso Fundido Burger will arrive at your table in nothing more than a paper food boat lined with brown parchment. There is no foliage nor pops of color. No truffle oil that costs more than the burger itself will coat the patty, and its sesame-seed bun won't make you wonder about its pedigree. But this is the Sonnet 130 of OC's burger world--and the cheese, the cheese is everything.

Not too long ago, Lola began offering a $5 burger special on Monday evenings. It changes every week, and has created a revivifying alternative to their normally pricy and small-portioned menu--sorry, fellas, but just stating the truth.

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I maintain that Britta Kvinge Pulliam and her namesake cafe are the two O.C. culinarily treasures we most take for granted. It was Pulliam, after all, that was doing farm-to-table cooking when most of the county's hipsters chefs were still in their swaddling clothes (which wasn't even that long ago!), who adhered to a seasonal menu years before county residents knew their Chez Panisse from their Che Guevara. Yet do we ever talk about Pulliam in the same breath as the current young guns? Nope. And we all know why we ignore Britta's: it's in Irvine, in a shopping plaza that until very recently was the last holdout to the city's Stepford intentions.

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So I know all of you go to Anepalco's off Main Street in Orange, the first branch of Danny Godinez's coming empire of alta cocina Mexican food. But not enough of you have yet made the trek to the second Anepalco's, the one off Chapman Avenue kitty-korner from UCI Medical Center. That one gets a good lunch and dinner crowd, but still nowhere near the lines that Anepalquito's (Godinez's personal nickname for his original location) enjoys. And it's a shame, because the newer restaurant is where Godinez is experimenting with Mexican food like a culinary Cafe Tacuba.

He just debuted a new menu, one with a panoply of exciting dishes--a steak within chile negro, frog legs surrounded by a fabulous pico de gallo, a tropical crepe. But the best dish is a stunning pambazo, Godinez's take on the iconic Mexico City sandwich that finds cooks getting a bolillo, soaking it in red salsa, and toasting the results.
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Anne Marie Panoringan

There was a time when it was all about chocolate chip. After taking home economics, we learned how to bake snickerdoodles. But our tastes for dessert changed, like our desire to end a meal with savory instead of sweet.

It was a fluke for us to come across this particular treat at Tender Greens, a place better known for their yummy, healthy salads. Our friend actually recommended the carrot cake cupcakes, but they were out. We needed that dessert fix, but all we spotted were cookies, clear-wrapped bundles of seemingly innocent nibbles. We counted: 6 for $6. Not bad for a hipster cafeteria.

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I've been so happy to see El Fortín grow up ever since first reviewing the Oaxacan restaurant in 2002. When I first went there, the dive was a bare-bones room with a small menu, scruffy floors, and a mostly Oaxacan clientele. Nowadays, this original location (the second is in Stanton, and a third is in Chino) has an ice cream bar, a mini-panadería, a CD rack, and even a business right across the parking lot that helps people ship packages back to la patria. And, more importantly for our purposes, El Fortín's food quality has not only not suffered, it's improved with age, with the menu expanding into its current encyclopedia size. More »

Edwin Goei

Tasty Noodle House's specialties are vast and all-encompassing. There's everything from Shanghai soup dumplings to stinky tofu to cold noodles slicked oily with peanut sauce. There are delicate, greaseless fried fingers of fish seasoned with seaweed and snakegourd simmered in a thickened clear gravy sprinkled with near-pulverized dried shrimp. The beef noodle soups are formidable. I've only begun to crack just the surface level of a menu that will take years to explore. But among all that I've tried so far, I already have a favorite, the one dish that I keep ordering again and again, visit after visit, takeout after takeout: the salted egg with bitter melon and scrambled egg.
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Nowadays, in this Mexican-food nation of ours, mole poblano is the Will Smith of the mole world: someone who was super-big way back when, but receded in popularity once newer, better options became available and is now just there, still hanging around, but now so unremarkable you start wondering why it was big in the first place. You can find mole poblano at nearly every restaurant, and it's always a giant bore: too sweet, too gloppy, the chicken too rubbery, with no heat and no nada.


The last bastion of marvelous mole poblano is at a seemingly unlikely place: Los Reyes de el Elote Asado, a lonchera that parks off Chestnut Avenue and Main Street in big, bad SanTana. It's legendary for its roasted corn and esquites, but the owners are from Puebla and have expanded the menu mightily over the years. The secret specialty? Mole poblano.

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Photo courtesy of The Sticky Pig

With a temporary heat wave descending upon us, what better time to discuss the coolest of treats: ice cream! Our resident bacon vixen, Tara Simon, now has a restored dessert cart in her custody. In the months leading up to the Sticky Pig's cart completion, she has been getting all mad scientist with her bacon-infused creations that capture both sweet and savory notes. Scoops of these tasty delights can be found at her brand-new location in the Old Town Tustin antique shop Buttermilk Sky.

Dark and dangerous, our preferred flavor is lovingly referred to as the Femme Fatale.
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Taylor Weik

As a college student who spends her nights studying or working on group projects, I'm not a big fan of dining out all the time. Going out to eat requires you to drop everything you're doing, and students with deadlines can't afford to take that risk. And there comes a time where you can only take so much order-in pizza before you start to hate it. So what is the thrifty, enterprising UCI student to do? Enter the Ippo.More »

Long before Dos Chinos, way before Kogi, Japanese and Mexicans in Southern California freely intermingled in the realm of teriyaki. It wasn't just geographic proximity that got chinitos and wabs playing around with each others' food; it was also the shared love for thinly cut strips of beef, of sweet marinades, of pairing the creation with rice or stuffing them in tortillas. Oki Dog was the first famous mestizaje of Jap-Mex (can you even say that? We can!), but far more beloved in Orange County is the Mexicanized teriyaki bowl of Mos 2 fame.

Far rarer, though, is the honest-to-goodness teriyaki taco: no fancy sauces or sous-vide nuttiness, but just teriyaki in the confines of an unadulterated taco. In fact, the only place in Orange County I know that sells the relic is Main Charbroiled Burger in big, bad SanTana.
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