Sarah Bennett

Use side entrance

Long Beach might be home to the largest stateside population of Cambodians, but it's still not as easy as one might think to find a home-style hole in the wall that kills it with Khmer classics. Most of the Cambodian restaurants along the culture's main central-city corridor are designed as catering venues, replete with sparkling stage decor and oversized dining rooms perfect for serving up more-approachable standards at that next special occasion.

Crystal Thai Cambodian has none of that. Separated from the Cambodia Town drag by only a few blocks, the barely marked space attached to the city's oldest Khmer market, Bayon, is as close as it gets to having a yiey (grandma) of your own.

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Sarah Bennett

As old of a city as Long Beach is, it still turns into a typical suburban zone of long, safe streets beyond Pacific Coast Highway and east of Redondo Avenue, lined with boxy houses reminiscent of Lakewood or Huntington Beach or any other nearby neighborhood built out in the decades of post-war boom. Even the shopping centers--placed on every major street corner--are filled with similar businesses and familiar chain brands.

But on Spring and Palo Verde, the family-owned Grounds Bakery and Cafe breaks up the pastel-stucco monotony with house-made bagels, sandwiches and salads more likely to be found in a small downtown joint than an oversized retail space next to Millikin High School.

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Sarah Bennett

Mosher's on Ocean

The West Coast might not be able to compete with New York on Jewish deli's, but as a native Angeleno, it's still been hard to get used to lunches in Long Beach without a good one around. You know, the places that are always named with a possessive (Canter's, Langer's, etc.) and serve pastrami on rye with bowls of matzo ball soup on the side. L.A. seemed to possess one for every lunch meeting my father had when I was growing up, but in Long Beach, I have been hard-pressed to find anywhere that makes their own corned beef.

Then I discovered Mosher's, a Jewish-style deli with two locations in the LBC. The first is across the street from Wilson High School and is a house-turned-walk-up-snack shack with no parking and a small patio on which teenagers can be seen grubbing on calories they won't have to think about for years. The other Mosher's is on the bottom floor of a newer Ocean Blvd. high rise, tucked in a corner across the street from City Hall and with a patio that stretches back into the housing complex's underutilized courtyard.

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Sarah Bennett

Occupying an eggplant purple shack in a parking lot surrounded by Mexican restaurants and a vacuum cleaner repair store, Sliced & Diced is a little schizophrenic food shack that could only have happened in Long Beach. Start with two kooky friends--one white, one Latina--who share a mutual love of comfort food. Add a two year-old catering company and pop-up sauce-and-spice shop that inspired the cooking friends to go brick-and-mortar. Throw in some tortas dipped in enchilada sauce (pambazo style) and roasted yams loaded with chili or smothered in brown sugar (Southern style) and you might begin to understand the layers of big flavors coming out of this tiny eatery.

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Sarah Bennett

Not to be confused with the East Coast convenience store chain of the same name, Long Beach's Wa Wa is a quick-n-dirty Chinese restaurant with cheap combo plates and made-to-order specialties that has dragged office zombies out of their Downtown cubicles for more than a decade.

The red-and-white tiled storefront is nestled between a ceramics studio and a postal service outlet on First Street in the Arts District, a neighborhood that was vastly different when Wa Wa opened in 2001. But in the time that it has taken for the block's empty retail spaces to fill with indie boutiques and the city to realize that the street makes a perfect venue for art and music events (see: Buskerfest 2012), the Cambodian-owned Chinese fast food joint hasn't changed much.

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Photos by Sarah Bennett

In today's fancy food world of duck fat fries and $15 casual chain burgers, a simple, cheap sandwich shop is a welcome respite. Hand-sliced meats, fresh vegetables and a baked-this-morning French roll are all that's needed to make this girl swoon, but On Broadway--located in an unassuming corner store that looks more like a donut shop than a full-scale sandwich joint--goes far beyond what $5 should afford.

Owned by a sweet Asian couple that seems to recognize everyone that walks in, On Broadway offers a massive selection of familiar and imaginative deli items that keeps the tiny ice-cream-and-chips-selling storefront from being just another a mediocre snack shack.

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Photos by Sarah Bennett

Yeah, it's not the best shot--but click on the jump to see yummy food

Authentic Trinidadian restaurants--hell, Trinidadian anything--are about as common in Long Beach as Uzbeki cafés are in Mission Viejo. Yes, the Venezuela-adjacent Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago has sandy beaches, nearly year-round sunshine and the occasional palm tree, but a kitchen that cooks up curried goat and fried shark still seems an unlikely match in a city where ethnic food more often means a taco stand or Thai delivery.


But with a love of hybrid dishes and a Persian/Indian-via-Trinidad owner willing to explain it all to newbies, one-month-old Callaloo on East Anaheim Street fits seamlessly into the city's Main Street of immigrant life.

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All photos by Sarah Bennett

"What came first: the chicken or the egg?" That question is irrelevant here. Far more pressing is which came first: the "World Famous" Reno Room or Coco Renos, its adjoining, Baja-style taco stand?

Many theories abound as to how a four-table storefront serving Mexican grub intertwined itself with a dive bar of Long Beach proportions. On the corner of Broadway and Redondo Avenue--straddling the border of nice Bluff Park and nicer Belmont Heights--is a two-headed haven for the vegan, meat-hungry and drunk alike.

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Sarah Bennett

Sorry to all the animal-lovers out there, but "vegetarian pho" is definitely an oxymoron, so much so that the very association of it with Long Beach's Number Nine has left many avoiding the place despite its convenient location on Fourth Street's Retro Row.

A recent lunch with a vegetarian brought me into the tiny café, and though it is hard to eat hipster-friendly pho when the authentic stuff is right up the street (try Pho Hong Phat on Anaheim Street), Number Nine has more to offer than veggie-friendly Viet options.

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Sarah Bennett

Just a few short months ago, Lona's City Limits Cantina was called Lona's Wardlow Station and it was a Long Beach dive bar of epic proportions. Warm beer was served in large, frozen glasses, karaoke songs were belted out with blue-collar bravado and a claw game in the corner (called "Lobster Zone") was filled with live lobsters, which often kept animal-rights protestors outside for days at a time.

But that's the way locals liked it and owner Lona Lee--an old-but-tough broad with decades of experience helping Long Beach get drunk--never seemed bothered by the things that kept all but her trusty regulars at bay. Then, the TV show Bar Rescue came in, fired her entire staff and proclaimed her Wardlow Station to be a "bottom of the barrel" joint.

A fresh coat of paint and one destroyed lobster machine later, Lona's (pronounced like "Lana") is a re-branded version of itself, still full of charm, but with significant upgrades that now only add to its mass appeal.

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