The Best of ’92 : The Top Ten

Top 10 dishes? How does a scallop burrito compare to a barbecued spare rib, roast chicken to a pepperoni pizza, the subtle savor of matsutake tea to the rude smack of a Hockey Burger? Or as a John McPhee excerpt posited in the New Yorker last week, would a truly unbiased palate prefer a Pop Tart (cold) or the fat gob behind a caribou’s eye? Anyway, these are 10 of the real good dishes I ate this year. I swear.

* Rojak is the classic Malaysian salad, what gado gado is to Indonesian cuisine or the Cobb is to the cooking of Southern California. At Yaz Min in San Gabriel, certainly the Southland’s best Malaysian restaurant, the rojak is spectacular, like some perfect, dimly remembered progenitor of Pacific Rim cuisine. Rojak involves sliced fruits and vegetables carefully arranged into a kind of volcano formation, sprinkled with chopped peanuts and drizzled with a dark, sweet dressing. The watery crispness of jicama jams against the fruitier crunch of cucumber, the tart, fibrous sweetness of pineapple against the almost resinous sweetness of ripe mango. There’s a nice, slightly oily top note from crumbly bits of fried tofu, and plenty of heat from sliced red chiles. The syrupy dressing, which includes black soy sauce, vinegar and a dab of dried shrimp paste, inspired one friend to pick up his plate and lick it clean, which proved his taste was better than his table manners.

706 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (818) 308-2036.

* Fufu, at least as served at the splendid Crenshaw-District Liberian restaurant Kukatonor, is basically mashed cassava root, a big lump of the stuff that is slightly shiny, slightly sticky and closer to the consistency of Silly Putty than any other foodstuff I could name. If you are West African, as are about half of Kukatonor’s customers, you roll a bit of fufu into a pigeon-egg-size ball with your fingers, dip it into a bowl of stew and use it to maneuver the food toward your mouth, much as Arabs use pita or Ethiopians use injera. Fufu may not be much by itself--in fact, the lemony pucker of the fermented cassava can be a little unpleasant straight--but eaten like this, the fufu’s acidity is rather refreshing, cutting through Kukatonor’s richly flavored Liberian vegetable stews the way a crisp Muscadet does through a dozen Pearl Point belons. Plus, it’s fun to say: fufu. Fufu-fufu. Fufufufufufu . There.

2616 S. Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 733-3171.

* Ginger salad. Genteel Uptown Whittier might be the last place you’d expect to find Golden Triangle, whose name evokes seemingly inappropriate poppy-field reveries and which is probably the only restaurant in the Southland to specialize in the exotic cooking of Burma. This is the place to come for delicious and unpronounceable curried catfish chowders, exotic pilafs, salads made with pickled tea leaves. And then there is the incredible ginger salad, biting shreds of the root tossed with coconut, fried garlic, fried yellow peas, peanuts and sesame seeds. Its fugal crunchiness is quite unlike anything you’ve ever tasted, yet somehow familiar, like a cocktail-party snack that came to you once in a dream. If the world ever gave it a chance, ginger salad might have the universal appeal of the cheeseburger.

7011 Greenleaf Ave., Whittier, (310) 945-6778.

* Yellow fish. Filleted, dotted with herbs, folded into thin sheets of tofu and fried into crunchy, gossamer-light cigars, the yellow fish at Sunny Dragon seems to dissolve into air upon contact with your tongue, leaving a vague memory of ultra-fresh fish and the lingering pepper-salt tang of the dip. Sunny Dragon may be the closest thing in San Gabriel to an elegant, high-style Shanghainese restaurant--a nice place with sweet, rich, oily sauces; pungencies of ginger and mellow roasted garlic; giant, fluffy ground-pork lion’s head meatballs. Where Cantonese restaurants steam whole fish, here they’re typically braised in fragrant, brown sauce; where Taiwanese restaurants broil eels with a sticky soy marinade, here elvers are quickly fried with yellow chives, served crackling with hot oil and perfumed with star anise. But it’s the yellow fish that will make you dream.

140 W. Valley Blvd., No. 210, San Gabriel, (818) 307-9008.

* Barbecued octopus. Although you will probably feel sated enough when you leave, the Korean restaurant Yee Joh is more or less an elegant drinking place with great snacks, and the best meals here seem to center around a succession of little tastes designed to speed the course of the tasty Korean rice wine dong dong ju : leeks and oysters fried in egg batter; crisp mung-bean pancakes; piles of slippery steamed tendon served with a delicious scallion salad. Best of all are the whole octopi that have been rubbed with chile paste and then grilled until crisp--the waitress lifts the red-stained beast above the platter with a pair of tongs, and . . . snip, snip, snip . . . cuts the tentacles into delicious, bite-size pieces with a pair of sewing scissors. It’s pretty good, especially considering that the American tavern-food equivalent may be Beer Nuts and pickled eggs.

2500 W. 8th St., Los Angeles, (213) 380-3346 .

* Shrimp Topolobampo. A bare, fragrant place in a Whittier strip mall, La Moderna looks pretty much like any Eastside Mexican restaurant. And La Moderna--not to be confused with the unrelated La Moderna Bakery a couple of doors down--serves all the groovy tacos, burritos and bowls of menudo you might expect. The sopes are fantastic saucers of crisply fried masa , with a crunch as delicate as sponge candy. But the outstanding feature of La Moderna is chef/owner Roberto Berrelleza, who will tell you all about his days as the maitre d’ at the old Hollywood Brown Derby and urge you to try his prize invention, shrimp Topolobampo. Served atop a habanero pepper salsa, the shrimp are spicy enough to close your throat and give you an endorphin rush that may last until the next day. “I like to serve this dish my way the first time,” Berrelleza says, watching the smoke curl out of your ears. “You will order it again, I guarantee it, but you will order it half as hot.”

8029 S. Norwalk Blvd., Santa Fe Springs, (310) 699-2953.

* Udon. Consider the unlovely udon noodle, that squirmy Japanese pasta, thick as a pencil and white as a grub, poor sister to the elegant buckwheat soba noodle. Yet in the hands of an artist, there can be poetry even in udon . And at Kotohira Restaurant, udon master Mr. Takahashi is one of the few people in the U.S. that still makes udon by hand, udon that are thick, white and long, diminishing to squiggles at the ends, clean in flavor, with the bouncy resiliency of elastic ropes. At Kotohira you can eat udon dunked in fish soup or anointed with curry, though it sometimes seems as if Takahashi would prefer that you not besmirch the pure flavor of his noodles with anything so common as hot broth. Udon are served hot, immersed in a tall bowl of plain hot water, or cold on a mat. You briefly dip the noodles into a bowl of soy sauce seasoned with wasabi and chopped green onion. Come hungry: To Takahashi, each noodle seems precious as a child.

1747 Redondo Beach Blvd., Gardena, (310) 323-3966.

* Campestre. Essentially a busy taco stand in a supermarket parking lot, Dos Arbolitos could be the best undiscovered Mexican restaurant in town, with cooking as refined as those Westside places that charge $20 for a taco plate but with twice the intensity of flavor. And unlike the classic-loving cooks at most rustic Mexican restaurants, here chef Yayo actually leavens the chile verde/barbacoa/costillitas menu with recipes of his own devise: Try the chicken with capers. Campestre , Yayo’s most inspired dish, involves long-braised pork steaks, ultra-rich, tender enough to cut with a plastic fork, massaged with a smoked-chile paste and topped with fried green pepper and a swirl of blackened strands of onion, sort of a cross between machaca and the best pork adobado you’ve ever eaten.

16208 Parthenia Ave., North Hills, (818) 891-6661.

* Akee and salt fish. “Akee, rice, salt fish are nice,” Harry Belafonte used to sing, and in fact akee and salt fish are quite nice at the Crenshaw District’s Jamaican restaurant Coley’s Kitchen, fried together with a fragrant tangle of peppers and onions. The Caribbean vegetable akee looks and tastes not unlike pillowy scrambled eggs when cooked. The steamy richness of akee mellows the cod’s pungent muskiness; the caramelized onions lend the strong fish an irresistible sweetness, like the dried cuttlefish you can snack on in Japanese movie theaters. A dash or two of the house’s hot sauce, sort of a pink-hued pepper vinegar with a blistering, citrusy hit of scotch-bonnet chile heat, carves out the direct path to enlightenment for this weird yet delicious plate of food.

4335 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 290-4010.

* Chancho frito, of course, involves peppery, blackened nubs of citrus-marinated pork hidden under a pile of the shredded-cabbage salad, salt mixing with tart, bitter with sweet, with both tostones and fried sweet platanos radiating from the center like thick spokes from a mountain-bike wheel. Chancho frito has a lot of Vitamin C for a plate of pork. Chancho frito is the sort of thing you don’t stop eating until the plate is clean, the sort of thing somebody is always frying up in “The Mambo Kings.” La Plancha, a once-famous downtown Nicaraguan restaurant newly transplanted into a spiffed-up Highland Park coffee shop, doesn’t serve the most refined food in the world, but the Nicaraguan specialties--which mostly seem to feature grilled meat and a lot of cabbage--can be powerfully good.

6207 York Blvd., Highland Park, (213) 255-1416.