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Best restaurants? — 17 Comments

  1. Our favorite ‘exotic’ restaurant when we were growing up was a very authentic Japanese place, out in the San Fernando Valley. My parents loved Japanese food, Dad having spent some leave there when he was in the Army … so it was a big treat for us to go there. They did divine tempura, and the first course soup was always good – little squares of tofu at the bottom of a bowl of broth. Ah, memories!

  2. Okay, ya got me.

    I’ve eaten at Peter Luger, Le Bernardin (In NY and Paris) and Chez Panisse (Helped build it.) but right now I’m really hungry for that Armenian barley soup.

  3. vanderleun: as well you should be. It was fabulous stuff. It can also be made with yellow split peas added (not a lot of them, though; you don’t want to turn it into that abomination, pea soup—feh!).

  4. My parents told me that their first experience with pizza was in the early 1950s, when an Italian-American friend- she didn’t speak English until she went to school- brought over the homemade edition.

  5. Short version: lost your virginity at eight in an Armenian restaurant 😉

    My best food memories are from camping: long hikes, food cooked over a camp fire at dusk. It wasn’t that the food was great, it was a combination of hunger, hard exercise, and atmosphere. You can’t buy that at a restaurant.

  6. Neo, I can’t remember – it was a little way out into the Valley, from where we lived on La Tuna Canyon Road, so Sepulveda and Ventura would have been around the right area. We loved going there, as it was a very special treat for us.

  7. Sgt. Mom: I used to like a Japanese restaurant there. It was pretty small, and had masks something like this on the walls. Don’t remember the name of the place.

  8. Billings had a quaint little Japanese place. Broke would buy me a bowl of rice, miso chicken and a bowl of sunomono soup all for 3 bucks. Payday was always the best day of the week.

  9. The last time I was in Chinatown, a friend and I stopped at a place for lunch; actually, the owner was out front corralling people to come in. He sort of hesitated before welcoming us. (I think he let us in because my friend is Filipino.) He explained that it wasn’t like going to a normal Chinese restaurant. “Chinese people very loud at lunch,” he explained. Well, it was like a high school cafeteria with big round tables for ten and you ordered from carts that the waitresses wheeled around. About 8 or 10 carts went by and, man, I didn’t see anything that looked like food. We had to leave. I’m squeamish, I guess.

  10. I remember eating at an Armenian place in London in 1973. Great food, but not as good as the Armenian/French meal I ate at a farmhouse outside Marseille. It was prepared by my Navy Buddy’s Aunt. She was the real deal – had escaped from the Armenian Massacre during her teens.

  11. When it comes to food feasts, I’ll pit the Romanians against anyone, anyday. My friend owns a small health club and every year for New Years the Romanians rent it out and I help him host it. Man, love those people. So friendly, and the food! Muy bien. These people are not vegers, okay. And the wine does flow freely. And the feasting and drinking and dancing lasts from sundown to sun up. Oh yeah.

  12. I remember having Basque food on the outskirts of Bakersfield when I was a kid. Spices that were new to me, lamb, pigeon(!) – and very weird to have family-style dining in a restaurant. Or having Thai food for the first time in my early twenties – a soup made with coconut milk ,WTF? It’s a big, wonderful world.

  13. After college, I moved to Philadelphia. It was the time of the restaurant renaissance, and it was great. South Street was full of empty delapidated buildings after a proposed highway project there was cancelled. Creative types started little informal restaurants that were affordable and became a hangout for the young and somewhat hip. One of my favorites had its desserts prepared by a woman in her home. I guess the food inspectors were afraid to venture into the area.

    At the same time, the ethnic neighborhoods had enough choices that you soon knew the only place to go for osso bucco, mussels, Thai crabs, spareribs with black bean sauce, Peking duck, cheese blintzes, and pastrami. The Italian Market was a typical Saturday AM adventure, and the cheese steaks were great. It was truly a food heaven. I can’t even begin to choose a favorite meal.

  14. LOL, the best restaurants in the world are ALL “holes in the wall”.

    Unfortunately, the worst restaurants in the world are ALSO, *all* holes in the wall, and there are a LOT more of them.

    Ya pretty well have to be a local to know which holes are great and which ones should be relegated to food waste disposal bins.

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