Pork Belly's (Venice, CA)

A couple doors down from a juice bar on Abbot Kinney is Pork Belly's, specializing in sandwiches made with meats smoked in-house by their competition BBQ pitmaster, Eric Solton.

There's no seating inside this small store, but you can eat on the wooden counter on the wall of graffiti and they're working on some outdoor seating.

Their signature sandwich is The Belly Up: Smoked BBQ Pork Belly topped with homemade coleslaw on a brioche roll ($8.95)

Generous amount of thick pork belly slices encased between brioche buns. It's decadent, for sure, but the slaw does a surprisingly nice job balancing the fattiness so that it's not too heavy on your palate.


If you're still afraid the pork belly will be too fatty for you, try The Chop: Brisket smoked for over 12 hours in their in-house smoker then chopped. Topped with homemade BBQ sauce and Cole Slaw on a brioche roll ($8.95)

This is easier to eat than the pork belly. With the shredded brisket you don't need to tear off a chunk of meat with each bite. The sauce is nice, slightly tangy. Again, the slaw balanced out the sweet BBQ sauce nicely so you can keep eating.

Oh, every sandwich also comes with a mini chocolate chip cookie, so watch out for it when you open the wrapper! The cookies are freshly baked and chewy.

Smoky Balls: Pork & Beef meatballs smoked then thinly sliced. Served with homemade tomato sauce, peppers and onions on a grinder roll, topped with melted cheese ($8.95).

The meatball had a very interesting texture, closer to meatloaf than the usual meatball. It's not as flavorful as the first two sandwiches but it had a subtle smokiness.

They also serve something which they claim are "like chili cheese fries but better". They're tater tots topped with either brisket (called Chop Tots) or chorizo (called Slop Tots) and melted cheese ($4.99)

Better than fries indeed! I only tried the slap tots but will need to try the one with brisket next.

You can still take your vegetarian friends here, where they can try the veggie sloppy joe or a grilled cheese sandwich.

Another side to get is the Fried pickles served with sriracha aioli ($3.95)

I think this is my first time having fried pickles but I really liked them, especially with that sriracha aioli.

There's no beer or wine here, but I have to admit I did enjoy the freestyle Coke machine with over 100 choices of soft drinks or lemonade. So. many. choices.

Pork Belly's offers something different in the Venice area and a quick, satisfying to-go lunch stop. To make it extra quick, you can also place your order online for pick up.
On Mondays and Thursdays they have ribs after 1:30 pm but unfortunately I was there too early to try it.

It's not just a lunch stop but they're also open late at night on the weekends (until 2 am on Fridays and Saturdays) and the food would be so good on those drunken nights and prevent hangovers!

Pork Belly's Sandwich Shop
1146 Abbot Kinney Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90291
(424) 777-8875
http://www.porkbellysla.com/

Disclosure: this meal was hosted 

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8 Flavors of Pork Belly at Palsaik BBQ in Koreatown (Los Angeles, CA)

I was recently involved with a project to review a few Korean restaurants in Los Angeles, and one of my assignment was Palsaik Samgyupsal Korean BBQ. I was pretty excited since I had never been to this restaurant which boasts eight flavors of pork belly. The set menu with the 8 pork belly and stew ("Palsaik Set Menu") was $49.95. I asked around as to how many people the set would feed and got answers ranging from "two, but when you get to the rice you won't be able to taste anything" to four, so I settled at three, which seems to have been the perfect number.

Compared to other Korean BBQ places, Palsaik is decidedly more modern looking and cleaner (though the service wasn't any better)

The presentation was also quite impressive. A long wooden board held eight plates of the pork and underneath each one the flavor was printed: Wine, Original, Ginseng, Garlic, Herb, Curry, Miso Paste, and Red Pepper Paste.

On the wall they also display the "health benefits" of each flavor, which I thought was pretty funny ... I mean, we're eating eight slices of fatty pork belly here! I don't think the "benefits" of the red wine marinade would really cancel out the effects on your blood vessels.

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Gourmet Three Course Meals, In Your Freezer

What's for dinner at home? Caramelized pork belly with steamed kale. Think I made it from scratch? Nope. This was frozen and delivered, by Pop Up Pantry.

There are many meal delivery services in Los Angeles, but for the most part they are too health focused (and healthy tasting ..) and expensive! Pop Up Pantry is neither. These are gourmet three-course meals, pre-prepared and shipped to you frozen for as little as $17.50 per person.

You order your meals and the date you want them delivered, and it will be shipped in a box via FedEx (they note that you have to freeze them by 8pm that day). Oh, and the good thing about using FedEx? You don't have to live in LA to order these, unlike the other meal delivery services! You can live in the middle of nowhere and still get them.

Inside the insulated box will be these frozen pouches of the prepared food.

Preparing them for the most part is easy. Most of them you just boil in water, or stick them in the oven for 30 minutes (your meals will come with detailed instructions, don't worry).

I tried out the Master Chef dinner, which was the two dinners created during the last Master Chef's finals between Christine Ha and Josh Marks.
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Ra Pour: Elevating Rancho Cucamonga

I wouldn't normally consider going to Rancho Cucamonga to dine, but the promise of a free hotel stay sounded like a nice getaway and convinced me to go check out this new restaurant headed by Executive Chef Greg Stillman, a French Laundry and Patina alum. On the drive to the restaurant, we saw what other places were in Rancho Cucamonga and it was pretty much restaurant chain capital.

Ra Pour is located inside the Victoria Gardens outdoor mall. The restaurant is large and a divider separates a large table facing the kitchen - a semi-private "chef's table"
The other side of the restaurant was the lounge area - even the lighting was different. Apparently after regular dinner hours the place turns into a club with DJs - not really my kind of scene.

The table started with a glass of sparkling wine, a 2007 Brut Taittinger Domaine Carneros, and shared some appetizers including tempura mushrooms and my favorite: lobster pops with lemongrass coconut sauce

The pops had actual chunks of lobster inside, not shredded and mixed. I tried the tempura mushrooms but didn't realize it had a dipping sauce which didn't make it to my side of the table at the same time, so it was incomplete.

The cocktail list contains five "signature cocktails" at $14 each and five "vintage cocktails" at $12 each. I went with one from the vintage list, the Highlander with Famous Grouse blended scotch whiskey, fresh grapefruit juice, house made grenadine, clover honey, orange bitters. I tried my friends' "signature cocktails" which lean towards the sweeter side.

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Candy and Fire: Spring at 1886 Bar

Cocktails on fire, beer cocktail, a flight of barrel aged cocktails, Chartreuse candies, and spiked sodas. You can find all those and more on 1886 Bar's new spring cocktail menu. The food side boasts lamb neck, shrimp toast, and "onsen" egg. In other words, there are plenty of reasons to visit 1886 this season, even if you hav

The Cinnablossom ($12) by Lacey Murillo is a table-side show, where the server will light up Lemonhart 151 on fire in the glass, then the cocktail itself (made with gin, lemon and homemade cinnamon bark syrup) is poured into the glass and extinguishes the flame.

The Bittersweet Farewell from Marcos Tello also gets fired up. The cocktail is made of gin, homemade passion fruit syrup, lemon juice, Campari, then the lemon garnish is doused with Lemonhart 151 and set on fire.

The Barrel Roll ($15, also by Lacey) is made with Bols barrel aged Genever, Carpano Antica, green chartreuse and garnished with a Campari "glass" candy. It's not just a garnish gimmick, the cocktail actually does taste better with the Campari candy.

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Trotter's Protege Meets Chinese Bao at The Chairman Truck

Fine dining chefs jumping ship to sell casual, comfort food is not just a trend that started in the past year. Chef Hiro Nagahara, formerly chef de cuisine at Bar Charlie (Charlie Trotter) in Las Vegas worked with Mobi Munch to start The Chairman Truck in 2009, selling chinese steamed buns with unique, high end fillings like spiced duck confit in San Francisco.

(The Chairman was originally named The Chairman Bao, but then they got sued by Baohaus in NY since "chairman bao" was apparently the first item on their menu. Gotta admit, it's such a catchy name.)

Mobi Munch is actually an LA-based company, and when they outfitted The Chairman's second truck, they decided to hold a tasting for friends and media before sending it off to SF. The tasting was held at Mobi Munch headquarters in downtown LA, where I tried five of their offerings. The buns are usually $3.25 each for steamed bao ($6.75 for baked - not sure how big these are), $3.75 for duck confit and pork belly.

1st bao: Tender Pork Belly with Pickled Daikon

First, let's talk about the bao itself. The bao is made using a 40 year old yeast brought from China 20 years ago by the SF truck operator, Curtis Lam's uncle who was the executive chef of Yank Sing. The warm bao was great, neither too thick nor too doughy.

The pork belly was tender, not overly fatty, and the crunchy, tart, pickled daikon was the perfect accompaniment to cut the richness. The daikon is, of course, pickled in-house ("in-truck"?)

The 2nd bao is a spinoff of korean spicy chicken: Spicy Red Sesame Chicken with pickled cucumber and carrots

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