We ate LA: Good Stuff

Umm... so it's been a while since we posted. I blame The Review Crew, but it might also be fair to blame a bit of laziness. Either way, I'm sure you've been wondering about that cliffhanger we dropped on you with the last post: what was that good food they ate in LA?

It's notable that our trip to E3 was filled with either horrific or boring food not worth mentioning. Sad, really. But I guess that's what you get when you spend the vast majority of your time in convention halls. To stave off malnutrition, we were treated to Cliff Bars by the lovely ladies of the media room. Those little bars were nice at first, but even free food becomes less enjoyable as you eat it for more than one meal a day.

But let's get back to the tasties.

Two days sit in my memory as the most flavourful. The first was our only free day as we walked down Melrose Avenue. Our goal was to see Darth Vader helmets, but we ended up doing a rather full day of shopping and walking in the LA heat.

As the hours passed, we realized it was get fed or get cranky time, so we decided to search out some chips and salsa and perhaps a drink. A store clerk recommended a place eight blocks back toward where we came, so we turned around to make our way up the other side of the street.

And that's when we saw the fruit stand.

Well, not really a fruit stand in the "BC Cherries" sense of it. Rather, it was more like a cart with a bunch of fresh fruit and veggies. As we walked past, a couple came up to the cart's owner and asked for a regular bag. And in a flourish of knifery, the owner chopped up a whole bunch of stuff, put it in a bag, added fresh lemon and lime and a few dashes of chili spice.

When you see something like that, how can you not get it yourself. So we ordered the same thing (orange, coconut, watermelon, apple and a few other things I can't seem to recall). It was just the right amount of sweetness, spice and sour. Ridiculously tasty and refreshing.

A "regular" sized bag of fruit.

(Since we've come back to Calgary, we've tried to recreate this masterpiece. We've not been completely successful yet, but a new chili spice was just given to use today. Perhaps this is the detail we've been missing.)

So while we're scarfing down a full bag o' spicy fruit, we look just half a block down the street and see something we've NEVER seen before: a Korean BBQ taco truck.

Intrigued, we move closer to the truck with our bag of fruit. Not only was this truck the home of the never-before-discovered kimchi tacos, but it was also the maker of vegetarian-friendly tofu kimchi taco. I don't care if I have a massive bag of fruit in my hand, this taco is about to be consumed!

And, yes, it was awesome.

It's possible we were getting a little full by now. The fruit and tacos were digesting as we moved further up the street. And then we came upon that Mexican restaurant that was our original destination. Well, maybe we'll just pop in for a quick visit.


An hour later, we'd consumed more than our fair share of some excellent homemade salsas and guacamole. As we nibbled away, we watched the foot traffic travel in front of us on the street. It was a pretty great ending to our mini-marathon of food.

Two days later, we found ourselves with an evening partially free enough to let us go out for a nice dinner. A quick Yelp search from the convention centre turned up Beverly Soon Tofu Restaurant. Because of this experience, I will never doubt the value of Yelp as a restaurant recommendation engine.

Sure, our half-hour walk to the restaurant into Little Korea was a bit, um, unsettling as the sun set and the streets became not so busy, but once we found Beverly Soon Tofu, we realized the sketchy trip was worth it. If you ever get a chance to get there yourself, I strongly recommend it.

Since we had no idea what to order, we asked the friend waitress to help us out with my vegetarian needs in mind. The result was a cheap meal that had us filled to the brim with flavourful appetizers (all of our appetizers--which were included in the meal--are in the photo at the top of this post) and main courses including the following:

Tofu "steak"

Tofu Soon

Tofu appetizer

Kimchi

Yeah, that was a pretty tasty trip.