Recently in Arcadia Category

By Evelyn Barge, Staff Writer

Once I was a chronically picky eater, but now my taste buds have taken a turn for the adventurous.

I call it the San Gabriel Valley Effect. There's so much delicious food - particularly ethnic cuisine - packed into our Valley that I just had to branch out from my boring meat-and-potatoes-eating ways.

The evolution has led to some of the best meals of my life, and I recently added Hop Li Seafood Restaurant in Arcadia to my list of favorites.

Hop Li is actually a chain of eateries with additional locations in Chinatown, Westwood and West Los Angeles, but the Arcadia restaurant is the only one with late-night hours. Open from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day, it's perfect for sating my frequent nighttime hunger.

The menu at Hop Li is expansive, so on a recent visit, my companion and I decided to sample a couple different specialties.

Our first choice was the deep-fried squab ($11.75) - something I'd tried to order at other Chinese restaurants in the past, but it had sadly always been out of stock.

It was an exciting find, but probably my least favorite part of the entire meal. The squab, which is a young domestic pigeon, was prepared simply with little added flavors or garnish. As you might expect with a pigeon, there's not a whole lot of meat to be had. But where there was meat, it was gamy and fairly tender.

I also found the whole squab difficult to carve up and eat, which is more a mark of my inexperience than anything else. Next time, I think I'll order the minced squab with bamboo shoots and lettuce to save myself the trouble.

The highlight of the meal was a plate of squid with garlic and black bean sauce ($5.99). It figures that a seafood restaurant would excel at serving up creatures of the deep, and Hop Li was right on the money. The sauce was a perfect, savory match to the firm texture of the squid.

An order of sliced chicken with straw mushrooms ($4.50) rounded out our more exotic selections, and the flavor combination on this dish was perhaps the best of all three.

 

Overall, we barely scratched the surface of what's available on the Hop Li menu. I also had my eye on a variety of hot pots (they take about 30 minutes to prepare) and the more unusual seafood items - frog, jellyfish and abalone - that were tempting the curious side of my palate.

While some of these rarer dishes will send your bill into triple figures, most items on the menu fall squarely within the $7.95 to $12.99 range. Lunchtime and late-night diners get even sweeter deals with a special menu that features plates as low as $4.50.

Hop Li Seafood is a world away from the food I was raised on - Italian on one side with a heavy dose of Southern cooking on the other - and that's just another reason why I know I'll be going back for seconds.

Hop Li Seafood Restaurant, 855 S. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia; (626) 445-3188

www.hoplirestaurant.com

By Kevin Felt

Orchid Thai Cuisine in Arcadia wouldn't be out of place in the trendy malls dotting the landscape of modern Bangkok.

As we thumbed through the long menu, filled with traditional Thai foods and a limited selection of Chinese-influenced dishes, we gazed at the comfortable modern decor and baby blue ceiling, augmented with wispy clouds and twinkling star lights, which would be right at home in the trendier parts of Bangkok.

The annotated menu includes more than 100 items with helpful descriptions, ranging from Satay Chicken, Papaya Salad and Jungle Curry to Panang, Pad Thai and Nam Khao Tod.

For most of the a la carte curries and main dishes on the menu, you can chose between beef, chicken, pork or tofu for $7.95, shrimp or squid for $9.95, or fish or scallops for $12.95. Most lunch specials, served from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, cost $5.95.

The generously sized $7.95 a la carte plate of Spicy Orchid Crispy Chicken was especially tantalizing. Small chunks of chicken were stir-fried to the perfect crispness in a tasty garlic glaze with slivers of carrot, green onion and cashews.

Though the menu labels the dish as spicy, the friendly waiter's warnings convinced me to try a medium version. Although it did little to sizzle my admittedly high-tolerance palate, the dish, atop 50-cent sticky white rice, was delicious.
 
Next was the $7.95 Pad-See-Ewe with tofu.

Thin, inch-wide rice noodles were pan-fried in a sweet soy sauce with egg, firm tofu and Chinese broccoli to create the slightly sweet, slightly salty dish, served on a large platter. It was good, but slightly bland for my tastes.
 
As an added surprise, as we boxed up our leftovers, the waiter delivered small cups of dessert.

Every day, the restaurant provides patrons with a different Thai dessert, he explained. Today's specialty was a surprisingly tasty soup of chewy green tapioca balls, corn kernels, coconut shavings and iced sweetened milk.

It will definitely be worth another visit to try the Eggplant with Basil Leaves or the Green Curry.

Orchid Thai is at 1311 S. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia.

Dining on a budget:
I've come to the realization that dining on a budget and local Chinese cuisine are often at odds with each other.
Take Din Tai Fung Dumpling House in Arcadia, which recently opened a second location on the same block of Baldwin Avenue because its popularity among its mostly Chinese patrons had created long lunchtime lines.
In the two years I spent teaching English to college students in Northeast China, it didn't take long for it to become apparent that dumplings were the budget food of choice for anyone wanting to celebrate.
Several varieties of dumplings are staples served during most holidays, but particularly at Chinese New Year, Lantern Festival and Dragon Boat Festival.
Students explained that dumplings are the food of choice because they're considered lucky, in part, because they resemble coins used in ancient China.
It didn't hurt, either, that the price was right in China: One could buy a plateful of about two dozen dumplings for less than 50 cents.
So, when I made my first trip to the popular Din Tai Fung restaurant, I was a bit dismayed at the hit my wallet would take.