Rapid Travel Chai

We are in Los Angeles for Memorial Day weekend to eat Chinese and Korean food.

Now in our Seattle base the flight is shorter though the need more urgent than NY. Seattle Chinese and Korean dining punches way below what a population that supports 3 daily flights to Seoul and 2 to Shanghai should suggest.

Every LA trip our meal in and out of LAX is at Feng Mao 2 in Koreatown. We then continue to a base in San Grabriel, Buena Park or similar with large dining clusters. If only Koreatown would open a solid value hotel option like a Holiday Inn Express, we would stay right there.

Feng Mao aka Lamb Kebab has locations on Olympic and on Western. We like the one on Western, known as Feng Mao 2, for its ambiance and location near the Korean shopping supermarkets.

The menu is the food of the ethnic Korean population of Northeast China’s Jilin province. They bring in touches of cumin from China’s Northwest, though it is not Uyghur food, another regional Chinese cuisine in short supply in the US. Chinese food traditionalists will scoff at elevating a regional ethnic cuisine over any of the ‘eight great cuisines.’

Besides us loving the food, that rarity of it outside China makes it all the more special to us. You can reliably find the food of Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan and Sichuan are restaurants in major US urban centers.

Glimpses of Jiangsu and Zhejiang can be had with luck. Shanghai Restaurant in San Gabriel and Shanghai Delight in Silicon Valley have some of the key dishes.

These awesome roast meats are elusive, cumin lamb on the right, fried spicy squid on the left:

Start with roasting your own kebabs and add in cumin or spicy roasted meat platters. Balance with a dish like chives with tofu skin or a stew. Add in a potato pancake or dumplings.

Enjoy!